srizals@gmail.com
When IDF, the mightiest army in the Middle East invaded Gaza to seek and destroy the terrorists that been terrorising imported settlers worldwide, they accidentally killed 350 officers of the law. The IDF did showed some NATO mercy by dropping leaflets before dropping bombs but the problem is that where could one flee since all Gaza is an open season for sick killers full of vengeance and hatred. Being surrounded by monstrous apartheid walls, they had only one choice, to flee to Egypt with the risks of being shot at by Egyptian boarder guards or not allowed to return to Gaza, their homeland and being an outcast forever. Remembering Dier Yassin, one would not repeat the same mistake, so they chose to die rather than to flee.
You see, a teacher would never be allowed to use corporal punishment in dealing with disciplinary problems. He had to tediously investigate the root of the problems even if it took days and lots of time and hard work besides his core work, which is teaching. He can't just simply punish the whole class if one or two of them are trouble makers. If he did, he would be asked by the principal or headmaster or be questioned just like in The Hague. But that's life in school. Israel is a nation above nations, so it would get away with just about anything.
Last year in December, for almost 3 weeks, the Gazans were being threatened and killed randomly. The world watched in horrors, some with deep hatred and the dark urge to seek revenge without being selective on who got to live and die, yes, just like IDF itself.
In my opinion, Israel is victorious in a way. The world still watched in horrors without knowing what to do. All the humanitarian aids are still waiting on papers and at the Egyptian borders. Viva Palestina was blocked. So, not much can be done but wait until all Palestinians in Gaza died quietly or cut each other's throat, being so confined in such inhospitable and hostile conditions. Most of us would just wait patiently; some will not and would take matters into their own hands. Maybe some would say it's just been a year since the onslaught. They forgot the onslaught and slaughter started almost 60 years ago at Dier Yassin.
The clock is ticking. Obama is shading his skin. Muslims are still confused of what they could do. Most of their weaponry are imported goods and out of date and configured to defense not attack. Europeans had united, both politically and militarily. OIC is good but without actual military union, Muslims would always become sitting ducks, killed and oppressed in fear they would become dominant like the West and took its role in dominating the whole world. Yes, just like Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin and countless tyrants of Castle and Dungeons that dominated Europeans for a thousand years prior to World War One. Oh, the dungeon and the dragon of the middle ages still exist, Gaza is the dungeon, Israel is the dreaded timidly crying dragon!
Maybe it is time for us to reflect the meaning of the Hadith by Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. when he said at the end of time, Muslims would be greater in numbers but would be just like the bubbles on the beach, following the tide and crushed at the beach repeatedly. Maybe we were actually infected by a disease known as al-wahn deep inside our hearts, too much love for this worldly life and the hatred of death.
When I was teaching somewhere not of my own, a father came to see his son and he sat at the back of the class and watched the teaching and learning process. Now, this is not a norm in the lands of the Malay, but I carried on and sometimes he would interrupt in a polite manner, in English if he thinks some of the children got carried away while doing the activity. When it was over, he came to see me and we have an interesting discussion. He said he was in a deep sadness and fear on what's going on with the Muslims around the world. He relates to me a Hadith that said at the end of time, everyone would be feasting on Muslims like they were having a feast of a celebration. His genuineness captures my heart. That was the first and the last time I had a conversation with this man. The next morning his son woke him up for Subuh prayer. Previously it has always been the other way around. He had returned to his Maker.
I wished I had prolonged our conversation that night.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Bukhara: The Minaret That Survived Ghengis Khan
Picture taken by Peter Price, http://www.pbase.com/juninho03/profile
srizals@gmail.com
Domination. The word itself is very provoking and caused resentment by those who were brought to their knees or are still on their knees before their tormentors. It means the act of subduing others, especially other humans, to do as to your will. Yes, you got to play god over the rest of the 90% identical beings as you are, that cried and felt pain and humiliation like you do. The only 10% difference is, you get to laugh at their miseries as they watched in horror and awe of how a magnificent monster you have become. Having so much power over other beautiful and intellectual supreme beings that ruled this dying old planet, the Homo sapiens, ops sorry, the human beings, according to the Cheyenne, mighty hunters of tatanka, the great beast that dominated the great plains a long, long time ago.
The Angkar or Pol Pot played god over the Kampucheans, Mao over the Chinese, Stalin over the Soviets, Hitler over the Europeans, American presidents over the human race and last but not least, the ones that kept on breaking their promise to God, the Zionist Israelis that returned to the land in mass which God Himself had banished them from. The same God that saved them from the Egyptian Pharaoh with the guide of His prophet, Prophet Musa a.s. The same God that had forbidden their return until the coming of the Messiah.
The Christian Zionists are in some sick agenda of fulfilling a deluded prophecy, so until I have enough understanding about them; I'm holding my tongue. But some just say that they are the slaves of the Zionist Jews themselves, who feed them and fatten them up, so that they would be loyal devout goyyims, unable to think beyond their gutless guts. The guardians of Zion against the good and the brave of the human race, all across the globe.
In America, even though they'd tried as hard as they can, Islam seems to be thriving there. So, to all Muslims, especially Americans themselves, cherish this, and stop supporting the radical views of an armed jihad against everyone. Don't be like the Zionist Israelis. What would you say in front of your Maker? The right time will come. Hopefully not somewhere in the near future, a couple of hundred years more. When Muslims are being killed in mass everywhere and driven out of their homes, and suppressed just for being a Muslim. At that time, the call of jihad would be inevitable and all ulil amri would declare the holy war against the evil supreme and dominating enemy and every able man and woman would have to heed the call. Fiqh al Jihad by a renowned Islamic Scholar, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, would be a good source for our understanding of Jihad. Self declared and armed jihad that is based on hatred and personal vengeance would only lead to fitnah that constitute chaos and anarchy that would endangered Muslims throughout the globe.
In remembering the slaughter of Muslims in Maluku by the Christian Bataks, I could not stop to notice how helpless and pointless it was to run and begging for your life. Everyone was in a killing frenzy and a Muslim was caught in the middle of it, and he was cut, stabbed right there in front of a law officer who did point his automatic rifle to stop the madmen but to no avail. The severed heads, of men, women and children, with their hands still tied up tightly by nylon ropes, dangled and shown as trophies by the Bataks, who laughingly put a cigarette in one of the severed head, a reminiscent of the cruelty of the midget Samurais that rape Nanking and Manila. Yes, the evil ones do have things in common. The ability to laugh in the face of other's miseries, just like the hell bikers on Harleys that had a road trip. Drinking and laughing while watching the fancy willy petes toasting the Gazans. Hope I can find it on youtube or somewhere and post it here, in case you don't believe me.
