War n Human. Hate is us. Why Forgive?

Do we have a killing gene? We find it so easy to hate.

E-Book: Why Forgive by J.C Arnold

There is a hard law…
When an injury is done to us,
we never recover until we forgive.
A l a n P a t o n

What if our intrinsic design precludes the need for forgiveness?

Abdul commenting on Fitna the video asked

Where are my Jews, my Black people, my African brothers and sisters to denounce such racism, xenophobia, and fear-mongering?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797 One of the foremost political thinkers of 18th century England

Should we perhaps; Accept ourselves, as we are?

IF, indeed we are designed to kill.

Bertrund Russell asked a question “Did the doctrine of hell bring cruelty into this world?”

Forgiveness is related to sin and some say, deserves divine punishment because it is a violation of God’s character .

Genocide

EVERY HUMAN BEING
A German Jewish emigrant:
‘It dawned on me that if I looked into my own heart I could find seeds of hatred there, too. I realised that they are there in every human being. Arrogant thoughts, feelings of irritation, coldness, anger, envy, even indifference – these are the roots of what happened in Nazi Germany.’

Are there any other emotions that can lead to hatred? What are they? What does ‘hatred’ mean? What is it like to feel it? What is it like to be on the receiving end? Does hatred ever feel right and good? If so, when? Does that mean it is right and good?

RESPONSIBILITY
An African American writer about prisoners:
‘It’s easy for folks who have enough to eat, homes, land, work, to preach about forgiveness. But is it fair to preach it to people living in hellholes, jobless, starving? Are they to forgive the fat well-fed millions who voted for their starvation? Who voted for war? Who voted for prisons? Who voted for a people’s repression? Who wish, in their heart of hearts, that those people had never been born? Should the starving forgive the repression to come, the genocide to come?’

IMG Thanks to

1. Ankur’s

2. Manas Dichow’s

3. Eleven Eight

Truth, lies bleeding on the streets

While the spin doctors tell us that life in Iraq is improving. Yet a female suicide bomber struck Shiite worshippers in the holy city of Karbala on Monday.

The dead/wounded toll rises from 8 to 15 to 35 to 43.

Do the numbers matter? Well it does, if you are one of the family of those blown up, but not for someone here in UK or US.

It isn’t even news anymore. As they say, talk to the hand

Img credit to Farm1

However there are people on this planet who will tell us that Tension Escalates in Iraq.

Reading between the lines, it is becoming obvious that Shock and Awe has had such a brilliant effect that this week, 5 years later as

Cheney’s motorcade zigzagged through Baghdad to meetings as helicopter gunships circled overhead. Explosions were heard in parts of the city, but none were near the vice president.

So what is Joe Public supposed to believe?

There appear to be two camps:

1. One that says one thing but knows another.

“The United States can do a lot for Iraq, but we cannot provide Iraq with an anchor in the Arab world, a kind of legitimacy for the new Iraqi project that comes from being fully integrated in its neighborhood,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

“And I think clearly some of our friends in the Arab world can do more on that score,” the official said of Cheney’s coming visit to Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Thanks to Faizshakir.

McCain, who arrived in Iraq on Sunday, told reporters that he also discussed with the Shiite leader the need for progress on political reforms, including laws on holding provincial elections and the equitable distribution of Iraq’s oil riches.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., speaking to reporters from Kuwait after a visit to Iraq, said Iraq should begin picking up more of the bills.

“We’re paying for things that Iraqis clearly should be paying for,” Levin said. “They have the capability, the surplus funds to do their own reconstruction, and to do their own weapons purchases and other things which we’re paying for and they need to pay for.”

Reported in

2. One that faces facts as they see it.

But some analysts have doubt about any major breakthroughs when Cheney talks about the matter with Arab countries.

“I don’t think that he’s going to be able to bring back anything meaningful because he’s got nothing to offer,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“He represents a lame duck president, a floundering economy, a situation in which the U.S. for all its efforts in Iraq has no leverage on the government in Baghdad,” Simon noted

In the final analysis it all boils down to simple things like

The Iraqis do not yet have a law for sharing the nation’s oil wealth among the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, a law that the Bush administration believes will trigger multinational energy companies to invest in exploration and production in Iraq.

