Yes. I have no idea about Canada but there is a huge income gap in military service in America. You have the poor which is the poorest 20% of Americans, the lower middle class which is the next 20%, the middle middle class which is the next 20%, the upper middle class which is the next 20% and the rich which is the top 20%. That top bracket, the rich, sends almost zero people into the military. The upper middle class sends relatively few. The lower and middle, middle class make up the vast majority of the military with a fair number of the poor also contributing. The very poorest would be the destitute, the homeless and such, and they've already fallen so far through the cracks they I guess you'd say non-participatory in so many things including miliatary service. That skews the numbers a bit but something like 90% plus of our troops come from the bottom 60% of America in terms of income and I'd bet if you could break it down further it'd be most heavily concentrated at well under the 50% mark.

Gee, Stanley. I am a bigot and a pig and an anti semite. So be it. And note that I do not intend to flag you for offensive language.(I don't care what you think.)

It is of course difficult to think of another case precisely like that of the Jews in that laws were promulgated and factories built to carry out the destruction. And difficult to match the scale - particularly since it was not until recent times we have have the technology to do it.

However - The deliberate destruction of native peoples, especially in the US, must come close. I don't know precise numbers. But they must move into the millions - and they certainly destroyed a far higher proportion of the target group. Funny how we never think of it in the same way as the holocaust.

Then there is the recent destruction of the Maya people in guatemala carried out by Guatemala troops under US direction. Only 200,000 were killed - but again that was a very high proportion of how many were available to be killed.

The killings of various racial groups in Africa, quite a few of them.

Hitler also targeted Slavs in exactly the same way as Jews as one of his "inferior" peoples, and killed large numbers of them. There have also been genocides in Asia and others in latin america.

Actually, there is an excellent book on the history of genocides. It is by a friend of mine, Frank Chalk, who is also a retired professor of history from Concordia. Frank, incidentally, is Jewish. But he may not qualify as a Jew by your standards since he prefers to find a way to peace in the middle east. He may be another anti-Jewish Jew and thus a pig and an anti-semite like me. Anyway, check out Frank on google to get the title of his book. Lend a copy to Jon1.

Jon1 - I have no interest is exchanging witty repartee with you and Stan. If you think the solution I suggest, then I am at least happy you have at last admitted I offered one. However, it seems to me your solution is not working either. If you would like to join us in looking for some other solution, welcome. If, like Stan, you just wish to call people names, then you really should find your own playpen.

Oh, Stan, have you read 1 Samuel 15:2-3?

Isn't that a genocide? And guess who did it.

graeme

I see graeme, you agree with the Bible do you? You consider it the literal truth? You must therefore agree that G-d gave the Holy Land to the Jews. That includes the West Bank and Gaza. So when will you be evicting the Palestinians? (Remember, you said this, not me).

okay. God gave the holy land to the Jews. Don't see why Palesinians can't accept that. Of course, there is some evidence that God changed his mind on the point... He was known to do that.

And the first genocidal maniacs of whom we have record were Jews.

Do I believe the Bible is literal truth? No. Do I believe God ordered the genocide in Samuel? No. Do I believe such a genocide occured. Quite likely. And there are many others in The Bible. At least some of them probably occured.

You're Jewish? And you're talking to a pig?

Is that Kosher?

graeme: okay. God gave the holy land to the Jews. Don't see why Palesinians can't accept that.

Perhaps you need to persuade them. After all, this was your idea, to take the Bible as literal truth.

Of course, there is some evidence that God changed his mind on the point... He was known to do that.

Evidence, please. And for the record, I do not accept the New Testament, so that will not do.

You're Jewish? And you're talking to a pig?

Is that Kosher?

You're a scream, graeme, really you are. You're also pretty ignorant when it comes to Judaism. We're not allowed to eat pigs. Talking to them is quite permissible. So sorry, you don't get rid of me that easily. In fact, the longer this continues, the more you tell us about yourself, so I have no motivation to stop. You're my finest evidence.

A point of logic:  If the whole world would be happy to see Isreal's enemies destroy her then the residents of Isreal would also be happy to be destroyed as they are part of the whole world.  That kind of all or nothing thinking can only lead to stress in the person thinking it.

Somegirl - your point of logic is .. illogical. It's also based on a false premise, because I did not say that the whole world would be happy to see Israel destroyed. I said the whole world would sit idly by while it happened. There is a difference.

STAN< I HAVe TRIED TO EXPLAIN TO YOU MANY TIMES< THIS THREAD IS NOT
ATTACK AND DEFENCE> THE INTENTION IS TO EXPLORE THE
PROBLEM< MUCH AS A DOCTOR EXAMINES A PATIENT TO FIND
OUT WHAT IS WRONG AND WHAT SHOULD BE DONE>

YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED IN AN EXPLORATION>  YOU WANT IT ONLY
IF IT IS RESTRICTED TO THE FAULTS OF  THE OTHER SIDE> YOU PERSIST
ON ACTING LIKE A DEFENCE LAWYER> BUT A DEFENCE LAWYER GETS IN ThE
WAY IN A HOSPITAL>

YOU ARE<THOUGH< A LIVING EXAMPLE OF A PART OF THE SITUATION> THAT IS
THE IMPACT OF THE HOLOCAUST EVEN ON JEWS WERE NOT BORN
WHEN IT HAPPENED>   YOU HAVE SAID IT MANY TIMES YOURSELF
BUT YOU REFUSE TO SEE THE IMPLICATIONS OF IT>
YOU SAID MANY TIMES THAT THE WORLD SAT BY IDLY AND WOULD DO SO
AGAIN>

I THINK THERE IS MUCH TRUTH IN THAT> (IT ALSO SAT IDLY BY FOR ThE|GAYS 
AND SLAvS AND BLACKS AND FOR MANY OThER GENOCIDES
BUT WE WON"T GO THERE>   WE:LL STAY WITH ThE HOLOCAUST>

NOW THINK> (I KNOW YOU WON"T BUT I"M" TRYING)>   THINK OF HOW THIS WILL AFFECT THE WAY JEWS PeRCEIVE THE 
REST OF THE WOrLD AND HOW THEY SHOULD ACT IN IT>

graeme, just because you don't hear me, there's no need to shout. I hear YOU loud and clear.

Moving house today, so will not be on this thread again for now.

the purpose of this column is not to assign blame. For a start, there is no point and no future in assigning blame. we have, in any case, no mechanism to punish whoever is to blame - so that whole process is a waste of time.

As well, - as nearly as I can understand Christianity, a major purpose is to avoid assigning blame. that is the meaning, I think, of the injunction to forgive. To forgive does not mean saying "it's okay". To forgive means to show understanding of why humans do as they do and think as they do so that instead of assigning blame for what goes wrong, we try to fix it.

The principiles of Christianity and Judaism, like those of most religions, are not arbitrary and esoteric. They are intensely practical. We forgive not because it's goody goody but because it works - and assigning blame siimply does not work.

The peoples of the middle east are the products of many centuries of experience. For Israelis, the most intense of those experiences was, of course, the holocaust. For arabs, it has, perhaps, been the interventions of the western powers in that part of the world for the past century.

All those experiences have an impact on how peoples of the region perceive the world and how they react to it. That means that if we want to understand what is going on and why people are behaving as they are, we have to understand what those experiences have done to them.

To assign blame is easy and self righteous. it's also superficial. And it doesn't work. However, to explore the people means being free to do so. It means accepting the fact that we are dealing with human beings on both sides and, therefore, dealing with all sorts of weakness and limitations on both sides. A knee jerk attack on one side or defence of one is no help to arriving at an understanding.

Nor does it help to come to this process with one's mind made up. We are not going to get much help in this from anyone who believes he already knows all about it, had his mind made up, and has already assigned blame.

On the arab side, we have those years of intervention by the west, often military. Western powers have created nations out of tribes - which destroyed old patterns - killed on a lavish scale as did the British in Iran, the French in north africa, the Americans in Iraq. They have created royal families out of bandit chiefs and imposed them on their newly minted countries (Saudi Arabia springs to mind). They have imposed torturing and murdering dictators - as in Iran. And they have rolled over profound cultural and religious distinctions.

That has, understandably, created deep suspicion, fear, and even hatred of the west. And most Israelis are perceived as people of the west whose nation of Israel was one more manifestation of western intervention.

For many Jews, the great lesson of the holocaust was the indifference of the world to what was happening to Jews. and generations of Jewish children have been powerfully taught the story of that indifference.

A prominent Jewish reaction has been a very human one. It is a distrust of the world, a sense of the importance of absolute self reliance, a sense that jews owe the world nothinig, have no reason to feel wrong or guilty about anythinig, and feel justified in anything they do. Read Stan - by all means. This message comes through in almost every post.

Again, there is no blame here for either of these groups, israelis or arabs. They are what history has made them. The important thing is that what history has made them is what we have to deal with if we want peace. Assigning blame just gets in the way of that reality - and will never lead to any peace.

That's why I started this thread.

It seems to be a real turning point in the midle east has been the rise to power of the Saudi royal family and the very fundamentalist brand of Islaam they practice.

i really cringe when i see pictures of various countries from the 60's.  Secualr, advanced, centers of learning.  To see the smae shots now, it is like looking at the middle ages.

Yes, and there are great conflicts within the arab states on that very subject. We made the Saudi royal family. a hundred years ago, they were still stealing camels from each other. Iran was secularizing after WW2. We put an end to that, and set Iran on the path back to fundamentalism. The US had a great deal to do with putting Saddam in power. We have created most of the problems we complain about. And, as the    Iraq war should have taught us, fixing the damage caused by these initerferences is so expensive that you have to wonder about the efficiency of interference in the first place.

There is a difference between geting involved - and interfering.

Actually you have it wrong about forgiveness and not assigning blame. When I ask GOD for forgiveness I first confess, I acknowledge what it is I did wrong. If I forgive another it doesn't mean that I'm somehow unaware or unacknowledging of what was done. I can forgive, on my best days I might forget, but I'm still aware of what the transgression was to begin with.

Unfortunately you got all of that right. The U.S. has a lot more strike outs than hits.

We disagree profoundly on forgiveness.

It is not about us gractiously handing out forgiveness like spiritual candy. It is about how WE deal with sins committed. It is not about the sinner asking for forgiveness. of course, if you are asking for forgiveness for yourself, you first have to admit the sin. Otherwise, why on earth would you ask?

But more importantly, forgiveness is about how we deal with the sinner. Forgiveness of the sort you are talking about comes from God. we have no power to offer than sort of forgiveness.

The forgiveness we offer is a practical, earthly one. It has nothing to do with forgetting the sin. And I know of nothinig in the Bible which says we should forget the sin. Forgetting has nothing to do with it.

Forgiveness refers to how we think of the person and the sin. We means we understand that sin is a part of the human condition, that we are all sinners. We don't blame. We understand, and we deal with it based on that understanding.

To assign blame is arrogant to play a role that even God does not claim.

As well, it doesn't work. Nobody, no situation, is improved by self-righteous posturing. If you want to solve human problems, you first have to understand them. And blame does not help us to understand anything. Forgiveness is about understanding.

That is why in this thread I am so anxious to get away from looking for who to blame. It's a tough line to walk. Forgiveness is hard to understand, and harder to do. And, oh, it's so natural for us to blame. We have to learn the difference between blaming and simply recognizing what happened.

Much of the current problem in the middle east is being exacerbated, as tiy say,  by US actionss. But it has certainly not been alone. For the first half of this century, most of the interference was coming from Britain and France. And, then, of course, the Germans were looking to replace all of them under Hitler.

StanT, I'm sorry, I guess that I should have said that Isreal would sit idly by and allow itself to be destroyed.  Which it is obviously is not doing.  I'm afraid I'm not the one being illogical here. 

