Why?

I consider myself as “white” in that my ancestors all came from Europe and my skin colour is lighter than that of “people of colour”. And I recognize that in many ways this has allowed me privileges not given to those who skin colour differs from mine. Likewise I speak the only language I know – “English”! Furthermore my heritage and inherited customs are also “English”.  

But does this make me “better” than those with a skin colour that differs from mine?; or “better” than those who worship God in a manner different from the way I do?; or “better” than those who speak a different language – even two or more languages?; or “better” than those with different customs and a different heritage?

Surely, surely we can move on, beyond such puerile thoughts and beliefs?

We need diversity; we need the “differences” – these things give us a focus rather than just navel gazing. A lack of “difference” in a group or society often brings out the worst in people and the resultant “mob” formation may have disastrous consequences. One just has to witness the frenzied mobs at recent political rallies or at football matches in England and Europe, or the extreme neo-Nazis or any extreme religious group to understand the effects that may influence much larger populations. 

Should such extremes enter main-stream society then confusion and a breakdown of law and order is inevitable. This has unfortunately been witnessed too often in the 20^thCentury. Apart from the horrendous massacre of about 6 million European Jews by the Nazis (1933-1945), there was the awful Pol Pot (1975-79) in Cambodia whose henchmen killed an estimated 2 million people. Then there was the deranged Idi Amin, the Ugandan president in the 1970s under whose rule about ½ million people died. Also never forget the “ethic cleansing” in the 1990s in what was Yugoslavia and the similar, current,  “cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and the present day “re-education” of a million Uyghur Muslims in China. The list is almost endless. 

And why? In the name of all that is wonderful – why?

I know this sort of thing has been going on for centuries but can’t we learn anything from the past? 

Rene Girard, in his book “The Scapegoat” states that a Portuguese monk, Fco de Santa Maria wrote that, “As soon as this violent and tempestuous spark is lit in a kingdom or republic, magistrates are bewildered, people are terrified, the government is thrown into disarray….. All the laws of love and nature are drowned or forgotten in the midst of horrors of great confusion; children are suddenly separated from parents, wives from their husbands, brothers and friends from each other….” 

That was written in 1697! What has changed?

Here is a quote from a speech by Frederick Douglass (African American, a former slave, social reformer, orator and statesman) on the 24^thanniversary of emancipation, Washington, DC, 1886, which has great relevance today:- 

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” 

Then there is the famous warning by John Donne the 17^thCentury sermonist and poet who wrote, “… any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Maybe we should all bear this in mind?

Oh dear! Israel’s “moral” army – again.

It is very unfortunate that it is necessary to question, again, the Israeli Government’s assertion that it has the “most moral army in the world”.

Recently an Israeli Court has convicted Israeli Army reservist, Sgt. Elor Azaria, of manslaughter for shooting dead a severely wounded Palestinian attacker. Now, it has been reported, that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will call for him to be pardoned for this cowardly and totally unprovoked attack - by an army medic – no less.

The question that should be asked is, to be ethically and morally unbiased, what would have happened if the situation had been reversed and the (now dead) Palestinian had been accused of killing a wounded Israeli soldier (the said Sgt. Elor Azaria)?

I know the answer, and so do you.

I suggest that no quarter, no mercy would have been extended to the Palestinian. He would have been shot in retaliation – or at best, if captured alive – would have been condemned as a “terrorist” and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Israel cannot claim that history, the admittedly appalling treatment that has been meted to Jews since time immemorial, gives them licence to claim the “moral” high ground while still indulging in self pity and making excuses for blatantly racial acts such as that carried out by Sgt. Elor Azaria.

Sgt. Elor Azaria should be condemned and serve out the sentence the court decides. To do otherwise will just enflame the Palestinians and push any “peace” even further into the future.

The Israeli’s have to understand and accept the hard truth that every action has a cause – and an effect. The to me (admittedly an outsider and a non-Jew) unfair occupation of Palestinian land is the primary cause of the “unrest” between the Israelis and Palestinians. No compensation is, or has ever been offered – merely the reference to the “God given” Biblical historic “right” of Israel to the land.

This is an entirely spurious argument. Should Japan be given back to the original Ainu? Should the Iberian peninsular be returned to the Celts? And then should America be returned to the original inhabitants – the North American “Indians”? What about handing Australia back to the “first people” the Aborigines?

Come on! Get real. Everyone, yes everyone, is a descendent of an immigrant – we all came out of Africa. We all have traces of Neanderthal genes.

No one has any God given or Biblical or any “right” to any land anywhere. But it is only fair, the ethical and moral thing to do, to offer compensation or reparation for land and houses “commandeered” from Palestinians.

Hasn’t Israel been given billions of Euros as “reparation” for the properties, in Germany and other countries, confiscated by the Nazis?

What is the difference, morally and ethically, between what the Israeli’s are doing and what the Nazis did? Both actions are actions on a spectrum – the Nazis at the appalling extreme end (10) with the Israelis round about the middle (say 4 or 5 out of 10).

Both are wrong.

It just is a matter of degree. A pardon for Sgt. Elor Azaria – would be wrong. Totally, morally and ethically, wrong.

Amended Feb 21, 2017:-

Sgt. Elor Azaria was found guilty of manslaughter for shooting dead 21-year-old Abdul Fatah al-Sharif in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, last March and jailed for 18 months.

