Israel's UN attack.

Reuters reports about the Israeli bombing of a UN post that led to the death of four UN peace keepers on July 25, during the brief war with Hezbollah. Here are the most interesting parts of a UN-led board of inquiry...

Israel used a precision-guided bomb to launch a direct hit on four U.N. peacekeepers
...
the board was "unable to determine why the attacks on the U.N. position were not halted, despite repeated demarches (communications) to the Israeli authorities from U.N. personnel, both in the field and in U.N. headquarters," Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a statement.

Interestingly, Israel has called in an "operational mistake"! How can they continue to make operational mistakes when the UN personnel kept sending them communications asking them to stop ?

Could this be then the real reason ? Excerpts...

The words of a Canadian United Nations observer written just days before he was killed in an Israeli bombing of a UN post in Lebanon are evidence Hezbollah was using the post as a "shield" to fire rockets into Israel, says a former UN commander in Bosnia.

Those words, written in an e-mail dated just nine days ago, offer a possible explanation as to why the post -- which according to UN officials was clearly marked and known to Israeli forces -- was hit by Israel on Tuesday night

Israel has taken full responsibility for the incident, but in the following manner...

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said maps of the area had been incorrect. "There was a mishap on the Israeli side where in duplication of maps, the U.N. position on the maps was not marked as it should have been and that created the tragedy,"
...

Regev said the investigation found that about 100 metres (yards) from the U.N. position there was a Hizbollah position where there was "hostile activity".

U.N. officials agreed Hizbollah guerrillas were at a base in the area as well as in a nearby prison. But they said there was no activity from the militia on July 25 and the U.N. bunker was clearly marked.

This whole incident brings to focus the problems with "peace-keeping" in volatile areas. Is it really possible for a small force of international peace keepers to be able to maintain the peace in an area where they are complete outsiders, and at times have no other option but to have tacit "understandings" with the local armed militias ? And then they get killed and reported as "collateral damage" with vague excuses as to the reasons behind their deaths.

Cross posted on : Context Switch.

The Thief of Rage 2

I was brought up as a Christian. My Mother was and is a Salvationist. I learnt from an early age the bizarre rituals and unhealthy dogma that surround and make up not only the Christian faith but also the Jewish muddle and the equally odd Muslim beliefs.

"our father who art in heaven
hallowed be thy name"

Bollocks.

If it sounds as though I am either being unkind or cruel then forgive me and anyway if your faith is so easily bruised then it is not much of a faith anyway is it? I mean no great disrespect to any of these faiths who have numbered amongst them people who are my friends and my family but there is some thing creepingly disquieting and darkly ominous about all and any organised religion. Organised religion is at best an accumulation of of dead ritual, lifeless dogma and a faith that is established on fear. The Church, any church gets in the way of pure faith by placing priests and bishops sharply between the congreation and their constructed deities.

Who needs a church anyway? It is nothing more than a club for like minded individuals to gather, eat buns, drink tea and sing vile and decaying ancient songs. Far better, surely, to go direct and for that you do not need, no matter how beautiful the works of architecture, a temple, mosque or synagogue.

"you are closer to God in the garden than any where else on earth"

Why is it that throughout mans short, by natures terms but long in the count of his own, time here had to construct personified deities? As a focus or an outlet of their spiritual faith I suppose but why try to shackle god to the limited wisdom and flimsy logic of mankind in the first place?

"Those who turn to deities as intermediaries between themselves and the subtle truth are like beggars who look outside themselves for the very treasure contained within their own nature. It is only after one discovers one's own divine nature that prayer or any form of worshiping the One Universal Life can be a true and effective spiritual cultivation of the wholeness of eternal life."

Surely God is the big bang?
God is the Tsunami.
God is corruption.
God is quantum physics.
Life and death.
Random creation.
An energy force that exists within and without us.

It is patently obvious to all that in the scheme of things we play only a small part. We are subject to the same laws and rules that nature has placed upon us for all eternity. And yet we still insist upon seeking wisdoms that exist beyond those holiest of strictures.

We still insist on giving names to something that is nameless and dressing it up in mumbo jumbo when in reality it is as simple to follow and understand as ABC.

