ATTACKED! What Are You Going to Do?

How Are We Going to Respond to Attacks?

BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- A Muslim Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Nasser Tarayra, was killed by a security guard on Thursday morning in an Israeli settlement in the southern occupied West Bank after carrying out a "martyr" attack--
repeatedly stabbing a 13-year-old Jewish girl, Hallel Yafa Ariel, in her own bedroom.
Shortly later, Hallel died from the murderous attack.
from http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=772054

Two months earlier, Muhammad's cousin, Yousef, was shot while committing a vehicular attack against Israeli soldiers.
Muhammad wrote on his Facebook page,
"Yousef is not the first martyr nor the last / and before he is my cousin he is a son of Palestine / God willing I will walk in the martyr’s footsteps / God have mercy on him and take him to heaven.”

After Muhammad's murder of the 13-year-old girl, his mother stated that she is "proud" of her son, and that her son is a "hero."
“My son died as a martyr defending Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque..."

“Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, he [my son] has joined the martyrs before him, and he is not better than them. Allah willing, all of them will follow this path, all the youth of Palestine.
Allah be praised.”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/mother-of-kiryat-arba-terrorist-my-son-is-a-hero/

A sister of the killer said, “My brother is now a martyr. May God judge the Jews, and may my brother be content with his portion in paradise.”
--

What Are You Going to Do?

How Are You Going to Respond?

Other True Real Life Events,
(from minor to serious to horrific):

#1 Property Damage/Vandalism: Your New Chevy Van Is Keyed on the Whole Left Side

#2 Verbal Threat:

#3 Assault and Battery: A 200-pound Girl Knocks a 100-pound Girl to the Floor and Beats on Her

#4 Bodily Harm: You Get a Very Bad Cut Across Your Forehead and Lose One of Your Eyes When 2 Thugs Attack and Rob You (This happened to the Brethren in Christ leader Donald Tippet. Read of how he responded at the bottom of this article.*)
http://www.bic-church.org/connect/publications/Shalom/previous/pdfs/Spring01.pdf

#5 Lethal Violence: U.S. Ally Attacks Others
(A Government or Group to Whom We’ve Given Intelligence and/or Monetary Assistance)

#6 Massive Wars: The Great War, The Seven Years War, etc.

#7 Invasions: The Mexican War, the Invasion of the Confederacy, Invasion of Vietnam by the U.S. and French, etc.

#8 First Strike War: U.S. Attack and Invasion of Iraq

#9 Individual Acts of Terrorism:
a. Palestinian Muslim Knife, Vehicle, and Shooting Attacks Against Many Jewish Civilians such as the murder of Hallel Yafa Ariel
b. Omar Mateen, Muslim American Security Guard, Shoots to Death 49 and Wounds 53 Same Sexual Individuals in the Pulse NightClub in Orlando, Florida

#10 Mass Slaughter/Terrorism in War:

#10A 9/11: Muslim Jihadists, originally supported by the U.S. Against the Russians Turn Against the U.S. and use planes to kill over 3,000 people

#10B U.S. Civil War: General Sherman's infamous March to the Sea, creating a 40-mile wide swath of destruction, vandalism, theft, and horror across Georgia, to terrorize the Confederacy into Surrendering;
the intentional abuse and deaths of hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate prisoners of war by both sides


#10C Pearl Harbor: Japan's First Strike Attack on U.S. Naval Ships on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu--2,335 military personnel killed and 68 civilians

#10D Japan's War Slaughter of Chinese:
"Japan’s China war produced notable cases of atrocities that, then and later, captured world attention."

"They included the Nanjing Massacre, the bombings of Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Chongqing and other cities, the enslavement of the comfort women, and the vivisection experiments and biowarfare bombs of Unit 731."

"Less noted then and since were the systematic barbarities perpetrated against resistant villagers, though this produced the largest number of the estimated ten to thirty million Chinese who lost their lives in the war,
a number that far surpasses the half million or more Japanese noncombatants who died at the hands of US bombing..."
http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html



#10E U.S. Counter War-Responses: Later Intentionally Firebombing 67 Japanese Cities Including Tokyo and Atomic Bombing Hiroshima/Nagasaki--killing at least 500,000 civilians, most burned to death.

