week 25, 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

A Modern Martyr

          Folk of my generation were brought up in the belief that in our wonderful 20^th Century, the age of Christian martyrs, like the ‘age of miracles’ was over.  Martyrs were those who were ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday – thrown to the lions in the arena in the reign of the Emperor Nero or slaughtered in some other agonising way for their refusal to renounce their Christian faith. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the protestant half of Christendom honoured as saints and martyrs their co-religionists who were tortured and burned alive by zealous Catholic monarchs like Queen Mary Tudor (‘bloody Mary’),.  The Catholic half gave similar honour (observed in the Church of Rome to this day) to recusant priests hung, drawn and quartered by her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I.

            There have, of course, been martyrs since those days – in the wake of the French and Russian revolutions for instance, though much of the anti-clericalism of those times resulted from the perceived support of the established churches for the tyrannical former regimes in those countries, and the contrast between the splendour and riches of the ‘princes’ of the Church and the abject poverty and squalor of the people.  The fate of the Jews in the Nazi regime was different (and worse) than martyrdom. Martyrs could often save themselves by repudiating their faith. In the holocaust the victims were condemned not by their faith but by their ethnicity.  None of us can change or repudiate that.

Suicide bombers, unlike their victims, are not martyrs.  They are cold-blooded murderers who compound their crime by killing themselves as well, thereby evading human retribution for their crime.

Meriem Ibrahim (an attractive 21^st century young woman threatened with a medieval punishment. She could be ‘that friendly and helpful young woman next door’ to you – or me)

A modern martyr (who may yet be saved from martyrdom) is Meriam Ibrahim of North Sudan.  She had a Muslim father, who deserted the family, and a Christian mother who brought her up as a Christian.  She married an American Christian man and has a young son and a daughter, the latter born in prison while she was shackled to the floor of her cell.  She has been condemned to death for having converted from Islam to Christianity and, before being hanged, is to be flogged with one hundred lashes for her ‘adultery’.

She is deemed to have been a Muslim because her father was Muslim. Sharia Law as interpreted in Sudan declares that death is the punishment for conversion from Islam to atheism or any other faith.  Since that same law also forbids a Muslim woman to marry a Christian man, her relationship with her Christian husband is ‘adulteus’; hence the flogging before the hanging!

‘Humanely’ (well, Islam does claim to be compassionate and merciful) they won’t hang her for two years (presumably to allow the new baby to become less dependent on her mother) and they won’t hang her at all, if only she’ll repudiate her Christian faith and return to Islam.  This she refuses to do.  She can’t in any case ‘return’ to a faith that she has never embraced.

Baby Maya, Meriam’s daughter born in prison to a mother condemned to death.  Her name is the same (though spelt differently) as that of my little German ‘adopted niece’ who was featured in this blog two weeks ago.

Meriam’s case is so outrageous to western minds that it has attracted world-wide condemnation.  Barak Obama (Meriam is married to a US citizen and that baby, born to a mother in shackles, and her brother, are half Americans) has expressed his outrage, as have David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband.  A petition, of which I am one of the 800,000 (so far) signatories, is to be presented to the Sudanese authorities.

Sadly, I have heard nothing of British Muslims making their voices heard, yet apart from Meriam and her family, it is they who are likely to suffer most from Meriam’s martyrdom.  Incidents such as these, and the wholesale murder and abduction of Christians by militant Islamists in Nigeria, lend fuel to the intolerance and prejudice of such neo-fascist and anti-Islamic  groups as the English Defence League, the BNP and at least a minority of the Ukippers.

            I very much hope that the Sudanese government will bend to world-wide anger and release Meriam and her children unscathed to join her husband, the children’s father, in the USA.  Already one Sudanese government spokesman has said that she would be released within a few days – but that was quickly denied.  Sadly, those who are convinced that Meriam was convicted in accordance with a law laid down directly by God to his prophet nearly a millennium and a half ago, are unlikely to be impressed by an appeal to ‘Universal Human Rights’ in 2014.