You see, Genghis Khan and the Mongols were sweeping the world with his Mongol riders, dominating other races and ravaging the rich Muslim nations. When he was at Bukhara, somewhere in Uzbekistan, as he did with other nations that resisted him, he destroyed everything to the ground except the Kaylan Minaret, dating back to 1127. The reason was said because he was captivated by its beauty. But we won't know now would we? Maybe we can ask about 60% of Swiss citizens and they can compare their logic with Genghis Khan. Sadly, the historic Babri Mosque wasn't so lucky. On 6 December, 1992 the mosque was destroyed by the Taliban, ops sorry, by the Hindus who called themselves Hindu nationalists.
Oh, according to a finding by Global Finance in collaboration with Bankersalmanac.com, had listed the ten biggest banks according to their total assets in the Middle East as of the end of 2008. They are, Emirates NBD, UAE - US$76.9 billion, NCB, Saudi Arabia - US$59.1 bil., Bank Melli Iran, Iran -US$45.5 bil., Samba Financial Group, Saudi Arabia - US$47.2 bil., Arab Bank, Jordan - US$45.6 bil., National Bank of Abu Dhabi, UAE - US$48.2 bil., Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corp, Saudi Arabia - US$38.1 bil., Bank Mellat, Iran - US$39.7 bil., National Bank of Kuwait, Kuwait - US$41.3 bil and Bank Saderat Iran, Iran - US$43.0 bil. The combined Iranian based banks' assets are 128.2 billions of real money, not some paper money printed in mass without any gold backings. Kind of reminding me of the banana money that Japan introduced in Malaya during the Japanese occupation which the Malays used to stack their pillows with. Dreaming of a rich man.
Now I know why Iran is an axis of evil as seen by Mr. Bushyhead and the millionaire, Mr. Bliar, his kind kindred. Can't let all the oil and money fall into the hands of the terrorists now can we? Hope you are willing to pay with more blood and anarchy coming your way. By the looks of it and according to history, these inglorious bastards wouldn't consider a thing in executing their agendas. Not unless, the very gate of their fancy mansion and beloved ones is about to be overrun by the ones they seek to destroy. Can you escape the circle of violence? Why don't you ask a Buddhist and listen to his wise answer.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Selective Dementia
srizals@gmail.com
Memory can be a bliss. Growing up and growing old is a norm of the human being. Like death, nobody can dodge it, no matter who he thinks he is, no matter how much money if not love, he has. No one, even you yourself can buy your way out of it.
For some it would be a nightmare, for the selected few, getting old is like a Chengal tree, the older it gets, the stronger and harder it become, and worth priceless. Do you know that you can see the oldest and the largest Chengal tree in South East Asia right here in the lands of the Malay, well to be more precise, in the land of the turtles, Terengganu Darul Iman, somewhere in Dungun, which got its name from a unique flower. 20 to 30 years ago, its beaches were swarmed with the largest turtle of them all. The giant leatherback turtles. Some still come, but the eggs were not fertile since there are no more males around. Sad but true. Other turtles are dwindling too. Thanks to the eater of everything he can get his hands on and the people that make profits out of other's miseries, in this case, the turtles that end up as a trophies or fancy souvenirs. Don't blame the Malays, we are Muslims, so we aren't allowed to eat them, only the eggs. Hmm, maybe we do play some part of it, we never know. So stop eating them. According to a recent study, consuming a certain amount of turtle eggs can be bad for you. So let's play safe and smart. Don't take unnecessary risks. It's not worth it. But the good and the brave are fighting back. Sanctuaries at selected beaches are running and enforcement, if not perfected, is taking its course. I only wished that their presence is felt by the bad and the deaf. Maybe we can learn something from the chameleon.
Do you know that the price of wood is sky rocketing here in the lands of the Malay. Illegal loggers seemed unstoppable, like the snatch thieves, they usually got lucky and got away with millions of ringgit, as if the logs could be easily tuck in and hidden from the naked eyes and the sawmills that would receive them were as elusive as the small Bengal cats that once roamed the forest of Malaysia in abundance. Come to think of it, even the common pangolin around my area seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Previously, they were so abundant, that in certain months of the year, I can't reveal it for safety reason, many were killed with their babies still clinging on their tails. Have the unchecked speed demons finally achieved something at last? The extinction of the slow moving Malayan pangolin! During the good old days, I even found a dead Malayan tiger cub by the roadside. My feelings at that time were like a kid that finally got to see the dinosaurs with a mixture of sadness and being afraid at the same time of seeing the bleeding and torn little cub, anxiously looking around if its mother could still be somewhere near. It’s funny how I could still remember it, like it had just happened yesterday.
Memory is golden. Sometimes it is all that is left. It is priceless. But for some, they can't cling on to it too tightly in case it would reveal just how wrong and bad they really are. No one seemed remember Dier Yassin or the Balfour Declaration or Lawrence of Arabia. Instead of learning from their mistakes and remedy them, they have chosen a different and a strange path. They have joined the club of the ones who suffer selective dementia. Hopefully this kind of amnesia won't drag on into their golden age. It would be sad to cry every now and then when you realised for the hundredth time that your loved ones had passed away only to forgot about it in the very next morning. Sad but true.
Having said this, it is accepted that this special gift is needed for us in order to survive a near driven to madness experience such as being abused or victimised by a monster. Even the monster himself, needs selective dementia too, in order to carry on being a monster and stop his own hand from pulling the trigger and blow his own head off, on discovering what a monster he truly is actually. For the mandevil, expect no remorse. He would cling on to his tyranny like trophies. He is the dweller of the everlasting fire, forever. And unlike Sam in the Supernatural, he won't get any share of torturing, ever.
Even if he had been killing, plundering and destroying for a hundred years, being in the damnation of hell for eternity would suffice for all his sins. For a unislamic Muslim that chose the similar path, a couple billions of years would cleanse all his sins before he is permitted to enter paradise for having a tiny faith deep inside his heart in Allah. But to put things in perspective, try clinging on to a burning match stick with your fingers. If you could hold on to it until the fire is gone then you should not have any fear of entering the eternal burning fire of hell.
Memory can be a bliss. Growing up and growing old is a norm of the human being. Like death, nobody can dodge it, no matter who he thinks he is, no matter how much money if not love, he has. No one, even you yourself can buy your way out of it.
