I was just reading a fiction novel about the Afghanistan war against Russia and a US CIA guy was trying to convince someone that the US was correct in helping the Afghan rebels because they were fighting for freedom. The person responded, Freedom for who? If the rebels win they will impose strict Islamic law and there won't be freedom for people who don't follow it.
Is one dictator better then another?
In Darfur, the people being killed are Black Muslims. They rebelled against the Sudanese government in a non-peaceful manner (to put it lightly). The Sudanese government and their Janjaweed friends have overreacted.
But the fact is there are 2 sides to this battle. Just because a group of people decide they want their own government doesn't mean that the government should roll over and say ok.
The Darfurians started shooting first. I don't think there is a need to protest just because peoiple are being slaughtered. You need to understand why the people are getting slaughtered. What if the people being slaughtered would kill you if they got the chance? How can Jews protest the killing of Black Muslims who do not believe that Jews have the right to exist, and after they are saved will support the Palestinians in their war against Jewish survival.
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7 comments:
Rock: The OU and alot of Rabbanim in the US decided that this was a worthwhile cause -- and as to who started shooting first, its sort of irrelavent if a mass massacre is taking place as reprisal.
Lastly, if G-d decides judgement on a people, thats one thing. For man to decide that "bad people deserve to be killed" -- then there are normative ways to establish if they are "bad", and what punishment they legally deserve.
The world decided often enough that the Jews were "bad"...and then meted out, "Bad people deserve to be killed."
Read Who Wants Peace
It is true, if the world believes that the Jews are the bad guys then they have an obligation to wipe us out. It is our obligation to return to God and he will save us.
Neither the US the UN, nor any other physical body has power over the Jewish people. God sends the bad guys after us when he doesn't like the way we're behaving.
Rock, part of ther reason so many Jews are protesting in support of Darfur, is the media is portraying the conflict in very simple terms, Black Muslim rebels: Good. Arab Muslim Sudanese soldiers and Jan-Jaweed: Bad. This two dimensional and inaccurate view is nothing new. There were similiarly inaccurate portrayals about the fighting in the Balkans, Kosovo and Israel.
I would have to agree with what kahaneloyalist said, the media is often not a good portrayal of the situation. And there are alot of innocent peple geting masacarred and are stuck in the middle of the politics game. It's always the regular guy that suffers. But as a side point, it really isn'tanything new, this is the pattern of the world over and over again, no matter how wrong it is.
Rock: Rabbi Yitzchak Alderstein wrote about Darfur on the Cross-Currents site.
http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2006/05/01/darfur-and-caring/#comments
Food for thought.
This is the comment I posted on cross-currents:
I think people are ignoring a major difference between this situation and the Holocaust. This war was started by the people being slaughtered. They have been offered agreements, by which the tragic killing of their people would be stopped, and they have refused.
I'm not saying that the agreements were good for them, I'm saying that in this case they have an opportunity to say, maybe our cause doesn't stand a chance and therefore we should back down and take what pieces we can until a better opportunity arises.
In the Holocaust, nobody gave the Jews an option to stop the killing if they would... In fact even those that tried by converting to a different religion got thrown into the gas chambers along with the rest fo the Jews.
The fact that a lot of people are getting killed does not mean that it is not there own fault and does not mean that we should protest. Rebellion against a government is dealt with by death in every society.
I'm not saying that we should hope that they get killed. We should certainly do what we can to get the rebels to agree to stop rebelling, but we can't call this a holocaust or give them reason to not come to an agreement with the Sudanese because they think if enough of them get killed they'll get what they want from the US/UN rushing in to save them.
Another point is that if the US/UN gets involved that would mean killing Sudanese and JanJaweed so that they don't kill the Darfurians who started killing them to begin with.
How is that justice?
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