早稲田国際教養AO 補助教材 Essay (A Classic Novels Get Revised for Today's Readers, a DebateAbout Where to Draw the Line.)

「チャーリー・とチョコレート工場」の作者等過去の有名作家の作品にはいわゆる不快な表現が含まれることがありますが、出版社が読者を失うことを恐れて、作者が既に亡くなっている作品の「問題」表現を変えたところ、読者や作家協会から猛烈な批判を受けたという話です。日本では第二次安倍政権以降、権力者の都合による公文書改ざん・破棄や歴史修正主義が目立つようになり、それが当たり前のようになってきているかもしれませんが、記録や作品に勝手に手を加えることの虚偽性・犯罪性を考えてみましょう。

 

 

解答のポイント

前半は文学作品を改訂した出版社側の主張、後半は問題点の指摘という構成をつかんで主張を読み取りましょう。

 

 

主題

不快な表現のある過去の文学作品の改定は、利益主義であり、元の作品の味わいや歴史的価値をなくしてしまう。

 

本文該当箇所 第5段落 The financial and cultural stakes are enormous. 金銭的・文化的利害関係は膨大だ。  Leaving the works unchanged, with offensive and sometimes blatantly racist phrases throughout, could alienate new audiences and damage an author’s reputation and legacy. 偏見があり時として露骨に人種差別的な文言が各所にあるままに作品を変えないと新しい読者が付かず、作者の評判と遺産を損ねる可能性がある。 第8段落 The big problem is treating cultural accuracy or sensitivity as something that can be easily inserted or replaced.  大問題なのは、文化的正確さや感性を何か容易に挿入可能または交換可能なものとして扱っていることです。  第9段落 But altering a text carries its own risks as well. Critics say editing books posthumously is a threat to authors’ creative autonomy and can amount to censorship, and that even a well-intentioned effort to eliminate bigotry can open the door to more pervasive changes. しかし、文章を変えることにはそれ自体のリスクもある。反対派は、死後に本を編集することは作者の創作上の自立性の危機であり、検閲になりうるし、偏見をなくそうとする善意の努力さえも、より多くの変更への扉を開いてしまう可能性があると言っている。第10段落 You want to think about the precedent that you’re setting, and what would happen if someone of a different worldview or ideology were to pick up the pend and start crossing things out. 自分が先例を作っていると思いたいのだろうが、もし誰か違う世界観やイデオロギーを持つ人が添削を始めたらどうなるのでしょう？　第11段落 Changes could also remake the literary and historical record by deleting evidence of an author’s racial and cultural prejudices, and eroding literature’s ability to reflect the place and time in which it was created. 変更はまた、作者の人種的文化的偏見の証拠を削除することによって文学的、歴史的記録も作り変え、生み出された場所と時代を反映するという文学の能力を侵食してしまうかもしれない。Sometimes, the historical value is intimately intertwined with why something is offensive 時として、歴史的価値は、そのものが不快な理由と緊密に絡み合っているのです。第12段落 Then, there’s the chance that readers who cherish the original works will revolt. それならば、元の作品を愛している読者たちが反乱を起こす可能性がある。第13段落 the Dahi estate should be ashamed. ダール氏の遺産管理者は恥を知れ。It would be better to let Dahl’s books go out of print than change them without the author’s consent. 作者の同意なしに著書を変えるより出版停止にしてあげた方がましだろう。The outcry was so intense that Dahl’s publisher, Puffin, announced that it would keep unaltered texts in print for readers who prefer the originals. 抗議の声はあまりにも激しかったのでダールの出版社パフィンはオリジナルの方を好む読者のために変えていない文章の出版も続けると発表した。第14段落 adding that they sought to preserve “the irreverence and sharp-edged spirit of the original text.「元の文章の不遜さとエッジの効いた精神」を損ねないよう努めたと付け加えた。

 

 

各段落の要旨

第１段落　文学遺産管理者が不快な表現を変えたところ、古典の扱いについて論争が起こった。

第2段落　既に亡くなっている有名作家の作品から現代では「不快な表現」とされる文言を削除した。

第3段落　削除した側は、不快な表現による読者離れを懸念しており、作者本人も改訂を望むだろうと主張している。

第4段落　過去の改定とは異なり、今回の削除は組織的であり、社会的反発を招いた。

第5段落　出版社は、作者が作品に込めた意図の解釈・保持と、時代の変化に合わせた作品の人気維持の板挟みになっている。

第6段落　ドアルド・ダールの作品の場合、不快な表現や差別用語が多く、ファン離れの恐れがある。

第7段落　古典的児童文学における差別用語や差別的な絵の扱いも問題になっている。（『ハックルベリー・フィンの冒険』のNワードを「奴隷」に置き換え。『タンタンの冒険』を図書館の児童書コーナーからなくす）