Better or Worse? – or just Different?

          Writing about Islam and Sharia law has brought to my mind the fuss that there has been about the accusation that the governing bodies of a number of Birmingham Schools had been infiltrated by Muslim extremists who were changing the schools’ characters and possibly using them to ‘radicalise’ the younger generation and possibly make them recruits for terrorism.   I think that we’ll probably hear a lot more about this in the days to come. 

My knowledge of the situation has been gained entirely from tv news bulletins and broadcast interviews with parents, governors and – of course - national politicians.   It must be said that Muslim parents seemed for the most part to be thoroughly approving of the very schools that have been causing most concern. Some of the practices of these schools reminded me of my own schooldays – now some eighty years ago!

Our school day began with an assembly and an act of worship; Christian worship of course.  Throughout my eleven years (5 to 16) of full-time education I never even met anyone with any other religious faith.  There was a hymn, a prayer and a reading from the New Testament. The handful of Roman Catholic pupils were excused this part of the assembly.  They joined us to hear the Head Master give out any notices and dismiss us to our classes.

In the 1930s.  Boys’ School on the right, Girls’ School on the left.  Utility block, shared but at different times, in the middle.  Note the fence between the two playing fields.

There was a Boys’ School and Girls’ School.  Ours were adjacent but quite separate.  There were separate playing fields with a high wooden fence separating them.  There was even a ‘trip wire’ a few feet from the fence over which we were forbidden to tread - to stop our watching the girls play hockey through the occasional ‘knot hole’!

There were no ‘sex education classes’ and certainly no contraceptive advice!  There were a few co-educational secondary schools.  As a schoolgirl my wife went to one, but they were the same in that respect. The very thought of mixed classes in such subjects would have provoked embarrassed shock and horror among even the most ‘progressive’ parents!   I am sorry that my school wasn’t co-educational.   It would probably have made me less agonisingly shy and ill-at-ease with the opposite sex than I was during my late teenage years.  I’m not so sure about the sex and contraceptive classes though – I really don’t believe that teaching these things to ever younger children is the best way to reduce premature sexual activity and teenage pregnancies.

            I am sure that there are lots of things about educating children and fitting them for the world of the 21 century that Muslims can and should learn from the ‘western world’ – but we shouldn’t be so reluctant to admit that there are one or two things that we can learn from them. 

           

           

             

Week 20 2014

Tendring Topics…..on line

The Odessa Steps – déjà vue?

          One of the most striking sequences in The Battleship Potemkin, a very early classic silent film, is of the massacre of unarmed protesting civilians by the Tsar’s Cossacks on the Odessa Steps, a giant stairway providing the main access to the town of Odessa from the Black Sea.  The film tells the story of the mutiny and takeover of the Potemkin in 1905 by its crew, provoked by brutal treatment and maggoty rations.  At about the same time there was an attempted revolt against the Tsar in Moscow and elsewhere throughout Russia.  The revolt was put down with extreme brutality.

            The Potemkin with its mutinous crew put in at Odessa and the mutineers were supported by the town’s people.  The film, directed by Eisenstein, shows them gathering on the Odessa Steps  (elderly men and women, students, a mother with a baby in its pram) to welcome the mutineers,  and being massacred by Cossacks and other of the Tsar’s troops.   It is a very vivid and memorable sequence, subsequently much used for propaganda purposes.  I saw the film for the first time two or three years ago and it certainly impressed me.

            History records though that it didn’t actually happen – not like that anyway.  In Odessa there were demonstrations in support of the mutineers and of the revolt against the Tsar.  The Tsarist troops did respond and did quell the revolt with brutality – but there was no spectacular massacre on the Odessa Steps.

            Perhaps in time to come someone will make a film about another massacre that took place in Odessa a week or so ago.  Again there was a public protest – this time against the pro-western government in Kiev and in support of the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It seems though that there was also a rival demonstration by supporters of the Kiev government – described by their opponents as violent Fascists and Nazis.  Violent they certainly were.  They drove the pro-Russian demonstrators back to take refuge in the local trade union building, and then threw in petrol bombs setting the building on fire.  There were over 40 victims – either burnt alive by the fire, or dying when leaping from upper windows to escape the flames.