If only we had the wisdom of the ancients to look and observe the god that surrounds us in our daily lives. The rules of man conflict with the natural rule of life. Women are every bit the equal of men and yet here we are, in the twenty first century with women still bound and dressed by the interpretative machinations of men. OK, you might argue that wearing clothes that conform to a particular faith is in itself a choice of faith, and that if a women chooses to dress like that then it is up to her. You would of course be right but the fundamental flaw in that is of course that the origins of the three major western faiths are that they were all written by men during a time, less enlightened, when women were very much second class citizens.

As Mao once said.

"women are the other half of the sky"

Homosexuality is another blind spot numbered among the many blind spots that men have created. Sex is natural. It is fun. It isn't just for procreation. It isn't just mankind that has invented the concept of "gay sex". I have seen with these humble eyes of mine two dogs, that is two boy dogs, screwing each other until their tongues lolled with pleasure. Stallions in the field copulating so hard that both myself and my children giggled our fool heads off.

Homosexuality is just another facet in the jeweled face of Tao, of nature. All love is blessed because it is a positive opposed to negative action with the only people affected by it being the people that partake of it.

And only the most warped and detestable of faiths would prevent the homosexual amongst them from preaching their pompous and perverse doctrine.

Soon it will be Christmas. A Christian festival. Right?

A festival that celebrates Christ's birth. Right?

Wrong.

It is also a far older festival than that. It is a Pagan celebration. One to break up the grey monotomy of winter and also to reaffirm that life will come again in spring.

Yuletide is not Christmas. It is something different again.

In this world we have a variety of faiths and beliefs. All of them at their roots good. All of them equal. Now is the time for people to follow their faiths and not their leaders nor the evangelists of any faith who will only destroy the garden we were given.

You see at the root of terrorism is faith. Faith perverted by man and if it means throwing out 'god' along with the bath water then the 'god' in question isn't much of a god any way is it?

THE THIEF OF RAGE (Organised Religion)

Everyone has a right to believe in whatever they chose to believe in.

Everyone has a right to select and follow whatever faith they feel comfortable whether be they Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Sikh or any of the multitude of other religions that there are to chose from.
Unfortunately, with mankind being the corrupt, tribalistic bunch they are something is bound to get screwed somewhere.

Not content to simply follow their own faiths quietly and to share it with only those that ask to partake in it, they, all of 'em, go around waving the flag and beating the drum for their own secular principles.
It is like a constant game of one-up-man-ship that can only lead to more and more passionate disagreement as to who is right and to who is wrong.

One God says do it this way whilst another says do the reverse.

All organised religion is a mortally flawed concept with failed dogma and outdated rituals used to invoke fear into its followers. You won't get to heaven unless you do as we/god tells you. This argument is then followed up with a swift..it says in the Holy Book.
And who pray tell wrote the Holy Book in the first place?
God?

I do not think so.

What kind of Father rules by fear?

Not only do they all attempt to frighten their followers into submitting to their twisted vision of Gods Word they then fleece them of what little money they have so as to enrich their own coffers to enable their own insular society to flourish. The churches of all denomiations and all faiths are nothing but propaganda machines whose sole purpose is to spread the word, their word, to anyone who might have two ears and a pocket full of cash to throw their way. They all share the same vision of a world that is dominated by their own brand of God.

God, what ever your concept of God may be, is a beautiful thing. A heartbeat that drums throughout the life blood of humanity. It is the thing that lets us all know how small we are in the scheme of things but also how vitally important in the balance of creation we truly are.

Organised religion is like a mens club where people of similar thoughts go to share their beliefs. Nothing wrong with that but why try to foist it on the rest of us?

I imagine that if the man that Christians refer to as Jesus (Jesus by the way is the angliscised version of the Greek Jesu which is a variant of the Hebrew Joshua) were alive, or Mohamed, they would both cry out in horror and shame "STOP. That is NOT what we meant".

The largest cause of the warped faith of Christianity is Paul. He wasn't even a close associate of Joshua's but he highjacked the man's teachings and then mutated them to suit himself. He was a homophobic rabble rouser who jumped onto the back of a great man in an attempt to twist power away from the Jews who he despised onto the faith that he created in the name of Jesus.

