Why is it so hard to accept evidence

The evidence that the attacks of 9/11 could not have succeeded without US-government involvement is practically overwhelming, if you are objective.

Three highrise buildings have crashed into their own foundation on the same day. The cause of those crashes is supposedly fire. That steel-framed buildings have totally crashed without the help of explosives has never happened before 9/11 2001 and never happened afterwards. The crashes only took seconds, barely more than a free fall. If you watch those crashes you can see that they look exactly like controlled demolishions carried out by expert-firms, something you might have seen in documentarys on this matter.
It is said, that the air-plane crash had weakened the buildings´structures. But the third building was not hit by an airplane. And the WTC-towers were especially built to withstand a hit by an airplane of similar size as those on 9/11.
It is said, that a fire fueled by airplane kerosene is hot enough to weaken steel.
And again, the fire in the third building was not fueled by airplane kerosene.And in one of the twin-towers most of the kerosene burned out at the impact of the crashing plane outside the building.and the fire-fighters in the towers could get all the way up to crash-sight without feeling an extraordinary high heat. In fact, they were convinced to be able to extinguish the fire in a short time. Photographs of the towers before the crash show victims who still were alive at the time directly at the impact area. No extraordinay heat had killed them yet.
After the crash of the WTC-buildings no experts, according to Fire Engineering Magazine, were allowed to examine the remains of the buildings to find out what caused their structural failure.

"For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car... Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members - described by one close source as a "tourist trip"- no one's checking the evidence for anything."

(Fire Engineering Magazine, January 2002)



These facts are indefutable. They comprise undeniable evidence that the key-points of the official 9/11 story are lies.
There different opinions on how the American government was involved in the planning or in the attacks themselves. But the physical facts point to the use of explosives in bringing the buildings down. And the fact that the US-Government did not allow examination of the remains, provide strong evidence, that it were not Muslim extremists who had gained access to those buildings to plant the explosives in the strategically right positions, but people who worked in collusion with powerful members of this very government.

There are thousands of other facts digged up by the 9/11 truth-movement that point in the direction of government involvement, but of course there is also disinformation floating around. While the disinformers try to discredit the facts, they cannot make them disappear.
Those undefutable facts are convincing enough to allow yourself to be convinced.

However for most people, especially on the Left, evidence be damned, they just cannot allow themselves to fundamentally doubt the official story.
It does not fit into their concept: "Islamistic terrorism is a blowback for American imperialism in the Muslimic world."
And of course many people in those Muslimic countries resent the American foreign politic. But the motive alone does not make a suspect into the murderer, he also needs an opportunity. There are others who have a motive as well: the members of the PNAC think-tank, who most of them are sitting now in the US-goverment or work as cheerleaders for war in the US-media. The government members have access to the buildings and the means, financially and the personal (special intelligence units probably), to do the job and cover their tracks. They might have used Islamist patsies, by having their organisations infiltrated and so manipulate their actions. But those patsies could never have succeeded on their own.
Chances are that the role of those patsies was rather minor.
Logic tells me that the man pretending to be Attah in Florida, could not have been a fundamentalistic Muslim. Being a fundamentalist means you strongly believe in your religion and accept all its rules. You want those rules to be a basis of behavior for everyone else. A man who is so convinced of his faith, that he is ready to martyr himself for it, would never ever break all those rules just before his supposed martydom. A fundamental Muslim would never drink alcohol, use cocain, live with a non-Muslim girlfriend, wear forbidden jwellery, go to a strip-bar and put money in the strip-dancers´ underwear. This all defies logic.

The arguments used by those who cannot accept a government involvement are, that it could not have been a government conspiracy are something like:" Thousands of people would have been involved and they could not have been kept quiet for so long."
In reality it depends on the method used for those attacks how many people needed to have been involved. And American intelligence agancies have a budget of 30 billions a year, drug revenues not counted, and nobody knows how many staff they employ. Special units are trained rigidly to follow commands without asking questions, they allways work on a need to know basis, never being allowed to see the full picture. And of course the organizers would have their own interest at stake, either financially or ideologically.

To salvage their belief in a international Islamist terror-network in the face of mounting evidence, that many of those blamed for terror-attacks are not acting like fundamentalists at all in their private life, some lefties have now started to see Islamism as a ploy used by political dissidents from Muslim countries to get the population on their side.
They just cannot come to grips with the notion, that AlQaeda is of course a political organisation, but it´s not fighting American and Israeli imperialism but supporting it by providing the propaganda tools to justify American military interventions, a planned generational war, a "clash of civilisations" and an exponential growth of military expenditure to enrich the main-shareholders of the military-industrial complex.

There have been precedents of lies to justify wars, precedents of false-flag operations by intelligence organisations.
In Italy it has been proven by a court of law that right-wing organisations had committed brutal terrorists acts blaming the radical left.
"Operation Gladio" it was called.

Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.
Indeed, it would not do for the families of the 85 people ripped apart by the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station to know that their loved ones had been murdered by "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence," as the Italian Senate concluded after its investigation in 2000.
The Bologna atrocity is an example of what Gladio's masters called "the strategy of tension" -- fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat. And as Rajiva notes, this strategy wasn't limited to Western Europe. It was applied, with gruesome effectiveness, in Central America by the Reagan and Bush administrations. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, guerrilla armies and state security forces -- armed, trained and supplied by the United States -- murdered tens of thousands of people throughout the region, often acting with particular savagery at those times when peaceful solutions to the conflicts seemed about to take hold.

There is documentary proof of personal connections between those Italian right-wingers and the CIA.
One of those connections is Michael Ledeen, who once again is a high offical in the Pentagon.

."Ledeen was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s.In the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues. More recently, Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar (the medium between Oliver North and Iran in the Iran-Contra affair) in support of resistance efforts in Iran. In addition to his work with the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen has supported or co-founded a number of advocacy groups pushing for a radical transformation of the Middle East, including the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, JINSA, and of course, Ziad Abdelnour’s U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.

The Left, the secular and the religious humanists and everybody else who believes in democratic values will never be able to overcome the war-profeteers and stop war and oppression unless they will accept the fact, that those fascists lie, cheat, manipulate the media and even mass-murder innocents in their own country to be able to profit from further mass-murder in other countries.
There has been a "Reichstags-fire" and a "Sender Gleiwitz incidence",a "Gulf of Tonkin" and an "Operation Phoenix" before. There has been a "Lavon affair" and the "Pseudo Mau Mau".
Through Phoenix over 40000 people were murdered in cold blood by US-employed CIA snipers, some of the victims were American military personell seen as security risk. British employed Pseudo Mau Mau murdered black Kenyans and white missionaries alike. In the Lavon affair Israel murdered British and American civillians, citizens of those 2 countries which had made the Jewish State possible, just a few years before.
Now there is al-Zarqawi a Palestinian from Jordan committing atrocities against civilians, fellow Muslims, totally counterproductive, if he wants the support of the Iraqi population.

If you do not recognize the enemy´s tactics, how can you beat him?
One of the tactics, of course, is to call conspiracy-theorists insane.
Why for God's or Marx's sake is the Left so totally incapable to accept that there are people within the upper echelon of the capitalist system who walk over dead bodies, thousands if necessary, for their political,ideological and financial gain?
They have done it before.

Talk to the Christians

On Wednesday, August 10, 2005 my friend Umkhalil wrote on her blog
"An Apology From a US Christian to Palestinians"
There she distances herself from the attitude of the Christian Zionists, represented by Jerry Falwell, who boasts: "The Bible Belt is Israel's safety net in the US"
and Ed McAteer, who promotes ethnically cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.
She writes:

"For their malice, for their perversion of Christianity, for their promulgation of lies regarding the Palestinian people and their history in Palestine, for their demonisation of the Palestinians, for their lack of regard for the dwindling numbers of their co-religionists in Palestine, for the lies that their leaders spew about God; i.e., "Those who promote a Palestinian state have placed themselves in alliance against God," for their incitement to hatred, for their advocating ethnic cleansing, for their role in promoting Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories, for those who believe as does Gary Bauer, co-founder of Stand For Israel, that it is an "obscenity" to give up land for peace, and for their complete and total abdication of the Golden Rule, I apologize to the Palestinians on behalf of US Christians."

Here is the answer I wrote to her:


This was a very good post and I agree with you fully in your assessment of those socalled Christian leaders.
And as Christians we should distance ourselves from those leaders and even apologize for the crimes other Christians justify or even commit in the name of our religion.
However, I do not believe that McAteer actually represents any kind of "moral majority". His views are unethical and immoral. And I am convinced that the majority of Christians, even US Christians do believe in high ethical values. The trouble is that many Christians are totally misinformed.
There are being informed by mass-media which either bend the truth about Palestinians and other Arab people by emphasising on so-called terrorist attacks neglecting to mention Israeli state-terrorism or American military terrorism against the people of Iraq or those media outlets just blatently lie. And Fallwell and McAteer can use those lies for their hate-mongering politics.
I´ve met conservative American Christians who have changed their pro-Israel attitude when they had received more truthful information about the situation in Palestine.