第8段落　出版業界は、古典的名作から不快な表現をなくす動きを評価しているが、時代背景を考慮した注意深い変更の場合に限るとしている。

第9段落　出版業界は、古典的名作の改定を教科書の改訂と同様としているが、文化的な正確さや微妙なニュアンスの安易な改訂を問題視している。

第10段落 しかし、文章を変えてしまうことにはそれ自体危険で、１）死後の作品に手を加えることは作者の自主性への脅威 ２）検閲になる可能性がある ３）エスカレートする可能性がある。

第11段落 不快な表現の削除・置き換えを一度始めたらきりがなくなる可能性がある。

第12段落 歴史的資料としての価値がなくなる。

第13段落 この改訂は読者の反発を招いた。

第14段落 「馬鹿げた検閲」「恥を知れ」「廃版にした方がまし」等の激しい批判が寄せられたため、出版社は改訂前の版の販売も継続することにした。

第15段落 ドアルド・ダールの出版社は、更新時に全体的な見直しの一環として用語のチェックを行っているが、作品の持ち味を残す努力はしたと付け加えた。

 

問1～5　記号問題

考え方　上記各段落の要旨及び別紙参照

 

問6　言語学者のドナ・ジョーナポリは、現実を隠し人生において全く無防備にしてしまうので子供を不快な言葉から守るべきではないと主張しています。賛成ですか反対ですか？何故ですか？解答用紙に英語でエッセイを書き、理由を２～３つけて答えを防御してください。

 

考え方　

本文の関連個所を元に判断する、自分の知っている理由や具体例も付ける。

Ideas and Expressions 

 

・Honesty is the best policy. Falsification and dishonesty are bad in any case. It is a criminal act to change any written text in the past with any consent of the original author. Children won’t benefit from changes of the original text even if they are well-intentioned.

 

・It is true that keeping children away from offensive words is keeping them from reality and they cannot acquire immunity. To be able to fight against offensive ideas and expressions properly, children should be exposed to those words.

 

・A similar case would be the sex education since the second Abe administration. The Abe administration scrapped the proper sex education in school that used to teach how pregnancy occurs and protected girls from premature, unnecessary pregnancy. But the programs were abolished and now there are concerns about increase of adolescent pregnancy. The truth must be known for survival.

 

・Using only politically correct words will sanitize the text and makes it less attractive. Mark Twain’s works, for example, give us pleasure as a literal work and as a record of his time, and seeing some expletives in the text won’t make children racists. Rather, they tell them a significant fact about the past of the U.S. as a colonizer. The way the character Jim was treated teach children the historical fact that they must know so that they won’t hurt some people or will be able to be correctly angry in real life.

 

・A list of offensive words names “Mom and Dad” as an offensive word, and the recommended counterparts are spouses, partners, and so on. Obviously, the politically correct synonyms do not have the warmth of “Mom and Dad”, and children’s books using “spouses” would be too sanitized to convey the feeling or mood of the story, at least until the future time when “Mom and Dad” are terms seen only in classics.

 

・It is said in the text that the historical value is intimately intertwined with why something is offensive. Indeed, offensive expressions reflect the main characteristics of a culture. For, example, right-wingers’ derogative remarks mirror the patriarchy of the Japanese culture. Israeli Zionists’ “human animals” mentioning Palestinians symbolized their mentality as colonizers. Children can learn the facts of life through so-called politically incorrect words and expressions.

 

・Great works in the past are the fruit of the culture of the times they were born, and to enjoy the taste, we have to eat the whole fruit, not extracting some ingredients that are regarded politically incorrect.

 

Writing for Academic Discussion Should schools prioritize teachig children how to be creative? - revised -

The necessity of teaching creativity in schools is a topic of considerable debate, especially in our rapidly evolving world. Some argue that fostering creativity is essential for preparing children for future challenges and opportunities, while others believe that traditional academic subjects should take precedence to ensure a solid educational foundation. What is your opinion on this issue? Should schools prioritize teaching children how to be creative? Why or why not?

 

 

☆Let’s Read

Read the following articles, underlined by yours truly Sasaki, and make sure what creativity is and how it can be learned.

