Friday, February 1, 2008

How many human rights violations can you count in this one? Unspeakable outrage of the day

Lord, have mercy.

Two mentally disabled women used as suicide bombers in Baghdad today.

The levels of violence and destruction of human being and dignity boggle the mind and heart.

Kyrie eleison
Christe eleison
Kyrie eleison

4 comments:

Ken said...

I don't know where this comment will go.

My loathing at this moment for those fanatics knows no bounds. To use mentally impaired women...to use children..."have you no decency sir, at long last?"

But I don't know who "sir" is. This is not about one man anymore, if it ever was. The idiot Curtis Sliwa can refer on the radio to "Obama rhymes with Osama," but it's not about Osama, it's not about George Bush, Cheney, any one man or woman. It's not even about Condi Rice, who Eliot Weinberger described as "Xena, Warrior Princess," doing martial arts exercises in her office.

It's about both sides of any question. It's Tudor England. Whom do you root for? Catholics burn Anglicans burn Catholics burn Muslims burn Christians burn Jews. It's Sunni burns Shiite burns Sunni rapes Shiite woman whose husband kills her in an honor killing. It's 650,000 Americans killing one another in the U.S. Civil War. It's the Battle of Verdun in WW1 fought to a stalemate at the cost of 250,000 lives between March and October 1916--at no gain of territory. It's history not as a bunch of dates (though dates matter) but as a nightmare that runs in a whirlpool or vortex and from which we will not permit ourselves to awaken. I fear we would rather dwell in the dream of perpetual hatred than make our peace with one another.

So "radical Islam" behaves heinously. George W. Bush stands self-righteously on the mountain of skulls he helped create by invading Iraq, tsk-tsking and hinting that not just "Islamo-Fascism" but all of Islam is somehow the "gutter religion" that charlatan Louis Farrakhan called Judaism.

I don't see an end. The demonizing has gone on since Samuel berated Saul for not slaughtering the enemy's children and domestic animals. It won't stop, or I have no idea how in hell to make it stop. De profundis clamavi ad te Domine.

johnieb said...

Sometimes it hurts so much to be human.

Fran said...

I was so stunned when I heard this yesterday. My heart is breaking for our world.

What else can I say? Your Kyrie says it all.

pj said...

Ken is correct.

On the news, they made sure to say that it is believed Al Qaeda is behind this bombing. (This was NPR, btw.) Now honestly, does Al Qaeda mean anything anymore? I can bomb Walmart and phone it in to the local police and call myself a representative of "Al Qaeda in Westchester." AQ is just a bogey man. All of us are culpable.