There are religion-haters on the Left who say it is useless to talk to conservative Christians,for they all are nothing but fanatical haters.
This is not true.
It might take a while for the shocking truth to sink in, but in the long run more and more Christians are realizing that they have been misled, that some self-appointed leaders are false prophets and that in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we should not support the oppressors, but the oppressed in Palestine and in Iraq. For Jesus himself has during his life on earth been the spokesmen for the poor and the humiliated, and He himself has been tortured. Jesus has told us to see Him in those who suffer.

So while we probably cannot reach those immoral leaders, it is in my opinion paramount to not give up on their duped followers.
We as Christians ourselves need to find ways to get the truth out to those other Christians. We need to figure out how to do it best and most effectively.
And then miracles can happen. Like a tidal wave the truth will wash away all the lies, and true justice can finally have a fertile ground to grow in Palestine and in other places.

Prejudices and the "Undermind"

"Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen". (A German proverb: "When someone travels, he has a lot to tell about afterwards")
The last few weeks I have been traveling through altogether 9 European countries. Maybe you remember the American movie:"It´s Tuesday this must be Belgium."
This is about the way we traveled on this trip.
I haven’t done a lot of traveling the tourist way so far, have most often just been visiting close relatives when I was away from home. So this time I thought, I’ll use the chance to see as many places in Europe as possible. Who knows when I ever get another chance.
One other positive aspect for me was, that when I ride as passenger in a car or a bus or a train and see the landscape move by in front of my eyes, my thoughts also start moving.
(By the way, the other best place for me to think is the bathtub at home, where nothing at all is moving. Maybe its the Icelandic hot water, it’s full of sulphur and actually very good for your skin. Maybe it’s also good for the brain cells, mine at least.)

What I noticed most during my trip, when I was talking to the people I met, was that just about everybody from every nation or ethnic group seems to have some prejudices against people from other nations or ethnic minorities.
Many Germans are prejudiced against the Tschek and the Polish, many Tschek are prejudiced against the Polish and the Gypsies, most everybody else in Europe seems to fear the Germans are still Nazis in their hearts. And while many Icelanders are prejudiced against Asian immigrants into Iceland, most other Western-Europeans are now severly prejudiced against their Muslim immigrants.
And actually if I’m really honest, I have to include myself in this litany. How often don’t I just generalize "the Americans", when I talk about the horror and disgust I feel for the crimes of war and oppression organized by the American government and acted out by American military and intelligence agencies.
My friend Umkhalil thinks, that the major reason for all these prejudices people have against "the others" might be the superior complex nearly everybody has sometimes. And she is probably right in this.

Everybody has some doubts about him- or herself, feels slightly incompetent in some situations, and this makes him or her feel bad. But when we can compare ourselves favorable to somebody else our self-doubts get smaller and we feel better.
It’s the situation Jesus describes in the story about the Pharisee standing in the front row of the synagogue praising and thanking God for being so much better morally than the sinner back there in the last row. And Jesus said that the sinner in the last row who accepts that he has done wrong and asks sincerely for divine forgiveness will find far more favor in the eyes of God.
But alas, it seems to be human nature to think far more often like the Pharisee than the repentant sinner.
But we do not only compare ourselves individually with others, since we are social beings, nearly all of us identify with some social groups, very often a national or ethnic groups. And there we also try to make ourselves feel better by thinking that our group of people is morally, intellectually, economically or in some other way better than some other group.
Since this prejudiced thinking is so very common, it most often isn’t really dangerous to the people who are objects of our prejudices.
Take for instance an elderly German aunt of my husband’s (He is half German, half Icelandic and we were also visiting his German relatives on this trip). As a child she lived in Poland as a member of a German minority. Together with her mother and sister she was driven out of Poland during after WWII. She never grew out of the prejudices against the Polish people taught to her by her parents and neighbors so very long ago.
She actually told me that nearly all Polish are lazy workers and steal.
I just gaped at her. How can anybody nowadays believe a thing like this?
And this aunt is not a general right-winger hating all foreigners. She has quite a good relationship to the foreigners living on her block.
I told her, that I knew many Polish people from my parish. All of them are very diligent workers and would never think about stealing anything, ever.
"And besides, think about the German farmers who are sometimes interviewed on TV, when it is talked about forcing unemployed Germans into work as seasonal harvest helpers on farms. Those farmers are actually horrified by the thought of having to employ only Germans instead of the Polish who come year after year as guest workers for the harvesting season. The farmers say, that the Polish workers are by far more diligent and skilled in this hard work than any unemployed German they have sometimes tried to employ." "These are the special Polish" the aunt thinks, "They are exceptions."
So if this aunt would ever have to deal regularly with some Polish people, she would probably meet them at first with quite a bit of distrust. But after a while she would probably decide, that these Polish neighbors probably belong to the small group of the "special Polish". I don’t think that there would be too much harm done.

It only starts to become dangerous, when some powerful politicians are using those prejudices for their own selfish reason, most often for war-mongering in the pursuit of more power and more land ore other economic advantages.
But for this purpose to play upon our inner superiority complex is not enough. The war-mongerers have to play on something else as well: our hidden fears.

And these fears have something to do with the way our brain works.
In the book "Hare brain and Tortoise mind", by Guy Claxton, the author explains, that we all are thinking on different levels of consciousness. And on all levels the mind tries to figure out patterns so we can function as good as possible in a complicated world.
Our conscious logical mind, which is related to our speech centrum tries to figure out the most obvious patterns.
But like with the learning of physical skills, the patterns involved in social situations are often far too complicated for our rational mind to cope with the entire subtle tale telling signs and recognize the underlying patterns.
This is when our "undermined" gets in. Our "undermind" has a mote of thinking, which can deal with far more information than our rational mind and see the underlying patterns.
And from the time we are very small children we start watching the people in our environment, watching their facial expressions and body language. And from the experiences we get through this, our "undermind" tries to figure out patterns in behavior, feelings and thoughts. And most of us are getting rather good in reading other people especially their opinions and feelings about ourselves. And from this our "undermind" tries to figure out, if we can trust these other people or not.
So far explains Claxton in his book.

My guesses in this are, that the trouble with this pattern seeking of our “undermind” is, that it bases its judgment on signs which are not universal. Some signs like smiles or a threatening aggressive posture are probably more or less the same throughout the human race, but the more subtle signs of our body language are probably depending on the culture we come from. And when we meet people from an unfamiliar culture our "undermind"has not enough information to base its judgment on. We are no longer able to "read" the other’s mind in the same way as we would in a familiar social setting. This makes us insecure and slightly fearful. And this is also the moment, when we are most vulnerable for the self-serving propagandists and the fear-mongerers.
Hitler and the other Nazi propagandists used these vulnerabilities, the old prejudices and the subconscious insecurities Germans felt when dealing with Eastern Europeans both Jews and Slavic people. The Nazis used them when proclaiming to the Germans that those "others" are dangerous to the Germanic race, that those strangers are planning to overwhelm or even eliminate the "superior Germanic race", out of envy of course.

Some people might conclude from this, that it is always dangerous when people of different cultures live together in the same country, the same town or the same neighborhood, for the differences and insecurities between the cultures can be exploited by the powerful and ruthless for instigating violence between those different cultural groups, even instigating a civil war or a war between nations.
This surely could happen. And therefore you might conclude to either ban any kind of immigration of people from other cultures or demand absolute assimilation. This is what most German politicians are demanding of the Muslim community in Germany right now. They see a multi-cultural society as dangerous.
And I think they are wrong.
Even while part of the mechanism, which could lead to violence between different cultural groups is subconscious, we, each and every one of us also has a conscious, rational mind. And this mind has, given enough time to think, always an override over our "undermind".
I actually see a big chance in a multicultural, multiethnic society, a chance we can use to promote a permanent peaceful world with just a bit of deliberate positive effort.
By having people of different cultures living just next door or across the street, if we reach out to them, we have the chance to overcome our conscious prejudices and our subconscious insecurities and fears, so they can no longer be abused by self-serving manipulators.
As human beings our ability to learn stays with us for all our lives or at least until we get Alzheimer. Just like our conscious mind can learn a new language, our "undermind" can learn in on a new culture. It however does take a slight bit of effort or even courage to stand the insecurity we will feel in the beginning of this new social experience and not just run away.
In my opinion the reaching out to other cultures should not only be done on an individual bases, but it would be more effective on a collective bases.
And since the modern self-serving propagandists are trying to use the differences between the so-called Judeo-Christian culture and the Muslim culture for their newest project in war-mongering, I see a big obligation of especially the Church to counter their unscrupulous efforts.

Who Profits?

The last couple of weeks I had no internet access and very little access to news in any language I can understand. But still, when I heard about the London bombings,
I never believed that "Islamists" actually were behind those bombings. It just doesn´t make any sense.
Officials in London now say, that the 4 perpetrators were tricked by their "Islamist" group-leaders, since they still carried their IDs. "Those perpetrators were ready to transport the bombs, but not kill themselves".
Well, this makes even less sense.
Why would islamic radicals murder the members of their own group?
They could have told them, to just leave their backpacks behind and get off the bus or subway before the explosion.
While the investigators now admit that the transporters of the bombs were tricked, the taboo-subject is still to ask the quite logical question, if the people behind the bombings were actually "Islamists" or even Muslims at all.
I think Joh Domingo is right, when he asks Muslimic leaders to stop defending Islam by trying to distance themselves from those crazy mass-murdering radicals, when Islam should not be on the suspect list of those mass-murders at all.

