Showing posts with label Atrocity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atrocity. Show all posts

October 2, 2016

U.S. Shuts Eyes To Syria and Ukraine

While we are willing to take in some refugees (true to "our values"), we are not willing to enforce "red lines" and stop the killing in Syria's almost 6-year murderous civil war. 

Incredibly, there are 500,000 killed (including 50,000 children) and another 2,000,000 wounded in the fighting already

Also, there are 6,000,000 internally displaced and another 4,800,000 refugees outside Syria causing a humanitarian crisis and destabilizing the region. 


Dictator Bashar Al Assad and most importantly, Russia seem unstoppable. 

Russia does not play by the West's rules--they make the rules!

While we threaten to cut off diplomatic talks, Russia continues the heaviest bombing of the war with 1,900 bombs on Aleppo in the last week alone.

The UN cries foul with empty threats of war crimes on the atrocities being committed, but again no one is willing to stop Russia.

Moreover, Russia brings in yet more advanced weaponry and warns the U.S. not to try to stop them in Syria (sound familiar to the 2014 blitzkrieg in Crimea/Ukraine?). 

Again, we are unwilling to stop the bombardment of almost 300,000 civilians in Aleppo with aid convoys, hospitals, schools, and bakeries all grotesquely now being fair game.

Last week, I watched 60 Minutes on CBS about our nuclear bomber fleet, and the rising threat of nuclear war with Russia.

What was particularly scary is that U.S. military strategists are now concerned that the U.S. is "sociologically weaker" than our opponents.

In particular, they worry that as Russia continues to threaten first use of nukes to meet their strategic aims with "an evolved willingness to employ nuclear weapons in the course of a conflict," they are counting on the U.S. to back down from any engagement or retaliation, because we would be so afraid of escalating with Russia, let alone using first. 

In other words, Russia does not consider the U.S. nuclear deterrent to be credible anymore--we are viewed as chicken and pushovers and Russia could simply "shock the Western powers into de-escalating."

First Ukraine and now Syria, what country is safe from the "Great Bear"--will the Balkans be next or perhaps somewhere even more deadly to a broken NATO and a farce of a UN. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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May 5, 2016

For Holocaust Remembrance Day



The photo is self-explanatory to all decent human beings out there.

We can never let evil rule the day.

Good people must stand up and speak out for good.

Never again!

(Source Photo: Sent to me by Minna Blumenthal)
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September 11, 2015

Remnants Of The Holocaust

So I had coffee with a wonderful gentleman this week.

And he--like myself--is a child of Holocaust survivors. 

Two quick stories he told me:

- His father, a survivor of the notorious concentrations camps that killed millions, had a number tattooed on his arm by the cursed Nazis. As the years past and his father worked to resume a normal life, what did he do with that number to try and help forget all the atrocities he went through? Get this...he used the number on his arm as the code for garage door opener. As he told his son, this way, I will never forget the code to open it.

- As a child, my new friend wanted to go to summer camp, he once asked his father, "Dad, when you were my age did you go to camp?" And his father replied, "Yes, I went to concentration camp!" Indeed, a very different sort of experience for a child. These days our children run, play, and swim in the beautiful outdoors at summer camp, but in our parents time, as Jews, they were hauled in cattle cars to suffer at the hands of the Nazis in slave labor, starvation, disease, beatings, torture, and in extermination camps behind razor-sharp barbed wire, attack dogs, and watch towers with machine guns.

How on Earth did these atrocities and genocide occur just 70 years ago--in the 20th century?

As much as I have learned, I am still dumbfounded by it: people (really more like vicious animals or Zombie devils) brutalizing other people, human beings--men, women, children, old people, the sick and disabled--and exterminating millions in the most horrific and brutal ways.

Now, the victims, their children, and grandchildren are left to go on and rebuild, where a tattooed number by the Nazis in the infamous concentration camps becomes a reminder for the everyday garage door opener in what we try to make of a normal life once again. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to HolocaustSurvivors.org)
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November 3, 2013

12 Years A Slave, But Not Anybody's Property

I saw the movie "12 Years A Slave."

I have seen other movies on slavery, such as Amistad and Glory, but none were as potent and realistic as this was. 


I came out with my head full of feelings of pain and injustice, as if I had just lived through those 12 years as a slave myself. 


I literally felt sick to my stomach and the room felt as if it was spinning and I could hardly breathe. 


My wife said to me, "You wouldn't be human if you didn't feel bad."


And I responded to her, "I feel bad that they (the slave owners and traders) weren't human."


I cannot tell the story of Solomon Northup or of the horrors of slavery any better than the movie in fact did. 


But what I can convey is my shear disgust for how anybody could enslave and mistreat others the way the Black people and others throughout history were. 


As a Jewish person, my own people have a history of 400 years of slavery in Egypt, and this took on a whole new meaning. 


As great actors as Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner were, The movie, The Ten Commandments, did not show the depths of Hell of slavery as much as the breadth of Heaven of redemption. 


And while the Pyramids of Egypt were built not with massively powered Caterpillar earth movers and construction equipment, but with the flesh and blood of my people under the whip of servitude 3,500 years ago, similarly the Capitol of the United States and The White House were built with Black people in chains and hung by the noose. 


In the movie today, the plantation owners said they could do what they wanted to the slaves and without fear of retribution or sin, because the slaves were their property. 


What is unbelievable is that anyone can believe that anybody can be the property of anyone other than G-d, the Master of the Universe, him/herself. 


The slave trader in the movie, tearing apart a family and selling the mother and her children separately, when questioned on his ability to commit such atrocity, says matter-of-factly,"my sentimentality extends the length of a coin."


For a buck, what will a person not do?


In history, we have seen individuals and whole societies cheat, steal, rape, enslave, torture, murder, and commit every treachery and treason...for a buck or even just because they could. 


What is the lesson for all of us?


People can do great good in this world, but unfettered by faith, conscience, reason, or fear of justice, they can do great, great evil--and for that we can never let our guard down.

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