Josh Haden On Gaza

Yesterday on my facebook page I reposted (as I did here) Brian Eno's recent article outlining his position on what's going on in Gaza.

The resulting facebook discussion helped me to better formulate my ideas on the matter, and I post my response below, slightly out of context:

I'm not an expert (far from it) on political and religious matters, so forgive me if what I say seems naive, simplistic, or even amateurish.

But it seems to me that Israel is perfect, and so is Gaza, for that matter, because they can't be anything else except exactly what they are at this point in time. They are the epitome of perfection.

Anyone who believes in God, or at the very least, says they believe in God, must concur, because God by definition is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Violence solves no social problems; it merely creates new and more complicated ones. If...victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for justice, unborn generations will live in a desolate night of bitterness, and their chief legacy will be an endless reign of chaos." (“Non-Violence and Racial Justice”)

I watched on CNN tonight how representatives of both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict said to the other, in so many words, your killing of our babies justifies our killing of your babies.

How could this way of thinking by both sides ever end the cycle of conflict we’ve been seeing for so many years now.

One of the sides needs to begin an assault from the higher moral ground, and say, no, your killing of our babies does not justify our killing of your babies. This must end now.

On the History Channel this week (can you tell I watch a lot of TV?) there’s been a whole series of programs on “Armageddon.” One such program has Nostradamus, the Aztecs, the Egyptians, even Christians and a whole host of others saying that the world as we know it will end on Dec. 12, 2012.

I don’t know if this is true or not, and I hope it isn’t, but wouldn’t it be sad if it were true, and the only legacy our world could leave for the next world-to-be was one filled with hatred, intolerance, violence, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, selfishness, avarice, greed, narcissism, and an inability to even seek perfection, instead of a legacy filled with love, spiritual enlightenment, reconcilliation, truth and honesty, selflessness, and acceptance of the unknown and unseen by human minds and human eyes?