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| somebody's idea of being "right" |
I have more than a suspicion that I am not alone in having
trouble loving my enemy. I am still reeling about someone planting a bomb at
the Marathon in Boston so as to kill as many human beings as possible. The
problem is that I am not horrified and surprised that someone could do such a
dastardly act. Killing innocent people in order to spread terror has been part
and parcel of our landscape for the last several thousand years.
Usually we humans dress it up with the niceties of declarations of war and
statements of regret for “Collateral Damage’ caused to civilians.
I remember more than 20 years ago when I was studying in
Jerusalem and members of our class visited a “settlement” in the West Bank.
Settlements are a strategy of our ally Israel of placing armed camps in the
middle of occupied territories on high ground to control roads when, not if, open
war will break out. Many of these camps are occupied by recent immigrants from
the former Soviet Union and the United States who want to make sure that Israel
will not lose land to any Palestinian state. I talked, actually talked would
not be the right word, mainly I listened to an harangue from a group of people mainly
from Brooklyn who lectured me on the Book of Joshua in the Bible where God had
told the people to cleanse the land of the residents, men, women, and children,
so that “God’s people” could claim the land. They saw themselves as continuing
the Biblical Mandate as they waved their Bibles in our faces making sure we
could see the loaded Uzis slung over their shoulders. Later that day we went to Ramallah where we
talked, or listened to a group of Palestinian Arabs who lectured us on the only
weapon we Americans, and our client state Israel, understood was violence to
claim their land back after it was seized in 1948. They claimed that “Justice”
required driving Israelis and their American lackeys into the sea.
Later that week the class I was taking went down to the
ruins of Jericho where the excavations at the tell (mound) uncover one of the
oldest settlements in the world going back to before 9000 BC. There were at
least 20 different cities built on top on the rubble of one ruin after another,
with many defined “burn layers” showing the ashes of conquest and the
destruction of the innocent.
The night of the Boston bombing I got in the mail from
Netflix, the Movie Zero Dark Thirty, about
the hunt for Osama Ben Laden, which starts
with long horrible scenes demonstrating torture, or as our government
called it, “Enhanced Interrogation”.
How much we love violence and excuse it for all sorts of
reasons. Jesus told us there is another way.
SHALOM
tom+
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