For some it would be a nightmare, for the selected few, getting old is like a Chengal tree, the older it gets, the stronger and harder it become, and worth priceless. Do you know that you can see the oldest and the largest Chengal tree in South East Asia right here in the lands of the Malay, well to be more precise, in the land of the turtles, Terengganu Darul Iman, somewhere in Dungun, which got its name from a unique flower. 20 to 30 years ago, its beaches were swarmed with the largest turtle of them all. The giant leatherback turtles. Some still come, but the eggs were not fertile since there are no more males around. Sad but true. Other turtles are dwindling too. Thanks to the eater of everything he can get his hands on and the people that make profits out of other's miseries, in this case, the turtles that end up as a trophies or fancy souvenirs. Don't blame the Malays, we are Muslims, so we aren't allowed to eat them, only the eggs. Hmm, maybe we do play some part of it, we never know. So stop eating them. According to a recent study, consuming a certain amount of turtle eggs can be bad for you. So let's play safe and smart. Don't take unnecessary risks. It's not worth it. But the good and the brave are fighting back. Sanctuaries at selected beaches are running and enforcement, if not perfected, is taking its course. I only wished that their presence is felt by the bad and the deaf. Maybe we can learn something from the chameleon.
Do you know that the price of wood is sky rocketing here in the lands of the Malay. Illegal loggers seemed unstoppable, like the snatch thieves, they usually got lucky and got away with millions of ringgit, as if the logs could be easily tuck in and hidden from the naked eyes and the sawmills that would receive them were as elusive as the small Bengal cats that once roamed the forest of Malaysia in abundance. Come to think of it, even the common pangolin around my area seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Previously, they were so abundant, that in certain months of the year, I can't reveal it for safety reason, many were killed with their babies still clinging on their tails. Have the unchecked speed demons finally achieved something at last? The extinction of the slow moving Malayan pangolin! During the good old days, I even found a dead Malayan tiger cub by the roadside. My feelings at that time were like a kid that finally got to see the dinosaurs with a mixture of sadness and being afraid at the same time of seeing the bleeding and torn little cub, anxiously looking around if its mother could still be somewhere near. It’s funny how I could still remember it, like it had just happened yesterday.
Memory is golden. Sometimes it is all that is left. It is priceless. But for some, they can't cling on to it too tightly in case it would reveal just how wrong and bad they really are. No one seemed remember Dier Yassin or the Balfour Declaration or Lawrence of Arabia. Instead of learning from their mistakes and remedy them, they have chosen a different and a strange path. They have joined the club of the ones who suffer selective dementia. Hopefully this kind of amnesia won't drag on into their golden age. It would be sad to cry every now and then when you realised for the hundredth time that your loved ones had passed away only to forgot about it in the very next morning. Sad but true.
Having said this, it is accepted that this special gift is needed for us in order to survive a near driven to madness experience such as being abused or victimised by a monster. Even the monster himself, needs selective dementia too, in order to carry on being a monster and stop his own hand from pulling the trigger and blow his own head off, on discovering what a monster he truly is actually. For the mandevil, expect no remorse. He would cling on to his tyranny like trophies. He is the dweller of the everlasting fire, forever. And unlike Sam in the Supernatural, he won't get any share of torturing, ever.
Even if he had been killing, plundering and destroying for a hundred years, being in the damnation of hell for eternity would suffice for all his sins. For a unislamic Muslim that chose the similar path, a couple billions of years would cleanse all his sins before he is permitted to enter paradise for having a tiny faith deep inside his heart in Allah. But to put things in perspective, try clinging on to a burning match stick with your fingers. If you could hold on to it until the fire is gone then you should not have any fear of entering the eternal burning fire of hell.
Only In Malaysia
WORKING AFTER WORKING HOURS
By
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
on December 27, 2009
1. Like the Bar Council I am disappointed that the Appeal Court had overturned the High Court's decision to stop the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission from questioning suspects after working hours.
2. We must respect working hours. Criminals should not commit crimes after working hours. Of course police should not investigate crimes after working hours. Firemen should wait until office opens before putting out fires.
3. The same should apply for weekends and public holidays. No questioning, no investigations and no putting out fires during non-working days.
4. What about politics and politicians? Well no politicking outside office hours also.
5. If we have more holidays then the crime rate would go down as crimes should only be committed during working hours.
http://chedet.co.cc/chedetblog/2009/12/working-after-working-hours.html
srizals@gmail.com
God how I wish if this ruling is applicable to the rest of the government servants...
By
Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
on December 27, 2009
1. Like the Bar Council I am disappointed that the Appeal Court had overturned the High Court's decision to stop the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission from questioning suspects after working hours.
2. We must respect working hours. Criminals should not commit crimes after working hours. Of course police should not investigate crimes after working hours. Firemen should wait until office opens before putting out fires.
3. The same should apply for weekends and public holidays. No questioning, no investigations and no putting out fires during non-working days.
4. What about politics and politicians? Well no politicking outside office hours also.
5. If we have more holidays then the crime rate would go down as crimes should only be committed during working hours.
http://chedet.co.cc/chedetblog/2009/12/working-after-working-hours.html
srizals@gmail.com
God how I wish if this ruling is applicable to the rest of the government servants...
Sunday, December 27, 2009
NATO Bombings
No justice for the victims of NATO bombings
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/no-justice-victims-nato-bombings-20090423
23 April 2009
Ten years on, no-one has been held to account for the NATO attack on the Serbian state radio and television building that left 16 civilians dead. Sixteen civilians were also injured during the air attack on 23 April 1999 on the headquarters and studios of Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS) in central Belgrade.
Those killed included a make-up artist, a cameraman, an editor, a programme director, three security guards and other media support staff. An estimated 200 staff are thought to have been working in the building at the time.
"The bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime," Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s Balkans expert said.
NATO officials confirmed to Amnesty International in early 2000 that they targeted RTS because of its propaganda function, in order to undermine the morale of the population and the armed forces.
"Justifying an attack on the grounds of combating propaganda stretches the meaning of 'effective contribution to military action' and 'definite military advantage'. These are essential requirements of the legal definition of a military objective - beyond acceptable bounds of interpretation.
"Even if NATO genuinely believed RTS was a legitimate target, the attack was disproportionate and hence a war crime," Sian Jones said.
NATO officials also confirmed that no specific warning of this particular attack was given, even though they knew many civilians would be in the RTS building.
The raid was part of NATO's "Operation Allied Force" against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999. Approximately 500 civilians were killed and 900 injured during the course of the conflict.
Many of these casualties were caused by indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks and a failure to take necessary precautions to protect civilians.
In several attacks, including the Grdelica railroad bridge on 12 April 1999, the road bridge in Lužane on 1 May 1999 and Varvarin bridge on 30 May 1999, NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians. In other cases, including the attacks on displaced civilians in Djakovica on 14 April 1999 and Koriša on 13 May 1999, NATO failed to take necessary precautions to minimize civilian casualties.
"Civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced during the conflict if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war," said Sian Jones. "Ten years on, no public investigation has ever been conducted by NATO or its member states into these incidents."
Amnesty International recommended as early as 2000 that the victims of violations committed by NATO receive redress. Yet the victims of the RTS bombing and their relatives have never received any redress or reparations, including compensation, despite proceedings in domestic courts in Serbia and further applications to the European Court of Human Rights (Banković and others v Belgium and others and Markovic v Italy), which ruled the cases inadmissible.
Many of the problems that undermined compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law in "Operation Allied Force" – such as lack of clarity in the command structure and decision-making processes on target selection, divergent understanding among national contingents of applicable international law – persist in the alliance’s operations in Afghanistan.
"It now appears that NATO has failed to learn from the mistakes of Operation Allied Force. If anything, NATO appears to have taken a step backward in transparency, releasing less information about attacks it carries out in Afghanistan than it did during Operation Allied Force," said Sian Jones.
"The most powerful military alliance in the world cannot afford but to set the highest standards of protection of civilians according to international humanitarian law. It must be held accountable for any violations of that law."
Read More
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) /NATO: "Collateral damage" or unlawful killings? Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force (Report, 5 June 2000)
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/no-justice-victims-nato-bombings-20090423
23 April 2009
Ten years on, no-one has been held to account for the NATO attack on the Serbian state radio and television building that left 16 civilians dead. Sixteen civilians were also injured during the air attack on 23 April 1999 on the headquarters and studios of Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS) in central Belgrade.
Those killed included a make-up artist, a cameraman, an editor, a programme director, three security guards and other media support staff. An estimated 200 staff are thought to have been working in the building at the time.
"The bombing of the headquarters of Serbian state radio and television was a deliberate attack on a civilian object and as such constitutes a war crime," Sian Jones, Amnesty International’s Balkans expert said.
NATO officials confirmed to Amnesty International in early 2000 that they targeted RTS because of its propaganda function, in order to undermine the morale of the population and the armed forces.
"Justifying an attack on the grounds of combating propaganda stretches the meaning of 'effective contribution to military action' and 'definite military advantage'. These are essential requirements of the legal definition of a military objective - beyond acceptable bounds of interpretation.
"Even if NATO genuinely believed RTS was a legitimate target, the attack was disproportionate and hence a war crime," Sian Jones said.
NATO officials also confirmed that no specific warning of this particular attack was given, even though they knew many civilians would be in the RTS building.
The raid was part of NATO's "Operation Allied Force" against the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between March and June 1999. Approximately 500 civilians were killed and 900 injured during the course of the conflict.
Many of these casualties were caused by indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks and a failure to take necessary precautions to protect civilians.
In several attacks, including the Grdelica railroad bridge on 12 April 1999, the road bridge in Lužane on 1 May 1999 and Varvarin bridge on 30 May 1999, NATO forces failed to suspend their attack after it was evident that they had struck civilians. In other cases, including the attacks on displaced civilians in Djakovica on 14 April 1999 and Koriša on 13 May 1999, NATO failed to take necessary precautions to minimize civilian casualties.
"Civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced during the conflict if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war," said Sian Jones. "Ten years on, no public investigation has ever been conducted by NATO or its member states into these incidents."
Amnesty International recommended as early as 2000 that the victims of violations committed by NATO receive redress. Yet the victims of the RTS bombing and their relatives have never received any redress or reparations, including compensation, despite proceedings in domestic courts in Serbia and further applications to the European Court of Human Rights (Banković and others v Belgium and others and Markovic v Italy), which ruled the cases inadmissible.
Many of the problems that undermined compliance with international humanitarian and human rights law in "Operation Allied Force" – such as lack of clarity in the command structure and decision-making processes on target selection, divergent understanding among national contingents of applicable international law – persist in the alliance’s operations in Afghanistan.
"It now appears that NATO has failed to learn from the mistakes of Operation Allied Force. If anything, NATO appears to have taken a step backward in transparency, releasing less information about attacks it carries out in Afghanistan than it did during Operation Allied Force," said Sian Jones.
"The most powerful military alliance in the world cannot afford but to set the highest standards of protection of civilians according to international humanitarian law. It must be held accountable for any violations of that law."
Read More
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) /NATO: "Collateral damage" or unlawful killings? Violations of the Laws of War by NATO during Operation Allied Force (Report, 5 June 2000)
Were Germans pagans under Hitler?
srizals@gmail.com
In an encounter with a Christian, he quickly brushed aside the claim that Christians were doing evil in world war 2 by claiming that Hitler and Germans were pagans. So what he did had nothing to do with Christians. Maybe this article would help to clear the issue.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
In December 1944, Germany had lost the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the Allies were preparing for victory, as World War II was coming to an end. American soldiers had landed on the beaches at Normandy in June 1944, and were advancing toward Germany from the west. The Soviet army had taken Poland in July 1944, and German troops were in retreat on the Eastern front. The war in Europe was very clearly over - except for the wanton destruction of historic German cities, which began with the bombing of Nürnberg.
Nürnberg was famous for producing toys and gingerbread cookies, not war materials; it was the ideological center of Nazi Germany and Hitler's favorite city. Nürnberg was regarded as the "most German" of all the cities in Germany, which made it a target for vindictive Allied bombing.
On the night of January 2, 1945, 514 British Lancaster bombers and 7 other British planes destroyed or damaged most of the old city, including the medieval walls, the historic castle and two centuries-old Gothic churches. At that point in the war, it was the most devastating air-raid attack on a civilian population and only the Allied bombing of Dresden, six weeks later, caused more damage and civilian deaths in Germany. On March 15, 1945, American bombs hit a church in the small historic town of Gardelegen and on March 31, 1945, the medieval city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber which had no military importance at all was bombed by American planes. When Germany was divided after the war, the eastern half was ruled by the Soviet Communists who would not allow the Germans to rebuild their churches.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
In an encounter with a Christian, he quickly brushed aside the claim that Christians were doing evil in world war 2 by claiming that Hitler and Germans were pagans. So what he did had nothing to do with Christians. Maybe this article would help to clear the issue.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
In December 1944, Germany had lost the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the Allies were preparing for victory, as World War II was coming to an end. American soldiers had landed on the beaches at Normandy in June 1944, and were advancing toward Germany from the west. The Soviet army had taken Poland in July 1944, and German troops were in retreat on the Eastern front. The war in Europe was very clearly over - except for the wanton destruction of historic German cities, which began with the bombing of Nürnberg.
