Saying Merry Christmas - and Actually Meaning It

Rasa - Pope Francis delivered a Christmas Day sermon in Rome's St. Peter's Square that catalogued a multitude of concerns with policies pushed by President Donald Trump as well as previous US presidents.

News ID: 435550

Date: 28 December 2017 - 23:27

RNA - Noting that children "suffer because of growing tensions" in the region, the Pope made an appeal for peace on behalf of children living in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, all of which have been engulfed in US-instigated conflicts in recent years.

Civilian deaths have surged under Trump in the US campaign for regime change in Syria and beyond on the pretext of fighting ISIL, while US-backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen have left the country in a state of chaos, grappling with a cholera epidemic and a state of near-famine for eight million people.

The Pope addressed the plight of refugees all over the world, without directly calling out Trump's ban on travellers from several countries and his pledge to build a wall at the US-Mexico border to keep immigrants out of the country, but making a veiled reference to policies that close borders off to refugees. The Pope also didn’t address the fact that when Trump and his wife celebrated Christmas at Mar-a-Lago’s big dining room with their rich friends, wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, they didn’t mean it. The Pope also didn’t address the fact that outside the impenetrable palace walls, America’s war on refugees, war-stricken, tired, and poor huddled masses means they have no Christmas this year:

A- Per usual and under the new National Security Strategy, the Trump White House has every intention to spend an inordinate amount of time and weaponry in 2018 trying to find new and increasingly arbitrary ways to wage wars against adversaries Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea. They plan, through prejudice and exclusion, to keep occupying the Middle East — including millions of refugees seeking safe harbor from America’s brutal wars, gang violence, rape, murder, or economic deprivation — away from Trump’s magic kingdom.

B- The Trump White House plans to maintain its cruel travel ban and refugee restrictions, and they just don’t care if this is going to deeply tarnish America’s long-held and once-cherished image as a safe harbor for those seeking freedom and human rights. Worse still, the international civil society, including the cash-strapped United Nations Human Rights Watch, are not going to expose the emperor’s new clothes, let alone speak up visibly and clearly.

C- The Pope didn’t address the fact that his restated support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was inflamed earlier this month by Trump's divisive decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem Al-Quds - explicitly siding with the Israelis in the decades-long dispute over the ancient city – is a bad idea that will go nowhere. It will never encourage resumption of dialogue between the parties and no negotiated solution can ever be reached this way, much less one that would allow the peaceful coexistence of two states within mutually agreed and internationally recognized borders.

D- The Pope didn’t mention that many Yemeni families won’t be able to spend this Christmas along with their dead or malnourished children in churches or at homes. The Saudi-led airstrikes have left no homes, schools, and hospitals, and certainly no churches for children many famine-stricken people in Yemen, not just to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ but because to use it as their only place they feel safe from US-backed Saudi airstrikes.

E- It is against this backdrop of heartless criminal intent that Trump, the racist-uncle-in-chief, has had the audacity to ensure his National Security Strategy will never make it possible for the common citizens to say “Merry Christmas” again ever in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and many other unfortunate nations across the Middle East and North Africa.

Here’s the thing about all this: America and its exceptionalism, its permanent war and terror, will soon make sure no nation on planet earth will ever be able to be a “happy nation” at all, let alone celebrate Christmas. This is because when the Trumpsters say “Merry Christmas” to the world from Mar-a-Lago’s big dining room they don’t actually mean it. In 2018, they are not there to celebrate the birth of the prophet who once proclaimed, according to the Gospel of Luke, that his mission was “to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.”

The kind of folks who don’t just find any room at the inn but get hauled off to a detention center in Trump’s America, or worse, become permanent refugees by US-armed warlords and terror proxies along the terror-held Middle East borders and beyond. Despite the Christmas publicity for stern words, the Trumpsters are there to continue their wars and state terrorism in the Muslim world. They will never urge Saudi Arabia to lift its blockade of Yemen. Instead, they will continue to set in motion their weapons deals and pocket billions of dollars.

It’s Christmas and time is running out for many war-stricken nations and refugees in the Middle East. What the world wants now is not Trump’s new National Security Strategy to dump resources into the military, nor his racism, white supremacy, controversial Holy Land declarations, human rights abuses, and nuclear war. Any new war or confrontation under this strategy, long or short, will only lead to further global instability and chaos, incurring a large civilian toll.

In the long run, such strategy will sow seeds of revenge, retaliation, hatred and death. The world needs courage to find a settlement to America’s dreadful wars, and mutual agreements to protect peace, which is at its most vulnerable. To give us something to cheer about and in the spirit of Christmas, may we all have permanent peace in 2018.

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