Originally Posted - July 27, 2006

return home

One can go back in history as far as the Phoenicians and find a trail of blood that would probably fill the Euphrates River.

How sad, how ignorant, how selfish, how horrific the vengeance man imposes upon his perceived enemy. Hatred is so deeply embedded in their souls from birth to death, and from one generation to the other, their very existence is based on inflicting misery to their fellow man.

We find all of this, plus the divergence of; politics, warring tribes, western cultural divergences, and Arab Moslem history of various warring factions amongst themselves within the Middle East. Add capitalist commerce and poverty, and you have a mixture not fit for life, and dreams are turned into nightmares.

Economics and politics play a big part, pitting nation against nation, with varying degrees of self interest. Russia for instance, refuses to help us with Iran. France has their own self interest combined with diametrically opposite ideological views of the war on terrorism. China is doing their own thing, perhaps because they don't see these radical Islamists as being a threat to them. North Korea, well, they are who they are, a barking puppet of China, with great disdain for western culture and democracy, mostly toward the United States. Then we have our own home-grown political ideologues whom have grossly miscalculated in their intellectual analysis of how dangerous terrorism is to western civilization as a whole.

No human should have to endure the suffrage these Lebanese people have experienced in their history. But that is life and death in the Middle East. Death comes early, and is not feared by fundamentalist Islamists, because the extremes of their misguided religious mythology tells the people that in Islam heaven is a grand place, and they will be rewarded for their good deeds here on earth.

Oddly, the term good deed is defined by the various clergy of Islam, and their various interpretations of the Koran, as killing those of which they disagree or dislike, then as a reward, receiving 72 virgins in Heaven.

Geographically, add in some Christians and Jews, and the old nomadic Arab PLO jihadists, who were (as small clusters of bandits) banished and driven from other Arab countries, compounded by their plight for a land they could call their own, and we see the blood gets thicker and deeper. When the PLO were given a piece of land, it was not good enough; they wanted more. And so, Israel stopped giving in to their demands of more, more, more.

The term secularism is thrown about in books written by westerners, (comparatively) less in the world of Islam, because in the world of Islam there is no other religion. Yet, in Lebanon, we find almost every religion in the world.

The dominant religious faction of Islam is probably Shi'a. Within the rank and file of Shiites, we find different political and ideological views, in which politics plays a great part in what they do, and the fact that certain people in the region, considering the migration and dual citizenship factor, wish not to demographically give us an accurate account of this mixture.

The minority faction is probably Sunni, whom are to some degree more liberal in their thinking, but don't believe it, because they possess other extremes that are not conducive to the acceptance of western culture.

This writer concludes that Whabbism, and fundamentalists Islamic believers are the lost souls of modern Islam, and their place belongs back in the 12th Century. I also believe if the Jews/Israelis, and most western nationalities, had their way, that is exactly where they would send them.

In our western world of instant oat meal, freeze-dried coffee, micro-wave ovens, and computer video games we want things to happen in a nanosecond. If it doesn't, we demand from our leaders that they do something immediately, post haste, yesterday. We cannot stand to see all of this carnage taking place when no body seems to have an immediate solution.

In addition, we see on our modern televisions hundreds of people being killed, yet we have not a clue as to who is innocent and who is not in this war. Those who harbor the idea of war today, and peace tomorrow should know, this is not the way things happen in the Middle East, and it never has been since the beginning of time.

If all of this war and carnage bothers you, turn off your television sets, grab your self a cold one, or find something else to occupy your time. Or, have another cold one, sit back, and enjoy the shock and awe of the war, because this war will not be over in our life time. The Hezbollah and Israeli fighting may end, but the continual fighting by radical Islamists will go on and on and on.

If you are not a believer of Islam, be happy and thankful you are not dead yet, because if those fundamentalist radical Islamist warriors, whom have declared war against Israel, had their way you would already be dead as the result of suicide bombing. After all, you are an infidel.

You do the math and the research, and I'll just say this: The United Nations did not exist in those earliest years, and it probably would have been best if they had never gone there. Since the UN has been in that region living side by side with Hezbollah for 28 years as a peacekeeping force, and peace is obviously non-existent, what good are they?

There are only a handful of nations on the face of the earth who truly agree on how to deal with this terrible war; Great Britain, Israel, Australia, and the United States, and some others to a smaller degree. Japan might be a fifth, but I have to see more out of them in the United Nations before I put them onboard 100%.

Not even Canada, who is a part of the North American continent seems to agree with the U.S. and our government's policy in fighting this war. Perhaps they have some "spit balls" they will lend us.

Let Israel do what they know they must do to deal with the situation on the ground, because no other humans on the face of the earth knows more about the people they are fighting than the Jews.

For those who want peace, join the battle to rid the world of terrorism, or get out of the way and let those doing the dirty work for you do their job.

Only then will you will see fig leaves and signs of peace.

Oz is a retired Navy vet who lives in Tampa, Fla.

© 2006 North Country Gazette