www.reconciliationtalk.com

Where did you learn about Muslims?

In the course of my day to day life in a town with a significant proportion of Muslims I have the privilege to chat informally, meet formally, work in partnership with them, or spend time with a Muslim friend most days. That does not even take into account for those who serve me at a shop or cafe, nod a greeting to me as I walk down the street, or indirectly help me go about my daily life. Furthermore, aspects of my work means I see all manner of statistics, pieces of information and reports about their lives.  And finally I seek to set that information in the context of what I can discover about their co-religionists in other places around the nation and world.

Overall I would say I am pretty well informed. So when I read a lot of the stuff that is out there about these dear people I often cannot believe what I am seeing.  I read in the press here, and in the US that my town, my country is taken over by Muslims. That is not what I see. What is the the truth then?

I think its all a matter of the reality one sees. For me the reality is that even in a place where, so the story goes, the Muslim population is full of Jihadis, reality is that the very large majority are ordinary decent people who want to get on with life, as British citizens and practice their faith in good conscience and inofensively. These are the people I meet every day even though I often keep an eye open for the few others. I have the privilege i know of being where they are, so I respond to their voice when I read something like the story we started with.

The web presence however of Islam is much more strident - due to the proselytising commitment of the few, and a good few petrodollars to facilitate it. Bloggers read and blog. And the journalists are often lazy and use it. Trouble is that is the voice so many quote and it has become the reality for so many nowadays as a result.

Yes, there is, as a friend said in conversation on line the other day, there are those who make  "a real and conscious effort to attempt to expand the jurisdiction of Islamic law" but the magnifying impact of the media and the blogosphere has upped its supposed dominance no end. My Muslim friends do not deny that it is there, and it is active, but it is not the main voice. But they are sick of it getting all the media, and are increasingly standing up and being counted on that.

I walked through Bury Park on election day a couple of weeks ago and the Islamists were out attempting in some numbers attempting to stop people sinning by stopping them voting. Their head honcho, a man villified by the national press this time last year, paid me the honour of wanting to stop me sinning, so I stood and listened to him to him for 40 minutes  As I talked i watched his buddies - men and women - as the very large number walked by unimpressed. Later as I stopped to talk to various Muslim friends (committed religious conservative muslims most) they expressed sadness at the fact these guys didn't want to be active citizens.

In so much of what I do I respond to voice of my friends, and what I also believe to be the majority voice. By doing so I empower them and I believe make it more likely that they and those like them will become the dominant voice of British Islam in years to come.

But when you speak about Islam where did you get your facts? If its from any written source - even me - that is not good enough. Find one to talk to. And I dare you to become friends!

The Psychic Scars of Kashmir

Link: The Psychic Scars of Kashmir.

A great photostory of the dreadful impact of war in beautiful Shrinagar in Indian Kashmir

The gardens of the devil, still sowing death

The first time I saw one, my first instinct was to pick it up. It shone in the sunlight, bright green, something new and fresh amid the dry grass of the south Lebanon hills. The little cluster bomblet seemed to have been made to hold in the hand. No wonder the little children died. ....

Link: The gardens of the devil, still sowing death - Robert Fisk, News - Independent.co.uk.

Land mines, cluster bombs - immoral, and to be banned. Why then are so many opposing this, and lobbying others to stop it?

The three trillion dollar war

This is shocking.

Link: The three trillion dollar war | Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes - Times Online.

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined.

The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And there is an extract on BBC2 Newsnights site:  The Three Trillion Dollar War by Stiglitz and Bilmes

I want to get this in perspective. I am a peacemaker. It would be nice if I earned £30,000 a year (say $60,000). I don't, but I can dream.  You could employ 50 million people like me with that money.  50 million!!  Do you think 50 million peacemakers might just be able to sort out a war. I don't want to be simplistic, so I won't push that line much further. How about one of those cruise missiles that were launched in gtreat numbers at Baghdad during the first stage of the war. They cost US$600,000. You could pay 10 peacemakers the exalted salary of $60,000 a year for one of those. Would ten missiles have been missed?

Please excuse me while I go and lament a salary that might have been and the 50 million colleagues I never knew.

Rambo Stallone on War

A good paper by my friend Charles Strohmer, who seeks to remove the Hollywood glamour from war, and especially a generation that have not known war.

Link: Charles Strohmer - Rambo Stallone on War.

