Protest

A pro-Tibet protester shouts anti-China slogans from a police van in front of the Chinese Embassy Visa Section in Kathmandu on April 29 [Picture: REUTERS]

I figured a day of onset of war or renewed war somewhere would make good use of this pic… Works today I think…

Since Israeli troops overran the Strip in 1967, Israeli politicians and generals have always seen it as a problem – a hotbed of radicalism and opposition. And so Israel has ventured failed experiment after experiment in the attempt to control Gaza. It has tried everything except the obvious – to allow its people to be free.

It has tried directly managing Gaza, and a brutal policy of quarantine backed by tanks, jets and gunboats. It has attempted the maintenance of strategic settlements, which only provided a focus for resistance against the patrolling troops. And when that failed, Israel retreated – only to find that, without a proximate enemy, those living inside turned to attacking the nearby towns with crude missiles.

Ironically, one of Israel’s experiments involved assisting in the creation of Hamas, which had its roots in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, to counter the power of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation. Israel has been determined to push Hamas ever closer to all-out war since insisting that even though it won free and fair Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, its right to govern could not be treated as legitimate.

Since Hamas took power in Gaza in summer 2007, after a short, brutal struggle with Fatah, Israel’s policy has been one of collective punishment, summed up in the policy of “no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis”.

It has tried everything except the obvious – to allow its people to be free.

Yes.. Let’s not get too carried away with this easy idea of  ”failure”.  We tried so hard!  We failed! Ongoing chaos seems to me to be the order of the day.  Just as Iraq is not,  nor was it ever,  “mismanaged”.

Here is where the author leaves us… I am less sure than he seems to be that some Great Fork in the endless war road that we share with Israel has occurred.  Nice thought tho.

And Israel has supplied a rallying point. Something tangible and brutal that gives the critics of its actions in Gaza – who say it has a policy of collective punishment backed by disproportionate and excessive force – something to focus on.

Something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel’s foes can say looks like an atrocity.

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What a strange day! A writer in the Sunday Observer (what a diminished, shadow of nothing that publication is!) ponders B16′s Christmas Urbi e Orbi

Over the past few months, the Vatican has been quietly canvassing Lord Guthrie, the former head of the armed forces, John Studzinski, the millionaire philanthropist, and a handful of other influential British Catholics on who should succeed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor upon his imminent retirement. From the telephone conversations and one-on-one meetings, it is clear what Pope Benedict XVI expects of the man who will lead Britain’s more than four million Catholics: courage, patience, PR nous and an unshakable respect for liturgical tradition.

As of last week, we also know one quality the Pope is not seeking in prospective candidates: tolerance towards lesbians and gays. [... and we did not know this last year?  and before?  --Mcat]

In his Christmas address to Vatican staff, Benedict XVI inveighed against the harm done by “gender theory” (he likened it to the threat to the planet caused by the destruction of the rainforest), which teaches that the distinction between male and female is down to cultural rather than biological influence. Most of the faithful billion-plus Catholics who pay close attention to every word the Pope utters must have drawn a blank: gender theory, perhaps a familiar concept to some Ivy Leaguers, is unknown in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the slums of Calcutta [really?  --Mcat]. The media, however, quickly bridged the knowledge gap and interpreted the papal message as a coded attack on homosexuals. Gender theory questions the patriarchy and sex-based discrimination; its critics, ergo, must support both.

and she posits that blither from il papa is, somehow,  going to cause:

Instead, Benedict XVI issued a message that could be, and was, boiled down to a finger-wagging warning against a vulnerable minority. Many Catholics, even among his most devoted disciples, must be issuing a moan of exasperation, none more so than the candidates to succeed Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor. These men stand to inherit a position that propels them to the centre of public life in an overwhelmingly secular society that will treat them with suspicion, if not downright hostility. Given the make-up of today’s Catholic church, at least some of these men are bound to be gay; given their candidature, their service to the church cannot be doubted.

How is any of this new, and why would things change?  B16 and Ganswein seem to be joined at the hip in some fashion, rather more than elderly prelate and youngish monsignor/secretary … but why would that or anything else change the church’s love of prohibition for people…  (Of course she is a Catholic writer, former editor of the Catholic Herald.  Keep the fictions going!)

As a critic has said of the pope:

”If Ratzinger had a motto it could have more to do with Caesar than Jesus: divide et impera.”

I say, Excellent! for a War Pope!  To my eye, things are on track!  Not the right track, but the preferred track!

They have had murderers and buggerers as papa and princes of the church for centuries and still they maintain the long finger shake… when not arranging the capelet…

Sorry, I just love to dish on the pope… it’s easy!

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