And here I go again asking: "Who profits?"
In every criminal investigation this is a legitimate question, only in political crimes these questions are banned or only allowed to "crazy conspiracy theorists" like me.
And yes I agree that even in criminal cases the person with the strongest obvious motive is not allways the perpetrator of the crime, but to take him off the suspect list is surely a bit unprofessional, isn´t it?

Like in Spain a year ago, now in Britain the population is getting less and less enthusiastic about the American war in Iraq. Even war-mongerer Tony Blair did show notions that he did not want to help expand the war to Iran. He seemed to fall in line behind the European position about Iran and her nuclear energy program.
Could it be, that those attacks were a shot at Tony Blair, that if he would no longer support the Anglo-Saxon-Israel course, it would be easy to just murder his people?
Of course I might be wrong, and Blair was in on it from the get going.
But when we remember the Madrid attacks, then we can be quite sure, that the former Spanish prime minister Aznar was not in on the Madrid attacks or he would have handled the propaganda war a bit less clumsily.
Some people thought that Aznar needed a bit of help in the elections and then they also thought the Spanish would react like a vengeful mob craving for Muslim blood just like the Americans have done after 9/11. But Aznar knew his people better, so he tried to blame the ETA for the few days before the elections. It didn´t help him.
Possible the same people who were behind the Madrid attacks had now in London learned their lesson. They waited til after the reelection of Tony Blair.
And my guess is, that they didn´t ask his permission, just as they didn´t ask Aznar´s.
Maybe, just maybe, there are indications that Europe is not taking the whole thing laying down any more. By officially stating that the bomb-transporters were being tricked, officials leave a small door open to one day tell their people that backers of the attacks were false flag agents of some non-muslimic intelligenc agency.
The purpose of course might also be, to discourage Muslims from becoming patsies for those agencies by joining some sinister groups, telling them: " At least, be careful, your leaders might trick you and murder you."
But besides that, the anti-Muslim propaganda goes on unhindered. From normal decent people in Germany I hear things like: "I have nothing against those people personally, it´s just their terrible religion. I hope this religion will die out some day." (Being exterminated or what do you mean by this?)

No, I don´t think, there is any other way: We need the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to prevent further slaughter of people, Muslim people and non-Muslim people alike.
And for this all people of good will, need to get the courage to become "conspiracy theorists". And there I mean especially the people from the left, who are more worried about their own reputation and credibility than about truth and the terrible consequences those propaganda lies, they themselves encourage, have on all the poor people of the world.
Look at the evidence produced by so many diligent people about 9/11. Yes, there are a few disinformant agents among them or a few others who love their own preconceived theories so much they do not care about evidence, but if you look at the bulk of the research of the 9/11 truth movement, you can say with certainty, that the official story is a lie: The events couldn´t have happened this way, there are physical and organisational impossibilities.
So lets be couragous enough to look, couragous enough to ask the obvious question:
"Who profits?"

Oversexualisation

I have a real issue with the sexualisation of public life.
I´m a nightshifter, and even on my free days I´m often awake during the night, often watching German satellite TV.
During the night the private stations finance their program with phone-sex advertisments. Normally I use the remote real fast because those ads really sicken me: Women present themselves as objects for one purpose and one purpose only, letting go of the last remnant of self-respect.
What should I care? It´s a way of making a living isn´t it.
Quite likely, that those women in the ads really make a good living. But millions and millions of others just make a very good living for some others, mostly men, and not just on the phone or on an ad. Many are literally forced into prostitution by men who had tricked them with promises of normal jobs, others were forced by poverty and desperation.
Speaking of that, I can tell you a personal story, as usual.
Some years back still in Germany while my kids were still small, I had been living for a couple of months in a shelter for the homeless. How I got there is another story.
However I was desperately trying to get out and find a decent place to live. I went to many interviews for a place to rent, nobody wanted to rent me anything, there were enough others applying for these apartments, who looked less risky.
But then there was this one woman. She said, she was going to move in with her boyfriend and wanted to sublet her apartment for a year at least.
However, she would need the permission of the building company and since her place was only one livingroom, one bedroom, she wouldn´t get it for a family with 3 children.
But then she looked at me and said, "it´s hard to live with children in a shelter isn´t it". I said yes, and she felt sorry for me. She had a little boy of her own.
So she sublet to me without permission, but we should be careful so the manager wouldn´t find out or she would loose her contract.
And so we moved in. And even when she after only 4 months told me she needed her apartment back, since things weren´t working out with her boyfriend, she still told me, not to worry, she would wait until we had found something new. (I panicked anyway, but that is still another story.)
She had been a bit vague on her job, but since we took over her phone, we soon found out from the strange calls we received, that she must have been connected to the redlight business.
I had several temporary jobs at the time, in one they cheated me of all wages for 3 weeks work, in another I worked 4 weeks and only got 3 weeks paid.
And that´s when I actually played with the thought of not saying: "wrong number", at the next strange call. Well, I was never seriously considering it just playing with the thought, I was not at the end of my tethers yet.
But I surely can identify with women who are, women who were slightly more desperate than I was and slightly less religious, women from countries were the economy has broken down, women who have hungry children to feed.
And one of those, for whatever reason she went into the business, showed compassion to me, when nobody else would.
No, I do not hate those women, not even the ones on TV, that go so much on my nerves.
But I hate a system where women and even children are sold, bought, used, humiliated and hurt badly, a system that makes women and children into discardable objects.
And I do not just blame the system on the pimps and their organisations, the providers of the business, I also blame it on the market.

If you take together prostitution and pornography, then it is one of the biggest markets in the world.
There has allways been a prostitution business, but in the last decades it has grown out of any proportians. Some free-sex advocates had argued, that with no more taboos on sexuality, there would no longer be a need for this kind of business.
I guess they were wrong.
The less taboos, the more demand and the more extreme. Normal prostitution is no longer enough. Now it must be violent sex.
Normal pornography is not enough, now it must be child porno or snuff movies.
It looks like adults, just as children, need certain rules and restrictions, even when some of them break them once in a while, for kicks.
But when the rules fall and no borders are any more visible, the people who need the adrenalin kick of breaking rules start getting so far over in their search for kicks, that they start seriously hurting others.
And with sexuality it seems, as if, just like with drugs, some people get addicted to their sexual kicks, they need more and more either life or in images. And it gives them less and less of kicks, so they need higher dosages, extremer ones.
This is the market for exploitation of women and children.

And how did we get so far?
I blame it on Freud. His ridiculous and never verified theories about sexuality being after food and water the most important need in life, and that restrictions on sexuality will make a person emotionally disturbed, these theories have opened the way to the falling away of rules and restrictions, which normally would keep a lid on the extremes of sexual behavior.

Sexualized images are now all around us, selling every product imaginable, and giving men the feeling that women are really only good for one thing and one thing only.
Date rape has not become less seldom, but even more frequent, than before the sexual revolution. For now many men just can´t take no for an answer any more. They quite honestly think the woman is just playing around and no doesn´t really mean no.

Besides rape, there is sexual pressure on teenage girls even as young as 11 years old.
They are told, that sex is allways cool and who doesn´t take part is totally out.
The newest "inn thing" seems to be, that as entrance fee for a cool party, girls have to perform oral sex on the organizing boys.

If this is the peak of women´s liberation, I definitely don´t want it, for the young girls I know!

We in the west are a society out of control in many ways, and sex in my opinion is definitely one of them.

Brainwashing

Thecutter says, that mainline media, like CNN for instance is brainwashing the American public. They no longer present information, like in the case of the 9/11 attacks they were presenting the headline: "War against America".
And this brainwashing was very, very dangerous.
I agree, we, or better said our ancestors, have been there before.
And I think she is absolutely right, the whole media spectacle was intentionally staged to produce a feeling of helpless shock and subsequent irrational anger and thirst for revenge, a New Pearl Harbour, as the PNAC writers had planned or a new "Reichstagsbrand"incident, like Hitler had staged.

But no matter, what some thriller movies say, brainwashing is not permanent. It needs constant reinforcement and it can be undone.
For some people it might take a little longer (like for my German grandma. She was 90 years old, when she finally accepted, that Hitler was NOT a good guy with only a few corrupt subordinates. Most everybody else in Germany only needed a few years after the war to realize how indefensible Hitler and the whole Nazi ideology was.)

I think the brainwashing by Corporate Media in the US is not so very different from what the Nazis did in Germany, when they took over all of the media. It is just a bit more sophisticated, since they make it look is if there was a variety of opinions, when in reality the media agrees on just about everything that is of any political consequence, just like all the mainline parties, both in the US and in Europe agree on the same economic course, just fighting about smokescreen issues.

