Map of Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli sites

Something about this day. Was it a foreboding when we woke to a dark, heavily raining morning? And then we heard the news. Last night before I shut down my computer after posting my last blog of the night, I had a look at my Twitter feed. There was an announcement that heavy conflict had broken out after Hamas had launched hundreds of rockets into Israel. This has been a tough year for Israel, having to cope with countless terror assaults. Not only incited by the Palestinian Authority through its school curricula teaching children to hate Jews and Israel as 'occupiers' but through the emergence of new terror groups in Jenin launching attacks. As though Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad weren't enough to cope with.

Israel has been forced to balance the safety and security of its presence in the Middle East after reclaiming its ancestral territories and human rights in its re-establishment as a Jewish state, an authentic indigenous place of haven for Jews the world over as citizens while at the same time absorbing the presence of others, non-Jews ranging from Christians to Arabs, Druze, Kurds, Circassians, Baha'i and Africans who have migrated to the country from their war-ravaged countries. Arab Palestinians represent over 20% of the population, with equal citizenship rights enabling them to elect members of their own to the Knesset. 

 

But the very fact of Israel's existence -- on land that Palestinian Arabs who migrated from Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East into Israel to live amongst Jews who never left to become a part of the great Jewish diaspora when Jews were forcefully dispersed during the Roman occupation thousands of years ago -- continues to see Palestinians resentful, raging against Israel's presence, declaring the land rightfully theirs, not that of Jews indigenous to the land. Peace has never really settled over Israel. From its legal and United Nations-supported declaration of statehood returned in 1948, it has suffered a succession of military challenges by neighbouring Arab countries, all rebuffed.

In the last several years, a number of Arab countries; The United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain and Sudan have joined Egypt and Jordan in signing peace agreements with Israel, under the Abraham Accords. It appears that Saudi Arabia is seriously considering joining them; in essence agreeing that Israel has a right to exist in its native geography. The Shi'ite Islamic Republic of Iran, the region's hot spot for aggression and violence, a major sponsor of terrorism, plans to destroy Israel, sponsoring and enlisting actions of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Inciting violence against the state with a long-range plan of its destruction, Iran views the potential of Saudi Arabia signing a formal peace agreement with Israel as a legitimization of its presence, by the most influential of the Sunni-majority Arab states in the Middle East, an agreement that could pave the way of all further resistance to Israel's presence vanishing in an accord of like minds looking toward future security and mutual prosperity. What better way to shock Arab nations away from accepting Israel's presence than to incite a war where Jews are forced to defend themselves by killing those Arabs attacking them?

This morning came the news that Hamas had lobbed thousands of rockets yet again into Israel from Gaza. That Hamas terrorist operatives had infiltrated Israeli army bases by stealth overnight, as well as Israeli border towns, to attack and kill Jewish soldiers and civilians alike, some being taken as 'prisoners' into Gaza, to be used as collateral for prisoner exchanges. Terrorists entered homes in border towns to kill the inhabitants, people in cars were summarily shot to death. Women were caught, raped and murdered. 

Hamas' own publicity arm took countless videos of shocking assaults of civilians being slaughtered, of Jewish women and girls abducted after being raped, of Palestinian terrorists wielding submachine guns stalking through the streets and houses of Israeli towns, shooting wildly, dead bodies lying everywhere on the streets. Documenting, in essence, their depraved atrocities, every one of which represents a crime against humanity, war crimes.

Crimes that should being shame to any community whose members might be involved in such malevolently horrible actions, but which within the Palestinian community becomes a reason for joy and jubilation, a resounding success by those who portray themselves to the world community at large as hapless victims of Jewish imperialism, who deserve compassion and support against the existence of a Jewish state. An attack on human decency, on the very concept of people of different origins, tribal affiliations and religions being able to live in decent peace among one another.

A condition of which Israel is a shining example, and of which the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and Gaza Strip remain a narrative of human depravity as they celebrate the deaths of those they have been inculcated with hatred toward by their leaders. For a Jew to appear in a West Bank city is to invite violence and death. Yet in Israel, over two million Arabs live in  peace and security among Jews in a Jewish state. 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1710617112094572907

As far as weather this November of 2022 is concerned up to the present our cup runneth over. We've had a much-appreciated spate of warm days, and ample sun, just what we don't normally expect from the penultimate month of the year. And today was no different. It dawned mild and continued that way. But since the forecast was for early afternoon rain, we decided we'd take our puppies out for their usual afternoon walk a little earlier than usual.

Before that happened, however, we tuned in to the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies. A ritual of sadness but one that ensures that the memory of those who fought and died -- against an ideology whose issues run counter to all that civilized nations value; peace, security and rule of law leading to equal justice for all -- would be  gratefully remembered. 

The ceremonial military acknowledgements married to the civilian version of remembrance held in quiet review of another year gone by in an 80-year history of the last global war that wasted too many lives. The ceremonial focus on the military role in its critical mission to free humanity from the talons of fascist Germany and its Axis partners. The deaths and disablement of countless numbers of military personnel to be grieved in a public gesture of memory renewed.

Countless other deaths of civilians, men, women, children, the elderly who died as 'collateral' damage unspeakably awful in its wide sweep of indigestible numbers. And finally, the unthinkable reality of a war within a war that led to the carefully orchestrated murders of millions of Nazi victims considered society's outcasts in Nazi ideology. To focus on the dreadful plight of Europe's Jews alone, illustrates the epitome of human depravity. We mourn them all, each and every one. And mourn more deeply that the world in turmoil made no effort to 'notice' the genocide by a stratagem that would lessen the number of its victims. A stratagem as simple as welcoming Jewish refugees from the slaughterhouse of Europe into the lands of the free world.

We who now populate the world barely recall the grimness of those war years; those alive at that time are becoming more scarce among the living. But the veterans and the civilians who were young in 1939 to 1945 live with their dim and distant memories. We ourselves recall a post-war influx of refugees. And recall the war years as well when rumours of gas chambers and giant ovens were validated in hushed, shocked tones.