“Old men start wars. Young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is accidental. We’re animals.” According to Joel Stein, in Newsweek (Feb. 4, 08), that’s what Sylvester Stallone wanted John Rambo to explain in the new Rambo film. Stallone, however, cut that dialogue, “because Rambo is a silent man, and blurting out your thesis is for college papers, not movies.

Stroohmer's conclusion:

There are ways wiser than war. This is true even for resolving seemingly intractable problems like the ones that were posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. But in the rush to war, the path of wisdom gets trampled under foot. Hedges and Schell, who, interestingly, at the end of the day do not consider themselves pacifist, are two of the emerging trustworthy voices crying, each in their own way, for ways wiser than war in international relations.

Of wisdom, the Bible itself so cries: Listen to me! Listen! Counsel and sound judgment are mine. My paths are paths of peace. Wisdom is better than weapons of war. Here is plea for rulers and their advisors to more consistently follow a worldview in which God created and sustains the world by wisdom, not by war. A worldview in which the one war that was truly worth the fight was fought and won by Christ on Calvary’s  hill, that we ourselves might be made wiser about war. Any takers?

1.4 Million Dead in 4 Minutes

The apparent strategic logic of 1.4 million dead -- explained in 4 minutes.

This video finally helped me understand what has previously appeared to be the illogical strategy of the American Civil war. I believe in the declared moral purpose of the North, the abolition of slavery in the south, but as with so many (I am tempted to say all) wars once combat starts it just gets caught into one unholy destructive cycle of death and destruction.

Christmas in the Trenches

Silent Night, by Stanley Weintraub, is the story of Christmas Eve, 1914, on the World War I battlefield in Flanders. As the German, British, and French troops facing each other were settling in for the night, a young German soldier began to sing "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht." Others joined in. When they had finished, the British and French responded with other Christmas carols

Link: God's Politics - Jim Wallis blog, faith blog, religion, christian, christianity, politics, values.

Is this the best they can do to make peace?

I am frankly horrified.  Do we ever learn from history?

U.S. considers enlisting tribes in Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda

What goes around surely come around. 

Where did Osama bin laden and friends learn their tricks?  The CIA funded the indiginious Mujahadin in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's.  see also Operation Cyclone   Osama Bin laden (an Arab) recruited for this same effort from the Arab world, and was directly involved in the fighting in Afghanistan. At the end of that war, the various Mujahadin groups fought each other, and some evolved into the Taliban - which the US supported to replace a still Soviet-inclined Afghan government. That same Taliban were allied with and provided the context for the basing of Al Quaaeda in Afghanistan in the years up to 2001.

The nature of the links between Bin Laden and the CIA can be disputed, and are not the point here.  see Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden [note; since this article changes regularly I am not endorsing its conclusions! merely the fact that the subject is disputed!]  It does not matter for the point of this discussion whether it was a direct link; it is enough to link the Taliban and its Mujahadin forbears as a product of US support.  In other words, "friends" in one generation can not be relied on to be friends in the next generation.  Especially when the bonds of the friendship are purely monetary, and the reason for friendship is identification of a common enemy or merely a grudge that can be exploited and nurtured with money.

Another factor from history to take into account. The allegiances and loyalties of the Pashtun tribes of the North west Frontier of Pakistan and neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (including N and S Waziristan where Bin Laden has often been held to be sheltered)  are perculiarly localised and seem, at least to the outsider, to be shortlived - they are known as fierce warriors and are noted for their bloodfeuds.)   No empire ever seems to have been able to subdue them, and many have been humiliated in the region; that is certainly true of the British campaigns on the NW frontier. (You can see a great slideshow and commentary on Waziristan here)

Is this really the means to the subjugation of America's enemies in the region, and to strengthen the enemies of Pakistan's apparent pathway to democracy? If it is succesful for a short while (the cynic says until the elections of Novemeber 2008), history would suggest the longer term fruit will be less positive, and could be downright disastrous.

Is this the best way to make peace?  It makes me very sad.

PS:  Washington's Tribal Dreams 

Through the Forest, a Clearer View of the Needs of a People

Through the Forest, a Clearer View of the Needs of a People

A LUOI VALLEY, Vietnam — Phung Tuu Boi reaches down to inspect one of the spiny shrubs lined up in a row before him. A few feet away, a cow grazes serenely in this emerald valley in the hills of central Vietnam.

Mr. Boi, a forester and director of the Center for Assistance in Nature Conservation and Community Development in Hanoi, points to the cow. “See this?” he says. “Very, very bad.”