Anyway, the brainwashing worked on me for a while, although I´m not an American. By now I think I can very well understand the feelings of many Americans. The events had hit home, undermined the normal feelings of security. They, like me, were not able to think critically at that moment.
For me the whole thing was also a bit too close to home. In a rather strange coincidence, September 11, 2001 was the day my husband was sceduled to fly for the fist time in his life to America. He wanted to help a friend who was in trouble there.
We turned on the TV to look at the Icelandic video text for information of eventual flight delays - nothing unusual there. Then we changed to German satellite TV, to pass the time for a little game show, something similar to Trivial Persuit, we sometimes watch together.
The first tower had fallen already. My youngest son came home from school, and together we watched the second tower implode – life.
“It´s falling, it´s falling” he cried. “No, no it isn´t” I said. “They just show the fall of the first one again.” Not believing my own eyes.
Then my husband left. He was picked up to be driven to the airport, it´s an hours drive. Nothing was clear yet about those attacks, and I was unable to think or talk coherently for the rest of the day.
Then, there came the news about the plane, which had hit the Pentagon and the one that had crashed in a field. There were rumours that other planes might have been kidnapped, still in the air,dozens maybe, possibly ready to be crashed into some other buildings - nobody knew anything.
My son went to the phone, calling his Dad on the cell-phone: "Papi, another plane has crashed. Papi, please don´t go."
Of course my husband was sent back from the airport. All flights had been cancelled that day and the next few days as well.
And of course, even if he had flown a day earlier, the chances for him to have been on one of those flights were very slim, but still, for children chances and statistics don´t matter.
The next several weeks my youngest son got out bed every morning, hours before everybody else and turned on the TV, watching news; only the news-channel, nothing else, no cartoons, no children´s stuff, only news. He didn´t eat very much either.
When finally the Afghanistan war began, I told him, that Afghanistan was very far away, and when they have caught the Osama binLaden and his men, then everything would be all right again.
He still kept watching the news to see, when they would catch Osama.
They never caught him.
My youngest son was 10 years old at the time.
How many American children were there at the time, the age of my son or a few years older, waiting for Osama to be caught, so everything would be alright again?
How many of them are now in Iraq wanting to catch Osama or Zarqawi or some other Emmanuel Goldsteinn, so everything would be alright again?

Was it Hitler or Göring, who said, that the general population do not want war, but that the leadership only has to tell the people that they are attacked and then they will be ready for fight any war.
The lies haven´t changed a bit, the methods just have become more advanced.
And still, "brainwashing" gives you the image, as if your whole thinking facilities can be taken over by some outside power forever.
But they´re not even succeeding with all of the soldiers. Even in such a restrictive environment as the military, some soldiers start thinking for themselves, recognizing that what they´re doing is ethically wrong. Some of them break down pychologically others become dissidents, American soldiers and Israeli soldiers alike.
Dissident thoughts are spreading within the military and their families.

History does not have to repeat itself. It could, but it doesn´t have to.
We know more now, than the dissidents before and during WWII and even the dissidents from the Vietnam war. We should be able to learn from the experiences of our ancestors.

Truth, Lies and a Change of Thinking

Many times I have repeated myself, saying, that truth is important, saying that if people only knew the truth, the corrupt governments would fall.Some disagree with me, they think that most people aren´t interested in the truth.
I sometimes ask myself, if they are right, and I´m just biased by own feelings.

And of course I see things through the lense of my own experiences.
I wrote before, that I´m Catholic now, but have belonged to another church for many years. I went to that other church as a young girl, because I was promised a better and more harmonic family life in there, and this was so very important for me. There was also the matter of no smoking and drinking, which also was important to me. I could be abstinent and my peers would no longer make fun of me. Outsiders would respect my choices,no longer urging me to have a drink, and young people inside would be just like me.
And yes, much of what I was promised came true.
Yes,I missed a certain spirituality, which for me is combined with catholic rites and prayers. But I didn´t even realize how much I had missed it, before I rejoined the Catholic church again, that was after I had left this other church.
What actually made me leave, was, that I had found out, that the founding narrative of that congregation was a bunch of lies;
not honest errors,mistakes or even delusions, I could live with that. Everybody makes mistakes and one person´s delusion is another one´s spiritual experience.
No, they were bold deliberate lies. And this is, what I can´t live with.
Some atheists tell me, that all Christian faith and all other religions, for that matter, are built on deceptions.
No,I say, they are not.
The events described in their holy scriptures happened a long time ago, no longer really verifiable, and those who talked or wrote about those events believed in them with all their hearts. In ancient religions you can also find ancient wisdom, an insight that goes deeper than any historic narrative.
You might call the belief in the presence of the Divine a delusion, but I have seen delusional thinking in a lot of modern ideologies and even in some scientific theories. The difference often lies in your point of view.
I think the absolute and ultimate truth lies beyond human understanding, in a world beyond three or even four dimensional thinking.
So while truth, in my opinion, never is relative or arbitrary, however it neither is ever final or absolute. Our view on spiritual, scientific and even historic truth has to be revised over and over again, to come closer to the final truth, while we realize that we never will reach it.
But while the final truth is beyond our reach, we are quite able to recognize lies, and debunk them. A lie is, when somebody tells deliberatly something he knows it isn´t true, or he twists facts in such a way, that they disguise their true meaning.

Most people have lied in their lives for different reasons. And in modern society, especially in the media, lies are no longer portrayed as unethical.
And still, deep down in ourselves, we know, that lies are wrong. Lying destroys trust. Too much broken trust destroys a society. Maybe the upper class and their intellectual lackeys can reason these facts away.
But we, the little people, know intuitively, that lying is destructive. And this is, what we teach out children, it´s ancient truth, religious, yes, and very valid.
And then, when we hear, that some trusted politicians have lied big time, we still are shocked. So shocked actually, that some of us will fall into denial. This denial protects their sense of security.They tell themselves, it wasn´t a lie. That politician just made a mistake, had some wrong information, maybe.
Some American people, I know, voted for Bush, because they honestly believed, that he was a man of integrety. They were disgusted by a political system where people openly lied.
Of course, to see any kind of integrety in the Bush government is a serious delusion. Those guys are some of the worst liars who have ever walked on the face of the earth.
To realize this will be a very hurtful experience for many people. The wall of denial cannot be broken by a few missing WMD. This could be an honest mistake.
The truth about 9/11 could brake the wall of denial.
September 11, 2001 was the day, when I fell into shock for hours.
Nothing came through, but the thought, that now WW III will start. It was not logical, why should an act of terror start a world war. But those pundits kept repeating, America is under attack, over and over again.
And I could no longer think, for it felt like the war had started.
Maybe it was something in the Bush speech, I don´t remember -
I was in shock - I couldn´t think - stared at the TV - watched those towers implode - over and over again - for hours - all day long - scared - just scared - feeling the bombs would fall soon - the world would end.
The next day, German politicians said: "We are all Americans now."
It took days to get over the shock, not only for me, for others, too.
It took a whole year, until I started to think again. When they started to plan after Afghanistan also an attack on Iraq and when a German magazine printed an article on the PNAC papers, then I first thought maybe they deliberately didn´t stop those attacks.It was like loosing the ground under my feet to even consider this.
But there it was, the doubts were there and my mind started to open up for many other questions as well.
When I look around myself, talk to others, I have found out, that it´s no longer very hard to saw doubts about the official 9/11 story. Most people have started to have their own doubts, most are glad, to be able to talk about them, feeling they aren´t alone. And from this, and the stubborn denial of all main-line media, to the realization for the little people, that they can no longer trust those media pundits, from there, the step to new and more independent thinking is but a small one.
The issue of Palestine, the issue of the Iraq war, the issue of planned wars against Iran or Syria, the possible false flag operations to instigate civil war in Iraq or Lebanon, all this is interrelated.
When 9/11 is debunked, false flag operations will no longer work, the population of the West will no longer support a crusade against the Muslim world. The pressure on Israel will be stronger.
I´m absolutely convinced that the truth about 9/11 is one the major keys to fight against the crimes of Imperialism. It is not the only key, other lies need to debunked as well.
But I think it is the easiest key to obtain, because there are millions of people who are already reaching out for it.
Sorry to say, but most of them do not belong to the progressive left.
Why this is so, in my opinion, is subject for another post.

My Brother´s Child

The next piece I wrote last night. It´s a way for me to cope, to find a perspective. And of course I´m comparing things that shouldn´t be compared, but it´s just the way I feel right now.