Make no mistake. Joshua (Jesus) was a Jew. A man of vision and a prophet of the Jewish faith. He was not the son of God nor did he want to create a new form of religion. He may have wanted to see changes made within his own faith but he did not form Christianity as a new faith. Paul did.
And Paul was a very flawed individual.


"Jesus, a strict Jew, will have been surprised to find that he had become a reformer of the law, and the reforms allowed gentiles free access to the Jewish God. Quite different was the teaching of Paul for whom the law was unimportant and Jesus an example of the dying and resurrecting god of the east whose teachings were irrelevant.
Thus, a strict upholder of the law became a liberalizer of strict Judaism for his gentile or Hellenized followers, the early Christians. Christians then began to maintain that Jesus had been a reformer all along. He was transformed from a strictly Jewish revolutionary into a reforming universal ethical teacher. And the myth has stuck."

There are those who criticise the modern Muslim faith saying that they are too violent, too agressive, too extreme. Certainly there are sections of the Muslim faith that lean too easily and too readily to violent actions. Killing innocent people is murder in the eyes of God and suicide is an act that betrays the gift of God which is life.
But hang on a minute Christians before you start scoring points over the worlds next largest growing faith, Islam, what about the Crusades? Were they not an act of evil committed by the Christian faith? Or what about the Spanish Inquisition?

Violence is never an answer or a solution to any problem. To defend ones self is a moral right and violent defence in the face of a violent act is a natural and fair response, but to blow up or kill people in the pretence that it is on Gods behalf is a vile and pernicious lie.

God does not, never has and never will sanction or bless a violent attack.

More than half of the worlds problems are caused by organised religion.

Jihad?
Crusade?
Holy?
War?
Holy and War are not compatriots. God and The Devil don't play golf. The words do not sit comfortably together.
Warlike is what we are.
Holy is what we would like to be.

Isn't it time that we started to look elsewhere for our moral and spiritual guidance?

There are many other religions that do not treat faith as though it were an act of world dominance. Many of the other, old beliefs, all practise a compasionate and loving way of life. Not one of them ever commits acts of violence unless it is in self defence and more imprtantly they practise what they preach but do not preach to convert.

I repeat, isn't it time that we started to look elsewhere for our moral and spiritual guidance?

The Few and The Many

these are the few,
the hindus,
the pagans,
the rastas,
the sikhs,
the shinto,
the buddhists,
the taoists.
these are the few that number two billion.

these are the many,
the jews
and the christians
and the muslims,
who number four billion and kill not only themselves
but also the few with their games of whose word of god is right.

why won't you listen to your singular god?
"thou shalt not kill"
why won't you practise what you preach?
"love thy neighbour"

and the few shall inherit the debris of death.



words by cocaine jesus

Vainglorious

The hands have all fallen silent
Where is their thunder?
Have they not but applause for themselves?

They wait for their hubris
Coiled in laps
Thumbs twirling
While eyes meander walls
And ancient corridors
Gleaning minutia
Glazing over details

Seething teeth still chatter
Chewing on ignorant lobes
Filling traditions
With traditional ire

Tears pool about my feet
But do I even muster to walk away?
Or do I portray the martyr
Drowning in a self made spotlight
What do I know of blood?
Even that of my own
I have not seen
It fills me with dread

The sun keeps on shining
It doesn’t give a damn
For nothing we shall ever do
Will change its course.

Idle Recollection

The oxygen becomes thin
So many screams
So many words
Relinquished to whispers
Some vespers
Some curses
Curled up in tight little balls
Held back in the mouth
Like sour candy
Lips pucker
Eyes squint
Lose focus
And all the while
The dead tarry in their graves
Making room
For those to come…

Babylon Burning

Nthposition has come out with another copyleft chapbook of poetry.

Check it out.

And one poem:

Paradise
Ray Hsu

The garden.
The detached
leaf.
The intruders.
The theft
of our bodies. The burning
weight. The living
chance.
The cold past
the gate.
No disaster is disappointing
enough.

(crossposted on my blog)