A beautiful, profound book of poetry by one of the best

“Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortable into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.” About her “Palestinian grandmother who lived till she was 106” she has this to say: “She wanted people to worship in whatever ways they felt comfortable. To respect one another, sit together around the fire cracking almonds and drinking tea, and never forget to laugh no matter what horrible things they had been through. What wisdom,” she asks, “did  she know that all these men can’t figure out?” (from the Introduction.)

In “Different ways to pray”, she writes

“There was the method of kneeling,

a fine method, if you lived in a country

where stones were smooth.

Women dreamed wistfully of

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

their prayers, weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables could

fuse them to the sky.

There were men who had been shepherds so long

they walked like sheep.

Under the olive trees, they raised their arms --

Hear us! We have pain on earth!

We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

 But the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

At night the men ate heartily, flat bread

    and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.

In “Passing the refugee camp” she writes after describing how

“Yesterday the soldiers smashed

Lena’s sink and tub and tiles” and

“They whipped a father in front of his sons

ages 2 and 4” and later

“On the steps of the National Palace Hotel

soldiers peel oranges

throwing back their heads so the juice

runs down their throats” she asks

They know what sweetness lives within

How can they know this and forget

so many other things?”

It is difficult for me to pick poems in this wonderful book that are favorites, because so many of them are. Painful, beautiful, poignant, wonderful poems. In “All things not considered”, she has this to say:

“You cannot stitch the breath

back into this boy.

A brother and sister were playing with toys

when their room exploded.

In what language 

is this holy?

TheJewish boys killed in the cave

were skipping school, having an adventure.

Asel Asleh, Palestinian, believed in the field

beyond right and wrong where people

    come together

to talk. He kneeled to help someone else

stand up before he was shot.

If this is holy,

could we have some new religions please?”

In “Blood”, she writes:

I call my father, we talk around the news.

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

to plead with the air.

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?

I first encountered Naomi Shihab Nye when I read one of her poems, “Kindness” that  haunted me until I found the book it was in and bought it. She is also the author of the young adult  novel “Habibi”, which I have also reviewed, and other novels and poetry collections. 

This is a book I keep nearby to read again and again and again. Go to your nearest bookstore and buy a copy. Get one from amazon.com or The Book Depository. But get one,read them out loud and listen to the voices there. 

This time Israel went too far: "Operation Cast Lead" as a genocidal campaign

A review of “This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion”, by Norman Finkelstein, Or Books, Kindle edition, 2011. Hardcover published by Or Books, 2010.

Contents: Foreword, 1/Self-Defense, 2/Their Fear, and Ours, 3/Whitewash, 4/Of Human Shields and Hasbara, 5/Inside Gaza, 6/Ever Fewer Hosannas, Epilogue, Appendix and Notes.

“It’s not that you are to carry out a massacre, but ……” — Israeli commander on the eve of the Gaza invasion (quote located just before the Foreword).

The name given to the attack by the IDF, “Operation Cast Lead,” says it all. When an army casts lead indiscriminately at a population, the underlying purpose is shock and awe, and the result is massacre. No amount of self-justifying verbiage – and there has been plenty of that – can minimize it. From the testimony provided by eyewitnesses and IDF combat soldiers, a massacre is exactly what happened. Followed by a blizzard of justifications, denial, obfuscation and outright lies, all of which Professor Finkelstein carefully documents. Amnesty International called the attack “22 days of death and destruction.” The Israeli government called it justified.

But this time they went too far. Operation Cast Lead was so far over the top and so overwhelming and indiscriminate (they even attacked UN installations) that they caused a tsunami of negative reaction from around the world. Their response? To build a political firewall of propaganda around themselves that had and has a very focused purpose: to seek out, delegitimize and destroy Israel’s critics using every means possible, including character assassination, misinformation, intimidation and destruction of their resources and their organizations. This plan is outlined in detail in a report by Israel’s Reut Institute published in February 2010 following a tsunami of negative response to the Gaza war. The report, which I have read and own a copy of, can be obtained, in PDF format, from http://reut-institute.org/data/uploads/PDFVer/20100310%20Delegitimacy%20Eng.pdf  It is well worth a careful read. An article by Ali Abunimah in the February 16, 2010 edition of The Electronic Intifada calls it “Israel’s new strategy: ‘sabotage’ and ‘attack’ the global justice movement.”