Humanity is adept at surfacing through the murky depths of disasters we ourselves produce. We are resilient and live in hope for the future. The future we live in now as the present sees dreadful regional wars taking their toll now just as they did then. Now and again there are attempted genocides but none quite so successful as the Holocaust proved to be.

We, in the present era, can leave the distemper of the past behind as we pursue daily lives of peace and tranquility even while there is an awareness of the deep dysfunction within the global community of humanity.We acknowledge the haven of life in wealthy and peaceful countries where we can, while deploring bloodshed elsewhere, take our own lives to the level of deep satisfaction in the pleasure of existence.

For us, it is the simple pleasures, the fact that we can do as we please in a free and equal society. For us, the simple pleasures revolve around comfort and plenty; there is nothing we lack to enhance our lives. Danger always lurks, whether it is the threat of racism raising its voice, random violence in the streets committed by the psychopaths around us, or nature imposing a pathogenic pestilence to alert us to the preciousness of life.

Just one thing after another. We're coping with the novel coronavirus, taking steps we know should protect us from transmission. Our lives have been complicated. Nothing -- at least most things society takes for granted -- is quite the same any more. But this is Canada. Where case numbers are relatively low in comparison to many other parts of the world. Including our neighbour to the south, grappling to try to get a grip on their contagion and the overwhelming number of deaths caused by COVID-19.

Our economy is in shatters, many people are unemployed, food banks require more help than ever to give assistance to people in dire straits. We are reminded daily of how delicately balanced our life on this planet can be. But, again this is Canada. We're well sheltered from the disasters that strike elsewhere. As in countries in conflict, countries threatened by natural disasters causing earthquakes, floods, volcanic action.

Lebanon yesterday, was put to another kind of test when its deep-sea port at Beirut was shattered by several explosions. There are people from all over the world who migrated from their countries of birth to emigrate to Canada to become citizens and raise their families here. But they remain lovingly loyal to the country of their heritage, returning there often to touch back with families still living there. "There are no words to describe what's happening now. It's horrific. I've never seen Lebanon like this in my life. It's worse than it was during the civil war", said Ahmad Arajil, president of the Lebanese Club of Ottawa.

"Most of my family is in Lebanon. Some of them were affected directly, their windows were shattered and their kids hospitalized. The hospitals aren't even able to take in the insane amount of wounded people. It's horrible." Yes, it is horrible. A country in a financial crisis, desperately trying to deal with a pandemic, an unstable government, the major governing share of which is an actual terrorist group outlawed by Western society and some countries in the Middle East. Lebanon has become Hezbollah.

That is the kind of insane instability that millions of people are forced to live with. A country that imports 80 percent of its food from abroad, and when an entirely avoidable catastrophe occurred with an explosion at a warehouse holding ammonium nitrate, buildings were levelled, a hundred people died, thousands wounded, and a storage unit containing 85 percent of the nation's wheat was destroyed.

For us, life though complicated by the everpresent threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, goes on. Predictable, familiar, and comforting. We are faced with innumerable little challenges throughout the course of every day and transcend them. Never or rarely are we confronted by a multiplicity of life-threatening circumstances coming at us from all directions.

The direction we took this morning was to take our usual morning passage into routine, led by Jackie and Jillie, our two little companion dogs, making our way into the forest for a leisurely ramble through woodland trails. The rain so recently stopped that it was continually falling from the foliage surrounding us. Thimbleberries picked as per usual, to whet our puppies' appetite for their breakfast that would follow on our return back home.

The copious rain from the frequent, unrelenting rainstorms and thunderstorms have stimulated the growth of various fungi and moulds, appearing now with greater frequency on tree trunks and decomposing, fallen trunks littering the forest floor. Some are colourful, looking like discarded orange peel, others are strangely architectural and grow in colonies. And there are the other fungi that come up as perfect mushrooms, beautifully shaped and multi-coloured.

Everything green looked as though it had been freshly lacquered. The forest was dark and it was still, but for the beautiful melodic notes of a cardinal . Every leaf emphasized its presence, dark, bright green and slicked with rain. And to our surprise, we came across a red baneberry shrub with most of its ripe red berries intact; a rarity this year in the woods where usually there are so many.

We passed by a familiar figure walking his black Lab, a dog that we never, ever see without his favourite bright orange stick held firmly in his mouth, no matter how long they're out, how far they delve into the forest. And finally, we wound up our circuit for the morning and headed back to street level to make our way home to the bright colourful welcome of our garden. Safe. Secure.

Then and now. What a sheltered life we live. With all its complications life here where we are is simple though it most definitely is not for other people living elsewhere in a world of mass upheaval. For those people living through the trauma of war and tragedy, areas of the world where disease and exploitation by their governments, neglect and privation take their toll, life is anything but simple; it is a challenge to survive. News reports of events taking place elsewhere on the globe keeps us informed and even at times incredulous that violent strife and existential threats must be faced by others, while our lives proceed along a circumscribed path of peace and stability. Reminding us of our good fortune in living in a country like Canada with its enormous geography and vast natural resources.

Bedtime reading has me lately fascinated by accounts written 550 years ago throughout Europe, penned by people living in England, and preserved by a chronicler of the same era, Richard Hakluyt. His Voyages and Discoveries make for fascinating instruction on the state of the world in the 1560s. Where wars were always on the horizon and humankind was as discriminatory toward others different by ethnicity, culture, religion and tribe as they are at the present. Take this for example:

Presently the Inquisitors came up another pair of stairs, and the Viceroy and all the chief justices with them. When they were set down, then came up also a great number of friars, white black and grey (orders) about the number of three hundred persons. Then was silence commanded and then presently began their severe and cruel judgement.