Nürnberg was famous for producing toys and gingerbread cookies, not war materials; it was the ideological center of Nazi Germany and Hitler's favorite city. Nürnberg was regarded as the "most German" of all the cities in Germany, which made it a target for vindictive Allied bombing.
On the night of January 2, 1945, 514 British Lancaster bombers and 7 other British planes destroyed or damaged most of the old city, including the medieval walls, the historic castle and two centuries-old Gothic churches. At that point in the war, it was the most devastating air-raid attack on a civilian population and only the Allied bombing of Dresden, six weeks later, caused more damage and civilian deaths in Germany. On March 15, 1945, American bombs hit a church in the small historic town of Gardelegen and on March 31, 1945, the medieval city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber which had no military importance at all was bombed by American planes. When Germany was divided after the war, the eastern half was ruled by the Soviet Communists who would not allow the Germans to rebuild their churches.
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
Noam Chomsky: If the Nurmberg Laws Were Applied
If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied...
Noam Chomsky
Delivered around 1990
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you've got to think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo. And once you think back, the question doesn't even require a moment's waste of time. For example, one general at the Tokyo trials, which were the worst, General Yamashita, was hanged on the grounds that troops in the Philippines, which were technically under his command (though it was so late in the war that he had no contact with them -- it was the very end of the war and there were some troops running around the Philippines who he had no contact with), had carried out atrocities, so he was hanged. Well, try that one out and you've already wiped out everybody.
But getting closer to the sort of core of the Nuremberg-Tokyo tribunals, in Truman's case at the Tokyo tribunal, there was one authentic, independent Asian justice, an Indian, who was also the one person in the court who had any background in international law [Radhabinod Pal], and he dissented from the whole judgment, dissented from the whole thing. He wrote a very interesting and important dissent, seven hundred pages -- you can find it in the Harvard Law Library, that's where I found it, maybe somewhere else, and it's interesting reading. He goes through the trial record and shows, I think pretty convincingly, it was pretty farcical. He ends up by saying something like this: if there is any crime in the Pacific theater that compares with the crimes of the Nazis, for which they're being hanged at Nuremberg, it was the dropping of the two atom bombs. And he says nothing of that sort can be attributed to the present accused. Well, that's a plausible argument, I think, if you look at the background. Truman proceeded to organize a major counter-insurgency campaign in Greece which killed off about one hundred and sixty thousand people, sixty thousand refugees, another sixty thousand or so people tortured, political system dismantled, right-wing regime. American corporations came in and took it over. I think that's a crime under Nuremberg.
Well, what about Eisenhower? You could argue over whether his overthrow of the government of Guatemala was a crime. There was a CIA-backed army, which went in under U.S. threats and bombing and so on to undermine that capitalist democracy. I think that's a crime. The invasion of Lebanon in 1958, I don't know, you could argue. A lot of people were killed. The overthrow of the government of Iran is another one -- through a CIA-backed coup. But Guatemala suffices for Eisenhower and there's plenty more.
Kennedy is easy. The invasion of Cuba was outright aggression. Eisenhower planned it, incidentally, so he was involved in a conspiracy to invade another country, which we can add to his score. After the invasion of Cuba, Kennedy launched a huge terrorist campaign against Cuba, which was very serious. No joke. Bombardment of industrial installations with killing of plenty of people, bombing hotels, sinking fishing boats, sabotage. Later, under Nixon, it even went as far as poisoning livestock and so on. Big affair. And then came Vietnam; he invaded Vietnam. He invaded South Vietnam in 1962. He sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing. Okay. We took care of Kennedy.
Johnson is trivial. The Indochina war alone, forget the invasion of the Dominican Republic, was a major war crime.
Nixon the same. Nixon invaded Cambodia. The Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia in the early '70's was not all that different from the Khmer Rouge atrocities, in scale somewhat less, but not much less. Same was true in Laos. I could go on case after case with them, that's easy.
Ford was only there for a very short time so he didn't have time for a lot of crimes, but he managed one major one. He supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which was near genocidal. I mean, it makes Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait look like a tea party. That was supported decisively by the United States, both the diplmatic and the necessary military support came primarily from the United States. This was picked up under Carter.
Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.
Reagan. It's not a question. I mean, the stuff in Central America alone suffices. Support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon also makes Saddam Hussein look pretty mild in terms of casualties and destruction. That suffices.
Bush. Well, need we talk on? In fact, in the Reagan period there's even an International Court of Justice decision on what they call the "unlawful use of force" for which Reagan and Bush were condemned. I mean, you could argue about some of these people, but I think you could make a pretty strong case if you look at the Nuremberg decisions, Nuremberg and Tokyo, and you ask what people were condemned for. I think American presidents are well within the range.
Also, bear in mind, people ought to be pretty critical about the Nuremberg principles. I don't mean to suggest they're some kind of model of probity or anything. For one thing, they were ex post facto. These were determined to be crimes by the victors after they had won. Now, that already raises questions. In the case of the American presidents, they weren't ex post facto. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself what was called a "war crime"? How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple. and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and couldn't show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans and the Japanese. So that wasn't a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo into rubble? So much rubble you can't even drop an atom bomb there because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason they didn't bomb Tokyo. That's not a war crime because we did it. Bombing Dresden is not a war crime. We did it. German Admiral Gernetz -- when he was brought to trial (he was a submarine commander or something) for sinking merchant vessels or whatever he did -- he called as a defense witness American Admiral Nimitz who testified that the U.S. had done pretty much the same thing, so he was off, he didn't get tried. And in fact if you run through the whole record, it turns out a war crime is any war crime that you can condemn them for but they can't condemn us for. Well, you know, that raises some questions.
I should say, actually, that this, interestingly, is said pretty openly by the people involved and it's regarded as a moral position. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg was Telford Taylor. You know, a decent man. He wrote a book called Nuremberg and Vietnam. And in it he tries to consider whether there are crimes in Vietnam that fall under the Nuremberg principles. Predictably, he says not. But it's interesting to see how he spells out the Nuremberg principles.
They're just the way I said. In fact, I'm taking it from him, but he doesn't regard that as a criticism. He says, well, that's the way we did it, and should have done it that way. There's an article on this in The Yale Law Journal ["Review Symposium: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in International Affairs," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 80, #7, June 1971] which is reprinted in a book [Chapter 3 of Chomsky's For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973)] if you're interested.