Amended Nov 21, 2017:-
The Israeli courts have rejected a plea for this man's pardon! Pardon! Thank God someone in Israel has the moral understanding to see that a wrong is still a wrong.

Azaria had told a colleague that Sharif, who had stabbed another soldier, "deserved to die".

The dangers of simplistic slogans

It seems to be fashionable, or the cool thing, to reduce complex issues to simplistic 3 or 4 word slogans.

If history is any guide slogans repeated often enough, are assumed as truths. Belief in these slogans leads to a steep inclined plane which propels all involved lower and lower into ever more harsh and deplorable policies. Apathy by the educated and predominantly self proclaimed elites in any country you care to name, who conflate identity with skin colour; skin colour with ethnicity; ethnicity with criminality (drug dealers and rapists); and ethnicity with religion (“they worship a different God”); religion with a need to compile a register, to make a list of all such people the easier for them to be kept under surveillance – such conflation is self destructive. It will lead very quickly to concepts of national and racial purity, and is only a short step from barbarism.

What follows is a damning statement about the dangers of apathy in the face of slogans and propaganda, by the German theologian Martin Neimöller, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

            Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

If, today, now, the words Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims, “illegal immigrants”, Afghanis, Syrians or whatever are substituted with any of the above, the picture presented would be a bleak one indeed.

Warsaw Ghetto 1940 – Gaza Ghetto 2018.

Amended May 15, 2018
I wonder if anyone ponders  the irony of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians (in Gaza) and compares it with the terrible events in Warsaw in the early years of the Second World War?

In 1940 the Germans (Nazis) walled off a small area of the city of Warsaw and instructed all Polish Jews to either move there or be forcibly transported there. From this Ghetto many Jews were transported to the infamous “Extermination Camps” that the Nazis had set up, under the ruse that they were to be “resettled”.

Once those in the Ghetto realized what was happening they set up a resistance movement to fight for their survival – after all they had nothing to lose. The final battle started on the eve of Passover on April 19, 1943, when a Nazi force consisting of several thousand troops entered the ghetto. After initial setbacks, the Germans under the field command of Jurgen Stroop systematically burned and blew up the ghetto buildings, block by block, rounding up or murdering anybody they could capture. Significant resistance ended on April 28, and the Nazi operation officially ended in mid-May, symbolically culminating with the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw on May 16. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps - (I acknowledge  reference to Wikipedia for some of this information).

Now, today, in the Gaza Ghetto with the Palestinians who were either moved there or were forcibly resettled because the Israelis took control of Palestine, we are seeing an eyrie replay of those appalling events of 1943 under different circumstances, certainly, but with the same intent:-

To DESTROY THE RESISTANCE AT ALL COSTS!

There is a blockade in place – imposed by Israel under the guise of stopping the rocket attacks on Israel. OK – this, just possibly, I can understand. But what I can’t understand is the Israeli refusal to recognize the Palestinians justification for their use of these weapons.  Remember there are 1.8 million Palestinians packed into a small enclave. Gaza is the most densely populated area on earth – they have nowhere else to go. The Palestinians are frustrated, demeaned as a people, treated as second class citizens, racially vilified, starved of opportunity and quite frankly treated in a manner that those Jews who survived the Holocaust would recognize as similar to what they were subjected to.

So now, the Palestinians are fighting just as the Jews did many years before.

To so twist words as to accuse the Palestinians (Hamas) of “causing the problems and the deaths of  Palestinian’s” is an obscene abuse of language. Hamas (read Palestinians) are fighting for their survival as a people; fighting for their community, their religion and their way of life. Isn’t this what the Israelis have always done in the past? Isn’t this what the Jews trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto did? Would anyone in their right mind claim that the Jews who died in the Warsaw Ghetto caused their own deaths?

I am sure the United Nations would, today, classify the Zionist militia group, Irgun (1931-1948) – under the leadership of Menachem Begin ( later, in 1977, Prime Minister of Israel), as a terrorist organisation. In fact Begin himself was, at the time, in the 1940s, declared a terrorist by the British who had a “mandate” over Palestine. Various Zionist leaders held different ideas about how to achieve their goal of an Israeli nation but revisionist Zionists, like Begin, were extremist nationalists who believed violence was justified to create a state and considered guerrilla and terrorist tactics a legitimate route toward this end.

Sound familiar?

The injustice of the carve up of Palestine after the Second World War when Israel was established (in 1948) without any Palestinian consultation or the payment of any reparation for the Palestinian properties taken over when the new State of Israel was formed, is the root cause of the present problem.

That injustice, seventy years old now, still burns in the Palestinian psyche. What are the Palestinians supposed to do? They formed Hamas to fight for their rights just as the Zionists formed Irgun to fight for theirs.

The Israelis have now systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza – hospitals, water plants, electricity generators, sewage systems, schools, roads, in fact anything of value to the inhabitants – with  the intention, I am sure, of forcing the Palestinians to leave, thus solving Israel’s “problem” (which the Israelis themselves created).

This is exactly what the Nazis did in Warsaw.

Violence begets more violence and creates a vortex, which, like a black hole, sucks in everyone and everything - there is no way out. Killing people never solved a problem – the Israelis know this; the Americans know this; the world knows this. Violence, as I have proclaimed in these posts many times before, is the last resort or the morally bankrupt.

Remember, what goes around comes around.

Read what you will into these words.