The first man that was called was one Roger the chief armourer of the Jesus, and he had judgement to have three hundred stripes on horseback, and after condemned to the galleys as a slave for ten years.

After him were called John Gray, John Browne, John Rider, John Moone, James Collier, and one Thomas Browne: these were adjudged to have 200 stripes on horseback and after to be committed to the galleys for the space of 8 years.

Then was called John Keyes, and was adjudged to have 100 stripes on horseback and condemned to serve in the galleys for the space of 6 years.

Then were severally called the number of 53 one after another, and every man had his several judgement, some to have 200 stripes on horseback, and some 100, and condemned for slaves to the galleys, some for 6 years, some for 8 and some for 10.

And then was I Miles Philips called, and was adjudged to serve in a monastery for 5 years without stripes, and to wear a fool's coat or sanbenito during all that time.

Then were called John Storey, Richard Williams, David Alexander, Robert Cooke, Paul Horsewell and Thomas Hull: the six were condemned to serve in monasteries without stripes, some for three years and some for four, and to wear the sanbenito during all the said time.

Which being done, and it now drawing toward night, George Rively, Peter Momfrie, and Cornelius the Irishman, were called and had their judgement to be burnt to ashes and so were presently sent away to the place of execution in the market place but a little from the scaffold, where they were quickly burnt and consumed. And as for us that had received our judgement, being 68 in number, we were carried back that night to prison again.

And the next day in the morning being Good Friday the year of Our Lord 1575, we were all brought into a court of the Inquisitor's palace, where we fund a horse in readiness for every one of our men which were condemned to have stripes, and to be committed to the galleys, which were in number 60 and so they being forced to mount up on horseback naked from the middle upward, were carried to be showed as a spectacle for all the people to behold throughout the chief and principal streets of the city, and had the number of stripes to every one of them appointed, most cruelly laid upon their naked bodies with long whips by sundry men appointed to be the executioners thereof; and before our men there went a couple of criers which cried as they went: behold these English dogs, Lutherans enemies to God.

They returned to the Inquisitor's house, with their backs all gore blood, and swollen with great bumps, and were then taken from their horses, and carried again to prison, where they remained until they were sent into Spain to the galleys, there to receive the rest of their martyrdom: and I and the 6 other with me which had judgement and were condemned amongst the rest to serve an apprenticeship in the monastery were taken presently and sent to certain religious houses.

That was then. This is now. And early this morning, after yet another predictable early morning rainfall, we tucked Jackie and Jillie into their harnesses and walked with them up the quiet street we live on to access the ingress to the ravine and the forest below, to spend the next hour-and-half wandering about the forest trails, mindful of the berries waiting to be picked and eaten and shared with our two little dogs. If these summer days do not represent a blessed life, then what does?

From time to time, as is usual, we came alongside others we know, some just recently introduced as it were, but most familiar to us from years of mutual devotion to the fresh air, exercise and sheer unadulterated pleasure of enjoying tramping through woods in all seasons and all weathers. With most of these people were their companion animals. All of us serene in the landscape. Appreciative but not too engaged in the thought that we are all extremely fortunate.

We may be beleaguered with fear of a global pandemic that haunts the world as a threat to health and recover, taking countless human beings to an early grave, but we are reconciled to the fact that we must take extraordinary precautions to maintain our health and keeping a reasonable distance while still making the most of life's opportunities is certainly to be recognized as cardinal in our efforts to remain well. And so, we do.

Humanity has become skilled over the ages in pledging to learn from its errors, and what could be more worthy of the intention never to repeat horrendous lapses of judgement than waging horribly destructive conflicts, taking a dreadful toll in lives lost, in populations distraught and homeless, the ruination of nations, the realization that we have the intelligence to prevent such catastrophes but somehow lack the will to energize ourselves against war.

Reminders are with us constantly since wars never fade into distant memory; they are recalled and mourned and deplored, and yet nothing seems to stop the ongoing events leading to regional wars, wars reflecting territorial ambition, ideological conflicts and the bid to achieve power and influence by withholding both from neighbours, depleting resources, both in human lives destroyed and advances in civilizational future.

Today, just as every other anniversary of the the world madness when twice Germany sought to gain its ambition to rule the world, and the Armistice agreement was signed between Germany and the Allied powers who fought to stop fascism's depraved and monstrous plans to launch a new world order to be subservient to it alone, the world stopped to take notice that yet another anniversary was being recognized, even while conflict rages in Africa, the Middle East, and threatens Eastern Europe and people in tormented countries led by both left- and right-wing aggressors spurred by tribal, sectarian, racist and ideological hatreds launch massive protests against their exploiters.

For countries at peace internally the sincere effort to recall the sacrifices of those who left their lives behind in foreign countries while they fought to free others from the trap of human rights abuses reaching out to threaten their own nations, evokes sadness and pride at one and the same time. Sadness that the price of liberty is costly to those who serve in the military whose country sends them abroad as a duty to humanity. Pride that many answer that call with the knowledge they may not survive the effort.

There are the civilians who give their support to the sacrifices of those who serve, and the current members of the armed forces who pay their respects to their predecessors who gave the peace of their lives to the chaos of war to disrupt the deadly aspirations of warmongers. The ritual of remembrance, the organized rites of commemoration are nothing if not sombre and subdued. All of such remembrance ceremonies that I can recall have occurred on darkly overcast, windy and miserable days, as though nature has sent her own emissaries to bear witness to the folly of humankind, and today was no different.

Under freezing, threatening skies awaiting a winter snowstorm on this day there were regimental march-pasts, dignitaries and authorities in evidence at the National Cenotaph in Ottawa. There were military bands, there was the cannon, the CAF fly-past, and there was the children's choir singing traditional songs of mourning. And there was the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the memorial wreath-laying ceremonies, and the crowds of thousands of ordinary people there to give their emotional support and thanks for the ultimate sacrifice.