I think one ought to raise many questions about the Nuremberg tribunal, and especially the Tokyo tribunal. The Tokyo tribunal was in many ways farcical. The people condemned at Tokyo had done things for which plenty of people on the other side could be condemned. Furthermore, just as in the case of Saddam Hussein, many of their worst atrocities the U.S. didn't care about. Like some of the worst atrocities of the Japanese were in the late '30s, but the U.S. didn't especially care about that. What the U.S. cared about was that Japan was moving to close off the China market. That was no good. But not the slaughter of a couple of hundred thousand people or whatever they did in Nanking. That's not a big deal.
Noam Chomsky
Delivered around 1990
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. By violation of the Nuremberg laws I mean the same kind of crimes for which people were hanged in Nuremberg. And Nuremberg means Nuremberg and Tokyo. So first of all you've got to think back as to what people were hanged for at Nuremberg and Tokyo. And once you think back, the question doesn't even require a moment's waste of time. For example, one general at the Tokyo trials, which were the worst, General Yamashita, was hanged on the grounds that troops in the Philippines, which were technically under his command (though it was so late in the war that he had no contact with them -- it was the very end of the war and there were some troops running around the Philippines who he had no contact with), had carried out atrocities, so he was hanged. Well, try that one out and you've already wiped out everybody.
But getting closer to the sort of core of the Nuremberg-Tokyo tribunals, in Truman's case at the Tokyo tribunal, there was one authentic, independent Asian justice, an Indian, who was also the one person in the court who had any background in international law [Radhabinod Pal], and he dissented from the whole judgment, dissented from the whole thing. He wrote a very interesting and important dissent, seven hundred pages -- you can find it in the Harvard Law Library, that's where I found it, maybe somewhere else, and it's interesting reading. He goes through the trial record and shows, I think pretty convincingly, it was pretty farcical. He ends up by saying something like this: if there is any crime in the Pacific theater that compares with the crimes of the Nazis, for which they're being hanged at Nuremberg, it was the dropping of the two atom bombs. And he says nothing of that sort can be attributed to the present accused. Well, that's a plausible argument, I think, if you look at the background. Truman proceeded to organize a major counter-insurgency campaign in Greece which killed off about one hundred and sixty thousand people, sixty thousand refugees, another sixty thousand or so people tortured, political system dismantled, right-wing regime. American corporations came in and took it over. I think that's a crime under Nuremberg.
Well, what about Eisenhower? You could argue over whether his overthrow of the government of Guatemala was a crime. There was a CIA-backed army, which went in under U.S. threats and bombing and so on to undermine that capitalist democracy. I think that's a crime. The invasion of Lebanon in 1958, I don't know, you could argue. A lot of people were killed. The overthrow of the government of Iran is another one -- through a CIA-backed coup. But Guatemala suffices for Eisenhower and there's plenty more.
Kennedy is easy. The invasion of Cuba was outright aggression. Eisenhower planned it, incidentally, so he was involved in a conspiracy to invade another country, which we can add to his score. After the invasion of Cuba, Kennedy launched a huge terrorist campaign against Cuba, which was very serious. No joke. Bombardment of industrial installations with killing of plenty of people, bombing hotels, sinking fishing boats, sabotage. Later, under Nixon, it even went as far as poisoning livestock and so on. Big affair. And then came Vietnam; he invaded Vietnam. He invaded South Vietnam in 1962. He sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing. Okay. We took care of Kennedy.
Johnson is trivial. The Indochina war alone, forget the invasion of the Dominican Republic, was a major war crime.
Nixon the same. Nixon invaded Cambodia. The Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia in the early '70's was not all that different from the Khmer Rouge atrocities, in scale somewhat less, but not much less. Same was true in Laos. I could go on case after case with them, that's easy.
Ford was only there for a very short time so he didn't have time for a lot of crimes, but he managed one major one. He supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which was near genocidal. I mean, it makes Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait look like a tea party. That was supported decisively by the United States, both the diplmatic and the necessary military support came primarily from the United States. This was picked up under Carter.
Carter was the least violent of American presidents but he did things which I think would certainly fall under Nuremberg provisions. As the Indonesian atrocities increased to a level of really near-genocide, the U.S. aid under Carter increased. It reached a peak in 1978 as the atrocities peaked. So we took care of Carter, even forgetting other things.
Reagan. It's not a question. I mean, the stuff in Central America alone suffices. Support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon also makes Saddam Hussein look pretty mild in terms of casualties and destruction. That suffices.
Bush. Well, need we talk on? In fact, in the Reagan period there's even an International Court of Justice decision on what they call the "unlawful use of force" for which Reagan and Bush were condemned. I mean, you could argue about some of these people, but I think you could make a pretty strong case if you look at the Nuremberg decisions, Nuremberg and Tokyo, and you ask what people were condemned for. I think American presidents are well within the range.
Also, bear in mind, people ought to be pretty critical about the Nuremberg principles. I don't mean to suggest they're some kind of model of probity or anything. For one thing, they were ex post facto. These were determined to be crimes by the victors after they had won. Now, that already raises questions. In the case of the American presidents, they weren't ex post facto. Furthermore, you have to ask yourself what was called a "war crime"? How did they decide what was a war crime at Nuremberg and Tokyo? And the answer is pretty simple. and not very pleasant. There was a criterion. Kind of like an operational criterion. If the enemy had done it and couldn't show that we had done it, then it was a war crime. So like bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a war crime because we had done more of it than the Germans and the Japanese. So that wasn't a war crime. You want to turn Tokyo into rubble? So much rubble you can't even drop an atom bomb there because nobody will see anything if you do, which is the real reason they didn't bomb Tokyo. That's not a war crime because we did it. Bombing Dresden is not a war crime. We did it. German Admiral Gernetz -- when he was brought to trial (he was a submarine commander or something) for sinking merchant vessels or whatever he did -- he called as a defense witness American Admiral Nimitz who testified that the U.S. had done pretty much the same thing, so he was off, he didn't get tried. And in fact if you run through the whole record, it turns out a war crime is any war crime that you can condemn them for but they can't condemn us for. Well, you know, that raises some questions.
I should say, actually, that this, interestingly, is said pretty openly by the people involved and it's regarded as a moral position. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg was Telford Taylor. You know, a decent man. He wrote a book called Nuremberg and Vietnam. And in it he tries to consider whether there are crimes in Vietnam that fall under the Nuremberg principles. Predictably, he says not. But it's interesting to see how he spells out the Nuremberg principles.
They're just the way I said. In fact, I'm taking it from him, but he doesn't regard that as a criticism. He says, well, that's the way we did it, and should have done it that way. There's an article on this in The Yale Law Journal ["Review Symposium: War Crimes, the Rule of Force in International Affairs," The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 80, #7, June 1971] which is reprinted in a book [Chapter 3 of Chomsky's For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973)] if you're interested.