In the firebombing of Tokyo alone, 100,000 died, and 1,000,000 were injured.
In contrast, at the start of WWII, President Roosevelt had warned European nations, “under no circumstances [to] undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities."

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey provided "a technical description of the firestorm and its effects on Tokyo:

"The chief characteristic of the conflagration . . . was the presence of a fire front, an extended wall of fire moving to leeward, preceded by a mass of pre-heated, turbid, burning vapors . . . . The 28-mile-per-hour wind, measured a mile from the fire, increased to an estimated 55 miles at the perimeter, and probably more within. An extended fire swept over 15 square miles in 6 hours . . . . The area of the fire was nearly 100 percent burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage."

“...probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man. People died from extreme heat, from oxygen deficiency, from carbon monoxide asphyxiation, from being trampled beneath the feet of stampeding crowds, and from drowning. The largest number of victims were the most vulnerable: women, children and the elderly.”


#10F



How do you think we ought to respond to attacks by others?

Here's the answer of only one man in response to a single attack:
*"Bishop Donald Tippet of New York City had a scar that ran across his forehead and he was
blind in one eye from two men who robbed and mugged him.

After his hospitalization, he decided to declare war on them. He went to the jail to visit them and told them God loved them and had a purpose for their lives, and he wasn’t going to leave
them alone until they discovered that purpose.

He visited them weekly, and finally led them both to Jesus Christ. He went to their parole hearings, and testified on behalf of the two men who had blinded him. Finally, he told them that when they got out of prison he would help them finish high school, and then he would help
them finish college if they chose to go.

One didn’t go to college, but the other did. He made outstanding grades, went to medical school, and became an opthamologist!

Donald Tippet won his war. He took back enemy territory. He would have added to the enemy’s victory if he had allowed vengeance and hatred to fester in his heart. Every time we join with Satan’s hatred, it enlarges his territory. Every time we add to his violence, it enlarges his territory.

We are called to take back enemy territory. This young man became a restorer of vision instead of a taker of vision.

He became a healer and friend; he was lost and now he is found...Donald Tippet declared war, and
assaulted those two men with love; he hurled forgiveness and grace at their hearts,
and he stabbed them with truth and compassion.

That’s how God fights wars. If you want to control somebody’s body, kill them, put them in shackles and in jail, but if you’re after somebody’s heart, the only weapons that work are the weapons of Jesus
Christ."
--Woody Dalton is senior pastor of the
Harrisburg (PA) Brethren in Christ Church.
Grantham BIC,March 4, 2001.
Shalom: A Journal for the Practice of Reconciliation,
Volume 21, Number 2; Spring 2001, page 5
http://www.bic-church.org/connect/publications/Shalom/previous/pdfs/Spring01.pdf
--


To be continued--


In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox

What is This Crime of Illegal Immigration?

Before we exclude the "others," let's consider this powerful quote from a long editorial by Orson Scott Card, the famous science fiction author and conservative commentator:

"What Is This "Crime," Really?

By Orson Scott Card

"A fifteen-year-old boy -- let's call him David -- has been yearning for his driver's license for a long time.

But today all thoughts of waiting for his license are out the window, because his little sister cut herself and he can't stop the bleeding...So David puts his sister in the car and, holding a towel on the wound to apply pressure, he drives...heading for the nearest medical emergency center.

...a state trooper sees him driving too fast and pulls him over. David tries to explain that he's only driving illegally in order to save his sister's life, but the trooper doesn't listen.

He drags David out of the car and handcuffs him and yells at him that he has no business driving a car without a license...

I'm sick at heart about the number of Americans, including friends of mine who should know better, who are proud of being exactly like that state trooper, when it comes to the question of illegal immigrants.

"They have no right to be here in the first place. If we give these people amnesty and let them stay and apply for citizenship, we only encourage more illegal immigration in the future. Besides, they use up our welfare and add to our school costs without paying taxes!"

In vain do the immigrants try to explain that their families were desperately poor...
Why can't we look at what these people are actually doing? Why can't we see the bleeding child in the passenger seat, and realize that most of these illegal immigrants are doing precisely what you or I would do in the same circumstances?
...
So what is this vile crime of "illegal immigration"...It consists of crossing over an arbitrary line that somebody drew in the dirt a century and a half ago. On one side of the line, poverty, hopelessness...
On the other side of the line, plenty of jobs that...would save your family's lives, give you hope for your children...