Heaven cries, when a child dies.
And I look up to the skies asking why
Why does she have to die
And I cry
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Europe a child is dying
The doctors knew no child has survived
Her illness with chemo-therapy,
And still
They wouldn´t allow anything else.
It´s the only method big pharma allows,
The only one that makes big money,
The only one taught in medical school.
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God,
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Nigeria a child is dying
The land she lived on is poisoned
The oil companies needed it
For profit
No more good food, no more clean water
And the child gets ill and the child is dying
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God,
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Columbia a child is dying
Hit by government bullets
They only wanted to fight
The "terrorists" and the war against drugs
And the child was just
In the wrong place
At the wrong time
Don´t tell me, it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in Iraq a child is dying
A smart bomb was not smart
Had hit her house
And blown it apart
And buried her in rubble
Don´t tell me, it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

Somewhere in America a child is dying
Born already ill
With no hope to survive
For her father has been a soldier
In Iraq and breathed in depleted uranium
Don´t tell me it´s nobody´s fault
An act of God
Maybe you´re right
And still I cried
For she is my brother´s child

And I feel my brother´s pain
After hoping in vain
And I see him cry
Looking up to the sky
Asking why
Why did she have to die
And heaven cries, when a child dies
My brother´s child

Breaking a Vicious Circle

Israel Shahak, when he researched Jewish history over the last 2000 years, was in his book " Jewish Religion Jewish History" describing a pattern, .
Jews have been both in Muslim and in Christian society outsiders, who sometimes had been isolated by decree of some political authority, most often however they have isolated themselves and walled themselves in, so that the lower class Jews had little contact to their Christian or Muslim neighbour. The contacts the upper class had with gentiles was one of hostile business dealings at least towards the lower classes of the gentiles.
Most often those upper class Jews worked as some kind of middle men between the king or other aristocratic rulers and the peasant and artisan population. They were very good tax collectors, even in times when the peasants had problems paying. They also became monopoly money lenders, since the taking of interests was forbidden in Christian and Muslim society. In both professions they put a lot of hardship on the gentile peasants. And when the pressure became unbearable, riots and progroms occured.
And then the whole Jewish community was attacked not only the oppressors.
And I think, that the ordinary Jews who had not done anything to hurt the gentiles, most often had never even had direct contact with them, didn´t even know what hit them.
They were probably told that the gentiles had gone crazy like gentiles normally do once in a while.
One other pattern was, that when the Jewish upper class had a very good contact to the ruling king, the gentile aristrocracy had very little to say. However when this aristocracy became stronger, they pushed the king or the Church to get rid of the Jews, because the Jews were in direct competition with them for power at the court.
This time the Jews were forced to leave the country, leaving their homes and most of their possessions.
And again the ordinary Jews did not know what hit them.
And so hostility and distrust grew with every of those occations. And so besides certain attitudes in the Talmud it was also those memories of past abuses which made Jews even less ready to show compassion in their dealings with their gentile neighbours.
And there was hostility and distrust on both sides over and over again.
Israel Shahak took the Nazi persecution of Jews out of this pattern. And he thought that modern antisemitism has totally different quality from that of earlier years, since it is far more racist.
Maybe this is right in one way, since in older times Jews were allowed to fully integrate into gentile society, if they converted honestly.
The differences were religious not racist.
But if you overlook the racist aspect, a similar pattern seems to be visible in the beginning of the 20.century as well.
In the Balfour declaration the head of the Rothschild family got the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, if he could get the Americans to join the war against Germany on the British.
Maybe the Americans would have joined anyway for their own reasons. But one way or the other the Germans believed that their defeat was the fault of the Jews.
The heavy reparation payments were pressed unto Germany and the ordinary people suffered. The only ones who actually profited were banks which were in a good part in Jewish hands. The anger of big parts of German middle class, who had lost their life savings grew. The industrial class saw the Jewish banking elite a direct encroachment on their own business and so they helped Hitler with his radical antisemitic rhetoric come to power, so he could ban the Jews from business and public life as he had promised.
And so the hate propaganda campaign began which then led to terrible Jewish suffering. And once again the ordinary Jewish had no idea what hit them.
They had been well integrated in all parts of German society and lived as equals and very often as friends with their German neighbours. They sure that the Hitler times would blow over and things would return to normal, that they didn´t even leave the country when their citizen rights were taken and they had to suffer all kind of discriminations.
And the cynical Zionists who instigated the whole affair and profited from it to the boot, were telling each other, that "one cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews of Europe" and did nothing whatsoever to save the European Jews. Instead they sometimes even sabotaged efforts to help Jews to emmigrate from Europe, efforts made by compationate gentiles in other countries.
After the war, they treated the survivors with disdain. And when it suited them, they lit fire under the paranoia caused by this terrible trauma.

And thanks to those cynics, many ordinary Jews who had been liberated from the ghetto after the Enlightenment are isolating themselves again behind psychological walls and in the case of Israel the walls are physical, isolating themselves in fear and deep distrust against gentiles.
And the way it looks like with the Neocons in Washington and the Likudniks in Israel pushing for a new round of the vicious circle by oppressing Palestinians to the edge of absolute despair, destroying other Arab societies and through their expansive warmongering the American military and the American economy at the same time.

But we do no longer live in the middle ages, the ghetto is no longer obligatory and information can flow freely.
For their own sake, ordinary Jews have to break this vicious circle. They have to distance themselves from leaders who show just as much contempt for their Jewish brothers and sisters as they show for gentiles.
Those leaders are either dumb enough to have not learned anything from history or they are just so full of themselves, so full of hybris, that they think they can get away with anything.

But so many ordinary Jews have been integrated in the societies of all the countries they live in, except in Palestine.
Ordinary Jews work in many humanitarian causes. They have universal ethics which they share with their gentile neighbours and they have friendly relationships with them.
Ordinary Jews do not need to protect criminals who call themselves the leaders of Jewish society.
They have to realize that their safety does not lie with those warmongering zynics, who have already brainwashed the Israelis into committing terrible crimes.
Their safety lies with us, their brothers and sisters in humanity.
They have to denounce Zionism and the belief that gentiles cannot be trusted.
They have to realize that the golden rule, which is also part of the OT, applies towards everybody in absolute the same. Only this way we can live in peace with each other.


The vicious circle can be broken, there still is time, but it´s running out soon.

Trauma, Healing and History

From Avigail Abarbanel´s website:

I believe that( ) Jewish Israelis will never be happy (even if there were no Palestinians left — God forbid) and that is because they have done nothing to heal their own trauma and are spending their entire life going around in circles and acting it out on others.........
.......Abusers hide the truth not only from others but also from themselves. They do so by telling themselves that they are the real victims. They wholeheartedly believe that because of their suffering they are justified in everything they inflict on their victims. They are often successful in eliciting sympathy from others and it is usually the victim that is left isolated....

Jewish people in Israel and in the diaspora feel traumatized, but it´s not only the atrocities and murders the Nazis committed against Jews, which make up this trauma.
The trauma goes back far longer, a trauma of thousands of years. There were progroms and Jewish communities have been over and over again driven out of the places were they had settled.
The Jewish narrative goes like this:
Ever so often gentiles get inflicted by some kind of insanity and start persecuting Jews. And the only thing Jewish people can do to prevent this kind of crazy persecution is to become stronger and more powerful than their gentile neighbours.
This is the reasoning behind Israel´s constantly growing military expenditure.
This is the reasoning behind the denial of Israel to give equal rights to Palestinians as to Jews and the denial of the right to return.

In these American court-movies you can sometimes hear from the prosecution, when the councill for the defendant in a murder trial asks his client under oath about his or her problematic relationship with the victim: "Objections! We are not here to put the victim on trial!"
In German court TV shows you never hear this kind of objection, and I really think it is a pretty stupid one. Of course, the court needs to hear what happens before the crime, what were the motive, what were the reasons. Only then judge and jury can decide, if it was premeditated murder out of greed or maybe manslaughter out of some other reasons. The deed is never justified, to be sure, but the circumstances should determine how high the sentence should be, and they can tell the court if the perpetrator can be rehabilitated one day or not and if the perpetrator is likely to commit a similar crime again.
So, if take this analogy to Palestine, then we can see, that Palestinians have been the victims from the day the Zionist project was conceived. You can read in Zionist lterature itself, how even the early Zionist showed disdain for the indigenious population of Palestine, you can read about mistreatment of Palestinian workers, of misappropiation of property, about the driving of peasants from land they had cultivated for many generations after it was bought from absentee owners and other examples of mistreatment. There were many instances of violence against Palestinian towns and villages already before the foundation of the state of Israel.
When Palestinians fought back, they had good reasons for it.
After the terrible atrocities of 1948, the reasons became even better, and still better after the occupation of the West-Banks and Gaza. And these are the reasons for Palestinian suicide bombings and other violent acts of resistance against an oppressive power.
Seeing the history of the conflict, it´s clear, who are the victims here.
And it´s just as clear, that the Palestinians did not cause the Jewish trauma.
Some victims, like abused children are innocent, and the reason for their victimization does not lie in them, but some place else.
But then, some former victims, like in this case the Jewish Israelis, become perpetrators who victimize others. Ms Abarbanel says, because they have not healed their trauma.
But how do you heal a trauma? As a professional therapist Ms Abarbanel has probably other answers to this than I as a lay person have.
I think a trauma only can heal, when you can overcome the fear that the traumatic event might happen again any time.
As a victim of abuse the worst feeling is the one of helplessness, of being unable to stop it. You try to find strategies to prevent further abuse and find safety. And you base those strategies on the information you have.
But when your information is false, your strategy will be wrong.
If you believe that the reasons for your victimization is the mental illness of your aggressor, it makes sense to contain this aggressor, because what else can you do against a mental illness.
But if there are other reasons like, if you have provoked the aggressor, it makes a lot more sense to stop the provocation.