            Meanwhile the police watched – and did nothing.  Who knows?  Perhaps there were so many pro-Kiev demonstrators that there was nothing else they could do.

            A glance at a map of Ukraine will make clear the significance of the events in Odessa.   This Black Sea port is many miles south-west of ‘eastern Ukraine’ where many of the inhabitants are ethnic Russians and most of them favour closer ties with Russia rather than with the EU and NATO.   It is clear that in Odessa and, no doubt, in many parts of Western Ukraine there are a considerable number – though probably a minority – of residents who have a similar outlook.   I expect too that in Eastern Ukraine there is also a minority loyal to the Kiev government.  That being so, any system of Federal Autonomous regions would leave large numbers of people still feeling that they weren’t represented.

            I think that if Ukraine is to have anything like a lasting peace ‘the West’ and the Russians need to forget their ‘cold war’ enmity and co-operate instead of competing both economically and politically.  We all face a common enemy in militant extremist Islam.  The USA the UK and other NATO countries, the Russian Federation and China have all suffered from the acts of terrorism of the jihadists.  They need to pull together, with mainstream Muslims both east and west, to defeat them.   Squabbling over Ukraine is just a distraction from the real struggle (Tony Blair got it right for once!) that faces civilisation.  

            Russia and the EU should break down the trade barriers between them and give Ukraine equal access to each economic bloc.  Ukraine’s permanent neutrality should be guaranteed by both NATO and the Russian Federation.  The reduction in Ukrainian defence spending that could follow such an agreement, plus economic access to both the EU and Russia, would surely give a tremendous boost to the country’s economy and give it the possibility of achieving a living standard equal to, or higher than any in the world.  Both the EU and Russia would also benefit.  The only losers would be the armaments manufacturers who thrive on ‘wars and rumours of wars’!

I wish I thought that there was even the remotest chance of all that happening!

‘Bloodshed divides, prayer and forgiveness unite’

          Thus declared Russian Quakers after they had recently considered the situation in the Ukraine..  They called for restraint by all parties and abstention from violence in any form.  ‘We are for purely peaceful and non-violent activities in defence of their claims and protection of their rights by everyone, regardless of which group of the population they represent in Ukrainian society. .Peace cannot be enforced by military means and no circumstances can justify armed warfare.

Note – Quakers have had a long and friendly relationship with Russia.  Two Tsars; Peter the Great in 1697 and Alexander I in 1817, joined Friends at Meeting for Worship when visiting England. Also in 1817 the Tsar invited English Quaker Daniel Wheeler to plan and supervise the drainage of the marshes and reclaim land near St Petersburg – a task that engaged him for thirty years!   A daughter-in-law of novelist Leo Tolstoy was a Quaker, and British and American Quakers were active in famine relief and other relief and rehabilitation work in Russia in the aftermath of World War I, the revolution and civil war.  In 1921 alone British and American Quakers fed some 212,000 people.  They remained a presence there throughout the 1920s.

The present Quaker presence is centred on Friends House Moscow.  Type Quakers in Russia or Friends House Moscow into Google, for a wealth of information on the subject.

Applause for David Cameron…….again!

            A fortnight ago I applauded David Cameron’s declaration that the UK is a Christian country and that we should be glad that of it.  This week I am again endorsing one of his public statements. No, I haven’t changed my political outlook. I don’t think I could ever vote for an election candidate from his party – unless, of course, it seemed to be the only way of preventing a U-kipper from topping the poll! There are though surely some topics on which all people of good will and compassion will agree and act.  David Cameron found one of them when he denounced, with real passion, the evil acts of the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in burning down a school in a remote part of Nigeria, abducting some 200 teenage girl pupils and threatening to sell them into slavery or forced marriage. Subsequently the same organisation has kidnapped more teenage girls and carried out more murderous terrorist acts in the same country.