If ever we feel any doubts about how fortunate we are to live where we do, we have only to look at the news. There but for the grace of geography.... In the civilized West where democratic rule of law and order, guarantees of human rights and freedoms and equality under the law order our every day we are protected from the excesses of cruelty to which tyrannical dictatorships are a given for those who experience persecutions on a daily basis.

It is hard to fathom when you have lived all your life in an environment whose protection of society and the individual has grown exponentially over all the years of your life, if you are advanced in age, to imagine how horribly miserable it would be to live in a society whose government doesn't hesitate to name critics of its abysmal social/political record as a police state, as "terrorists", according them the same military reaction usually reserved for terrorists or foreign invasions.

The plight of ordinary citizens who have been plunged from the comfort of an ordinary life into the hellstorm of regime siege, experiencing the bombing of their schools, mosques, hospitals and apartment buildings, with deadly artillery fire directed on civilian gatherings such as bread line-ups or briefly perfunctory funerals is unimaginable to those of us whose most frightful nightmares could not begin to conjure up the existential threats that these poor unfortunates face.

We, on the other hand, live our pleasantly routine lives, enjoying the experiences of daily going about our business and though we do indeed appreciate our good fortune, a style of life so unlike what others in the news are experiencing that it boggles our mind to read of the atrocities that nations considering themselves well-ordered and civilized are capable of perpetrating upon the defenceless, claiming they are merely protecting their version of law and order but throwing in the vicissitudes related to radical ideologies, sectarian religious animosities and political gain.

We have the right and the freedom to criticize our government. That freedom extends to selecting the political candidates we feel best exemplify at any given time our values, who will extend themselves on behalf of advancing those values during their allotted time in public office. Those who fail to prove their worth, who inspire ridicule or loathing or simply disappointment can be removed with the ease of the ballot box.

There are countless individuals who make it a point to be current with news, all news worthy of attention, whether local, national or global. And nor do those people who with deliberation take steps to avoid directly confronting the news because of its depressing effect on their thoughts, escape those stories recounting conflicts of epic proportions -- and the barbaric actions of people whose sense of human dignity is too degraded to be rescued -- manage to void their minds of the lives lost and the atrocities inflicted by people loyal to an inhumane ideology that demands deadly violence as its due.

It is, in short, difficult to maintain an emotional equilibrium. To be informed is to have knowledge of the crude and cruel actions taking place on a daily basis that have their genesis in ethnic, tribal, clan, sectarian, ideological and religious confrontations between people of opposing groups. Humanity fails, time after time, to overcome its most base instincts meant to equip the human animal for survival in a hostile world, and which modern humanity has been incapable of, and unwilling to surmount by reason and a compulsion to compassion for others.

There are emotional escape valves to rescue people from the deep dudgeon of despair; that is, those who are not directly affected by the never-ending maelstrom of carnage afflicting so many regions of the world. There is, of course, the bonds that people forge between one another in more civilized areas of the world, further removed in time and place from the more primitive, tribal impulses that motivate far too many to view others as hostile to their own advancement and therefore, requiring to be despised, hated and violated.

There is the comfort of family and close friends for those who are fortunate enough to be able to rely on those age-old bonds of trust and togetherness. And there is also the calming effect of assurance that nature itself is capable of arousing in all of us, recalling a time in the past when humankind was more reliant on nature to provide the basic requirements of human existence before humans learned how to exploit, manipulate and subvert the natural world to reflect  what humanity intended to wring from it.

Living in a part of the world where, if terrorism intrudes, it does so minimally, and the prevailing institutional law and order steps in to quell violence and protect society from its effects, there is that escape valve; we can consider ourselves fortunate and we can entertain our options to becalm our spirits by taking full advantage of the bucolic memories of an earlier time, and the graciousness of the natural world proffering peace and tranquility as a balm in a world where civilization appears far too often on the verge of collapse.

The Ultimate Appropriation and the Justness of War Against the Infidels

"[Islam] is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign supreme."
Osama bin Laden

"It is alleged in popular stories [and only God knows the truth] that Amina d.Wah, the mother of God's messenger, used to say when she was pregnant with God's messenger that a voice said to her, 'You are pregnant with the lord of this people and when he is born say, 'I put him in the care of the One from the evil of every envier; then call him Muhammad'. As she was pregnant with him she saw a light come forth from her by which she could see the castles of Busra in Syria."
Ibn Ishaq

"Why should you not fight in God's cause and for those oppressed men, women, and children who cry out, 'Lord, rescue us from this town whose people are oppressors! By your grace, give us a protector and helper!"?
Qur'an 4:75

"...what is the religion of Abraham, and how did he come to practice it? At 3:65-67, Jews and Christians listening to the Qur'an are challenged: 'Why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? . . . Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright, in a condition of submission 'Hanifan musliman'.' That Abraham's submission is to God is indicated by what immediately follows: 'and he was not with the idolaters'. That the submission is not mediated by Jewish or Christian sources is important, as is the obvious fact that Abraham's religion is also not mediated by the Qur'an. All these texts come after Abraham's discovery of true faith, which provides the paradigmatic example of the religious potential of human reflection."

*****

War is a means to a political end, which is the establishment and governance of a political-territorial association governed by Islam.

We may take this further: the establishment of an Islamic state is itself a means by which the Muslim community can carry out its divinely mandated mission of calling humanity to the relationship with God signified by submission, al-islam. In this connection, war is a means to a political end [establishing an Islamic state], which is itself a means to an overarching religious goal [calling humanity to Islam]. This approach suggests that there is nothing particularly good or bad about war in itself. It is a means to an end, and should be viewed as such. Resort to war is thus a matter of estimating its probable effectiveness in attaining certain goals. Notions of just conduct in war are similarly suggested by the desire to gain particular objectives.