I think one ought to raise many questions about the Nuremberg tribunal, and especially the Tokyo tribunal. The Tokyo tribunal was in many ways farcical. The people condemned at Tokyo had done things for which plenty of people on the other side could be condemned. Furthermore, just as in the case of Saddam Hussein, many of their worst atrocities the U.S. didn't care about. Like some of the worst atrocities of the Japanese were in the late '30s, but the U.S. didn't especially care about that. What the U.S. cared about was that Japan was moving to close off the China market. That was no good. But not the slaughter of a couple of hundred thousand people or whatever they did in Nanking. That's not a big deal.
Dresden Holocaust
The WWII Dresden Holocaust -
'A Single Column Of Flame'
2-6-2
http://www.rense.com/general19/flame.htm
"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.
___
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.
In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.
Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.
However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."
So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.
But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin.
That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.
Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.
The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.
It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.
At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:
"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."
MELTING HUMAN FLESH
Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.
However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.
In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.
When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.
A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."
****************
Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.
In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, the town in eastern Germany, during the last months of the Second World War. More than 600,000 incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. ...
Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....
In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five, he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes, by your people [the English], may I say," he insists. "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm fond of your people, on occasion, but I was just thinking about 'Bomber Harris, who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up. A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that's really sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being good sports," he concedes.
The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19
***************
The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million -- persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000.*
Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china--and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware!
It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the "London blitz." In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.
In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.
If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."
This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!
Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.
More links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
http://ww2history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_bombing_of_dresden
'A Single Column Of Flame'
2-6-2
http://www.rense.com/general19/flame.htm
"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr
On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.
___
Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.
In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city."
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.
Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.
However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable."
So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.
But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin.
That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines.
Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them."
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.
The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.
It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.
At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:
"The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."
MELTING HUMAN FLESH
Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots.
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.
However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.
In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.
When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.
A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."
****************
Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.
In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, the town in eastern Germany, during the last months of the Second World War. More than 600,000 incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. ...
Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....
In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five, he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes, by your people [the English], may I say," he insists. "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm fond of your people, on occasion, but I was just thinking about 'Bomber Harris, who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up. A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that's really sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being good sports," he concedes.
The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19
***************
The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million -- persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000.*
Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china--and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware!
It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the "London blitz." In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war.
In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children.
If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders."
This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates!
Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.
More links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
http://ww2history.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_bombing_of_dresden
Christopher Bollyn: Fire Bombing
SUPPRESSED SUBJECT: WWII FIRE BOMBING OF GERMAN CITIES
Posted By: ChristopherBollyn
Date: Thursday, 29-Jan-2004 11:35:41
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/43701
WORLD WAR II FIRE BOMBING
REMAINS SUPPRESSED SUBJECT
By Christopher Bollyn
While the reconstruction of Germany’s cultural landmarks is celebrated, discussion of how and why German cities were reduced to rubble by Allied firebombing continues to be a suppressed subject.
GOSLAR, Germany – In order to understand the extent of the destruction of Europe’s cultural heritage caused by the Allied firebombing of German cities, it is worthwhile to visit Goslar, one of the few medieval cities of Germany that survived the Second World War intact.
To stroll through Goslar’s 1,000-year-old streets and to dwell in its ancient buildings brings the modern-day visitor in touch with Germany’s medieval past. Goslar, and its famous silver mine, was the capital city of the Holy Roman Empire and a founding member of the Hanseatic League long before Germany became a nation in 1870.
Because Goslar survived the Second World War largely unscathed, it gives perspective to the culture that was lost during the widespread devastation that occurred when U.S. and British bombers incinerated some 1,000 German towns and cities during the final months of the war.
Thirty miles to the northwest is Hildesheim, a medieval Catholic bishopric founded in 814 by Ludwig the Pious. The old city of Hildesheim was obliterated in a holocaust caused by 250 British bombers dropping bombs and incendiary devices during a midday bombing strike on March 22, 1945. More than 10,000 inhabitants of Hildesheim, about one-third of the population, were killed and 82 percent of the city was reduced to rubble during the short and intense bombing strike, according to historians at its museum.
Although Hildesheim was rebuilt after the war, like most German cities destroyed by Allied firebombing, the rebuilt city looked nothing like the 1,100-year-old city that had been destroyed. The elaborately carved and painted half-timber Fachwerk houses from the 15th and 16th Centuries were replaced with austere non-descript modern constructions.
Until March 1945, Hildesheim had been considered "a jewel among German cities" because of its architectural and artistic treasures. In the aftermath of the war the only buildings that were rebuilt in their original form were the churches and Cathedral of Hildesheim.
The Cathedral of Hildesheim was built around a rose bush that Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, had discovered in bloom during a winter hunting trip. After the firebombing, the Cathedral was reduced to rubble and the famous rose bush was burned to the ground. The roots survived, however, and the 1,100-year-old rose bush still flowers high against the Cathedral wall.
Forty-four years after the bombing, in 1989, a citizen-led initiative succeeded in rebuilding the city’s marketplace with its 500-year-old buildings. One of the most remarkable reconstructions is the near-exact replica of the famous Knochenhauer Amtshaus, a late-Gothic masterpiece of Fachwerk construction originally built in 1529.
The multi-story building, which once again houses a guildhall, a museum and a restaurant, was rebuilt in the original Fachwerk style without using a single steel fastener. Some 7,500 wooden pegs hold the timber frame together and there is not a single right angle in the entire building, according to museum historians.
However, what is conspicuously lacking in the city museum is any display depicting the devastation that British fire-bombers brought to Hildesheim and its civilian population three weeks before the war ended in April 1945. Only two aerial photos of the devastated town can be found in the entire museum – in its uppermost attic.
Dr. Manfred Boetzkes, the historian who is director of Hildesheim’s museum told American Free Press that when the museum opened in 1989 it had an extensive display about the bombing, which even included specimens of the bombs that had been used. Conservative politicians from Hildesheim, however, found the display to be "too provocative," and it was soon removed.
When the firebombing display was removed, the themes of the museum were also changed to focus more on Jewish life in Hildesheim and Nazi persecution of Jews, a museum curator explained.
AFP asked Boetzkes if he thought a display on the firebombing of Hildesheim was necessary for the city’s historical museum. "Yes," he said, "I think so." Boetzkes added that a new display on the bombing is being planned.
Asked if Hildesheim’s post-war generations were aware of what the city had looked like before it was destroyed, Boetzkes said very few young people knew about the city’s former splendor.
