I’ll be traveling for the next 4 weeks and this site won’t be updated. There is a wealth of information here and I encourage people to browse the site.

Dr. Dhafir’s lawyers are currently responding to the government’s response to their appeal brief submitted on February 8, 2008.

I was just looking at a post I made in April 2005. It was after the verdict had come down, but before Dr. Dhafir was sentenced, and I was about to go to Scotland for 4 weeks. It seems like such a long time ago, but my sentiments remain the same:

“I have spent many hours since the verdict from Dr. Dhafir’s trial came down thinking about what to write on this website. After ten weeks of thinking, I still don’t know what to write. I can’t find words to describe how I think and feel about what has happened in the case of Dr. Dhafir and others involved in the charity Help the Needy. I sometimes feel the court experience has left me in a parallel universe that I share only with others who witnessed the trial proceedings.”
See the full post.

Reading over my 2005 post I see how often I come back to books about Germany in the 1930s/40s in an effort to understand our own time. I am currently reading Raul Hilberg’s “The Destruction of the European Jews” and highly recommend it. Hilberg meticulously documents the complete destruction process of the Jews. Books like this have so much to teach us about our current situation.

I don’t get to write to Dr. Dhafir so often when I am traveling so please consider writing to him, or sending him a nice card, so that he knows he is not forgotten and that his humanitarian work is appreciated:

Do not address him as “Dr.” as these letters will be returned:

Rafil Dhafir
11921-052
FCI Terre Haute
P.O. Box 33
Terre Haute
IN 47808

I continue to hope that justice will indeed be done in the case of Dr. Dhafir.

Katherine

One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything. Daniel Berrigan S.J.