 

Article 1 Medical students 'raised on screens lack skills for surgery'

Leading surgeon says lack of hobbies and creativity in schools has affected children’s practical abilities

Matthew Weaver  Oct 2018  The Guardian

 

New medical students have spent so much time on screens that they lack vital practical skills necessary to conduct life-saving operations, a leading surgeon has warned.

 

Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, said that a decline in hands-on creative subjects at school and practical hobbies at home means that students often do not have a basic understanding of the physical world.

 

Backing a campaign by educational thinktank the Edge Foundation to encourage more creative subjects in the national curriculum, Kneebone said spending hours engaged in virtual worlds was no substitute for experience in the real world.

 

“Partly it stops [students] being aware in three dimensions of what’s going on around them, because their focus is much narrower, but also it takes away that physical understanding you get by actually doing things,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live. “That has to be done in the real world with real stuff.”

 

Kneebone said there had been a “very serious knock-on effect” on practical skills among students since smartphones had become so popular.

 

He said: “We have noticed that medical students and trainee surgeons often don’t seem as comfortable with doing things with their hands … than they used to even perhaps five or 10 years ago.

 

“People are no longer getting the same exposure to making and doing [things] when they are at home, when they are school, as they used to.”

 

He claimed that cutting back on creative subjects at school had a negative impact on the tactile skills necessary for a career in medicine or science.

 

Kneebone said: “We are talking about the ability to do things with your hands, with tools, cutting things out and putting things together … which is really important in order to do the right thing either with operations, or with experiments. You need to understand how hard you can pull things before you do damage to them or how quickly you can do things with them before they change in some way.”

 

Kneebone said that by spending time online children were missing out on practical skills acquired from hobbies such as cooking, woodwork, playing a musical instrument or model making. He endorsed making Halloween jack-o’-lanterns as a start for budding surgeons.

 

He said: “Pumpkin carving is one example of using sharp instruments with great delicacy and precision on a hard surface with a soft inside to create something that you have got in your mind and then you have to make it happen.”

 

 

Article 2 The Guardian view on creativity in schools: a missing ingredient

Imagination should infuse teaching of science as well as the arts. Children are not pitchers to be filled with facts   Oct 2019

 

You can’t see it, smell it, hear it. People disagree on how, precisely, to define it, or where, exactly, it comes from. It isn’t a school subject or an academic discipline, but it can be learned. It is a quality that is required by artists. But it is also present in the lives of scientists and entrepreneurs. All of us benefit from it: we thrive mentally and spiritually when we are able to harness it. It is a delicate thing, easily stamped out; in fact, it flourishes most fully when people are playful and childlike. At the same time, it works best in tandem with deep knowledge and expertise.

 

This mysterious – but teachable – quality is creativity, the subject of a report published this week by Durham Commission on Creativity and Education, a body chaired by Sir Nicholas Serota, the chair of Arts Council England, with input from figures including film director Beeban Kidron, architect Sir David Adjaye and choreographer Akram Khan. The report, put together in collaboration with academics from Durham University, concludes that creativity is not something that should inhabit the school curriculum only as it relates to drama, music, art and other obviously creative subjects, but that creative thinking ought to run through all of school life, infusing the way human and natural sciences are learned.

 

The authors, who focus on education in England, offer a number of sensible recommendations, some of which are an attempt to alleviate the Gradgrindish turn in education policy of recent years. When children are regarded as pitchers to be filled with facts, creativity does not prosper; nor does it when teachers’ sole objective is, perforce, coaching children towards exams. One suggestion from the commission is a network of teacher-led “creativity collaboratives”, along the lines of existing maths hubs, with the aim of supporting teaching for creativity through the school curriculum.

 

Nevertheless, it is arts subjects through which creativity can most obviously be fostered. The value placed on them by the independent education sector is clear. One only has to look at the remarkable arts facilities at Britain’s top public schools to comprehend this. But in the state sector the EBacc’s focus on English, maths and science threatens to crush arts subjects; meantime, reduced school budgets mean dwindling extracurricular activities. There has been a 28.1% decline in uptake of creative subjects at GCSE since 2014, though happily, art and design have seen a recent uptick.

 

This disparity between state and private is a matter of social justice. It is simply wrong and unfair that most children have a fraction of the access to choirs, orchestras, art studios and drama that their most privileged peers enjoy. As lives are affected by any number of looming challenges – climate crisis, automation in the workplace – humans are going to need creative thinking more than ever. For all of our sakes, creativity in education, and for all, must become a priority.