            Mr Cameron was quite right too in pointing out that these were not isolated acts committed by a small group of terrorists in a remote part of Africa.  They are part of a loose movement of fanatics who practise a perversion of Islam that subjugates women, detests ‘western’ education especially for women and girls, and seeks to gain God’s approval by carrying out a hate-filled jihad of violence against everything that the rest of the world values.  They were responsible for ‘9/11’, for the tube bombings in London and for the many bomb outrages in Russia, including those before the winter Olympics in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad).  I fear that they are to be found among those whom Britain and the USA have been supporting, trying to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.

            The USA the UK, France and China have all volunteered to assist in securing the liberation of those kidnapped girls.  I am sorry that Russia is not among them.  They have had longer and more recent experience of dealing with jihadist terrorists and could probably have offered valuable help and advice.  It is also important that we should obtain the vocal and visible support of the great majority of Muslims.

            We have seen them take to the streets in protest when their Koran has been burnt or defiled, or their prophet insulted.  I’d like to see them do the same about the abduction, imprisonment and sale into slavery of those Nigerian teenagers.  They, the majority of peaceful Muslims who are happy to live in peace and friendship with those of other religious faiths, have the greatest reason for supporting the downfall of the extremists.  In the short term, acts like those of the Boko Hara and other Islamic terrorists, fan the flames of Islam-phobia.  ‘Phobia’, it should be remembered, means fear.  The acts of these terrorists give others cause to fear.

            Then again it is only the contents of the Holy Book of any religion that are sacred.  The book itself is the work of human hands.  If one copy of the book is burnt or defiled, a hundred other copies can be printed to replace it.  But each one of those abducted teenage girls is precious, a child of God, created by God in his own image, unique and irreplaceable.  To defile, misuse or deliberately injure any one of them is a most grievous sin.   To claim, as these extremists do, that they are doing so in obedience to God’s will is surely the ultimate blasphemy.  It is the sin against the Holy Spirit that Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet of Islam and much more than that to Christians, declared to be the one unforgivable sin.

            The deliberate harm of even one of God's children evokes more sorrow – and perhaps anger - in Heaven than the burning of a score of holy books.  I hope that the majority of peace-loving, tolerant Muslims will denounce with fervour these acts of terror and blasphemy by those who claim to share their faith, and will support efforts to end their activities.  

           

            

Week 22 2013

Tendring Topics……on line

‘God hears the embattled nations sing and shout –

‘Gott Straffe England!’ and ‘God save the King!’

God this, God that, and God the other thing!

‘Good God’, says God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!

            This mildly irreverent rhyme was written by Sir John Squire, early twentieth century satirist, in 1916 the year of the Battle of the Somme in World War I.   ‘Gott straffe England! (God punish England!) was the refrain of a ‘Hymn of Hate’ widely – though not universally – popular in Germany during those war years. It declared England, rather than Russia or France, to be Germany’s principal foe   Both Britain and Germany were nominally Christian countries and both claimed God to be ‘on their side’.  Both armies had military padres to offer their troops spiritual comfort and perhaps to assure them that their cause was the one that had divine blessing and approval. Throughout World War II the belt buckle of every German soldier was inscribed with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ or ‘God with us’?

           The now virtually unknown words of the second verse of our National Anthem were once sung with gusto.   I remember them. They told God exactly what was expected of him!

O Lord our God arise!

Scatter her enemies, and make them fall.

Confound their politics, 

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On thee our hopes we fix.

God save us all.

            This attitude persists today. The brutal murderers of that British soldier outside the army barracks in Woolwich last week declared the Muslim refrain Allah Akbar (God is Great) as they waited for martyrdom, or the opportunity for yet more killing, with the arrival of the police.  Every suicide bomber believes himself to be giving his own life as a worthy sacrifice to God if, at the same time, he manages to kill a few infidels.