In the case of the Jewish trauma it is necassary to put the victim on trial, for the victim´s sake.
Only if the patterns leading to progroms and other prosecutions historically are brought out into the open, the vicious circle can be broken, fear can be banned, hatred and the compulsion to senselessly beat around in retaliation on those, who never were responsible for the trauma, can be overcome.
Truth is important, so very important.
Truth can heal a trauma.

Differences and Strategy

Thinking about the ethnic cleansing of Germans from areas which belong now to Russia, Poland and Tschekoslovakia there seem to be some similarities to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from large parts of Palestine.
But there are also differences:
Germany had just lost a war, which the German government had started and in which the German army and special units had committed terrible atrocities against the peoples whose country they were occupying.
While the first years after the war were difficult and hard on all Germans, especially on the refugees and deportees, after those years, when the country was rebuilt and economy grew, everybody became integretated in the process, including the people who had been driven out of East-Prussia, Schlesia and the Sudetenland. There also were paid some compensation money by the German government.
Because of all this, the acceptance of historical guilt, the economic integration and the policy of compensation, most of the younger generation of those people from former German areas accepted the loss and so did the next generations.
Nowadays there are extremely few people who actually even think about a return of these areas to Germany or of a return of Germans to these areas.

Policies were totally different in Palestine:
Palestinians had only defended their own land, homes and property and had never invaded other people´s countries or committed atrocities against them.
So, of course, they never had the feeling of being at least partly at fault for their predicament.
The refugees were never compensated for their loss, instead even their long history of living in Palestine for thousands of years was flatly denied.
The refugees never were integrated into the population of the countries which had taken them in, but many still have to live in seperate areas, refugee camps. They are often discriminated against and in some places have no legal rights or even legal passports to travel at will.
Worst of all, however, is the fact that the ethnic cleansing, the driving of people off their property and the destruction of their homes and the killing of people has not stopped and is still an ungoing process.
If the German people would have to live under similar conditions, they would never have accepted the situtiation either, historical guilt or not.
The question is, was there a chance or even is there still a chance, that Palestinians could or can accept their losses.
I recently read excerpts from the diary of Moshe Sharett, a Israeli prime minister in 1954 and 55. In there Sharett contemplated on an agreement with neighbouring Arab countries and even on matters of compensation, but his efforts were sabotaged by the hardliners Ben Gurion and others.
This made me think, that possibly in the 1950s there was a time, when there could have been made a compromise between a Zionist Israel, the Palestinian people and the neighbouring Arab countries.
Sure, compensations could never have made up for what was lost in homes, land and human life, but it would have helped the Palestinians to start a new life away from home. Compensations could have given the Palestinian economy within the rest of Palestine and in the neighboring countries a boost and would have helped Palestinians to establish themselves there.
For Israel it would not have been too hard to make those compensations really substantial. By making peace treaties with both the Palestinians and other Arab nations, Israel could have spent far less on military expenditure, so that part of German compensations and American aid could have been diverted to compensation for the Palestinians.

But then, when I tried to google those diary excerpts again, I found some other excerpts and they made me doubt, that there ever was a possiblity of compromise for the Palestinian people with Zionism.
On the Al-Bushra website of Arab American Roman Catholics I found this article about the Moshe Sharett diaries:
Here is an excerpt:

Sharett's diary, for 5/26/55 records the thinking of some of those who orchestrated Israeli attitudes and also influenced world opinion. The principal spokesman for the opponents of the possible peace was Dayan. And the diary reports:

"We do not need (Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S., such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the west, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to an infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us freedom of actrion, and this is what we need in the coming years. Reprisal raids which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph. First (the reprisal raids) make it imperative for the Arabgoernmentsto tkae strong measures to protect the borders. Second, AND THAT'S THE MAIN THING, THEY MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO MAINTAIN A HIGH LEVEL OF TENSION AMONG OUR POPULATION AND THE ARMY. Without these actions we would cease to be a combative people and WITHOUT THE DISCIPLINE OF A COMBATIVE PEOPLE WE ARE LOST....We will have to cry out that the Negev is in danger SO THAT ANGRY MEN WILL GO THERE."

Sharett then adds his own comments:

"The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This state has no international worries, no economic problems. THE QUESTION OF PEACE IS NON-EXISTENT. IT must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly AND LIVE ON ITS SWORD. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Towards this end it may, no, IT MUST, INVENT DANGERS AND TO DO THIS IT MUST ADOPT THE METHOD OF PROVOCATION AND REVENGE....and above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally GET RID OF OUR TROUBLES AND ACQUIRE OUR SPACE...Ben Gurion himself said it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war."

Of course these diary entries are taken out of context, so that it is not quite clear to me, if Sharett did actually share the same opinions as Dayan or Ben Gurion or if he just interpreted their words. But since Sharret was only in power for a couple of years and everybody else in the Zionist movement seems to have been against even minimal compromises, his real opinion didn´t make a real difference one way or the other.
It seems quite obvious to me now, that even then, there never was a chance for compromise with Zionism.
The Zionist ideology does not allow for compromise, it only wants to overcome all obstacles towards its goals by the ruthless use of military power and by deceit.

But then, while Zionism surely has its roots in the "Jewish exceptualism-chosen people-eternal victim" narrative, I think we still have to make a difference between the opposition to Zionism and the opposition to Judaism or the Jewish people.
Just as you have to make a difference between the Nazi ideology and the German people, although the Nazi ideology does have its roots in some part of German culture.
And this is not just a matter of mushy heart, humanitarian, liberal thought. It´s a matter of strategy.
Here is another excerpt from the al-bushra article:

The eternal, Zionist dialectic again! If the people are not obsessed with fear, create conditions to frighten them. If there are no visible enemies - create them! Ignore any hand outstretched in friendship, for the friendship CAN DISSOLVE THE IDEOLOGY.

I agree with their view on this.
Zionism is an ideology built on fear and distrust of gentiles. Somebody like Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli with a 100% Jewish background, might be able to do a total critizism of Judaism without doing harm. If non-Jewish persons do this, it might become counterproductive to their cause. Open hostility towards the Jewish People per se or the insistance that Judaism has no right to exist, will feed into those feelings of fear and distrust against the rest of the world and reinforce this Jewish national paranoia.
I don´t think, there is much hope to convert Ariel Sharon or other extremists away from Zionism, but I do think, it is possible with most of the ordinary Jewish people in the diaspora and even in Israel.
I think it is necessary to to find the words which make it quite clear, that the Zionist ideology is unacceptable to us, but that we still reach out in friendship to the Jewish people.

I know, that it sounds unfair, that we should tiptoe around the Jewish people, a people who is overrepresented in the media and in the economic, political and academic upper classes of western society. And given the terrible atrocities committed in Palestine and by proxy in Iraq and other places, it sounds even more unfair.
But then, only a minority of Israelis or diaspora Jews is personally responsible for those crimes. For most the only guilt they bear is the silence and failure to oppose those crimes. If we do not seperate between the Zionist ideology and the Jewish people, Zionism´s hold on ordinary Jews will become even stronger. The false believe, that Zionism is in the long run the only way of survival for individual Jews or the Jewish people, will be strengthened. Fear and paranoia can strangle logical thought and ordinary compassion for the suffering of others.
And this special paranoia is so dangerous exactly because the Jewish people are over-represented in the media and other influencial professions.
There needs to be a strategy to counter the paranoia.

Non-Violence

According to international law the struggle of the Palestinians against Israeli occupation is legal. According to Church doctrine it would probably constitute a "just war".
So nobody has the right to criticize Palestinians for a militant struggle.

So what I´m doing now, is asking hyopthetical questions as some kind of personal brain-storming.
The question is, what is strategically the best course.
When I talk about "loving the enemy", it for sure cannot mean to accept abuses against Palestinians silently, because actually this is not really love.
For the Israeli Jews, by acting inhumane, they are destroying part of their humanity through these actions and hurt their eternal souls. And quite obviously is, that Israelis, through the acceptance of brutalizing Palestinians, are more and more starting to brutalize each other as well. After having committed untold crimes against other human beings, people just don´t come home and live a normal life. The same happens to many American veterans. They come home and become violent towards family or neighbours. If you love them, you try to stop their self-destructive behaviour.