Israel made it even more difficult for itself when, several weeks later it attacked the Mavi Marmara, one of the boats in a peace flotilla headed for Gaza, killing a number of the people on board. Again, the Israeli government justified it and launched a massive propaganda campaign of justification. But even the Reut Institute said they had gone too far.

Israel is very good at being its own worst enemy. Instead of trying to partner with Palestine’s indigenous Arab population and build a nation together, they set about vigorously uprooting and attacking them, a process that continues in both Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel itself. “Under the guise of what is called the ‘peace process’,” Professor Finkelstein writes, “Israel has effectively annexed wide swaths of the West Bank and shredded the social fabric of life there and in the Gaza Strip.” All, of course, justified whilst thumbing its collective nose at world opinion and the UN. Again, all carefully documented by Professor Finkelstein and others … and justified and denied by the Israeli government.

Israel justifies its behavior on the grounds of “security”, but the question that arises in reading this and other books on the subject raises this significant question: Would Israel have any security problems had they treated Palestine’s indigenous population as respected partners? Would they have any security problems today if they treated Palestinians with respect instead of contempt? I very much doubt it.

“This Time We Went Too Far” is a book that I recommend and have as part of my library. It is not, however, at all popular with those for whom Israel can do no wrong. Read it with an open mind. I give it 4 stars.

Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed

Efraim Karsh: Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010.

Howard Sachar, author of A History of Israel, calls it “A work of meticulous, even exhaustive scholarship which must be taken with great seriousness and respect by historians of diverse points of view. Indeed, any student of modern Israel will ignore at their peril its sheer cornucopia of factual revelations” (from the dust jacket) … and the sheer abundance of its factual exclusions.

The following two quotations, one from the first page, the other from the last page of the text (257) establish the parameters of Professor Karsh’s study. “For Jews all over the world, this was the fulfillment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in their ancestral homeland. For Arab political elites, it was a shameful surrender of (a however minute) part of the perceived pan-Arab patrimony to a foreign invader.” 

“And so it goes on. More than six decades after the Mufti and his followers condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution and waging a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbors, their reckless decisions are still being re-enacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders… Only when Palestinian and Arab leaders change these dispositions and eschew their genocidal hopes will the refugees and their descendants be able to leave the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, and will the Palestinians be able to look forward to putting their self-inflicted ‘catastrophe’ behind them.”

To Professor Karsh there is no need to present the Palestinian point of view, because to him the Palestinian point of view is not valid. Yet there is no evidence from his research that he ever tried to assess it, and he excoriates those historians (like Ilan Papé, Shlomo Sand and others) who have. “It is indeed a historical irony that, since the late 1980’s, much of the Palestinian historiography has been written by Israeli ‘new historians’ … younger, politically engaged academics and journalists who claim to have discovered archival evidence substantiating the anti-Israeli case. These politicized historians have turned the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, with aggressors transformed into hapless victims and vice versa” (page 4). He goes on to claim that these “new historians”, instead of unearthing “new facts or offer[ing] new novel interpretations”, they have “recycled the standard Palestinian Arab narrative of the conflict” (page 5). His evidence? A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (repr. 199) in full with permission from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C), Vol. 2, pp 570-80; the Peel Commission Report, p. 91; and Aharon Cohen: Israel and the Arab World (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), p. 228. No mention of the sources they have used, no questioning of same, just dismissal of them as “politicized historians” who, being “politicized” are biased whereas he, somehow, is not.

From the simple exercise of reading the modern history of this region, the following things have occurred to me, but not to Professor Karsh:  that large numbers of new, mostly European immigrants would have seemed invasive to Palestine’s indigenous population … that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN’s declaration in 1947 to create a Jewish State in Mandated Palestine would have caused alarm bells to go off in the Middle East … that it is normal to expect that Palestine’s Arabs and their supporters would have fought against what they viewed as another in a long line of European colonialist adventures … that the continued expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and Arab East Jerusalem is a problem … and that Israel’s Arab citizens are treated as second class citizens. All of these things are extensively documented, but not by Professor Karsh. Does this represent “meticulous, even exhaustive scholarship”? I don’t think so.

