This is my take on the Israel/Lebanon War.
1) You cannot continuously state that this is a war with “Hezbollah” and blast innocent Lebanese civilians.
2) You cannot say it is defense if you are taking out hospitals, bridges, power plants, water treatments centers and villages. This is not a defensive strategy and regardless of how many times you say you have a right to defend yourself, no one believes that it is a defensive move. That’s like taking out an entire family’s kids, the refrigerator, the a/c unit, the water line and electrical lines to the house, leaving the dad standing there with a gun.
3) You cannot set a precedent of negotiating with someone under certain conditions and then turn around and blast the crap out of them when the same conditions occur. On at least two occasions, Israel has exchanged prisoners under these exact circumstances, with Lebanon. What changed?
4) You cannot squeal about two soldiers being held hostage when you are holding 9000 people without charge, including women and children, incommunicado, from other countries. It looks a tad bit duplicitous. Just from my point of view, perhaps.
5) Just because you scream “terrorist” does not make it so. Some say that about this current administration. Does that mean that another nation can come in and expel the republican party? Hezbollah, much like Hamas, was voted in democratically. Just because we don’t like it, doesn’t mean we have a say as to whether they stay or not.
This is truly a mess. How can we possibly go over there and say a damn thing? We set the standard with Iraq. Invading a sovereign country without provocation. Of course, there are always reasons that one can find to attack others. But we are supposed to learn as we age, we are supposed to gain wisdom. We have gained nothing.
I find it so amazing that somehow Christians are rubbing their collective hands together as if we have some say as to when the world will end. God controls that, not us. As much as you guys want to accelerate our demise, God hates that crap. We are not in control. He does not want us to help it along, for crying out loud! What happened to God’s PLAN?
What are we leaving for our children, our grandchildren? This is our legacy? This is what we do with something that is given to us, a marvelous gift from God to be stewards of this amazing planet and all its inhabitants? This is the best we can do? We have boiled away hundreds of years of civilization and complex inter-community issues and made it black and white. There is so much more to this region than terrorists and Muslims. There are intricate roots of tribes and cultures that are being completely ignored, as we clumsily try to eradicate the area of “extreme fascist Muslims”. Have we not figured out yet that you cannot eliminate the enemy? By wasting people with a particular ideology, you end up making the families, the friends and the community rise up to avenge those people. We saw it repeatedly with gang-violence. The “blow them to kingdom come!” “obliterate them!” are all interesting battle cries, but those statements have no basis in reality.
And finally… we have four dogs in our family. Recently I received an email stating that the Houston pound was desperate for foster families for puppies that had been brought in. We decided that we could do that. We got two-four week old black lab mix puppies. They are adorable. Now that they have been cleaned up and fed some baby food and had a bottle. They are so precious at this age. The pound does the best it can, but the smell was absolutely staggering from the moment we walked in. Just in the limited areas we went to, there were so many animals. So many tiny kittens. Little Rottweiller pups. Little and big dogs just desperate for some interaction. If you can’t have a dog all the time, maybe you travel, maybe you don’t want the continuous responsibility, whatever the reason, fostering is a great alternative. Of course, we lament the inevitable attachment that we will have with these two tiny guys, 2 & 3 pounds of pure pup, but our home is so much more of a warm, loving, friendly place than the noisy, cold and dirty pound. They allow fostering of dogs, cats, and I’m sure just about any other animal they have in there. A cat or a dog experiencing life on the “outside” even for a week, would beat the animal shelter hands down.
Consider it.
1) You cannot continuously state that this is a war with “Hezbollah” and blast innocent Lebanese civilians.
2) You cannot say it is defense if you are taking out hospitals, bridges, power plants, water treatments centers and villages. This is not a defensive strategy and regardless of how many times you say you have a right to defend yourself, no one believes that it is a defensive move. That’s like taking out an entire family’s kids, the refrigerator, the a/c unit, the water line and electrical lines to the house, leaving the dad standing there with a gun.
3) You cannot set a precedent of negotiating with someone under certain conditions and then turn around and blast the crap out of them when the same conditions occur. On at least two occasions, Israel has exchanged prisoners under these exact circumstances, with Lebanon. What changed?
4) You cannot squeal about two soldiers being held hostage when you are holding 9000 people without charge, including women and children, incommunicado, from other countries. It looks a tad bit duplicitous. Just from my point of view, perhaps.
5) Just because you scream “terrorist” does not make it so. Some say that about this current administration. Does that mean that another nation can come in and expel the republican party? Hezbollah, much like Hamas, was voted in democratically. Just because we don’t like it, doesn’t mean we have a say as to whether they stay or not.
This is truly a mess. How can we possibly go over there and say a damn thing? We set the standard with Iraq. Invading a sovereign country without provocation. Of course, there are always reasons that one can find to attack others. But we are supposed to learn as we age, we are supposed to gain wisdom. We have gained nothing.
I find it so amazing that somehow Christians are rubbing their collective hands together as if we have some say as to when the world will end. God controls that, not us. As much as you guys want to accelerate our demise, God hates that crap. We are not in control. He does not want us to help it along, for crying out loud! What happened to God’s PLAN?
What are we leaving for our children, our grandchildren? This is our legacy? This is what we do with something that is given to us, a marvelous gift from God to be stewards of this amazing planet and all its inhabitants? This is the best we can do? We have boiled away hundreds of years of civilization and complex inter-community issues and made it black and white. There is so much more to this region than terrorists and Muslims. There are intricate roots of tribes and cultures that are being completely ignored, as we clumsily try to eradicate the area of “extreme fascist Muslims”. Have we not figured out yet that you cannot eliminate the enemy? By wasting people with a particular ideology, you end up making the families, the friends and the community rise up to avenge those people. We saw it repeatedly with gang-violence. The “blow them to kingdom come!” “obliterate them!” are all interesting battle cries, but those statements have no basis in reality.
And finally… we have four dogs in our family. Recently I received an email stating that the Houston pound was desperate for foster families for puppies that had been brought in. We decided that we could do that. We got two-four week old black lab mix puppies. They are adorable. Now that they have been cleaned up and fed some baby food and had a bottle. They are so precious at this age. The pound does the best it can, but the smell was absolutely staggering from the moment we walked in. Just in the limited areas we went to, there were so many animals. So many tiny kittens. Little Rottweiller pups. Little and big dogs just desperate for some interaction. If you can’t have a dog all the time, maybe you travel, maybe you don’t want the continuous responsibility, whatever the reason, fostering is a great alternative. Of course, we lament the inevitable attachment that we will have with these two tiny guys, 2 & 3 pounds of pure pup, but our home is so much more of a warm, loving, friendly place than the noisy, cold and dirty pound. They allow fostering of dogs, cats, and I’m sure just about any other animal they have in there. A cat or a dog experiencing life on the “outside” even for a week, would beat the animal shelter hands down.
Consider it.
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