 

 

☆Let’s think

1.       Why is creativity important?

 

Note: critical thinking, flexibility, innovation, self-expression, emotional intelligence, ability to question norms, collaboration, confidence, social skills, etc.

2.       How can school teach creativity? What are creative classes?

 

 

☆Hints for Points

Creativity (arts, experiments, and extracurricular activities)

1.       Whether one is creative or not will be crucial in the near future as the impacts of climate change becomes serious and more routine jobs will be taken care of by AI.

2.       Real creativity comes from real contact with nature, people, and society.

3.       Establishment of individuality is necessary for society to evolve..

 

Academic subjects

1.        Creativity requires solid foundation, essential knowledge and skills. To create something new, you need to know what has already been created. What you think is new might already exist.

2.        Breakthrough in science often comes from interdisciplinary studies, integration of academic studies..

3.        Another pandemic may happen. (economic conditions, social trends)

 

 

☆Sample Answer

【Thesis】Although I agree with Meg in that creativity is the inspiration that is the key to solve difficult problems and come up with new ideas, I don’t think school should prioritize teaching creativity because in my view, school cannot teach creativity in a real sense. It is not a subject. Thus, I think school should prioritize providing quality education of academic subjects for children, while reducing school hours and homework, to help their natural development of creativity.

【Creativity】Creativity is not something that you learn from school education but something you forget in school. Children are naturally all creative. Yet, once they start school, they lose creativity. Studies to get good scores in examinations of subjects in which they have no interest stunts, I guess, the development of their neurons, which had been budding freely by then. Long school hours and large amounts of homework reduce their free time, which helps children develop creativity through interaction with the real world in each individual’s environment.

【Academic Subjects】On the other hand, academic subjects are indispensable to develop and mature a creative mind. They provide knowledge and skills to understand and internalize nature, people, and society in detail and deeply. Teachers should be here to support children do these jobs by providing them with proper materials and assignment.

【Conclusion】What school can do is to teach traditional academic subjects well, and therefore, although it is paradoxical, school should not prioritize creativity so that children can grow up to be creative.

(245 words)

早稲田国際教養AO Supplement The Pain of Those Who Remember by Chris Hedges - revised -

Read the following excerpt from the foreword, The Pain of Those Who Remember, written by a former war-correspondent Chris Hedges, from “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” by Atef Abu Saif, and answer the following question. The first edition of this book was published in December, 2023.

 

The story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive, there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King Herod – who learned from the Magi of the birth of the messiah – orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel warns Joeseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under the cover of darkness and make the 40-ile journey to Egypt.

  I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant framers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

  ‘Why is this such and important day?’ I asked.

  ‘It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,’ a farmer answered.

  The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world ― the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileges, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups ― who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

  Evil has not changed down the millennia.

  Neither has goodness.

 

Question: The writer says, “The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete”. Also, on December 25, 2023, Pope Francis said that children dying in Gaza are the “little Jesuses of today”. What exactly are they talking about?

 

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Ideas and expressions:

Both analogies refer to Palestinian refugee children in Gaza being killed in the Israeli genocide, which is the last phase of the 76-year-old ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the ongoing colonization by Israel, which was built and has been led by Zionists. Israel has been periodically and methodically killing Palestinian children as they call it, “lawn-mowing”, to reduce the Palestinian population, ignoring the two-state solution and keeping invasion into the Palestinian territories.

 

Even before the Hamas attack on the Israeli civilians on October 7, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had insulted, arrested, attacked, and killed innocent Palestinians, including women, children, elderlies, and the disabled, on a daily basis. They help Israeli citizens usurp houses and land of Palestinians, backed by the Israeli government. They also pour cement into wells and break water facilities in Palestinian territories. After Hamas was elected in Gaza, Israel built walls around Gaza and controlled food and materials that go in and out of this small strip of land, keeping 2.5 million Gazans even poorer than before. Israel had killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians daily and in wars. It had even killed peaceful marchers. It shot and killed a couple of thousand and injured thousands of Gazans, including children and a nurse, who marched, in the Martin Luther King Jr. style, towards the wall to show the world the brutality of Israel in 2018 - 2019. IDF targeted legs of the marchers so that they will be crippled for the rest of their lives, which is their routine.

