Tendring Topics
Pots and Kettles
Nowadays,
of course, both cooking pots and kettles gleam on the kitchen shelf and their
contents are cooked or heated by gas or electricity. This wasn’t always the case. I can remember a time, in the 1920s and ‘30s,
when much cooking and water heating was carried out over a coal fire or on a
coal fired cooking range. It didn’t take
long for both saucepans and kettles to acquire a black, sooty coating. Hence came the expression ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ when a
critic of someone else’s behaviour showed the same defect as the subject of his
(or her) criticism.
It
was a thought that must have recently been in the minds of a great many people
with memories as long as mine. Our Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, has been
revealed as the head of a government that has approved the export of arms and
military equipment to the Russians, shortly after he had publicly criticised
the French for honouring a contract for providing the Russians with
battleships. The embargo had been
imposed because of Russian support, and alleged supply of arms, to the
pro-Russian separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine .
It
could, in fact, be argued that ‘our offence’ was rather more serious than that
of the French. I don’t think any one
seriously imagines that the pro-Russian rebels have any ambition to acquire a
navy, whereas they most certainly can use rifles, missile parts and other
military equipment that we have been sending to Russia . I don’t find the excuse that rifles can be used for hunting and that some of
the other equipment was to be sold on to the Brazilian Navy, very convincing. Is
it, I wonder, quite OK to supply arms to the Kiev government? I reckon that those tanks that we see the
rebels using don’t come from Russia
but have either been captured, or acquired as a result of the defection to the rebels of some
of the government’s forces.
The fact is
that no-one can be certain of the actual use to which exported arms may be put. I don’t suppose that when the French sold
exocet missiles to the Argentines, they imagined for one moment that the
Argentines would use them to sink British warships engaged in the liberation of
the Falklands .
I have little doubt that Colonel Gaddafi used weapons and ammunition
that we had sold to him against us, when we helped Libyan rebels to overthrow his government. Some of the weapons used by the Taliban to
kill ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan
were undoubtedly provided clandestinely by ‘the west’ to help their
grandfathers kill Russians! We have also
sold weaponry to such autocracies as Saudi Arabia
and Qatar
some of which, I have little doubt, have found their way into the hands of ISIS and Al
Qaeda. I hope too, that the governments of both the USA
and the UK have recently felt just a
little uneasy about the use of weaponry that we have sold to Israel .
The manufacture and sale of weapons of war is
an evil comparable with the slave trade.
It thrives on international discord and those who hold shares in the
companies involved grow wealthy on the death and maiming of their fellow men
and women; on violent death, the destruction of homes, and the creation of
innocent and helpless refugees.
A world-wide
ban on the manufacture and sale of weapons of war would be a positive answer to
our prayer, ‘Thy will be done on earth as
it is in Heaven’.
Two young heroines!
At a time when
the news seemed to be going from bad to even worse, with three air liners downed in a week, an Israeli armed incursion into Gaza with the shelling of a United Nations school used as a shelter for refugees, and a total of some 1,000, mostly civilian, Palestinian dead, on 24th
July there came some really good news on a BBC news bulletin.. Meriem Ibrahim had been allowed to leave
North Sudan and, with her husband and two children and accompanied by an
Italian government minister, had flown to Rome
where she had met the Pope who had commended her faithfulness and courage.
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Blog readers will recall that
Meriem Ibrahim was the young Sudanese mother who was sentenced to being flogged
followed by hanging for allegedly converting from Islam to Christianity and for
marrying a Christian - which, since a Muslim woman is forbidden by Sharia law
from making such a marriage, was regarded as adultery! She could have escaped those penalties had
she abandoned her Christian faith for Islam – but that she resolutely refused
to do. She gave birth to a daughter
while shackled to the floor of her prison cell.
World-wide
protests resulted in her being freed but then at Khartoum airport where she,
her husband and her two children were about to depart for her husband’s home in
the USA, they were prevented from departing on the pretext that her passport
was invalid – and in North Sudan, so it seems, she remains.
No less
deserving, but more fortunate, is Malala Yousafazai the teenage Muslim girl
from Pakistan
who was shot and left for dead by the Taliban for the crime of attending school
and promoting education for other girls.
At death’s door, she was flown to Britain for urgent surgery and,
almost miraculously, has been restored to health. However Malala isn’t one to seek safety from
further Taliban activity in obscurity..
She has inspired others to campaign, and is campaigning herself, for
education for girls throughout the world and has recently been to Nigeria where
she urged the President to redouble his government’s efforts to find and
liberate the teenage girls who have been abducted by jihadist extremists and
threatened with slavery or a forced marriage.
A sad, bad
world has reason to be thankful that there are young women of the calibre of
Meriem and Malala! I wish I could claim to have, or ever to have
had, their faith and their courage. The
thousands of us, and the governments, who rescued Meriem from a cruel and
totally unjust punishment must again urge the North Sudan government to allow her to return home.
Late News
I have just read in the ‘Church Times’ that
Meriem and her family have taken refuge in the United
States Embassy in Khartoum USA
Assisted Suicide
One
of my most horrifying nightmares is of being trapped in a totally paralysed
body, praying for death, but being incapable of doing anything about it; incapable in fact of doing anything at all.
It
might have been thought that that recurring bad dream would make me a keen
supporter of the ‘assisted suicide’ bill that was recently debated in the House
of Lords. It wouldn’t have helped 'the me' of my nightmare in the least!.
No doctor would have been able to declare that I had six months or less to live, or
that I had a necessarily terminal illness.
Nor, I think, would it have been possible for me to give the informed
consent required by the bill.
I
don’t think it possible to solve this problem by means of legislation. The present situation is, I believe, that it
remains a criminal act to assist a suicide – but that the Public Prosecutor
does not press charges if he or she is persuaded that the person giving the
assistance was acting out of love and did not have some ulterior motive. That
is probably the best that we shall get.
If the Public Prosecutor can’t make up his mind then a jury can decide.
After sixty years of marriage my
wife’s life came to an end eight years ago, in
her sleep in her own bed at home, and after several days of unconsciousness. I do not believe that she suffered any
pain. I can’t say with absolute
certainty what I would have done had she been suffering unbearable pain that our doctor was unable to alleviate, and had
begged me to help her end her life. I hope that I would have agreed and tried to do so. One thing I do know. The possibility of my
being prosecuted for manslaughter or even murder would not have had the very
least influence on my decision! I doubt if I would have given it a moment's thought.
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