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Saturday, February 28 Please travel with us to Montgomery to watch Waltz with Bashir at the Capri Theatre.
Roger Ebert writes:
Waltz With Bashir is a devastating animated film that tries to reconstruct how and why thousands of innocent civilians were massacred because those with the power to stop them took no action. Why they did not act is hard to say. Did they not see? Not realize? Not draw fateful conclusions? In any event, at the film's end, the animation gives way to newsreel footage of the dead, whose death is inescapable.
The massacre, well documented, took place during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The victims were in Palestinian refugee camps. They were killed by a Christian militia. Israelis were in nominal control of the militia, but did not stop the massacre. Blame has never been clearly assigned. Certainly the Christians pulling the triggers were guilty. Were the Israelis enablers?
In war, they say, no one sees the big picture, the men at the top least of all. "Waltz With Bashir" opens with a recurring nightmare had by a friend of Ari Folman, who wrote and directed the film. It is described to Folman in the course of his attempt to reconstruct what actually happened during days when he was present; he has the confused impression that the truth of those days was just outside his grasp. He sets out to interview Israeli army friends who were also there, and his film resembles "Rashomon" in the way truth depends not on facts but on who witnessed them, and why.
Monday, March 23 at 7:00 PM. Please join us at the Ferguson Starbucks to discuss Omair Ahmad's Encounters, the story of the radicalization of a young Indian Muslim by brutality and repression.
Ahmad writes in Tikkun: If we do not speak for the marginalized, somebody else will. If we don’t speak for the oppressed, for those that are persecuted for being from the wrong tribe, for being the wrong person in the wrong place, who are killed simply because they are poor and therefore insignificant, then, because of our silence, somebody else with destructive intent will.
[. . .] According to an authenticated Hadith, the Prophet was asked about the definition of faith. He answered that faith meant that if a person saw a wrong being committed they should act to stop it. And if they were too weak to act, they should at least speak against it, and if they were too weak to do even that, they should at least condemn it in their hearts.