 

Right after October 7, Israel stopped all the necessities from going into Gaza and started indiscriminate attacks, calling the people “human animals”. Since then, Israel has flattened almost all the buildings in Gaza, displacing 100% of Gazans and killed over 40,000 civilians, including 16,000 children, by bombs, bullets, and torture. IDF have bulldozed people alive with garbage, whose arms ziplocked, and burned those in tents alive. They target writers, medics, and doctors. They have destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Their latest powerful weapons tear the victims apart into small pieces, which are collected in plastic bags. After a recent bombing of a school used as a refugee camp that was done during morning prayer, people had to put unidentified pieces of victims together in bags and share them by weight to the families of victims, going 70 kg for an adult and 25-35 kg for a child. IDF also use internationally-prohibited white phosphorus bombs, which melt flesh and bones, producing corpses of children the contents of whose skulls are lost. If those who died of hunger or disease due to lack of nutrition and sanitation caused by the Israeli blockade, over 160,000 Gazans have been killed in this genocide. IDF also arrest innocent Palestinians, including children, in the West Bank more than before. They keep thousands of them in prison in horrendous conditions, torturing and raping them.

 

When they started the attack on Gaza, they ordered the people to evacuate to the southern area in Gaza and attacked them on the way and in the area. There is no place to flee in Gaza now. Like baby Jesus, children in Gaza are homeless, sleeping in camps or on the ground, or on the concrete of ruins, in the never-ending noise of killer drones above their head. They go to sleep fearing their oppressor’s attack at night, when bombing becomes more frequent than the day time, thinking this can be the last night of their short lives. Jesus, or rebels under Roman occupation who collectively became a legend as Jesus Christ, was a Jew, and Jews and Palestinians are of the same race, Semites. Jesus had wooly hair and dark skin, as the Bible describes him. In other words, Jesus could have looked like anyone in Gaza or vice versa. Ironically, now those who claim themselves as his descendants are relentlessly killing people who could be identical to Jesus.

 

早稲田国際教養AO Supplement The Pain of Those Who Remember by Chris Hedges - revised -

 

Read the following excerpt from the foreword, The Pain of Those Who Remember, written by a former war-correspondent Chris Hedges, from “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” by Atef Abu Saif, and answer the following question. The first edition of this book was published in December, 2023.

 

The story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive, there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King Herod – who learned from the Magi of the birth of the messiah – orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel warns Joeseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under the cover of darkness and make the 40-ile journey to Egypt.

  I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant framers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

  ‘Why is this such and important day?’ I asked.

  ‘It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,’ a farmer answered.

  The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world ― the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileges, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups ― who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

  Evil has not changed down the millennia.

  Neither has goodness.

 

Question: The writer says, “The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete”. Also, on December 25, 2023, Pope Francis said that children dying in Gaza are the “little Jesuses of today”. What exactly are they talking about?

 

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Ideas and expressions:

Both analogies refer to refugee children in Gaza being killed continuously in the Israeli genocide, which is the last phase of the 76-year-old ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel has been methodically committing, ignoring the two-state solution and keeping invasion into the Palestinian territories and periodically killing Palestinian children as they call it, “lawn-mowing”, to reduce the Palestinian population.

 

Even before the Hamas attack on the Israeli civilians on October 7, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had insulted, arrested, attacked, and killed innocent Palestinians, including women, children, and elderlies, on a daily basis. They help Israeli citizens usurp houses and land of Palestinians backed by the Israeli government. They also pour cement into wells and break water facilities in Palestinian territories. After Hamas was elected in Gaza, Israel built walls around Gaza and controlled food and materials that go in and out of this small strip of land, keeping 2.5 million Gazans even poorer than before.

 

Right after October 7, Israel shut down all the necessities that were to Gaza and started indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, calling the people “human animals”. Since then, Israel has flattened all the buildings in Gaza, displacing 100% of Gazans and killed over 40,000 civilians, including 16,000 children, by bombs, bullets, and torture. IDF have bulldozed people alive with garbage, whose arms ziplocked, and burned those in tents alive. They target writers and doctors. They have destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Their latest powerful weapons tear the victims apart into small pieces, which are collected in plastic bags. In a recent bombing of a school used as a refugee camp during morning prayer, people had to put unidentified pieces of victims together in bags and share them by weight to the families of victims, going 70 kg for an adult and 25-35 kg for a child. IDF also use internationally-prohibited white phosphorus bombs, which melt flesh and bones, producing corpses of children the contents of whose skulls are lost. If those who died of hunger or disease due to lack of nutrition and sanitation caused by the Israeli control, over 160,000 Gazans have been killed in this genocide. IDF also arrest more innocent Palestinians, including children, in the West Bank than before. They keep thousands of them in prison in horrendous conditions, torturing and raping them.

