Tear Down That Wall!

Copyright © 2005, Jordan White

 

 

            Dateline: August 6, 2005, Alan Cowell writing in the New York Times:  “Prime Minister Tony Blair on Friday promised new measures to close down mosques and bar or deport clerics deemed to be fostering hatred and violence, answering critics who say the country has sheltered Islamic extremists for years.  He also said two Islamic organizations would be banned.  A global list would be drawn up of people ‘whose activities or views pose a threat to Britain’s security,’ and they would be kept out of Britain.”

 

            Whew!  Where have we heard this kind of rhetoric before?  A group of people, whose most obvious common ground is their religion, being set apart by their legal government, although they have resided there as long as anyone could remember.  All of a sudden these people are vilified, citing security issues with the people whose religion is the more “patriotic” one (“Christian”, of course), and then are singled out by the government, possibly even to be subjected to worse treatment than the government is, at this time, willing to admit.

 

            Hey, maybe Blair will decide that a good way to identify these folks on his so-called “global list” would be to force them to wear an emblem sewed to their clothing, such as, say, a large yellow crescent?

 

            And let’s put aside the Geneva Conventions for a moment—hey, they are for use during wartime, and these folks don’t qualify as soldiers, anyhow, and let’s go right ahead with “collective punishment”.  And maybe to make things easier for us we should herd them all into small enclosed spaces, “for their own safety”, of course.

 

            I’m sure it’s not lost on Blair that it serves to unite the portion of the population that are not being persecuted into a sort of Crusade against those that are.  And it helps inflame out-of-control patriotism and nation-worship with talk of “sacrifice” and “freedom” and “God Save the Queen”!

 

            Are we seeing a pattern here?  Or is it okay with a world that witnessed very much the same treatment of another religious minority under very much the same rhetoric?  Is the world ready for yet another system of confining human beings to bantustans, concentration camps, Auschwitzes and Birkenaus?

 

            And, hey, why wait for Britain to get around to carrying out its own inhumane-treatment-of-Muslims-for-political-gain?

 

            You can see Israel hard at work, making it happen right before your eyes, imprisoning its Christian and Muslim Palestinian population behind a heinous thing it calls the “Security Fence”.

 

For more information: http://stopthewall.org/