On this Eve, Please Write for Those Suffering in Eastern Ghouta, Syria

Rescue the perishing!

from Amnesty International URGENT ACTION:

"14 individuals have died since July in Eastern Ghouta, as the Syrian government blocks their medical evacuation and those of another 572 other severely injured and ill people. More deaths are expected if authorities do not approve their immediate evacuation to hospitals in Damascus...and cases of acute malnutrition." Damascus is "just 10 kilometres away..."

Sahar died of malnutrition in besieged Eastern Ghouta, Syria, on 22 October 2017.


"According to medical personnel in Eastern Ghouta, an area near Damascus where government forces have been holding around 400,000 civilians under siege, 14 people have died while awaiting medical evacuation. The medical evacuation of 572 people suffering from severe injuries and chronic diseases has been pending approval from the Syrian government since July."

"According to the testimonies, a majority of patients can be saved with basic medical supplies that are available in Damascus, just 10 kilometres from Eastern Ghouta. No medical evacuation has been allowed so far."

"Doctors and medical workers are unable to provide adequate medical care to the injured and ill due to lack of adequate surgical supplies, medical equipment and medicine, particularly for treatment of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes."

"As a result, doctors are using expired medicine from destroyed hospitals. There has additionally been a rise in cases of acute malnutrition, especially in children, exacerbated by the lack of access to food, humanitarian aid, and other life-saving necessities."

1) TAKE ACTION
Write a letter, send an email, call, fax or tweet:
 Calling on the Syrian government to immediately lift the siege on Eastern Ghouta;
 Urging it to unconditionally allow medical evacuations to Damascus;
 Calling on it to provide unfettered access to UN humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners.

Contact these two officials by 30 January, 2018:

President
Bashar al-Assad
Fax: +963 11 332 3410 (keep trying, if it does not go through, include your message to the president in an e-mail to the Ambassador, asking for it to be forwarded)
Email: syria.pr@outlook.com
Salutation: Your Excellency

Permanent Representative to the UN Bashar Ja’afari
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
820 Second Avenue, 15th Floor
New York, NY 10017, USA
Fax: +1 212 983 4439
Email: syria.pr@outlook.com
Salutation: Your Excellency


https://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent-actions/urgent-action-14-dead-as-a-result-of-the-syrian-government-siege-syria-ua-275-17/
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In the LIGHT,

Daniel Wilcox

Rescue refugees!

For centuries, the United States opened its arms to many refugees
whose lives had been torn apart by war,
and those ruthlessly hounded because of who
they are or what they believe in. But today, the people of Syria

http://gph.is/2gOb3xy

are suffering these hardships on an unimaginable scale, and we're still waiting
for US leadership on the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time.

Take action. Urge Congress to increase the number of Syrian refugees
resettled in the US.

Please, let us accept at least 200,000 refugees.

How will we pay for this?

STOP funding oppressive Muslim governments such as Pakistan!

STOP supporting the wars and human rights violations of Saudi Arabia.

SUPPORT AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, WORLD VISION, and other human rights and development organizations.

https://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=42358


http://www.wvi.org/syria-crisis


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Rescue the Perishing, Care for the Dying...The Best Way to Help Syrian Refugees

Read the Vox article “The Best Way the US Could Help Syrians: Open the Borders”

By Dylan Matthews

“Bombing is rarely the best way to help people.”

“Morality in foreign policy isn't about bombing bad guys. It's about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won't involve bombings at all.”

Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Ultimately, the choice was whether to commit tens of billions of dollars, and tens of thousands of US ground troops, to implement a strategy that might have toppled Assad and saved thousands of lives, but which also might have made the conflict even more brutal than it's been. The latter was probably more likely, in fact. The cost would have been considerable in any case, and the benefit very uncertain. Compared with the benefits of letting Syrian refugees into the US, which we know are great, and the costs, which we know are small, that's not a very attractive proposition.

The best humanitarian interventions don't involve the military.

Cash transfers are an extremely effective humanitarian intervention that doesn't involve the military at all.