Wouldn't you take any risk to get across that line?..."

By Orson Scott Card
Read the rest of this heartfelt article and another one on immigration at
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/
--

There are, of course, complications in this difficult issue. About twenty percent of illegal immigrants are criminals. They need to be arrested and deported.

And we need to have Congress and the President figure out a humane way for hard-working, law-abiding illegal immigrants to pay a fine for their breaking the law and then help them become citizens if they wish to do so. Also, our immigration policy needs to favor the poor and wretched of the earth as it once did!

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
On the Statue of Liberty
Emma Lazarus


And at the same time, we all need to remember that most of the American Southwest was stolen by American crooks about 170 years ago!

A biblical passage comes to mind on all of this: “He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens...
Hebrew Bible, Deuteronomy 10:18-19

The Tragic Nature of Duty, Honor, Country, and God

Duty, honor, country, God...aren’t these sacred nouns of what dreamed ideals are made?
What every good human seeks or should quest after?
How could such great exemplars possibly be the source of tragic, unmitigated evil?

In my childhood and youth, duty, honor, country, and God meant nearly everything to me. I still remember standing tall to receive my God and Country Award in Boy Scouts--months after many hours of preparation and achievement to earn the medal--then wearing it, proudly, on the green khaki of my Boy Scout uniform on important days.

The award hung there next to my merit badge sash emphasizing exactly those virtues of duty, honor, country and God. And hard work, reverence, etc., all those ethical characteristics of the Boy Scout Oath and Law: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

But then all hell broke loose…

But before I explain what happened, wind back to one section of the past in U.S. history to get a more generic overview of these vaunted words—duty, honor, country, and God.

Consider the complicated, convoluted, tragic American Civil War in which two dutiful heroes stand out--Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant.

Take the latter first. Grant joined the war effort to keep Southerners from leaving the Union. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Grant didn’t think Americans have a right to leave a government they oppose. Strangely though, he had previously violently supported Americans taking land from another country, Mexico, helping kill many for that right!

Oddly, also, Grant's family owned slaves and he worked them. From 1854 to 1858, Grant used the slaves of his wife’s father on the family farm. And Grant bought a slave in 1858, only three years before the Civil War but sold her in 1859.

His view of slavery may have been changing. However, his family didn’t free their slaves until after the Civil War ended and Missouri abolished slavery. So ironic that Grant was killing many Southerners when his own family back in Missouri still owned slaves!

While Grant gave partial support slavery, he seems to have been committed to an almost mystical vision of country, the United States. Like Lincoln, he didn’t think states had a right to democratically leave. “There are but two parties now, Traitors & Patriots and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter…”

So, like Lincoln, he was willing to abandon slavery if it would stop states from seceding. Grant said, “If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.”

Previously, Grant had served in the U.S. Army invasion of Mexico. New American immigrants to the area had wanted to bring slavery into its portion of Mexico, but slavery was outlawed in Mexico. Isn’t that the beginning of irony—that this Union which Grant so valued, was actually born of land theft, and that the U.S. had supported the importation of slavery into Mexico by Americans who had recently immigrated into Mexico!

Already, 15 years before Secession, duty is again shown to be morally twisted.

Isn’t it strange that Grant warred to support rebels who supported slavery against the Mexican Government, but opposed democratically elected states, who supported slavery from leaving the United States? What a moral tongue twister!

And Grant, himself, later recognized the wrong nature of the Mexican War. He called the latter war “unholy.” And said, the “Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War. Nations, like individuals are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment..”

But as always with so many well-meaning humans, duty calls: According to Grant, “Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life and history.”

I suppose some people will say, ‘At least in the Mexican War, U.S. soldiers fought dutifully against people in another country, who believed differently, and even looked different. But when duty called in 1861, it called for brother to take up arms against brother. Like the story in the Jewish and Christian Bible-- the senseless murder of Abel by his brother!

But, in the case of the Civil War, both sides were Cain, though, as the defender against invasion, the Confederacy less so, since they only wanted to go their own way, not invade the North. In fact, technically, the Civil War wasn’t a war about who controlled the nation, but about the North refusing to let Southern states leave after they had voted to do so.

Striking ironies. The Confederate general protecting Vicksburg from the invasion and assault by Grant’s troops from the North, General John Pemberton, was himself actually a Northerner. Two of his brothers, in contrast, joined the Union army, supporting the Northern invasion of the South! How tragic!

The rector at Vicksburg’s Christ Episcopal Church, the Reverend W.W. Lord, had also moved from New York 10 years before. He and his wife, also, supported the Confederacy!

So, hopefully, it is clear, that while a small group of Southerners, the ruling class of plantation planters, owned slaves, most didn't. Furthermore, most Southerners fought against the Union, not mainly because of slavery but because the Yankee army had invaded their homeland, their country.

This was exactly the case of Robert E. Lee. Known as the soldier’s soldier, Lee was admired even by his enemies. As a Christian and a Southern he followed duty and honor and country and God, enlisting in the Confederate Army even though he himself opposed Secession.

During his time at West Point, he got NOT one demerit, a very unusual achievement. For him, duty, honor, God and country were most important.

Lee had, at first, been offered command of the Union forces set to invade the South, but he said he wouldn’t attack his own state of Virginia. No, he would instead go back to defend his home.

Like Grant, Lee and his family owned and used slaves. Like his opponent Abraham Lincoln, Lee supported the freeing of slaves and having them emigrate to Africa. He did recognize slavery as a social evil that, hopefully, would eventually be ended.

Lee wrote to his wife in 1856, “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any Country.”

Lee chose to obey the state government of Virginia (and other Southern states, rather than the northern states who had a monopoly in the U.S. government) He stated, “Obedience to lawful authority is the foundation of manly character." But weren’t he and his state rebelling against lawful authority?

Wasn’t Lee one of the “traitors” that Grant railed against? Not according to Lee and millions of other Southerners. They weren’t rebelling but withdrawing from a democratic voluntary association, just as Thomas Jefferson, also a Southerner, had said everyone has a human right to do.

Unlike many a human when violently attacked, Robert E. Lee didn’t hold to revenge. He even emphasized forgiveness. “We must forgive our enemies. I can truly say that not a day has passed since the war began that I have not prayed for them.” Not the usual image of the battle-hardened soldier in either historical tomes or popular media is his famous statement?

Yet here is the tragedy, the moral evil: Lee ordered hundreds of thousands of Americans into battle to kill other Americans, Christians to kill other Christians.

By following duty, honor, country, and God, Lee was directly responsible for multi-thousands of deaths. Of what use is it to pray for your enemies, and to forgive them, if you order them killed?

Keep in mind that some of his opponents in the Union Army were also Christians who believed in prayer, forgiveness, duty, honor, country, and God! Yet they invaded and killed countless numbers of Southerners, stole their produce and animals, confiscated and burned their homes and factories, causing untold suffering and anguish that lasted for many years!

Furthermore, many Northerners were racists, even in the Union army, and opposed Black equality. After the Civil War, racist Black Codes came into being in the South.

But racist codes were also evident in places in the North. And there were"Sundown towns" such as Hawthorne, California which had a sign outside its city limits in the 1930's which read, "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne."

So much for honor and that God loves everyone, "red and yellow black and white..."

What came of all this high-sounding moral code of duty, honor, country and God? Over 800,000 needless deaths, millions of wounded, the ravaging of half of America, untold suffering to civilians, unjust and immoral laws for over 100 years against Negroes, and die-hard racism.

One major secular philosopher, Immanuel Kant, emphasizes how duty shines above all, how duty is the highest call of humankind—the one true ethical act.

But not in the case of the very unCivil War.

The one good side effect of the war was the emancipation of the slaves, though when Lincoln emancipated slaves, he did so only for states in the Confederacy. Most historians say that Lincoln did this primarily as a war measure.

Slaves in the North continued to be enslaved until the end of the war! Lincoln's Emancipation didn't apply to them. So strangely, Lincoln freed slaves where he didn't rule, but enslaved Negroes where he did rule!

Then Lincoln also advocated that freed slaves should leave the United States. In March 1861, Lincoln said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

He further stated, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves I would do it…”

“I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Etc.


Of what strange things are duty made, and the slaughter of others, and the hypocrisy of religion.


To be continued…

In the Light,

Daniel Wilcox