Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly |
| A minor pharaoh famed for not having his tomb robbed (ancient-egypt.com) |
 |
| Spring, Egypt's Tahrir Square and the MIC (AFP) |
A non-event, some video that had been up on YouTube for months, is suddenly seized on as a cause to protest and riot? Doubtful.
It is difficult to say what is really going on, but this is clearly a pretext fanned by FOX News and presidential candidates in the US.
Should anyone be upset that the Prophet
Mohammed is mocked? Yes. Our modernity means we have few if any sacred cows. That's fantastic and liberating for us. And eventually other spiritual people will devolve/evolve to that state. But until then respect is needed all the way around.
Buddhism is more peaceful and peace-inspiring than most people imagine. According to the Buddha, if a person hits another person and that hit-person hits back, that second-hitter is worse than the first. Jesus (Issa) would be proud to align himself with a nonviolent tradition like that.
 |
| Hi, I'm Republican Jesus |
How far from that are our Judeo-European ways. Here we're encouraged to hit first and keep hitting.
(Growing up in Boston if I were to come home crying that I had gotten beaten up by someone, my father -- or my older brother in hi place -- would ask me, "Did you hit him first?" If the answer were no, I'd get a second beating. It's the Irish/Italian way. It's the east coast way. It's probably a holdover of surviving in a lower socioeconomic bracket. It's probably what any
CHAV would do in Britain or
gavone in New York).
Jesus is reputed to have said, "Turn the other cheek." If one is backhanded disrespectfully, turn the face to be hit honorably, openhandedly on the opposing cheek. In neither case is one to get mad, but we rarely follow that. At least we espouse it. At least we carried out crusades to spread Jesus's message of love to "barbaric" Muslims. (Did we teach them to cut off the hands of thieves, extract eyes for eyes, and not suffer children disrespecting parents under penalty of death, all things the Bible enjoins us to do?) We are the barbarians, and we can't bear to see ourselves that way.
"We aren't; they are!" we say. Or maybe everyone is. It's like Elizabeth Kubler Ross said, "I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay."
So, hey Americans, stop insulting Islam! And, hey Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), stop invading, corrupting, installing, and deposing dictators friendly to the West.
Why?
 |
| Peace in the Middle East? (richardsilverstein.com) |
If anyone believes the geopolitical Middle East is setting fire to embassies, schools, and effigy flags because of a YouTube video, they must not have been paying attention to events over the past few decades. It is analogous to the gratuitous Rodney King beating and attempted murder by the LAPD. Los Angeles did not erupt into rioting after criminal police were acquitted because of that acquittal. These are merely excuses, triggers, detonators to a tinder box of long held resentments.
It is because these abuses -- in this case abuse by the long arm of the US military under the control of our overt and covert government and the much shorter arm of the MIC's main ally Israel -- have been mounting for decades. They do not stir themselves up but are organized and antagonized by "our"
PsyOp forces. So why do we keep falling for our mainstream media's slanted coverage which seems bent on instigating Armageddon scenarios wherever it can.