But [military bombing] enables a strange hypocrisy. The humanitarian interventionists who would've attacked Syria, and now mourn our failure to do so, aren't [increasing our] foreign aid budget in general, perhaps to 1 percent of gross national income, like Sweden, from merely 0.2 percent.

They're not calling for reforms that make it easier for USAID and other aid agencies to spend on highly effective projects that reduce child and maternal mortality. They're not calling on the US to eliminate all quotas and tariffs on goods from poor countries, as well as farm subsidies that make it harder for poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to export their goods. They're certainly not calling for a massive expansion in levels of immigration to the US from...the world's absolute poorest countries.
--
Plenty of people in Washington like restricting immigration, especially low-skilled immigration from poor countries. Plenty of people in Washington like the idea of cutting the foreign aid budget, or perhaps eliminating it altogether.

But it's not too late to help refugees. The boats are still sailing, and sinking. Children are still dying. People are still suffering. It's not too late for the US to heed the International Rescue Committee's call for us to resettle 65,000 refugees, not the paltry 1,434 we've resettled so far. It's not too late to do the International Rescue Committee one better and let in 200,000, 500,000, 1 million even. It's not too late to make Syrian refugees' lives dramatically better.
--
Morality in foreign policy isn't about bombing bad guys. It's about helping people. And usually, the best way to do that won't involve bombings at all."

by Dylan Matthews

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/4/9258149/syria-refugee-humanitarian-intervention
END OF EXCERPT

Yes, what if the U.S. and many other wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia, Germany, Iran, and many others drastically reduced their weapons and bombs budgets and funneled that money into restoration, reconciliation, development, and in the short-term immigration and refugee rescue?

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

Christian Faith and Inhumanity, Torture, Ad Nauseam

"Today torture has been reestablished.

"In many countries the system of justice quietly tolerates torture being applied before and simultaneously with the regular proceedings of police and prison officials in order to extract confessions form those accused."

"The amount of suffering thus caused every hour surpasses imagination. To this renewal of torture Christianity today offers no opposition even in words, much less in deeds."

Is this a news comment on the actions of the United States and its allies over the last 10 years?

Is this the beginning of a critique from one of the new Secularists lambasting American Christian leaders for their support of torture, inhumanity, nationalism, oppression of undocumented persons, preemptive war, ad nauseam?

Tragically, no. But thank God, Albert Schweitzer, a theist, an academic, concert musician, doctor, mission worker once did speak out these words, though it came long ago in back 1931.

Isn't it ironic, how in some ways so little changes in human ethics, especially not in Christian ethics, year after year?

Why is it that so many "Christians" now support actions that are so contrary to Jesus' words from 2,000 years ago?

Not too long ago, I even read of Christian leaders at present who claim slavery isn't inherently evil because Scripture supports and condones the institution! Furthermore, another Christian leader said that torture is God's will because the Old Testament supports torture!

But at least this one follower of Jesus did speak out 80 years ago against all oppression in the name of Jesus.

Here are a few more of his comments:

"Christianity has need of thought that it may come to the consciousness of its real self. For centuries it treasured the great commandment of love and mercy as traditional truth without recognizing it as a reason for opposing slavery, witch burning, torture, and all the other ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity in its name.

Only when it experienced the influence of the thinking of the Enlightenment was Christianity stirred up to enter the struggle for humanitarian principles.

The remembrance of this ought to preserve it forever from assuming any air of superiority in comparison with thought.

If Christianity, for the sake of any tradition or for any considerations whatever, refuses to let itself be interpreted in terms of ethical religious thinking, it will be a misfortune for itself and for mankind.

Christianity needs to be filled with the spirit of Jesus, and in the strength of that shall spiritualize itself into the living religion of inwardness and love that is its destiny.

Only then can it become the leaven in the spiritual life of mankind.

Because I am deeply devoted to Christianity, I am trying to serve it with loyalty and sincerity. I do not attempt to defend it with the fragile and ambiguous arguments of Christian apologetics.

I demand from Christianity that it reform itself in the spirit of sincerity and with thoughtfulness, so it may become conscious of its true nature."

Albert Schweitzer
Out of My Life and Thought
p. 183, etc.
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Healing news from the past needed for today's religious blindness.

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox