Week 29 2014

Tendring Topics……on Line

First – the Bad News

            For years the UK has had nuclear Trident submarines roaming the world’s oceans as a so-called Independent Ultimate Deterrent to aggressors. Like NATO it is a relic of the cold war and of the ‘defence policy’ aptly described as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); ‘You dare to threaten me with your nuclear missiles – and I’ll threaten you with mine. If you dare to attack me with them, then I’ll attack you.  We’ll both be totally destroyed and (it's unfortunate about the collateral damage) large areas, perhaps the whole, of planet Earth will be made uninhabitable.

            Well, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO were stupid enough to use nuclear weapons.  The ‘cold war’ ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The UK ran down its full-time professional army, navy and air force in response to our economic situation – but Trident remained sacrosanct, untouchable.  In the meantime acts of aggression took place and it became abundantly clear that our ‘ultimate deterrent’ deterred no-one at all in the real world.  It didn’t deter Argentina from invading the Falklands.  It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus.  It didn’t deter the USA and its Caribbean allies from invading Grenada.  When, quite recently, Russia annexed and recovered its lost province of Crimea ‘the west’ blustered and threatened but – thanks to God and common sense – nobody even mentioned that ‘ultimate deterrent’.

            In the meantime the real threat to us all comes not from aggressive sovereign nations but from terrorists who have been inspired by a perversion of Islam to believe that they’re fighting God’s battles for him on earth.  They don’t yet possess nuclear weapons but the danger of their acquiring them is a natural consequence (or perhaps God’s punishment!) for our continuing to develop them, instead of banning their manufacture world-wide and destroying every single exiting nuclear weapon.  We have learned recently that chemical weapons can and have been banned world-wide.  It must be possible to do the same with nuclear weapons.

  I believe that much more dangerous than the possibility that Iran may develop a nuclear armoury, is the very real possibility that the nuclear weapons that we know Pakistan possesses should fall into the hands of terrorists.  NATO sent forces to Afghanistan to destroy the bases of Al Qaeda that had been protected by the Taliban government.   All they succeeded in doing was persuading Al Qaeda to move its bases elsewhere, notably the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. In those tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and those who sympathise with them, are a considerable force possibly with a ‘fifth column’ in the Pakistan armed forces.  It is by no means impossible that they may one day overthrow the present Pakistani Government, acquire those nuclear weapons and threaten to use them

            Would our ‘independent ultimate deterrent’ then reveal its true value?  I doubt it.  Are people who tie explosives round their bodies and blow themselves up in crowded market places in the conviction that thereby they’ll go straight to Heaven as holy martyrs, likely to be deterred by the possibility that the victims of their nuclear weapon may respond in kind?

            And the bad news?  The independent cross-party Trident Commission, set up by the British American Security Information Council, has decided that there is no credible alternative to Trident.  I’m glad to note that British Quakers – but there are so few of us – are opposing this decision.  Here’s a copy of a report in The Friend, an independent Quaker weekly:

 The assertion that ‘these are weapons of mass destruction……….which have proved to be a poor deterrent against acts of terror or against recent political events’ must be an example of Quaker fear of making exaggerated statements.  They haven’t proved to be a poor deterrent, but have been no deterrent whatsoever!

…..and the not-quite-so-bad news!

          When I first heard it, in fact, I had thought that it was really good news.  It all began a few months ago when we learned that, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Royal Mint was going to strike a memorial £2.00 coin with an image of Lord Kitchener on it.  The image was taken from an army recruiting poster in which the general (the hero of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army!) was assuring anyone viewing the poster that  Your Country needs YOU!

            I was one of thousands who felt that a war that had cost millions of British, French, Russian, Austrian and German lives, fought for reasons that were far from clear, and which had led to another bloody world-wide conflict  only twenty-one years later, was not best remembered by an image of a  luxuriously   moustached General urging young men to become cannon-fodder.  We petitioned the Royal Mint and the government to use instead an image of Nurse Edith Cavell.  The daughter of a Norfolk parson, she had been nursing the wounded of every country in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium.  She also helped two hundred wounded and captured British service-men escape to neutral Holland.  She was detected and arrested by the Germans, court-martialled and shot.

            In 1947 I worked briefly as a Public Health Inspector for the city of Westminster.  Quite near the office was a statue of Edith Cavell.  It bore the words for which she is best remembered.  ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’, which she said to the pastor who visited and prayed with her on the eve of her execution.    She was obviously a much more appropriate image for a memorial coin than that of a past-his-best general beckoning other men to their deaths.

            Last week I was elated when I learned that there would be a Nurse Edith Cavell coin struck in commemoration of the World War I centenary.  We had won!   Or so I thought until I read the ‘small print’ of the news item.   The Nurse Cavell coin is not to be struck instead of, but as well as, the Lord Kitchener one.   What’s more the Kitchener coin is to be a £2.00 one for general use – apart from the image it’ll be exactly like the £2.00 coins in use today.  The Nurse Cavell coin, on the other hand, will have a nominal value of £5.00 and is intended for coin collectors.  Unlike the Kitchener coin, they won't be in daily use.  Most of us will probably never see one.

             

                                                           

 Here are enlarged pictures of the two coins.  It is likely to be all that most of us will ever see of the Nurse Edith Cavell coin!

                                                                          

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.