"Whenever God's Messenger sent forth an army or a detachment, he charged its commander personally to fear God, the Most High, and he enjoined the Muslims who were with him to do good.
He said: Fight in the name of God and in the path of God. Fight the mukaffirum [ingrates, unbelievers]. Do not cheat or commit treachery, and do not mutilate anyone or kill children. Whenever you meet the mushrikun [idolaters], invite them to accept Islam. If they do, accept it and let them alone You should then invite them to move from their territory to the territory of the emigres. If they do so, accept it and leave them alone. Otherwise, they should be informed that they will be in the same condition as the Muslim nomads in that they are subject to God's orders as Muslims, but will receive no share of the spoil of war. If they refuse, then call upon them to pay tribute. If they do, accept it and leave them alone. If you besiege the inhabitants of a fortress or a town and they try to get you to let them surrender on the basis of God's judgement, do not do so, since you do not know what God's judgement is, but make them surrender to your judgement and then decide their case according to your own views. But if the besieged inhabitants of a fortress or a town ask you to give them a pledge in God's name or in the name of God's Messenger, you should not do so, but give the pledge in your names or the names of your fathers. For if you should ever break it, it would be an easier matter if it were in the names of you or your fathers."
Shari'a reasoning on war

"I asked: If the Muslims besieged a city and its people positioned behind the walls shielded themselves with Muslim children, would it be permissible for the Muslim fighters to attack them with arrows and hurling machines?
He replied: Yes, but the warriors should aim at the inhabitants of the territory of war and not the Muslim children.
I asked: Would it be permissible for the Muslims to attack them with swords and lances if the children were not intentionally aimed at?
He replied: Yes.
I asked: If the Muslim warriors attack with hurling machines and arrows, flood cities with water or burn them with fire, thereby killing Muslim children or men, or enemy women, old men, blind, crippled, or lunatic persons, would the warriors be liable for blood money or acts of expiation?
He replied: They would be liable neither for blood money nor for acts of expiation."

Arguing the Just War in Islam . . . John Kelsay, Professor of Religion, Florida State University

Think and consider: the Koran has created a divine narrative for the faithful that it is their obligation to Islam to evangelize, to invite by whatever means are considered necessary, those not of the faith to enter it, submitting to the divine authority of Allah, while considering all those who might leave Islam for another faith, or simply for no belief in the divine whatever, to be heinous apostates whose choice of deserting the faith is deserving of death.

Islam has bred deadly jihadist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, dedicated to sustaining and spreading the original purpose of Islam; world domination, Salafist groups like those practising Wahaabist Islam, fundamentalists who see, as the Koran instructs them to, those nations not dedicated to Islam as 'Houses of War' reflecting insulting intransigence in refusing conversion to Islam, while awarding itself the title of the 'House of Peace' with a mission to transform the unenlightened who refuse to declare 'There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger' (the Shahada declaring submission to Islam) into 'Houses of Peace', at one within the bosom of Islam, making it permissible to indulge in mass murder as an instrument of jihad for the noble purpose of enlisting non-Muslims into the greater umma.

One of the invaluable tools in the arsenal of conquest-aspiring Islam is to traduce the reputations of Infidels, Christians and Jews, as mortal enemies of Islam who will go to any lengths to prevent Islam from reaching its goal of world domination, a conquest that will bring peace and harmony to the earthly sphere and those within in.

By casting the kuffars as responsible for violence, not the jihadist-aspiring-martyrs committing atrocities throughout the world, groups like Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iranian Ayatollahs and their Republican National Guard for Shiite domination, and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant championing Sunni domination, along with the myriad of other  terrorist groups portraying themselves as defenders of Islam, Muslims whom the West considers moderate, justify the methods of jihad. And since mosque sermons so commonly emphasize and repeatedly cite prayers that villainize non-Muslims, citing their opposition to, or disinterest in Islam as 'Islamophobic', Muslims choose to believe what their faith expounds, contrary to all rational debate labelled as corrupt sophistry, and the reality of Islamist-inspired barbarities.

European nations that have been overrun by the migrant and immigration and refugee presence of Muslims are discovering that their traditions, culture, value beliefs and laws are held in contempt by the relocated Muslims in their midst, continuing to pledge every facet of their lives to Islam. As their Muslim populations grow so too does the infiltrated presence of an alienated, hostile community living among them, out of which is bred those choosing to dedicate themselves to incrementally destroying the host country, to transform it into another Islamist territory, relentlessly and consciously aware that whatever violence fails to accomplish, their soaring birthrate and population density will eventually accomplish.

The dwindling numbers of faithful among religions other than Islamic will eventually be absorbed over time, transforming cultures and religious adherence owing to the tolerance and patient belief in equality typical of Western thought, solving all social issues of disequilibrium among people. The vast preponderance among non-Muslims professing a belief in the equality of all people live under a delusion of time and patience solving all human disputes, and in a twisted way their belief renders an emphatic impetus to Islam's march of conquest.

"Less than a mile from the checkpoint we reached what had been a large Kurdish town. Except for a small section on the west side that had not yet been leveled, it was just piles of rubble. Between Jalawla and Suleimania, we counted twenty-nine destroyed towns and villages, but clearly there were many more in the area. In some cases, bulldozers were still at work, parked near half demolished buildings. Where the demolition was more advanced, the Iraqi Army had burned orchards and fields, blown up mosques, knocked over grave markers, and stripped wire from the utility poles. Closer to Suleimania, we passed through a landscape dotted with fruit trees but with no sign of human presence, not even a shepherd."
"By August 1, 1990, the Iraqi government had eradicated more than 4,000 of the approximately 4,500 villages in Kurdistan. In eastern Iraqi Kurdistan, the army destroyed the cities of Qalat Diza, Halabja, and Sayid Sadiq. According to the Iraqi Kurdistan Front, al-Majid's [Ali Hassan al-Majid, governor of the north, Saddam Hussein's cousin] decrees put 45,000 square kilometers of Kurdistan off limits to human life, out of a total of 75,000. Kurds living in the prohibited zones were deported to southern Iraq, or executed. After Saddam's fall in 2003, the Kurdistan government minister for human rights, Mohammed Ihssan, led forensic teams that uncovered mass graves containing thousands of Kurdish corpses near Samawa in southern Iraq and west Iraq in Salahaddin Governorate. The Kurdistan Government officially estimates that 182,000 died between 1987 and 1990 in the Anfal [from a Koranic verse interpreted to entitle the Muslim faithful the right to plunder the property of infidels]."

