Badlands
I've been staying away from this issue, but the Girl Cousin sent this to me, and I felt the need to pass it along:"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.
If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel."
That, in a nutshell, is the truth of the situation. And I am soooo fucking tired of hearing about the death of "civilians" in the Arab states, and the death of "Israelis" in Israel. The implication is that all Israelis are... what, exactly? All soldiers? Not innocents? Deserving of their deaths in a school bus, or a pizza parlor or a shopping mall? Because those places don't sound like military targets to me. But to hear the world press yammer on about it, they aren't civilian targets.
I am sick of the Hammas and the Hezbolah hiding behind the shields of women and children and then claiming that Israel (politically correct phrase that really means "The Jews") are guilty of brutality and wholesale slaughter of innocents.
I am sickened by the whole Mel Gibson story. The arms-length intellectualism of analysis of his "alcoholism" and "non-anti-Semitism". Bullshit. The man, to quote my SisterFriendGirlFriend, "drank the bad Kool-Aid" and needs to be treated.
I am tired of the creeping tide of anti-semitism that is rising across the world. I am tired of the attitude that says just ignore it, it isn't that bad, it's only a few people, it's blown out of proportion, it can't happen here.
Oh, it is happening here. And there. And everywhere. And I am tired of it all.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/04 at 12:08 PM in What the Fuck is Wrong With You People
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/04 at 12:08 PM in Yellow Dog Politics
Yeah. I’m tired of it too. I don’t get what the other side stands for. “We love Allah so much we’ll kill innocent people for Him?”
I see no solution, no end.
Maybe an invasion from Mars would distract everyone.
No, probably not.
Which is the bigger threat, Steve? Mel Gibson, hands-down. I will guarantee you (betting any amount of money you choose) that more people have heard of Mel Gibson, than South Park. I will bet you an even larger amount of money that there are more people all over the world who have seen Mel Gibson’s “Passon of the Christ” more than once, than there are those who have seen even a single episode of South Park.
Mel Gibson and especially, his sweetheart of a Dad, have made plenty of anti-Semitic statements, dead-sober. Because that’s what their version of Christianity - or is it a flavor of Catholicism? - believes in.
Have the pogroms started here, Steve? Maybe not yet. But there’s plenty of anti-semitic violence going on in western Europe, particularly France and Belgium, who have ever-growing Muslim immigrant populations. And not a damn thing being done about any of it by their governments. Sound familiar?
Wake the fuck up, Steve. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Stop watching that bullshit garbage on Comedy Central and turn on the news from time to time.
Oh, Steve, you are wrong when you say that Jewish life and property are not harmed or in danger here. Look at the defaced synogues and cemetaries, and say that again. Ask any child who has ever been called a Dirty Jew and say that there is no damage to the psyche.
But you are barking up the wrong tree when you focus on South Park. That episode was a satire on the rubes who line up, not on the Virgin Mary herself. I have seen the Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese sandwich, I have seen the miraculous crying sap of the tree in Little Havana, I have seen the iguana with GOD written on its side. The people who believe in those manifestations of the holy are the subjects of South Park’s ridicule, and, in my opinion, rightly so.
The people who believe in holy wars (on any side) are wrong. My God does not tell me to kill the people who don’t believe like I do. My God tells me to love all. My religion instructs me to the see manifestations of the holy in the most simple: the rain, the grass, the sky and the sea.
I am taught by my religion that to honor life and other’s beliefs is to honor my own God.
If you want to believe in something else, my belief is that that is your right.
Steve, you make presumptions about my god. Yes, I am a Jew, but I am not a fundamentalist Jew. As an amalgam of reform/conservative/reconstructionist I choose not to read the OT as (forgive the pun) gospel. I don’t think stoning sinners is an option. I haven’t made animal sacrifice part of my worship process.
But I do believe in the spark of the divine in each of us.
I do not believe in the righteousness of holy wars. Not the Crusades. Not the Irish Troubles. Not the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans. Not the Final Solution of the Nazis. Not the bombing of abortion clinics by Christian Fundamentalists. Not the Muslim/Hindu/Buddist wars that I cannot begin to fathom in India. Not the calls from Texas pulpits to bring total war to the Middle East to bring about the second coming. Not even, or maybe especially, the intolerance of Fundamentalist Jews towards those whose interpretation of Judaism is less strict.
I truly believe that all good religions come down to pretty much the same few points:
1. Take care of each other, especially those who can’t take care of themselves: the very old, the very young, the very sick, the very poor.
2. Treat the earth gently and all the life on her.
3. Acknowlege that there is something greater than you.
4. Respect differences.
Yep. Pretty much it.