A Christmas Letter to President Obama

Dear Mr. President,

Ironic that Kill List Tuesday fell on Christmas this year. Did you take a by-week in celebration of the Prince of Peace’s birthday or did you video­­­­link in with your team, gathered in the Situation Room with their lists of nominees, and choose who will die this week by a drone strike or a team of Special Forces assassins? There’s no rest for the wicked, my mother used to say, so I’m betting it was business as usual; after all, they’re Muslims, no Christmas on their calendar, no Silent Nights, no Holy Nights for them, right? Christmas Eve, one of your drones in Yemen assassinated a midlevel al Qaeda ‘operative’ and an unidentified Jordanian. “Christmas greetings on behalf of America from President Obama!” No Christmas this year for them. And no Christmas either, for the confirmed 176 children killed by drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Did you shed a tear for any of them, Mr. President? Or do their lives not count because anyone not “us” is a terrorist-militant-insurgent, an imminent threat to the U.S. no matter how young? The murder and mayhem in Newtown and Aurora and Virginia Tech is in our DNA now, an extension of the murder and mayhem we commit in places like Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya… We can pass gun laws and require mental health tests until hell freezes over but until we stop the murder and violence abroad, the murder and violence at home will continue. Your public displays and vows ring hollow, Mr. President, for the seeds of violence are in the Oval Office in the form of Kill Lists and secret justifications for the murder or imprisonment of anyone under the guise of national security. How can you support gun laws at the same time you support death by drone? How can you shed a tear for those 20 beautiful little kids gunned down in Newtown and not shed a tear for the hundreds slaughtered in the mountains of Waziristan? How can you expect violence at home to end when it is the same violence you promote abroad? This is the day to ask, Would Jesus keep a Kill List or order drone strikes or send out teams of assassins in the dead of night to batter down doors and shoot unarmed men—and sometimes women and children? Avenging angels and an eye for an eye hasn’t worked; let’s try turning the other cheek, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, forgiving those who trespass against us and doing unto others as we would have them do unto us. Merry Christmas, Mr. President, peace on earth good will toward man.