            Nor is this attitude, if not its practice, completely eliminated among Christians.  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was reported to have been outraged when Archbishop Runcie prayed for the Argentine as well as the British victims of the Falklands War.  Only last week correspondents to the local daily Gazette proclaimed that God had intervened on the side of the western allies in World War II – by calming the sea to enable the remnants of our army to escape via Dunkirk and, on at least one occasion, preventing enemy bombers from taking off to bomb England!  Can those correspondents possibly believe that God was supporting the British and American bomber crews who incinerated thousands of innocent civilians in the bombing raids on Dresden on 13^th and 14^th February 1945?

            The God revealed to us in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ is the loving father of all mankind.   To suggest that he wills any act of violence by one of his children against another is the ultimate blasphemy, the ‘unforgiveable sin’.  Jesus told his followers to love their enemies, bless those that curse them, and do good to those who are spiteful towards them.  To those who rummage through the Old Testament  for justification of this, that or the other act of violence, he said that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament  is encapsulated in the one commandment, to treat other people as you would like them to treat you. I understand that other world religious faiths include the same or a similar injunction.

            Can you imagine Jesus Christ, as we know him from the four Gospels, giving his blessing to suicide bombers, improvised explosive devices, cluster bombs, land mines, unmanned drones controlled from a distant country assassinating those deemed to be enemies of that country, or submarines roaming the oceans armed with weapons capable of destroying whole cities? 

There will, I suppose, always be those who are so consumed with hatred,  fear or envy that they will resort to violence, or plan to resort to violence against their fellow men and women.  Those who do so should not delude themselves that their thoughts and actions have the approval of God!

Some Afterthoughts

          One of the men believed to be involved in the killing of that young soldier in Woolwich  told a bystander that he was hoping to ‘bring war onto the streets of Woolwich’.  Those who have attacked mosques and Islamic Centres in reprisal for the murder are behaving exactly as the murderers had hoped.  Almost equally stupid was our Prime Minister’s assertion that the actions of these cold-blooded murderers ‘had nothing to do with religion’.  Of course they were to do with religion – a false religion that most of us are quite prepared to accept is as contrary to the tenets of Islam as the reaction of those who attack Islamic centres is contrary to Christianity.

            However, when asked why the murder suspects had not been more closely watched by the security forces since their radical views were well-known, an official spokesman replied that there were thousands who held similar views and it was impossible to monitor them all.

             That I do consider a very alarming piece of information.

‘

Clacton’s ‘Benefit Ghettos’

          When my wife and I were house-hunting in Clacton for our small family way back in 1956 we quickly realised that we couldn’t afford to buy a home near to the seafront.  The properties  within a few minutes walk of the sea, mostly large Edwardian houses offering holiday accommodation during the summer months, were well beyond our means.  We settled for the modest bungalow in Dudley Road (once described in Clacton Town Hall’s Council Chamber as ‘working class residential’) where, fifty-seven years later, I am writing these words.

            How astonishing therefore to find that those once ‘posh’ roads near the seafront in Clacton’s Pier Ward are now a ‘Benefits Ghetto’ with a staggering fifty-four percent of residents living on state benefit.  It is claimed to have the fifth highest number of folk-on-benefit in the country. Even in the town’s Golf Green Ward which includes Jaywick, Britain’s most deprived area, only forty-eight percent of residents of working age are living on state benefits. Douglas Carswell, Clacton’s Conservative MP says that, ‘this just shows the need for welfare reform.  I don’t think that William Beveridge and Clement Attlee when setting up the welfare state all those years ago, wanted to see half the people living in Pier Ward to be living at someone else’s expense.  There are government changes coming in which will see people who are on jobseekers allowance expected to look for a job.  Frankly that hasn’t been happening.  People who are young and fit and able to work will be expected to work’.  Perhaps Mr Carswell can suggest where those job-seekers should look for work in an area where jobs are notoriously scarce and where there are at least a dozen applicants for every vacancy.