So non-violence in my opinion cannot be passive, it must be very active and demanding; in the spirit of Martin Luther King, who led the civil rights movement as a movement for joining hands in common humanity. Justice for him did not mean seeking revenge, although, considering the really horrendous crimes white Americans had committed against the people abducted from their African homes and also against their descendents, a call for revenge might be understandable. But to demand an eye for an eye would make everyone blind in the end.
So "loving" means most often: forgiving - and allowing a new start for a relationship between people. But it cannot mean to allow injustice to continue.
The non-violent civil-rights movement worked, but when King was killed, not all goals were reached.
Racism had not been overcome in all aspects of life.
There still was, for instance, alot of economic discrimination.
And racism had not been overcome in everybody´s mind.
And recently, looking at the ever increasing prison population of predominantly non-white people and at the disenfrenchment of African Americans at the voting polls, there even seems to be a back slide.
So the question is would an exclusive non-violent movement like this work in Palestine?
There are many differences in the situation.
The civil-rights movement, seemed to have an enormous positive media coverage in the USA.
Mainline media throughout the western world would not cover a Palestinian movement in the same positive way. There are so many non-violent demonstrations already going on against the "Wall", and the international media takes rather little notice of them.
Would the coverage of alternative media and the work of activist make up for the lack of positive mainline media attention?
The growing effort by Zionist groups to censor pro-Palestinian voices on campus in the US seems to indicate that Israel is afraid of their influence.
Another difference to the American civil rights movement would be the ruthlessness Israeli forces already show against non-violent demonstrations and other actions, even using poisoned gas. American police could by far not risk the same ruthlessness against demonstrators. The degree of ruthlessness risked depends naturally on the public attention paid to it.
And there again, can international activists help focus enough attention on Israel´s behaviour to influence her against state terrorist acts?
Can the mainline media be forced to pay attention?
Another question is of course, if it is possible, that all Palestinian organisations could come to agree on the same short time and long time goals. A big coordinated non-violent effort over a long time would need to put up concrete demands, which have to be fulfilled.
One thing is for sure, Sharon wouldn´t like Palestinian non-violence.
Zionist Israel does everything to portray Palestinians as aggressors and herself as just answering the violence. It is quite obvious that Sharon deliberately tries to provoke violence whenever Palestinian groups try to negotiate a seize fire. And when violence then comes forth, Sharon escalates his terror. Although on a lower level Israeli terror, while not reported in mainline media, is on going constantly.
And I´m convinced, that some attacks credited to some or other Palestinian group are actually Mossad black ops (like the suicide-bombing where more than 50 people died, but nearly all of them foreigners,since it went off in quarters of town, where only guest workers live). There have been documented instances of such tactics against other Arab people before, like against Egypt in the Lavon affair, whose perpetrators actually have recently received some medals or so.
(I´d say, a real chutzpah, since their victims were partly Americans. How can they dare to anger and humiliate the Americans so publicly, when they so very much depend on American financial and military help? Well, it looks as if Israel can get away with anything because of her influence on the media.)
So an organized non-violent movement would actually have each and every single Palestinian group to agree upon non-violence, to counter any possible Mossad false flags.
Violent groups can act on their own with all their own goals. However, non-violence as a main strategy needs to be coordinated.
Is this actually possible? And would it work?
One other probable strategic reason for Israel in killing Palestinian leaders is, besides provoking violence, also to kill off possible popular coordinators in non-violent strategies.
Israel, of course, would not give in one iota on its own. Only the international community could force Israel to make real concessions. But would the West do this?
How much publicity is needed so that western sympathizers could put enough pressure on their own government?
How far would Israel go to prevent being pressurized?
What tactic would she use?
How much influence does she have on western countries?
Is there any way to counteract Israel´s tactics?

One thing is sure. Non-violence is a powerful tool.
The enemy is using it. In the majority of cases in the recent years, where
governments were overthrown and replaced by American puppets, it was done by non-violent means. American sponsered NGOs were using youth-groups or student movements, paying a few instigators and using the others´ enthusiasm for democratic changes in bringing to pass an American agenda, which really isn´t interested in democracy, just in looting the place for corporate interests.
It happened for instance in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. It was tried unsuccessfully in Lebanon and Venezuela. And they are still trying it in Iran. However, the Neocons in the Pentagon opt rather for a military campaign there and in Syria,since the Likudniks in Israel think a new government in Iran and Syria wouldn´t be safe enough. They want Iran and Syria destroyed and cut into tyni pieces.

So non-violent strategy is not just an idea of a few other worldly Christian, or in case of Mahatma Ghandi Hindu, dreamers. It needs however far more consistency and coordination than violent tactics. And it only works in combination with lots of public attention.

Anger and Fear

Many people in the pro-Palestine movements have witnessed Zionist atrocities up close, others have friends who have been hurt. I can understand, when criticize me for too much philosemitism.
It´s so much easier for me, who has never been touched directly by all the cruelty inflicted in the name of Zionism, to have a concilatory attitude towards Jews.
If I´d ever been hurt personally I quite likely would be a loud raving anti-semite. But if this should ever happen to me, I hope that people would realize, that those ravings would just be a reaction on being hurt and would weigh the things I have said and written before as my more accurate attitude.
For I believe, that reaching out to the Jewish people is not only a religious duty for a Christian, it is also a very important tactic in the struggle for peace.

Gilad Azmon and Israel Shamir believe that Jews need to give up their identity of being Jewish in order to reconcile with the rest of humanity. I have not subscribed to Shamir's newsletter, although I read it regurlarly, because I believe that to demand from Jews to give up their Jewish identity will probably not work.
A feeling of identity is such an important psychological factor wihtin a person, it´s for many people next to impossible to give it up.
I didn´t realize before I started living permanently here in Iceland, how important my German identity is for me. And I´m definitly not one who keeps yelling: I´m proud to be a German. That´s considered a Neo-nazi attitude.
I have lived here for so many years, I could apply for Icelandic citizenship, but I haven't done it yet because until recently I thought I would loose my German one.
There would be a lot less historical baggage and sometimes negative attitude to carry, if I could identify as an Icelander, but I just can´t. For better or worse I´m German.
The same is true for my religion. In my late teens I went from the Catholic to another church, because I was turned off by the insincerity and the liberal sexual attitudes of my catholic peers and fell for the promise of a more family oriented church with no drinking, smoking and more strict sexual rules.
With time I realized, that I couldn´t stand the Old Testamentarian attitude and the America centeredness of that church, but I would have stayed anyway for the sake of family and friends, found some niche for me somehow, but I didn´t because I couldn´t find any spirituality there.
I finally realized why I couldn´t find it, when I went back to the Catholic church: I had missed the rituals most and foremost. I do not believe, that only Catholics go to heaven, or only Christians or only religious people, but I do believe that I myself go to heaven as a Catholic or not at all, for my spirituality I only can find in the Catholic church.

Of course not everybody is like me and there are many who can find a new national identity or spirituality outside their childhood faith, but nevertheless there are for sure a lot of people who can´t.
Jewish national identity is not bound to national borders, but still it is a traditional national identity. And many Jews have a religious identity as well, but this does not mean, that they have to indentify with all the ancient precepts. There are quite a lot of different attitudes to what it means to be a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist or a Hindu.

So I think, for a Jew to reconcile with the rest of the world does not necessarily mean he has to give up Jewish identity, he could reconcile with Jewish history instead.
Avigail Abarbanel writes on her blog, that the Jewish people is traumatized and that this is what lies mostly behind the Zionist atrocities.
Of course most Jews living today have not lived through Nazi persecution themselves. It is not what has them traumatized, rather what was told to them about this persecution together with other instances of persecution in history is traumatizing Jews.
And again its not the historical events, but the perception of those historical events, what traumatizes Jews.
Into this perception belongs the belief, that the Jewish people has been the most persecuted in the world and that they are in danger of persecution all the time.And so, very often when Jews perceive that gentiles are angry at some Jews even for quite legitimite reason that trauma comes up. Trauma, that´s true for Jews and for Gentiles, makes normally decent people act, talk and think irrational. For decent people to justify Zionist injustice and brutality in any way, is irrational.

Many people within the pro-Palestine movement feel angry when they hear about another act of Zionist oppression and murder. And because there are so many Jews who justify Zionism, this anger is sometimes directed at Jews per se. And its natural, that people get angry, when somebody they care for is hurt so badly. And the members of the pro-Palestine movements have all started to care deeply for the Palestinian people, even if they are not Palestinian themselves.
The trouble is, that Jews, who are conditioned by this certain perception of history, will perceive this anger as hatred, as unreasonable anti-semitism and react with an even closer bond to Zionism.
Anger is in my opinion counterproductiv, if you want to break this bond.
"Love your enemy" is actually a method to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles to peace.
You keep on trying to get the enemy to reciprocate your love, even if it takes a long time.
On the other hand I do not think, that it is productive to accept and even promote a distorted perception of history, in order to make Jewish people trust you.
It quite obviously does not work. At the memoration of the Ausschwitz liberation, the whole UN was singing, or at least listening to, the Israeli national anthem, in spite of there having died many people from many other nations as well, and Israel had not even existed at the time. It was as if everybody was agreeing to that Jews, represented by Israel were the only victims of Nazi brutality. And still Zionist does not trust gentiles and feel constantly threatened.

"And they will know the truth, and the truth shall make them free."

The cause for Jewish trauma, persecution-complex or mass-paranoia, however you will call it, is a misconception of history. And this has to be overcome.
And yes, when you start to attack Jewish history, most Jews will perceive it as attack on the Jewish people, since national history is often tied to identity and yes, they will react with anger or fear.
But there is just no way around it. And in the long run one doesn´t have to loose one´s identity when one accepts a more accurate and less sanitized version of one´s people´s history.
We Germans had to do it, and we can live with it.
And for me personally it means to not only stifle anger when it comes up in me, but to do my best to actually overcome it and overcome fear as well.
For yes, of course I´m afraid. I fear, that Zionist pressure on the American government for war in behalf of Israel will lead to an unlimited world-war. But fear is just as big a hinderance for a peaceful world as anger is.
Racism is just another word for xenophobia (fear of strangers), antisemitism another one for judeophobia (fear of Jews) and there is no word for what Zionists feel for non-Jews, but you can call it Gentile-phobia.

