Syria's National Morale — or Morass

My father would have turned 79 tomorrow.

He died on October 7, 2007 from complications of liver disease — a condition he somehow came down with even though he hardly ever consumed alcohol. He served as a Lutheran minister for 38 years, preaching the word, baptizing those new to the faith, burying the dead, conducting marriages, visiting the sick, and doing all the many other things pastors do to equip the saints.

I miss him every day.

With my dad in the back of my mind, I happened to hear about a 79-year-old human rights lawyer in Syria being sentenced to three years in prison for supposedly “weakening national morale.” Haitham Maleh had spent six years as a political prisoner in the 1980s. This did not deter him, however, from decades of advocacy for an end to emergency rule in Syria.

Amnesty International decried the sentence and described Maleh as a prisoner of conscience for his criticism of the corruption and one-party rule of the Ba’ath party, which has banned all opposition since it took power in 1963.

Maleh is not the only human rights activist who has been imprisoned. Mohannad al-Hassani, a 43-year-old lawyer, was also jailed for three years on similar charges.

Neither Maleh nor Hassani should be in prison. One reason I support Amnesty International is that it keeps their personal stories and political commitments live, despite the unjust imprisonment.

Given the grim conditions in Syrian prisons and the ineluctable effects of age, Haitham Maleh may or may not leave prison alive. But he's fighting the good fight, just as my father did in his own ministry. In the words of the epitaph written by civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson, as engraved on his tombstone, "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives."

By that measure or any other, Haitham Maleh's life is important. As was my father's.

A Conspiracy of Hope: 24 Years and Running

It's getting rather thin, but I've still got the t-shirt - from the Conspiracy of Hope benefit concerts for Amnesty International, twenty-four years ago. I bought it from a student at Rockhurst College in Kansas City, where I studied for the Missouri bar exam in the summer of 1986.

Though I didn't see any of concerts, even on TV, I'm grateful for the glimpses still available, courtesy of You Tube.



When Peter Gabriel took the stage at the New Jersey Meadowlands in May of 1986 to sing his anthem "Biko," Nelson Mandela was in prison and apartheid was still very much in place in South Africa. Mikhail Gorbachev was only just beginning his reform efforts in the Soviet Union.

Much has changed for the better in the world since then. South African apartheid is gone, as is the Soviet Union. Yet so much remains to be done.

What is the ongoing legacy of the concerts and the aspirations to which they gave voice? To paraphrase Peter Gabriel at the Meadowlands, it's up to us.

Amnesty: Death Penalty Awareness 2010

Though I don't know Hebrew, I'm told by those who do that the verb in "thou shalt not kill" translates as "thou shalt not commit murder." (Exodus 20:13)

What, then, is "murder"? Does killing someone who has killed qualify?

To the ancient Hebrews (Genesis 9:5-6), the answer was obvious:

An eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
A life for a life.

Memorable, poetic language, with a clear moral core: Each human life is to be respected because each human being is made in the image and likeness of God.

But even a bedrock biblical statement like this does not stand outside of time; it must be interpreted. (As my dad used to say, summing up much of the German theology he had studied at Luther Seminary before anyone in America had heard of Derrida, text + context = meaning.) As banal as it is to say it, three thousand years is a long time, and what "a life for a life" means today isn't settled in two seconds merely by saying "Genesis 9:5-6." More than a tautology (life = life) is necessary to contribute meaningfully to today's death penalty debate in America.

To be sure, the Bible is foundational. It's a complicated compendium of books, however, with contrasting viewpoints in dialog with each other. The "a life for a life" statement in Genesis must be evaluated against the words of Jesus, who broke up an execution by saying he who is without sin should cast the first stone. In short, we must use our minds, and our knowledge of contempory culture, to gain insight from the Bible on the question of the death penalty.

So put the "proof-texts" aside and consider the factual settings set forth in the real death penalty cases to be highlighted in Amnesty International's upcoming Death Penalty Awareness Week.