Welll we shouldn't get drawn into a quibble. Some people did help. But the western world was not prominent in that respect. Britain did accept some Jewish refugees. China accepted rather large numbers and, indeed, one of them became a member of the chinese national assembly. But most countries - including Canada ranted from indifferent to (as in the case of Canada) hostile. That's important because it has had a lasting effect on Jewish thinking, and it's an important factor in Israeli political thinking. Generations of Jewish children have been raised to remember that indifference. StanT  is one of them - notice how often he mentions the world's indifference.

For the matter, the world was also indifference to the mass murder of slavs by Stalin, and then by Hitler. It was indifferent - except in self-righteous speeches to the mass murders of Mao and Chiang. It was indifferent to hitler's attempt to wipe out gays. In all of those cases, not the slightest attempt was made t o help those people.

But in Jewish circles, the emphasis, understandably is on the Jews - almost as though none of these others never happened. It is central to Jewish perceptions of the rest of the world that only judaism was subjected to a holocaust. YOu can see that in both Stan amd. interestingly in Jon1.

In fact, there have been many genocides in history, including one by israelites, according to 1 Samuel. The deliberate murder of people based on perceptions of racial difference has actually been fairly common,  though rarely as systematically as by Hitler or with the tools he had available to do it. Just recently in Rwanda we had a genocide of a remarkable death toll considering the crude weapons and bureaucracy which carried it out.

To understand what the holocaust did to Jewish perceptions is not a criticism or a placing of blame. It's a reality that is central to understanding what is going on in the middle east - and if we want to solve it, we have to understand it.

Do you even realize that not one person here has ever claimed that only Jews died in the holocaust. I, like any educated person, know that gay people, Roma (gypsy), trade unionists, non-whites, and others were killed en masse as well as anybody who tried to stand up for anybody in any one of these groups. You are attacking a position nobody has taken.

Foremost forgiveness comes from GOD but we are supposed to emulate that. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us". As GOD forgives us we are supposed to forgive others. We are supposed to imitate GOD. Of course we'll fall very far short but that's the goal. I know that the Bible says that GOD removes forgiven sin from HIM "as far as the east is from the west". I remember from Sunday School the image of GOD wadding it up into a ball and tossing it out of the universe. I also remember talk about "is there anything GOD can't do?" and one answer being to remember forgiven sin, because it's been removed "as far as the east is from the west". That is our goal. We may miss it most of the time but it's still the goal.

I don't disagree with your second point. What I wanted to emphasize is that we cannot forgive in the sense of absolving from sin. that is not in our power. We cannot say, in effect, forget it. If a person murders, we cannot say - it's okay. We don't have that authority - nor would it make sense. A murderer is dangerous. We can't simply pat him on the head and say it's okay. What we have to do with him is to understand him so that we can deal with him in the most effective way. Our forgiveness, the only one we capable of, is this latter one. We forgive the sin because we realize that the sinner, like us, is prone to sin. Then we try to deal with getting him past the sin.

Blaming is no help. Indeed, it makes things worse, often by introducing the very destructive idea of revenge - which means revenge right back at us. Which is what we are watching in the middle east.

As to the notion that intelligent people know all about the others killed in the holocaust - I know lots of intelligent people who don't. When Frank Chalk published The History of Genocide, he was attacked by many intelligent people, including rabbis, who thought it was wrong and harmful to Jews to discuss other such events as though they were genocides. You will remember that earlier in one of these threads that StanT (or was it you) insisted that there was no genocide similar to the holocaust. It was unique.

I have been in synagogues many times listening to speakers on the holocaust. I have never heard one mention other genocides. I saw the Speilberg film on the holocaust. It was entirely, I think (certainly almost entirely) about it as a uniquely Jewish experience. If you were to conduct a poll in any sample population group, I would be astonished if ten percent of respondents had any knowledge of other groups in the holocaust. I would be more astonished if more than five percent knew of other genocides - with the possible exception of Rwanda.

And then, of course, there is the genocide carred out by the ISraelites, the one StanT brushed past lightely, that is reported in 1 Samuel.