Is the book worth reading? Oh, definitely. His disrespect for Palestine’s Arabs is as crystal clear as his pro-Israeli bias. It is so clear that it is propaganda: stern, dismissive of other points of view, and very much interested in convincing its readers that what it presents is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But it isn't. Even the title, Palestine Betrayed gets it wrong.

To have peace in the Middle East or anywhere else, one must quit propagandizing and engage in peacemaking. Propaganda perpetuates conflict and suffering because, being dismissive, it refuses to listen to points of view other than its own. And that is as sad as it is troubling.

Professor Karsh has an undergraduate degree in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from Hebrew University (Jerusalem), and an MA and PhD in International Relations from Tel Aviv University (Tel Aviv). He is currently Professor and Head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Programme, King’s College, London.

War is Killing People, a review of "The Bomb", by Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn: The Bomb. San Francisco, Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 2010, 91 pages. $8.95

Comprised of two previously published essays on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the French village of Royan at the end of World War Two plus a new Introduction by the author. Both attacks were justified and defended as necessary in bringing the wars with Germany and Japan to an end. Yet, as Zinn and others have shown, not everyone was in agreement with that. More likely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done to show the Soviets that we had the ultimate weapon. On the incendiary carpet bombing of the little village of Royan Zinn writes that "The evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation" that, like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the lack of viable military targets, were carried out against civilian populations to make a point: Resist us and you shall die.


In Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, September 1, 2001), British ethicist Jonathan Glover writes about "the moral slide" in reference to the decision during World War One to block aid shipments to the German people that caused thousands to die of starvation. From there it was a simple matter to push the envelope a little further and allow the bombing of civilians as a means of crushing an enemy's spirit and defeating him. Civilians, in other words, were now players in a military drama. Once frightened non-combatants, they were now an element military strategic planning, bargaining chips in an endgame that they was chosen for them by people they did not even know.


What Glover did in his masterwork, Howard Zinn did years earlier in his essay on the bombing of Hiroshima. "The strategic argument ... that there was no military necessity to use the bomb, is not enough. We need to confront the moral issue directly: faced with the horrors visited on hundreds of thousands of human beings by the massive bombings of modern warfare, can any military-strategic-political 'necessity' justify that?" (emphasis added). It is a question that each of us needs to ask ... and answer for ourselves.


In the Introduction, written in late 2009, Zinn brings the discussion into the present: "What you see over and over again in the news reports is the words 'suspected terrorist' or 'suspected al Qaeda' -- meaning that 'intelligence' is not sure whom we are bombing, that we are willing to justify the killing of a 'suspect' in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, something we would not accept from a police operation in New York or San Francisco (emphasis added). This suggests, to our shame, that the lives of people other than Americans are of lesser importance" (page 19).

I don't know if this hits you like it hit me, but when I read that I put the book down, looked out my window at my neighborhood, and thought. I thought about my country's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and its support of Israel in its dealings with the non-Jewish residents of Palestine. I thought about its deadly "Operation Cast Lead" attack on the tiny enclave of Gaza that unleashed an overwhelming rain of fire and death on everyone living there, and justified it as retaliation for a few missiles Hamas fired in its direction. I thought about the Obama administration's rejection of the well-documented Goldstone Report condemning Israel's actions as unjustified and accused its leaders of war crimes. And our long support of Israel in spite of a growing mass of evidence that shows that its treatment of Palestine's non-Jewish residence has from the beginning been a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

And I thought, as a citizen of the U.S.A., they are doing these things in my name. And by my silence I give my unspoken support to behavior that I do not agree with because it is morally reprehensible and wrong. It is this moral question -- are attacks against civilians morally acceptable or not -- that is the basic question for each of us. 

In his book House of War about the Pentagon, James Carroll includes an anecdote about a group of American general officers thinking about nuclear war against the Soviet Union. One of them says that since the U.S. has more of them, we would win, even if there are only two of us and one of them left standing. This is not only irresponsible, it's insane. I remember thinking "You idiot! You haven't won a damn thing! All three of you are men!"

I give Zinn's little book a 5-Star rating. If the moral issues that he raises concern you, and if they don't, buy a copy and read it.