"On the morning of March 16, 1988, Iraqi warplanes flew over the small city of Halabja, on a plain east of the strategically important Darbandikan Dam in Eastern Kurdistan. The day before, Iranian Pasdaras [Revolutionary Guards] and Kurdish peshmerga had captured the city, but both forces withdrew, possibly suspecting an Iraqi attack. Three years later, I was in Halabja and the survivors told me what happened next. Planes with Iraqi markings dropped bombs that made softer detonations. There followed a smell that resembled burned almonds. Leaves turned brown, and people dropped dead. The corpses turned black."
"More than five thousand people died int he Halabja gassing."
From The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End
Peter W. Galbraith

Now the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant -- many of whose leaders were the elite among the Saddam military, dismissed with the fall of Iraq to the U.S.-led 2003 invasion to remove Saddam Hussein -- has picked up the bloody thread, targeting Kurds and Yazidis along with Christians and other minority ethnic and religious sects in the regions they now dominate.

In Kurdistan, the most effectively fierce opponent of ISIL, there is haven provided for all those who have been tormented and escaped slaughter by the viciously predatory killers. The Kurds themselves in Syria and Turkey remain targets of discrimination and bloody violence, perpetrated against them by the Turkish military thanks to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They are denied sovereignty in their ancient homelands which Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey claim as their own geography.

How much suffering can a people absorb? When will justice gain them their own internationally recognized sovereign state for a people representing 40 million people denied nationhood?

"We didn't know -- imagine! In these days we didn't know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany already had the seeds of tragedy in it."
"By the time the full horror of what was happening in Germany, and later in Austria, reached the newspapers, the whole thing had become almost too fantastic for the ordinary mind to take in. It took a war to make people understand what was happening in peacetime, and to tell the truth, very many never understood it."
"All that the ordinary man in the street thought about this was that "that man" was at it again and that Germany seemed likely to be a perpetual pain in the neck to those who wanted a quiet life. The Nuremberg Laws was a vague term to most people, very imperfectly understood -- except for the fact that they were something Hitler had thought up against the Jews. And, if the Jews were being put in their place in Germany, some people thought it was not a bad thing."
"On the terrible ninth and tenth of November, 1938, throughout Germany and Austria and the borders of Czecho-Slovakia -- now under German domination -- the order went forth that every male Jew between the ages of eighteen and sixty was to be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp. And with very few exceptions, this came to pass, in circumstances of the most horrible brutality."
Safe Passage, Ida Cook : The Remarkable True Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis

The passages above are excerpted from a memoir originally published in 1950, republished in 1976 as We followed Our Stars, by Ida and Louse Cook, two British sisters whose parents raised them to be resolute and morally sympathetic adults. And their daughters did not disappoint their parents' expectations. Which were never spelled out to the girls, but which they had emulated from their parents' expressions and values, adopting them as their own.

Ida Cook eventually became a 'romance writer', a writer of what we call today, pulp romance fiction so popular among women as steamy romances. Neither sister ever married, so Ida's imagination filled in all the gaps in her and her sister's experience of intimate relationships between men and women. She was a writer born, however, and eventually began to earn quite a bit of money from her popularized stories, money she used for twin passions the sisters shared.

They shared a love of opera, and even as young and timid, but determined adults in their early twenties, set out to experience opera as it was mounted in Germany and in the United States, taking passage that they could barely afford to visit those countries, eventually becoming familiar to and friends with operatic stars, through the force of their personalities and obvious love and knowledge of that branch of musical performance.

This memoir was re-discovered and re-published in 2008. Oddly, but perhaps fittingly enough, by the very publishing house renowned for the publication of tawdry romance novels which had never lost their popularity with the reading public whose tastes veered in that direction. Serious readers of classic literature tend to shiver with distaste at the very name of the publishing house -- Harlequin. But this later re-publication of the sisters' World War II recollections has the Harlequin imprimatur.

And it turned out that their passionate attachment to opera opened the door for the two sisters to view what was happening in Germany to the persecuted Jewish community under the banner of the Third Reich.  Their operatic contacts in New York and then Germany introduced them in an intimate manner to the plight of German Jews and eventually the two sisters became integrally involved in aiding desperate Jews to find temporary haven in Great Britain until they were able to move on to permanent settlement there or elsewhere.

It is their dual story of their love for opera, the characters of operatic renown who became their personal contacts, and their dedication to the task of helping desperate Jews to find passage and safety out of Germany and Austria that this book focuses on. Since Ida was a professional writer, the book itself is well written, describing in fond (opera) terms their experiences and in horrified terms (the looming Holocaust) their knowledge and involvement in rescue.

They were able to bring 28 Jewish families out of harm's way by risking their own safety and security in their many purposeful trips to Germany and Austria to interview potential 'cases' that they took on, spending whatever profits were made through the publication of Ida Cook's many romance adventures which people paid attention to while studiously remaining ignorant of the colossal tragedy unfolding on the Continent predating and during the dreadful Second World War years.

Last night the sky was perfectly clear, a glowing, velvety blue vaulted over Planet Earth. A crescent moon hung high, and under it, Mars. A reflection of the state of humankind's endless conflicts veering into a new year? Who knows what the prominent presence of the symbol of the God of War emphasizes about our inability to live in peace with one another?

And perhaps the message delivered a little more than simply that. In that the crescent moon is one of the primary symbols of Islam, and certainly Islam and conflict appear to be disconcertingly matched, from its 7th Century inception as a religion of conquest to its current manifestation as the sole cause of terrorism through jihad infesting world communities around the globe.