            William Beveridge and Clem Attlee, were they alive today, certainly wouldn’t have expected to see two and a half million unemployed in Britain sixty-five years after the end of World War II.   Clem Attlee would have been horrified at the way in which the aspirations of those who had fought and won the war have been treated with contempt by successive governments.  In particular he would have had difficulty in believing that after ten years of New Labour government the gap between the incomes of the richest and poorest in our land was wider than it had been at any time in the twentieth century.

            The fact is that the decline of Clacton as a holiday resort, largely as a result of cheap air travel, has meant that there is no longer the demand that there once was for boarding house holiday accommodation.  The owners of buildings that had been used for this purpose found that they could manage quite nicely by letting out single rooms cheaply all the year round as bed-sitters for those who could afford nothing better.  It became known that there is usually cheap bed-sit accommodation available in Clacton – and homeless and jobless people from all over the country found their way here; just another example of the functioning of 'market forces'.  

            Government Cuts in the public services and the attempt to persuade ‘the big society’ to do for nothing some of the tasks formerly undertaken by paid labour, have played their part in reducing the number of jobs available for both skilled and unskilled workers.  Public and private enterprises alike are cutting the number of their employees to the bare minimum – and below!  Recently I noticed that the Public Conveniences on Clacton Station were locked because of vandalism and misuse.  Those who needed to use the Convenience were advised to get a key from one of the station staff. They'll be lucky to find one!  It isn’t so long ago that the constant presence of uniformed station staff acted as a deterrent to miscreants of all kinds.  But Profitability, Productivity and Cost Effectiveness (the unholy trinity driving market forces!) demand that employees must be profitably occupied every minute of their working day. No wonder hospital emergency departments are unable to cope with the demand put upon them, public property is constantly vandalised, public buildings defaced by graffiti, litter blows about our streets, there are potholes in our roads and broken paving makes our pavements dangerous to pedestrians.

            In the coming months we can confidently expect even more refugees from the imposition of the Housing Benefit Ceiling and the Bedroom Tax in London, to arrive among us.  Many of them will hope, almost certainly in vain, to find work as well as cheap accommodation. A few will be content to exist on ‘benefit’.  It is about those that we’ll read in the tabloid press.  There is little point in castigating them.  They are the product of our wonderful ‘free market economy’ that encourages everybody  (billionaire tax-dodgers, Bank Executives with their bonuses and miss-sold insurances, money lenders, expenses fiddling Councillors, MPs and Noble Lords, slum landlords, loan sharks and, right at the bottom of the pile, lowly benefit scroungers), to grab as much as they can for as little as they can get away with.

  

  

           

             

           

            

Week 24 2012 17.6.12

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘When will they ever learn*?

It isn’t very often that I find myself 'on the same side' as a feature writer in the Mail, but I have to admit reluctant agreement with at least some of the sentiments expressed by Peter Hitchins in the Mail on Sunday at Whitsun.

            ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?  Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya?  Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias.

            I had been shocked earlier when I had discovered that Saudi Arabia was among the most fervent supporters of Syria’s ‘freedom fighters’.   Surely we all know that, at least prior to the current uprising, Syria was an oasis of tolerance and liberalism compared with Saudi Arabia, with its subjugation of women, its medieval laws and punishments, and its total prohibition of any kind of religious worship other than its own extreme version of Islam.  Far from supporting ‘freedom fighters’, Saudi Arabia’s ruler had sent troops into neighbouring Bahrain to help the brutal efforts of the government there to suppress its own ‘Arab spring’ of rebellion.

            Had any other two countries been similarly involved in the suppression of popular rebellion, there would have been outrage in London and Washington. Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain though, are not only sources of oil, they are also wealthy and reliable purchasers of armaments.   Plausible excuses can always be found for their excesses and their rulers welcomed as honoured guests when they deign to visit us.                             