But none of this has anything to do with casting blame. It has to do with understanding the perceptions and reactions of a substantial number of Israelis. We need to understand that.To close our eyes to it doesn't help anybody. Quite the opposite, it makes us like a doctor who cannot heal a patient because he refuses to look at symptoms he considers unattactive.

You are right that only GOD can absolve sin. As for the holocaust being unique 14 million civilians were killed in addition to all the soldiers who died in world war two. 14 million cold blooded murders. That is unique in size certainly. Also there are few if any cases in how systematic the killing was. If we were to try and list holocausts the second one that comes to my mind is native Americans, the trail of tears for example. Certainly many native Americans died becuase of the actions taken by the white majority. Some died of illness and disease introduced by Europeans. Others died when their land and livelihood were taken from them. Other died from the rigors of the journey west, or due to unfamiliarity of the new threats they faced. I'm sure that's not all of it. Even so there was not the systematic collection of people for the sole purpose of first degree murder. There was just enough indirectness that the public could make excuses. The excuses were weak and unjust, but by the standards of the day, enough. All of that puts the holocaust of W.W.II. unique in size and manner even though throughout the world and throughout history there are too many examples of people being killed primarily or exclusively because of who they are.

all too true. The killings are getting worse because the tools available to us are so much more powerful - and the capacity for organizatin. The killings of Stalin and Mao and Chiang weren't really genocides - but the scale exceeded anything previous.

I'm afraid we can expect even more and worse. The mass killings of innocent people in the last century have exceeded anything in history so far as I know - not just in the numbers killed (that is a result of more advanced killing technology), but in the number of organized mass killings. Without trying hard, I can think of a dozen or more just in the last fifty years.

And there is often a racial dimension to the killing even when it is not strictly speaking a genocide. People are generally willing to be far more brutal in a war with people the perceive as racially different - which is just about exacatly what you said in your final sentence above.

We seem to be driftinig in a frigthtening direction. The US alone is at war to such a degree it is destroying the economy, and cannot be supplied by American soldiers. (over half the US soldiers in Afghanistan are mercenaries). And the war in Afghanistan is, in fact, the war in Afghanistan and pakistan. Africa is collapsing into a sea of wars. Latin American is, I think, becaming a dangerous situation. Russia is looking to stake out its power.

Are we approaching a point at which we can say this is World War Three?

 I try to avoid thinking of anything that would bring about feelings of  'winners' and 'losers' but, as that's pretty ingrained in militaristic thinking, I would just point out that Israel's elephant-to-mouse imbalance of weaponry and powerfully-armed allies mean it couldn't possibly lose.  It even shows that every day now as it continues to trample the human rights of the many (so says the UN) for the terrorism espoused by the few.  It shows that in its utter contempt for any sort of peace negotiations right now.

Okay that's just getting the heat off my head.  In light of the resolutions ultimately passed at GC40, like-minded congregations (or working groups within them), presbyteries and even entire conferences can still pool resources and ideas with, hopefully, the ultimate goal of working for peace accompanying those who are doing the same in the region.  There's quite a comprehensive list of such groups - Palestinian and Israeli - at http://www.connexions.org   We don't even have to take sides, although it's only natural if we do as individuals. However our role as empathetic listeners should guide us against bias.  Our call to seek peace can and should be our guiding principle.

Back to the winners-losers analogy for just a second.  Those of us who are seven to ten time zones away would do well to remember that just as we are no longer "missionaries" overseas, but partners, most of us cannot possibly claim to know the depth of trauma all people in the Israel-Palestine region suffer.

Very true in your closing.

On the prospects, there was a chilling article in Saturday's The Globe on the Hassedim (VERY orthodox Jews) in Israel. They have always been very violent, very pro war, and a heavy drain on Israel. But now their political influence is becoming pronounced as never before. They are some 20% of  the population, growing very fast due to a phenomenal birth rate, and united for power. Think of them as a Jewish Taliban. And Isael has 250 nuclear warheads.