 


This faces us

“The day I see a leaf is a marvel of a day.” — Kenneth Patton

Sitting here in my study looking out at the snow, I think what marvelous things our senses are. To sit quietly and see, touch, hear, smell and taste the world we live in. To take the smallest, the tiniest particle or being and take it in and savor it. To watch the wind in the trees, the approaching rain, the sound of voices or a voice. To hear music, laughter, grief. To look into our loved one’s eyes and see into the depths. To hold a loved one’s hand, to feel the warmth and texture of skin on skin, to cherish memories.

What a privilege just to to be without expectation or agenda.

Spring Poem

This morning walking

to work

I saw

leaves

backing out of

the

branches of a hedge.

Scottish Country Fair, St. Paul

On the green

dancers leap & twirl

bodies light as mist

They catch moons with their arms

throw out suns

make the earth under their feet

groan with pleasure

& with their eyes

give out a solemn joy & pride

that moves across the green

like a soft wind

blown up from a valley

or a shaft of light

cast down through trees.

Ocean

The ocean

is magnificent

sun sparkling

on its calm surface.

Quiet

In this quiet room

only the TV and my pen

show any motion

~ ~ ~

I wrote the first poems back in the 1970s. They are in my poetry collection, Seeing: Collected Poems, 1973 – 1999, published by Tortoise & Hare Publications in 2000, and now out of print. The last two poems I wrote while visiting my wife’s family in Kushiro, Japan in December 2007. On sunny days, the old red macaw sat on his perch outside in the winter wind.

Happy New Year to each of you. I am now back from my “writing sabbatical”. For more about that, go to www.geogepolleyauthor.com, go to “Writer’s Blog” and read “When the Well Runs Dry”.

Warmest regards,

Toasty

For a future to be possible

Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that for a future to be possible on this planet, we – each of us – has got to do something to turn things around so that a future is possible for our children, grandchildren and beyond?

“The day we stop killing off our own species,” writes Zoe Taylor of McClure Middle School in Seattle, WA, “our world will become a book with no more torn pages.” (Source: Wisdom Commons, www.wisdomcommons.org.) That ought to be so obvious that no one would question it. Yet people go on killing each other every day in acts of war and vengeance.

Are there active movements where you live to reduce violence and the madness of war? If there are, what are they? If there aren’t, why not? What prevents such  movements from happening? Historian Andrew Bacevich has written that Americans are seduced by war (“The New American Militarism”). I am convinced that America and its citizens are seduced by violence. It’s in our militarism, our video games, our domestic relations, our language and in our gangs. Is this true where you live? What can you – can we – do to change this where we live? What are we willing to do.

For the first time in my life, I live in a country – Japan – that is committed to the peaceful means of solving conflicts. Nonviolence has been written into its Constitution since the end of World War Two. Does this mean that war thinking has ended? Not at all. It means that the nation, and its people are dedicated to seeking peaceful means to solving conflicts. Looking back at the horrors of World War Two, the Japanese people wanted nothing to do anymore with war and warmongers, and they have stuck resolutely by that and demanded that their politicians and military leaders do the same. (The last military officer to publicly rattle his sword, a four-star Air SDF general, was summarily fired from his job earlier this year and mustered out of the Self Defense Force.)

South Africa changed from a White controlled government to a racially inclusive government led by Nelson Mandela without the eruption of violence and hate that most people had predicted. And in Northern Ireland, in spite of occasional outbursts of sectarian violence, the people and their leaders seem committed to a peaceful future.

For a future to be possible we, as individuals, neighbors, communities and nations, must begin committing ourselves to beliefs, attitudes and activities that bring a peace that respects our differences.

What do you think?

All for this post,

Toasty

 

A wonderful story for young adults of any age

Review of “Habibi”, by Naomi Shihab Nye. Mass Market Paperback. Simon Pulse, 1997.

Naomi Shihab Nye brings her poet's voice to this touching story about 14 year old Liyana Abboud and her family as they move from St. Louis, Missouri to Palestine, where her father, a physician, was born and raised. The move isn't an easy one, for more reasons than one. The family arrives to find conditions more tense than they had expected, with growing violence and a growing Israeli military presence in the West Bank. The story is also filled with some memorable characters, one of the most memorable being Sitti, Liyana's 81 year old grandmother, who is the “glue” that holds her large family together, a veritable font of energy and wisdom.