 

When they started the attack on Gaza, they ordered the people to evacuate to the southern area in Gaza and attacked them on the way and in the area. There is no place to flee in Gaza now. Like baby Jesus, children in Gaza are homeless, sleeping in camps or on the ground, or on the concrete of ruins, fearing their oppressor’s attack at night, when bombing becomes more frequent than the day time, thinking this can be the last night of their short lives. Jesus, or rebels under Roman occupation who collectively became a legend as Jesus Christ, was a Jew, and Jews and Palestinians are of the same race, Semites. Jesus had wooly hair and dark skin, as the Bible describes him. In other words, Jesus could have looked like anyone in Gaza and vice versa. Ironically, now those who claim themselves as his descendants are relentlessly killing people who could be identical to Jesus.

早稲田国際教養AO Supplement The Pain of Those Who Remember by Chris Hedges

Read the following excerpt from the foreword, The Pain of Those Who Remember, written by a former war-correspondent Chris Hedges, from “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” by Atef Abu Saif, and answer the following question. The first edition of this book was published in December, 2023.

 

The story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive, there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King Herod – who learned from the Magi of the birth of the messiah – orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel warns Joeseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under the cover of darkness and make the 40-ile journey to Egypt.

  I was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled the war into Honduras. The peasant framers and their families, living in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate the Massacre of the Innocents.

  ‘Why is this such and important day?’ I asked.

  ‘It was on this day that Christ became a refugee,’ a farmer answered.

  The Christmas story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world ― the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and privileges, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel lobby groups ― who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete.

  Evil has not changed down the millennia.

  Neither has goodness.

 

Question: The writer says, “The infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken concrete”. Also, on December 25, 2023, Pope Francis said that children dying in Gaza are the “little Jesuses of today”. What exactly are they talking about?

 

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Answer Key

Both analogies refer to refugee children in Gaza being killed continuously in the Israeli genocide, which is the last phase of the 76-year-old ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel has been methodically committing, ignoring the two-state solution and keeping invasion into the Palestinian territories and periodically killing Palestinian children as they call it, “lawn-mowing”, to reduce the Palestinian population. Even before the Hamas attack on the Israeli civilians on October 7, IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had insulted, arrested, attacked, and killed innocent Palestinians, including women, children, and elderlies, on a daily basis. They help Israeli citizens usurp houses and land of Palestinians backed by the Israeli government. They also pour cement into wells and break water facilities in Palestinian territories. After Hamas was elected in Gaza, Israel built walls around Gaza and controlled food and materials that go in and out of this small strip of land, keeping 2.5 million Gazans even poorer than before. Right after October 7, Israel shut down all the necessities that were to Gaza and started indiscriminate attacks on Gaza, calling the people “human animals”. Since then, Israel has flattened all the buildings in Gaza, displacing 100% of Gazans and killed over 40,000 civilians, including 16,000 children, by bombs, bullets, and torture. IDF have bulldozed people alive with garbage, whose arms ziplocked, and burned those in tents alive. They target writers and doctors. They have destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Their latest powerful weapons tear the victims apart into small pieces, which are collected in plastic bags. In a recent bombing of a school used as a refugee camp during morning prayer, people had to put unidentified pieces of victims together in bags and share them by weight to the families of victims, going 70 kg for an adult and 25-35 kg for a child. IDF also use internationally-prohibited white phosphorus bombs, which melt flesh and bones, producing corpses of children the contents of whose skulls are lost. If those who died of hunger or disease due to lack of nutrition and sanitation caused by the Israeli control, over 160,000 Gazans have been killed in this genocide. IDF also arrest more innocent Palestinians, including children, in the West Bank than before. They keep thousands of them in prison in horrendous conditions, torturing and raping them. When they started the attack on Gaza, they ordered the people to evacuate to the southern area in Gaza and attacked them on the way and in the area. There is no place to flee in Gaza now. Like baby Jesus, children in Gaza are homeless, sleeping in camps or on the ground, or on the concrete of ruins, fearing their oppressor’s attack at night, when bombing becomes more frequent than the day time, thinking this can be the last night of their short lives. Jesus, or rebels under Roman occupation who collectively became a legend as Jesus Christ, was a Jew, and Jews and Palestinians are of the same race, Semites. Jesus had wooly hair and dark skin, as the Bible describes him. In other words, Jesus could have looked like anyone in Gaza and vice versa. Ironically, now those who claim themselves as his descendants are relentlessly killing people who could be identical to Jesus.