Do you remember the high hopes when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq – and of their outcome?  Saddan Hussein was a cruel and ruthless dictator – but under his dictatorship Iraq was a united country in which terrorist groups like El Qaida scarcely had a foothold and in which there was a degree of religious freedom and tolerance unusual in the Middle East.  There was a thriving Christian community and well-attended Christian churches.  Our ‘victory’ (do you remember George Bush proclaiming it from the bridge of a US Aircraft Carrier?) has produced a divided country with a ruined infrastructure.  Kurds are seeking independence and Sunni and Shia Muslims are at each other’s throats. Christians are under constant attack and are emigrating as quickly as they are able to do so. There is a constant threat of terrorist bombs.

Then there was the Arab Spring first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and finally Libya.  It really seemed that parliamentary democracy would triumph, that these countries would throw off their ancient legacies of autocracy and embrace government of the people, for the people, and by the people.   I did, at the time, suggest in this blog that it was at least equally likely that a militantly Islamic government, comparable with that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would emerge.  Currently the Egyptians have elected an Islamic parliament and are faced with the choice of an Islamic President or a representative, albeit a milder one, of the old regime.  My guess is that the Islamic candidate will win.  The moderate, liberal, secularist, and freedom-seeking Egyptians who had been the backbone of the Arab Spring have disappeared.  Their various factions had varying ultimate aims.  They were divided.  The Islamists and the Traditionalists had clear and understandable objectives and were united. It is they who have triumphed.

I am not surprised that the Coptic Christians, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian faith, established in Egypt long before the arrival of Islam, are full of foreboding.

As for Libya, where ‘the west’ played an active role, having secured a mandate from the United Nations on the dubious grounds of protecting civilians from  air strikes by the Libyan Government.  In Egypt there may have been some doubt, but in Libya we know perfectly well than among the ‘freedom fighters’ we have been supporting are terrorists trained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnia and  Pakistan.   At least some of them have proved themselves to be as competent as Colonel Gaddafi’s minions at torturing and murdering their captured and helpless opponents.

I have no idea when, or even if, a credible government will eventually emerge in Libya but I have little expectation or hope that it will be a freely elected, liberal and tolerant one.

Today (6^th June 2012) has been a bad one for Afghan civilians.  In Kandahar three Taliban suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians.  Elsewhere in that unhappy country, an American air strike (not for the first time) has accidentally managed to slaughter everyone at a wedding reception - collateral damage, innocent victims of our ‘war on terror’.  Can we wonder that ordinary Afghans hate us foreign infidels even more than most of them hate the Taliban?

History (the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s) has shown that foreign intervention has the effect of increasing the bloodiness of civil conflict.   We should, I am quite sure, offer humanitarian aid where we can to alleviate the suffering of civilians on either side of the conflict, and mediate if and when asked to do so.  For God’s sake though (and I mean that reverently not blasphemously!) let us otherwise keep out of other people’s armed conflicts!

*’When will they ever learn?’ was the refrain of a popular protest song of the 1960s entitled ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Secularism

         

          In the United Kingdom those of us who, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘­profess and call ourselves Christians’ have come to take it for granted that the greatest enemy of Christian faith and tradition in this country has been the apparently inexorable advance of secularism.  We no longer have a public holiday at Whitsun.  It has been replaced by a fixed-date secular late spring public holiday.  Christmas, the time at which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, has been systematically secularised.   Happy Christmas! is being replaced on our greetings cards by Season’s Greetings or some such similarly meaningless phrase. Ask at a Post Office for the special stamps issued as Christmas draws near and you’ll be offered secular ones. However, as a rather patronising concession to a minority interest, there will be some ‘religious Christmas stamps’ kept ‘under the counter’ for those who specially ask for them! We are encouraged to speak of ‘the festive season’ or ‘the mid-winter holidays’ rather than of Christmas!   The most popular Christmas images are no longer a baby in a manger, a young mother lovingly holding her new-born child or wise men following a star, but of Santa Claus and his reindeer, holly and ivy, or young children playing in the snow.

            Easter has become a celebration of hot cross buns, cuddly bunnies, chocolate eggs and dancing daffodils, rather than of a suffering man on a cross and his glorious resurrection.