It isn't easy being an American teenager in Israel, especially when you're half-Arab and half-American and female. The rules are very different (and Liyana tests them, as any self-respecting teenager will), you don't understand the language, dad (“Poppy”) has to do all the translating, you don't “fit” anywhere, and the tensions between your father's people (and hence your own) and the powers that be in Israel grow daily. To complicate matters, a friendship develops between (and warms) between Liyana and a Jewish teenager named Omer (she mishears his name as “Omar”). It is a time of hardening positions and escalating violence. “Did people who committed acts of violence think their victims and their victims' relatives would just forget? Didn't people see? How violence went on and on like a terrible wheel? Could you stand in front of a wheel and make it stop? ... It was better ... if you were able to let the violence stop when it got to you. But many people couldn't do that.” When a Jewish deputy mayor of Jerusalem proposes that two thousand Arab homes in east Jerusalem be torn down to make room for fifty thousand houses for Jews, and nothing is said “about pain or attachment or sorrow or honor”, what happens? When someone knocks on your door, walks in and kicks you and your family out without so much as a by-your-leave, and you lose everything, what's the logical consequence? These are the issues that Liyana, her family, and every other human being in that part of the world (and in many others) had and have to deal with every day of their lives.

As grandma Sitti says to Omer “You will need to be brave. There are hard days coming. There are hard words waiting in people's mouths to be spoken. There are walls. You can't break them. Just find doors in them. See?”

Ms. Nye does a wonderful job of painting in the details of her story in vivid color, images and anecdote.

This may be a book for young adults. In my view, it is a book that everyone should read.

All for now,

Jorge Luis Tostada (“Toasty”)

My kind of hero: Bernard Loeffke, Major General, USA (retired)

General Loeffke is on the left in the photo

A Vietnam veteran, Bernard (“Burn”) Loeffke commanded Special Forces and finished his Army career as the Commanding General of Army South. A graduate of West Point, he has an MA in Russian and a Ph.D. in Political Science. When retired from the U.S. Army in 1992, he did something that didn’t surprise anyone who knew him: he studied to be a Physician’s Assistant, receiving his degree in 1997. After graduation, he participated in several medical missions in combat zones in southern Sudan.

A professional soldier, Burn Loeffke is also a man of peace and compassion, the sort of man who commands respect because he gives respect to everyone he meets. In that, he’s like my old Naval Reserve Commander, Commander Roy Heffelfinger. I met General Loeffke at a conference at the Pacific Institute in Seattle in 1998, where he was speaking. I had just written my first book, “Things I’ve Learned From the Old”, and gave a copy to him. The next day he came up to me and said he’d read the book and liked it. Then he turned to those who were standing around waiting to speak with him, and, holding up the book, said: “This is a fine book. You ought to read it. And here is the author.” Out of the blue, unasked for, unexpected. That’s Burn Loeffke, and that’s what makes him my kind of hero: He has a heart for other people.

Here’s a quote from his book And the Least Beastly of Us Should Be Doing It: “Acting like brothers is the key to keeping hope alive in our Americas”. And by “brothers”, he means that every human being living anywhere from the North Pole to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, is a brother and sister and must be treated as such, and not left, marginalized and unwanted, to live in poverty and despair. That’s the way he treated the people under his command, and that’s the way he treats everyone. And that, more than anything, makes him my kind of hero. We need a lot more like him.

General Loeffke is the author of several books, including And the Least Beastly of Us Should Be Doing It; Our America, Our China (Dr Bernard Loeffke, Dr Renliang Xu, and Marc Loeffke); How These ... Can Make Us Healthier (with Carmen Queral) ;and From Warrior to Healer: 99 True Stories from a General to His Children, which I have read.

His website is Helping Others Today, a not-for-profit initiative with his son Mark and daughter Kristin that supports a variety of projects, including:

An orphanage in Guatemala

A reconciliation camp in Ireland

An AIDS clinic in Kenya

A free clinic in Haiti

A school in a refugee camp in Sudan

A day care center in Kosovo

Aiding low income children in the Third World

Educating nurses in Niger

Their website is at: http://helpingotherstoday.com

All for this post,

Toasty

A hero

 

Our news is so full of people who do all they can to attack, belittle and tear down that I’ve decided to dedicate the next few posts to people who stand up, confront wrong, build up, heal, and comfort – people who live by their beliefs in spite of all the garbage, violence and trash that is heaped on them. This is the first installment, and my hero is Clarence Jordan.