Make It Personal

The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic.
I don´t remember where I read this quote, but I know, it is true.

We humans are social beings. We are created to live in groups and relate to each other. We can feel empathy for each other, even feel each others emotional pain. Some neurologists say that there are devices in our brains,neural patterns, for feeling empathy.
But we are also emotionally limited. We cannot feel for people we do not know. So when people get hurt or killed some place far away from us, people we never met, we never heard about on the other side of the world, our intellectual knowledge may tell us about the injustice being done to them. But intellectual knowledge is just not enough to act on it, to give up some comfort and conveniences for those who suffer injustice, we need emotional knowledge, we need to feel.
But then for us humans there are other ways of getting to know a person than seeing him or her face to face. We can see his picture, listen to her story told by others or watch a documentary on TV.
A few weeks ago there was a short documentary in a news-magazine on German TV about the Gaza withdrawal plans of Sharon. We saw an elderly Jewish couple who lived in one of those Gaza settlements. They had lost their daughter in an attack a few years back. Her daughter was buried in the cemetary of the settlement. We were told that in Jewish religion it was impossible to exhume bodies and bring them to another cemetary. We watched the mother going to the cemetary mourning for their daughter. She said she would never leave the settlement voluntarily.
Then the moderator of the news-show told us, that it was indeed difficult, the Gaza disengagement. Injustices would been done no matter what happened.
It would have worked on me, if I had not known better.
It would have worked,
if I had not known about the security zones around those illegal settlements, where Palestinians are shot at sight, when they came close,
if I had not known about the stealing of farm-land and water in a densely populated area, where Palestians went hungry and had to scrimp with water while Israeli settlers lived in luxury,
if I had not known about the little boy who was shot close to one of those security zones while trying to catch birds to sell on the market because his family was poor and needed the money.
I did not feel sorry for this elderly couple, I did not feel them to be justified for their attitude, but I would have, if I hadn´t known better.

The media can form opinions in the way they show an issue, in the way whose plight they show and whose they leave out. We need to see the faces of those who have suffered, we need to hear their stories. We need to get to know them.
Often even fictional stories told in movies or TV-shows can bring a point across.

Yesterday I watched a show from the TV-series "Without a Trace":
Here an old man went missing, a Peter Dusek. He had been a juror in a murder trial.As the story unravels we find out, that Dusek had recognized one of the witnesses of the trial,a Max Reinhard a former Gestapo officer who had lived in the US under a false name. During the war Reinhard had searched out Jews who lived in hiding with non-jewish families. Reinhard went up to children of the towns he was searching through to persuade them to become informers on their families or their neighbours. Peter Dusek was one of those children. He lived in the same apartment building as the family who were hiding Greta´s family. Greta was Peter´s friend, but he became an informer. He was maybe twelf years old. After Peter had recognized Max Reinhard, he went to Greta, who had survived Auschwitz and gave her a painting, her family had owned and Peter had taken into custody after their deportation. He also told her the truth of what he had done 60 years ago as a child, hoping for forgiveness, but he didn´t get it. So Peter Dusek went to Max Reinhard and turned him over to a Mossad agent, who was able to abduct him to Israel. In the end a policewoman said, that justice sometimes takes a long time.

Only a year ago I would have liked the show about fictional Greta, Peter Dusek and Max Reinhard, glad that justice was done in the end.
A year ago I knew so very little about the people of Palestine and of course I did not know anything about Ahmed Salah.
I read about him on Umkhalil`s blog. He lives in Al-Kahder village near the west bank city of Bethlehem. He is 14 years old.

(Ahmed)Salah(...),told reporters that soldiers arrested him from inside a grocery shop, took him to the nearby Road 60, and asked him to lead them to the homes of three teens who earlier had thrown stones at traveling Israeli vehicles.
"I told them I saw no stone throwers," Salah said.
Yet, soldiers took Salah to his home, searched the place and asked him to call his father. When the father, Taha Salah arrived, a soldier told him that his son threw stones at them. Taha then slapped his son on the face, but the officer told him that his son did not throw stones, but that they wanted him to lead them to the homes of three teens who had thrown stones at soldiers.
Salah told his father that he didn't see anyone throwing stones at soldiers, but soldiers didn't believe him and strongly pushed him and his father.
"I told them that you say my son didn't throw stones, leave him alone. You have no right to force him to lead you to the homes of other villagers" the father said.
One soldier pushed the father once more and warned him that if Ahmed refused to lead them to the homes of alleged stone throwers, they were going to arrest him.
"I told them to do what they want, and asked Ahmed to step out of the military Jeep. Ahmed jumped out and started to run towards our home. At this point, two soldiers started chasing Ahmed, a third soldier fired at him from few meters' distance," the father said.
"I jumped off the Jeep and ran towards home. I heard shooting and felt something penetrating my body. I fell on the ground besides the fence of my home, and woke up in the hospital," (Ahmed) Salah said.

Ahmed was wounded in the back and the chest. It happened last Wednesday.
Maybe Ahmed really didn´t see who threw the stones, but knowing the kids of the village, he probably knew anyway or he could have guessed. He knew he would be arrested when he didn´t collaborate. He probably had heard what happens to Palestinians in Israeli jails.
He did not become an informer.

Ahmed Salah´s story, the story of his family, his friends and his village would make a great movie.
Why doesn´t anybody make one?

To Be Chosen

In Christian and Jewish Theology the Jewish People is chosen by God.
In Christian Theology it was chosen to bring forth the Messiah of the world,Jesus Christ, God incarnate, Son of Man and Son of God.
In Jewish theology the Jewish people was and will always be specially chosen by God.
But what does that mean?
It could mean that the Jewish people is seperated and superior to all other peoples of the earth. Some Jews believe this, many others don´t.
Christian monks and nuns believe that they were chosen by God for special tasks, like praying for the souls of their fellowmen or serving the poor and the destitute.
Catholic priests believe they are chosen by God to perform the rites of the Sacraments in order to serve the Christian community.
The orthodox Jews of Naturei Karta believe, that the people of Israel was chosen to perform the acts of the law, and so serving all human kind and bring the light of God to the world.
Chosen to serve is a good way of feeling chosen.
By serving you heal yourself and you heal others.
There was a time, when I thought the most urgent reform the Catholic Church should make should be to throw out the Old Testament.
And I still can´t read it or listen to it without a few cramps in my stomach. People tell me,I must learn to read it in a different way. But I just can´t overlook the violence and, what I consider, injustices. I only can tell myself, that probably those parts were not inspired.
But I´ve come to the conclusion that there must be a reason, why Jesus, who created a religion of the most egalitarian principles for all mankind, was chosen to be born inside the nation who already was the most alienated from the rest of mankind.
Simon Jones argues on his blog in the post "We are all Jews now", that in our capitalist society whose motor is the taking of interest, which before was a Jewish privilige, we all have become alienated from each other and from nature. And we all need to heal from this alienation.
But healing, I think, is a spiritual task. We need ourselves to be healed and help others to heal.
So when our late Pope John Paul and our current Pope Benedict talk to the Jewish people they are trying to heal Jewish alienation from us Christians and from the world by using what Jesus has taught us: "Love your enemy, love those who curse and abuse you."
Maybe you believe the Jewish people must heal themselves. I think they can´t, due to mass-paranoia through misconceptions of history.
The main-tool the Zionist leadership uses to keep the Jewish people in line of their Zionist goals, is fear.
The Catholic church tells the Jewish people:
You do not need to be afraid of us!
You are our brothers and sisters, we do not wish you harm.
At the same time the Catholic church opposes globalized capitalism, the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and wars against the Muslim world obviously fought in behalf of Israel.
This opposition has caused rather vicious attacks by the Zionist dominated media of the US. The child-abuse scandal is, in my opinion, just an overblowing by the media of a few isolated real incidences, with a lot of bandwagon cases, when it was clear how much money can be made out of those accusations. And while the Church did allow herself to be blackmailed for money, she did not give up in her opposition to war and exploitation of the developing world.
While the Church has probably no illusions about changing the minds of the leadership of Zionism, she does still actively reach out to the ordinary Jews. There is a psychological aspect in it: If you touch somebody, who is angry at you for whatever reason, in a friendly, non-threatening way, it is very likely that his anger will recede.

So, I do not believe, that the Jewish religion is beyond redemption and that the Jewish people can only be healed by mass-conversation to Christianity.
Healing lies in facing uncomfortable historical and present truths.
Healing lies in overcoming fear and mistrust.
Healing lies in accepting universal rights.
Healing lies in universal love for all mankind alike.
Healing lies in the interpretation of being chosen:
To feel chosen not for being superior in any way but, like the Jews of Naturei Karta, to feel chosen to serve for the universal good of all human kind.

And since we in the west are actually "all Jews now", we have to heal in just the same way, so war, oppression and exploitation will finally be a thing of the past.