Five years and still nothing to show for what they really came for except perhaps as Desert peace eloquently puts it “The Invisible Wounds of the Iraq War”.

Remember Mr Joe Public, they did it on our behalf and we let them.

People sometimes say they respect the ’sincerity’ of those who display passionate conviction, even when what they are convinced about is visibly false. Tony Blair is regularly given credit for his sincerity, at least by the right-wing media, as he remains the only person in the world to believe in Iraqui weapons of mass destruction. But surely we ought to find passion and conviction in such a case dangerous and lamentable. The tendency of mind that they indicate is the vice of weakness, not the virtue of strength. Far from being a sign of sincerity, passionate conviction in these shadowy regions is a sign of weakness, of a secretly known infirmity of representational confidence. If we sympathize with the doughty Victorian W. K. Clifford, we will see it as a sign of something worse: a dereliction of cognitive duty, or a crime against the ethics of belief, and hence, eventually, a crime against humanity. (A paper by Simon Blackburn “Religion and Respect” Simon Blackburn is currently the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge)

A German’s point of view on Islam.

I may not agree with every word, but have copied the transcript in its entirety.

Dr. Emanual Tanay is a well known and well respected psychiatrist.

I have included the topic for the only reason, that, here is a person who recounts from personal experience.

If a Christian can speak about his/her experience and call it witnessing, then I feel Dr Tannay has as much a right to be heard.

A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War ll owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.

‘Very few people were true Nazis ‘he said,’ but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.’

We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history.

It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the ‘peaceful majority’, the ’silent majority’, is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. A man whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War ll owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. ‘Very few people were true Nazis ‘he said,’ but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.’ We are told again and again by ‘experts’ and ‘talking heads’ that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectra of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is that the ‘peaceful majority’, the ’silent majority’, is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managaed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War ll was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were ‘peace loving’?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points:

Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.

Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghanis, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, at the risk of offending, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems of expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this – think about it – and send it on.

Emanuel Tanay, M.D. 2980 Provincial St. Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734-997-0256 drtanay@umich.edu

Witness to the Occupation: Facing Injustice in Palestine

by noticeable

Message of the Wall

copied here from

http://noticeable.wordpress.com/2007/03/17/witness-to-the-occupation-facing-injustice-in-palestine/#comment-557 

“Israel does not want you. Your very existence is a threat to our state. We do not want to hear or see you. Leave.

Such is the power of the psychological message of the wall. But the barrier has even greater physical consequences. As it snakes its way through the West Bank, its path is not faithful to the 1967 borders. The wall’s path, as conceived by Israeli authorities, swallows up vast acres of Palestinian land severing access to profitable farms, keeping students from schools, preventing the sick from reaching needed medical care and dividing families from one another. In the tiny village of Jbarrah, an old man walked us to the place where we could see beyond the barrier that stood above his town. With the afternoon sun falling across the landscape, he pointed out over the wall and told us that the breathtaking ridge just beyond the wall used to his village’s land. There, hundreds of olive trees sit, waiting for the harvest that may never come. The wall in Jbarrah also cuts off the village children from their local school. Through there is a gate that is supposed to open at certain times to allow access, Israeli soldiers consistently fail to abide by the established schedule.

 The gate is opened for the students only when the army gets around to it, leaving the children on some days waiting for hours in the rain. Only a makeshift shelter of blue tarps and aluminum poles sits at the gate’s entrance to protect the children from the weather as they endure the long waits that result from the army’s erratic schedule.”

 Read the full post at:

http://noticeable.wordpress.com/2007/03/17/witness-to-the-occupation-facing-injustice-in-palestine/#comment-557

Also see other similar info at

http://up2peoplelikeu.wordpress.com

Ben Normam & Friends Launch Palestine Awareness

It just had to rain didn’t it. 

The guys were more immersed in how they would actually build a wall to represent the plights of the average Palestinan that they forgot about the weather.

Check it out for yourself:

http://up2peoplilikeu.wordpress.com