Clarence Jordan was born in Talbottom, Georgia in 1912, and died suddenly of a heart attack at age 59 in 1969.

Clarence Jordan lived what he believed, and he believed in living Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, binding oneself to the equality of all persons, rejecting violence, ecological stewardship, and common ownership of possessions. In 1942 he and his wife moved to a 440 acre farm near Americus, George, calling it “Koinonia”, a Greek work that means fellowship.

Until the advent of the civil rights movement, their neighbors generally left them to live and farm in peace; then Koinonia became the target of a stifling economic boycott and repeated violence, including several bombings.

I met Clarence Jordan at a conference for Baptist ministers in a Chicago suburb in 1963, where he spoke about the civil rights movement and the response (or lack of) of the White churches in the South. A Bible scholar, we were eager to hear what he had to say about the civil rights movement that some claimed was “tearing our nation apart”. Interesting how discomfort turns reality around: It wasn’t racism that was tearing our nation apart, it was opposition to it.

In his quiet, red clay south Georgia drawl, Clarence Jordan said it. The churches, both large and well-known and tiny and unknown, had turned Blacks and their supporters away and in so doing, turned their backs on everything that Jesus taught and stood for. He said it quietly, eloquently and pointedly.

By the end of his first presentation, there was a lot of discomfort in that room. When we returned from lunch, with all of the local Church bigwigs seated behind us, he began by saying that they had asked him to apologize for saying what he had said about the churches negative response to the civil rights movement.

With each of the bigwigs looking pleased, he began his apology. And with each word he spoke, the white faces seated behind him turned to scarlet. I don’t recall Clarence Jordan’s apology other than to say that it turned their words back on them as a scathing indictment.  All delivered in his quiet broad red-clay Georgia drawl.

It was brilliant, it was deserved, and I was happy that I wasn’t on its receiving end. It, and the man who delivered it, stand as beacons to me of heroic living.

So I give you Clarence Jordan, one of my heroes, as a life to be emulated.

Among other writings, Clarence Jordan was the author of the Cotton Patch translation of the New Testament. Here is a sample, from his translation of Paul’s letter to Ephesians, which he translates as “The Letter to the Christians in Birmingham.” You’ll see why the church bigwigs at that conference were so uptight:(from Ephesians 11-13):

"So then, always remember that previously you Negroes, who sometimes are even called "niggers" by thoughtless white church members, were at one time outside the Christian fellowship, denied your rights as fellow believers, and treated as though the gospel didn’t apply to you, hopeless and God-forsaken in the eyes of the world. Now, however, because of Christ’s supreme sacrifice, you who once were so segregated are warmly welcomed into the Christian fellowship."

Hard to misunderstand, isn’t it?

That’s all for this post,

Toasty

Palestine – Continue the insanity, or create peace?

Newsweek Cover article is 'WILL IT EVER END? IT COULD – HERE'S HOW,' By Managing Editor, and former Jerusalem bureau chief, Daniel Klaidman:

As Klaidman writes, “There are no options other than a comprehensive agreement that creates two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, warily coexisting side by side. ...” 

“But how to salve the wounds of Palestinian grievance? One intriguing solution is offered by writer Walter Russell Mead in an essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Mead argues that though Israel must take some responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy, the entire NAKBA, or catastrophe, 'cannot simply be laid at Israel's door.' Israel must acknowledge its part in the events of 1948, but the international community must take 'ultimate responsibility' for the 60-year-old crisis. In this way, the world would acknowledge that the Palestinians have indeed suffered a historic injustice, but obviate the need for Israel to bear full responsibility. 'This is a way to confer dignity on the Palestinian people,' says Levy-a crucial step toward securing an elusive peace.' “ –- from Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook Daily Update

Think about it: isn’t it about time for this tragedy to finally end in peace for everyone? Isn’t it time to put resentments and grievances behind end the suffering for everyone? I sure think so. Enough of the lunacy!

Shalom,

Toasty