It is food for reflection, albeit uncomfortably sitting on our minds. There, sitting on our minds because of the prevalence and reach into every corner of the world of a religion purporting to be one of peace, but peace eluding even those Muslim faithful whose brand of Islam fails to sit well with those sects who name them apostates, fit for death.

So the question arises, will the war against the Islamic State, which presents as the current presence of malevolent Islam with its Medieval-style executions leaning heavily on the scale of atrocities to shock a world that imagined itself grown well beyond such barbarism succeed in its campaign to put the restive beast to rest?

Amid the jarring reality that Muslim nations like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran among others consider non-Muslims to represent an inferior representation of humanity, countries where apostasy's cure is a death sentence, where state death penalties depend on crucifixion, beheading, torture and public hanging relate to Islam's treasured Shariah law.

Added to the extremely frigid temperatures this week it is once again snowing. The night before, the thermometer dipped to minus-26 degrees C. and rose to a balmy minus-16 degrees, with a lighter wind quotient than the vicious gusts we experienced on Friday with equally cold temperatures. Last night it was only minus-19 degrees, and this morning when we first took our little dogs out to the backyard it was a relatively mild minus-12 degrees, with snow falling, and just a light wind.

When we look out our front door, this is what we see:

When we look out our patio doors it looks like this:

So we shelter in our warm and comfortable homes, reflecting our safe and secure lives.

We know, from reading the newspapers and on the Internet -- that the ancient historical city of Aleppo in Syria with its fabled past as a primary trading route on the Silk Road -- it is also cold and damp. There, people are sleeping on the streets since their normal shelter in the past of their normal lives is no longer available to them. Men, women and children are daily exposed to thunderous explosions from an ongoing barrage of bombs courtesy of the Syrian military and the fly-by assistance of Russian warplanes.

Thousands of Sunni Syrians have been killed in the last month in Aleppo by the Alawite Shiite regime of Bashar al-Assad, a bloody tyrant determined to wrest back all of his imperial territory from the impudent "terrorists" who themselves believe they are opponents of his regime because of the inequalities they have long suffered under a minority Shiite government accustomed to making life miserable for Syria's majority Sunni civilians. During the course of this civil war, a half-million Syrian lives have been snuffed out.

The military onslaught of a destroyed east Aleppo where Sunni Syrians know they are targets, and where they are safe nowhere from the casual and deliberate dropping of barrel bombs, chemical infused bombs and artillery is relentless. Hiding in ancient mosques will not save them, these heritage sites have been bombed into rubble. Health-care providers and their patients have been deliberately targeted along with the hospitals that sought to treat the victims of state violence. Schools for children to attend are no longer viable.

The thought uppermost in their parents' minds was how to feed their children, and keep them from death.

People weep as they are forced to leave their beloved city in east Aleppo. While in the city's western half, curious Alawite defenders of the regime live out their normal lives while witnessing from balconies adjacent the areas being bombarded, the carnage their neighbours suffer.

The sanctimonious 'regrets' and statements of compassion heard from the United Nations and world leaders merely reflect the disinterest of the world at large to intervene forcefully, where diplomacy has failed to aid the maimed and battered Syrians pleading for rescue and haven from the death that inexorably stalks them, while their president congratulates himself on having achieved his goal; the destruction of opposition to his capriciously deadly rule.
                     

Karam Almasri: The main entrance to a surgical hospital in eastern Aleppo after it was hit by bombardments: MSF

The Blitz was Nazi Germany's sustained aerial bombing campaign against Britain in World War Two. The raids killed 43,000 civilians and lasted for eight months, petering out when Hitler began to focus on his plans for Russian invasion in May 1941. Photo: People in Coventry walk to work past smouldering piles of rubble after a bombing raid in 1940. (Getty Images)

London, 1941

Blitz landscape     Westminster City Archives

I run up and down Baker Street. There are fires all around me. I can't see through the smoke. I turn into George Street, and there he is. He's with another man, running toward a smoldering heap of rubble that moments ago was a house.

The sky is streaked with reddish-gold specks. Large grey flakes, high up above the fire, dance, twirl, twist, and sail down slowly, vanishing as they touch the ground. The flames are greedy beasts, beautiful and wild. The crackling and hissing makes them vicious.

Ambulances and first-aid vans start to arrive. Doctors, soldiers, and civilians try to help. Cups of tea appear. A baby lies on the pavement, crying. I run to him. His mother is digging and digging in the rubble. To find the father? Blood and dirt on her hands, tears running down her grimy face. Her hair sticks to her cheeks. She won't let me pick up the baby. A young man climbs out of a window, hangs on to the sill as the wall of a neighbouring house collapses. Buildings cave in, as if crushed by a giant foot. Clouds of dust and smoke burst into the air.

Walter is digging in the rubble, looking for people who are trapped. A tall young girl stands in the middle of the road, paralyzed. I grip her arm, try to move her, but it is as though she is riveted to the road. I try to persuade her to come with me, but she can't hear me, and her eyes don't see me. I stroke her dusty, blond hair. Tears fall down her frozen face. "Mother", she whispers. Has she seen her mother, trapped, pinned under wreckage, dead?

Eventually she moves, and I lead her along the burning street to the church door. I ask the man in the blue jacket to take her down to the shelter.

I run back along George Street. Walter is still digging. In Baker Street, people lie buried under beams and floorboards. A hand sticks out of the rubble, the top of someone's head. I'm going to be sick. A boy lies pinned under part of a roof. He is in agony; he tries to smile. An old woman, grateful for a mug of tea, jokes about the missing sugar.

The bombers are coming back. I rush back to the church and go down into the shelter to see if my parents are all right. It is packed. Mother struggles through the crowd toward me. She is crying.

