Thief recounts the fictional story of an Iraqi farmer who encounters Saddam Hussein at both ends of his life. This past year, that program included the film Thief, written and directed by American Film Institute student Julian Higgins. Windrider students also get the opportunity to screen award-winning shorts from the Angelus Student Film Festival.
Had we, the people of the world, been able to forgive Saddam Hussein, who couldn’t we forgive? The world, very publicly, failed to remember forgiveness, we failed to remember grace, and it grieves me to this day.įor Windrider participants, the Sundance Film Festival is more than just the movies chosen for exhibition in the festival. Allowing that he was as deserving of death as any tyrant on the planet, the world missed an opportunity to love its enemy, to extend grace and mercy and forgiveness to a man who needed grace and mercy and forgiveness. Saddam Hussein was the world’s enemy for many, many reasons.
#Saddam hussein capture and death tv#
So, as I sat idling in my truck, burning the gas that fueled the conflict that I watched on TV when I was seven years old, the conflict that eventually led to the capture, conviction, and execution of Saddam Hussein, I was pierced by the lapse in love that Saddam’s sentencing represented. If it was true, as my presidents told me, that Saddam Hussein was my enemy, then that meant that he was one of the ones I was called explicitly to love by my Lord. During this same time, I also learned more and more about another Middle Eastern man who called me to love my enemies, who challenged me to forgive those who trespass against me, who offered unrelenting grace to even the vilest of sinners, who would die rather than destroy anyone or anything he created. I daily laid at the end of my mom’s bed watching TV and worrying about her health, my unborn sister’s health, and the health of my world engaged in war with this man named Saddam Hussein.Īs I grew up, I watched as two more presidents sparred with this Middle Eastern man on the other side of the globe, and I learned to call him my enemy. positioned troops in Saudi Arabia to protect their vast oil reserves from Saddam’s advances in August of 1990 until President Bush declared a ceasefire in February of 1991. participated in the Gulf War a decade and a half earlier, my mother was on bed-rest, pregnant with her fourth child, my sister Abigail, and she watched the nearly non-stop news coverage of the war from her bed from the time the U.S.
Saddam Hussein had been a constant presence in my life for as long as I could remember. I cried then, and I’ve cried every time I’ve remembered and reflected on that day ever since. I was twenty-two years old, in my final semester of undergraduate work at Texas A&M University, and sitting at a stoplight in my gas-guzzling, American-made truck on the south side of campus listening to NPR when the news bulletin came through that Saddam had been sentenced to death.
#Saddam hussein capture and death trial#
On November 5, 2006, less than a month after his trial began and less than three years after he had been found hiding in a six by eight foot hole by American military forces, the deposed president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was convicted of killing 148 Shiites from Dujail in 1982 and sentenced to death by hanging.
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