            We are encouraged to abandon referring to dates as BC (before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini or ‘Year of our Lord’) but as BCE (before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).  Determined secularists would like to see the abolition of prayers in schools or at public meetings and the departure from radio and tv of such popular religious programmes as Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day and Prayer for the Day.

            Yet, as an article in the Church Times reminded its readers a few weeks ago, while we in the UK deplore the advance of secularism, Christians in Egypt are fervently praying, probably in vain, that they may have a secular government in Cairo!

            I have listed above some of the things that proselytising secularisers have done and are doing.  It is only fair to add some of the things that even the most determined secularists, however misguided we may think them to be, don’t do.  They don’t throw bombs into religious gatherings or explode them fixed to themselves in public places, convinced that – if only they can take a few believers with them – they will be rewarded.   Nor do they persecute, ostracise, punish, or threaten to kill members of their families or communities who convert to one of the religious faiths available, or who marry into a believing family. 

            I am, of course, describing the activities of some Muslims. I know perfectly well that none of those things is compatible with ‘true Islam’ and that Jihad is really all about the struggle between good and evil within oneself.  A great many, probably a large majority, of Muslims in this country find the activities listed above as abhorrent as I do.  But some Muslims do believe they are an essential part of Islam and that jihad doesn’t mean an inner struggle but an outward war against the infidel.  When Britain and the USA covertly funded the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in Afghanistan, they hoped they would use our money to kill Russians, certainly not to conduct a struggle within themselves!  They are now realising that to the mojihadin, one lot of foreign infidels is much the same as another. 

            I am not selecting Muslims for condemnation.  Christians have been as bad, if not worse. I know that the Christian faith is one of love and compassion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.  In the 16^th century though, when Christians were torturing each other and burning each other alive in the name of Christ – who would have believed that?

            Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries pious Puritans in New England as well as in Britain imprisoned, tortured and hanged unfortunate women denounced as witches. They would have quoted Biblical chapter and verse against any who protested.  ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was, so they believed, the Word of the Lord.  Even today there are those who proclaim themselves to be fundamentalist or Bible Christians, who eagerly hunt through obscure passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy to justify their fierce opposition to practices or attitudes with which they disagree

In their enthusiasm for the small print of the Old Testament they seem to have missed the words of Jesus Christ. He told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is encapsulated in just two simple commandments – Love God with all your being and love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.  Jesus clarified that second commandment by explaining that we should treat other people in exactly the same way as we would like them to treat us.  When he reminded his listeners that they should not attempt to pour new wine into old bottles or sew new cloth onto an old garment,  he was surely referring to the many rules and regulations  of the Old Testament

How strange that some Christians prefer to live by the multitudinous prohibitions and demands of the old dispensation rather than by the two straightforward and simple commands of the new!

 Like Egypt’s Coptic Christians, I would not wish to be ruled by an ostentatiously religious government, whether Muslim or Christian (no, not even Quaker!).  I am happier with a secular government, that may well include individual Christians or Muslims;  one that is tolerant of all religions whose followers are prepared to comply with the law of the land; a Government that is always prepared to listen to and take seriously the advice of religious leaders.  Its members, religious, agnostic and atheist, should act in accordance with the reason that God has given them and in the light of the dictates of their conscience, which, as a Quaker, I believe to be inspired and enlightened by the Inward Light of Christ,  God’s gift to every man, woman and child on this earth.

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’

            I am afraid that there has been nothing very cheering or uplifting in anything that I have so far written in this week's blog.  I thought therefore that I would end it with the latest picture of my ‘honorary German niece' Maja.   Isn’t she a truly beautiful child?  Although not yet six years old her eyes seem to be full of intelligence, love and trust.  It was surely such a child as this that Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and told them that this was the example they needed to follow if they wished to enter God's kingdom.

            Maja’s great grandfather was a lieutenant in the German Army in World War II.   He was killed on the Eastern Front at the same time that I and my comrades in the British Eighth Army and his compatriots in the German Afrikakorps were trying to kill each other in Libya.  My greatest hope for the .future is of lasting peace in Europe spreading throughout the world so that such circumstances may never arise again.