"I was so worried. Why have you been so long?" She flings her arms around me. "Where's Walter? What a terrible raid. Just look at all these people." Father, tears in his eyes, grips my hand.

Walter joins us, his face and clothes black with grime. His left hand is bandaged -- he tried to pick up some metal rods that were too hot to handle. I stroke his hair.

"It was terrible, darling. Terrible" Walter says. He gropes for my hand. I am proud of him.

More and more people crowd into the shelter. Some have to sit on the flagstone floor. They are dressed in their nightclothes. There is a huge unexploded bomb in Portman Square. We don't know if our houses will still be there when we go outside. If we go outside. We are safe only from blast -- not from a direct hit.

A huge man with ginger hair is standing in front of my father, poking a thick finger in his chest. "Bloody enemy aliens! You have no right to be in here -- your planes are killing our people. Go home!"

Walter leaps at him. The man shakes him off easily and knees him in the stomach. Walter punches him in the face. Mother covers her eyes. Father has gone white.

The shelter marshal, a slim young priest, shouts, "Stop this at once! These people have every right to be here."

The man carries on shouting: "We need their places. Bloody traitors!"

"Look at him", says the priest, pointing at Walter with his bandaged hand. "He's bleeding. He's exhausted from trying to rescue people. You -- what have you done to help?" He pushes the man into another room.

From: Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler, Trudi Kanter, Scribner, c.1984

Gangs of thugs in brown shirts owned the streets. They drove around in trucks, flashing their guns and their swastika armbands, hooting at the pretty girls. If they wanted to pick you up or beat you up, they did so with impunity. Anybody who resisted was beaten or killed or taken away to Dachau or Buchenwald or some other concentration camp. (You must understand that at that time, the concentration camps were prisons where opponents of the Nazi regime were detained . . . The inmates were made to work at hard labor and lived in dreadful conditions, but the words 'concentration camp' came to stand for monstrous cruelty and almost certain death. Nobody even imagined there would one day be a death camp like Auschwitz.)

Cheering crowds greet Hitler as he enters Vienna. Austria, March 1938.

— Wide World Photo

How can I describe to you our confusion and terror when the Nazis took over? We had lived until yesterday in a rational world. Now everyone around us -- our schoolmates, neighbours, and teachers; our tradesmen, policemen, and bureaucrats -- had all gone mad. They had been harboring a hatred for us which we had grown accustomed to calling 'prejudice'. What a gentle word that was! What a euphemism! In fact they hated us with a hatred as old as their religion; they were born hating us, raised hating us; and now with the Anschluss, the veneer of civilization which had protected us from their hatred was stripped away.

Jews in Vienna forced to scrub Schuschnigg's slogans off the sidewalk --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

On the pavements, protesters had written anti-Nazi slogans. The SS grabbed Jews and forced them at gunpoint to scrub off the graffiti while crowds of Austrians stood around jeering and laughing.

The Nazi radio blamed us for every filthy evil thing in this world. The Nazis called us subhuman and, in the next breath, superhuman; accused us of plotting to murder them, to rob them blind; declared that they had to conquer the world to prevent us from conquering the world. The radio said that we must be dispossessed of all we owned; that my father, who had dropped dead while working, had not really worked for our pleasant flat -- the leather chairs in the dining room, the earrings in my mother's ears -- that he had somehow stolen them from Christian Austria, which now had every right to take them back.

Members of the League of German Girls wave Nazi flags in support of the German annexation of Austria. Vienna, Austria, March 1938.   — Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes

Did our friends and our neighbors really believe this? Of course they didn't believe it. They were not stupid. But they had suffered depression, inflation, and joblessness. They wanted to be well-to-do again, and the fastest way to accomplish that was to steal. Cultivating a belief in the greed of the Jews gave them an excuse to steal everything the Jews possessed.

We sat in our flats, paralyzed with fear, waiting for the madness to end. Rational, charming, witty, dancing, generous Vienna must surely rebel against such insanity We waited and we waited and it didn't end and it didn't end and still we waited and we waited.

The restrictions against Jews spread into every corner of our lives. We couldn't go to movies or concerts. We couldn't walk on certain streets. The Nazis put up signs on Jewish shop windows warning the population not to buy there. Mimi was fired from her job at the dry cleaners because it had become illegal for Christians to employ Jews. Hansi was no longer allowed to go to school.

SS men supervise the confiscation of goods belonging to Jews deported from Vienna --
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

Uncle Richard went to the cafe where he had been going for twenty years. It now had a Jewish side and an Aryan side, and he sat on the Jewish side. Because he had fair hair and didn't look Jewish, a waiter, who did not know him, said he had to move to the Aryan side. But on the Aryan side, a waiter who did know him said that he had to go back to the Jewish side. He finally gave up and went home.

Baron Louis de Rothschild, one of the wealthiest Jewish men in Vienna, tried to leave the city. The Nazis stopped him at the airport and put him in prison, and whatever they did to him there convinced him that he ought to sign over everything to the Nazi regime. Then they let him leave. The SS took over the Rothschild Palace on Prinz Eugenstrasse and renamed it the Center for Jewish Emigration.

Right after Grandmother died, the world held a conference at Evian-les-Bains, a luxurious spa in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, at which the fate of the Austrian Jews was up for discussion. Eichmann sent representatives of our community to plead with other countries to pay the Nazi ransom and take us in. "Don't you want to save the urbane, well-educated, fun-loving, cultured Jews of Austria?" they asked. "How about paying $400 a head to the Nazi regime? Too much? How about $200?"

They couldn't get a cent.

No country wanted to pay for our rescue, including the United States. The dictator of the Dominican Republic, Trujillo, took a few Jews, thinking they might help bring some prosperity to the tiny, impoverished country. I have heard that they did.

Transport list of Viennese Jews -- www.HolocaustResearchProject.org

From the NAZI Officer's WIFE -- Edith Hahn Beer, c.1999