In an effort to show what the city once looked like, Boetzkes has published a book, Alt Hildesheim in Aquarellen, that contains detailed watercolor paintings of the streets and buildings of old Hildesheim. The paintings were done between 1892 and 1919.
"There was no military or strategic reason to bomb Hildesheim," Boetzkes said. Asked then why the British had bombed the city and left two strategic industries outside of town untouched, Boetzkes said it was "psychological warfare" aimed at traumatizing and demoralizing the German population.
In a recently released film entitled "The Fog of War," former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara, who participated in the firebombing of Tokyo as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, says if the U.S. had been on the losing side of World War II, he could have been tried as a war criminal.
"There’s a definition of what’s legally acceptable in war – it’s the basis for the war crimes element of the International Criminal Court in the Hague," McNamara says in an interview, "I don’t know whether the Tokyo fire-bombing in March of 1945 was thought to be illegal at the time. I doubt it. It was similar to what was done at Dresden and Hamburg and so on. Today, I think it would certainly be considered illegal."
Dresden, which was devastated in a massive firebombing attack on Feb. 13-14, 1945, has rebuilt many of its cultural landmarks. The restoration of Dresden’s famous Frauenkirche, which lay in ruins for decades, is today nearly complete. As in Hildesheim, in Dresden, where tens of thousands of civilians and refugees died in the holocaust created by the firebombing, there is no central memorial or museum space dedicated to the subject of the destruction of the city.
"I didn’t argue about the legality of the air war," Jörg Friedrich, the German author of two recent books on the Allied fire-bombing said, "this would have hindered the image I intended to draw. The landscape of the destruction has to be described.
"Germany, with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Russian campaign, cannot in any way be self-righteous about this," Friedrich said, "but we should engage in a common fight for the truth.
"You have to look into the face of the past," Friedrich said. "Then you can ask if it was a heroic one or a tragic one – or perhaps a criminal one – or if it included necessary evils in a tragic time. You have to look into this face even if it has a Medusa face, and in the British case the Medusa’s face is the bombing campaigns."
British prime minister Winston Churchill said the fire-bombing of German cities was designed to increase "terror" in a 1945 memo to his Chiefs of Staff: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed," he wrote during the final weeks of the war.
Asked why it has taken so long for this history to be told, Friedrich said, "Until 1989 we were in a state of war, but in 1990 the war was over and the question could be asked, ‘What was the fate of this nation?’"
According to Friedrich, after 1870 the unified German nation posed a serious problem for the British Empire and their allies, who decided that Germany had to be destroyed. "Germany had to be fought by war," Friedrich said, "This had to be done city by city, man by man."
Finis
Additional links:
http://ezinearticles.com/?German-Memory---Firebombing-on-Dresden-and-the-Devastation&id=562646
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Firebombing
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e090217
Posted By: ChristopherBollyn
Date: Thursday, 29-Jan-2004 11:35:41
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/43701
WORLD WAR II FIRE BOMBING
REMAINS SUPPRESSED SUBJECT
By Christopher Bollyn
While the reconstruction of Germany’s cultural landmarks is celebrated, discussion of how and why German cities were reduced to rubble by Allied firebombing continues to be a suppressed subject.
GOSLAR, Germany – In order to understand the extent of the destruction of Europe’s cultural heritage caused by the Allied firebombing of German cities, it is worthwhile to visit Goslar, one of the few medieval cities of Germany that survived the Second World War intact.
To stroll through Goslar’s 1,000-year-old streets and to dwell in its ancient buildings brings the modern-day visitor in touch with Germany’s medieval past. Goslar, and its famous silver mine, was the capital city of the Holy Roman Empire and a founding member of the Hanseatic League long before Germany became a nation in 1870.
Because Goslar survived the Second World War largely unscathed, it gives perspective to the culture that was lost during the widespread devastation that occurred when U.S. and British bombers incinerated some 1,000 German towns and cities during the final months of the war.
Thirty miles to the northwest is Hildesheim, a medieval Catholic bishopric founded in 814 by Ludwig the Pious. The old city of Hildesheim was obliterated in a holocaust caused by 250 British bombers dropping bombs and incendiary devices during a midday bombing strike on March 22, 1945. More than 10,000 inhabitants of Hildesheim, about one-third of the population, were killed and 82 percent of the city was reduced to rubble during the short and intense bombing strike, according to historians at its museum.
Although Hildesheim was rebuilt after the war, like most German cities destroyed by Allied firebombing, the rebuilt city looked nothing like the 1,100-year-old city that had been destroyed. The elaborately carved and painted half-timber Fachwerk houses from the 15th and 16th Centuries were replaced with austere non-descript modern constructions.
Until March 1945, Hildesheim had been considered "a jewel among German cities" because of its architectural and artistic treasures. In the aftermath of the war the only buildings that were rebuilt in their original form were the churches and Cathedral of Hildesheim.
The Cathedral of Hildesheim was built around a rose bush that Ludwig the Pious, son of Charlemagne, had discovered in bloom during a winter hunting trip. After the firebombing, the Cathedral was reduced to rubble and the famous rose bush was burned to the ground. The roots survived, however, and the 1,100-year-old rose bush still flowers high against the Cathedral wall.
Forty-four years after the bombing, in 1989, a citizen-led initiative succeeded in rebuilding the city’s marketplace with its 500-year-old buildings. One of the most remarkable reconstructions is the near-exact replica of the famous Knochenhauer Amtshaus, a late-Gothic masterpiece of Fachwerk construction originally built in 1529.
The multi-story building, which once again houses a guildhall, a museum and a restaurant, was rebuilt in the original Fachwerk style without using a single steel fastener. Some 7,500 wooden pegs hold the timber frame together and there is not a single right angle in the entire building, according to museum historians.
However, what is conspicuously lacking in the city museum is any display depicting the devastation that British fire-bombers brought to Hildesheim and its civilian population three weeks before the war ended in April 1945. Only two aerial photos of the devastated town can be found in the entire museum – in its uppermost attic.
Dr. Manfred Boetzkes, the historian who is director of Hildesheim’s museum told American Free Press that when the museum opened in 1989 it had an extensive display about the bombing, which even included specimens of the bombs that had been used. Conservative politicians from Hildesheim, however, found the display to be "too provocative," and it was soon removed.
When the firebombing display was removed, the themes of the museum were also changed to focus more on Jewish life in Hildesheim and Nazi persecution of Jews, a museum curator explained.
AFP asked Boetzkes if he thought a display on the firebombing of Hildesheim was necessary for the city’s historical museum. "Yes," he said, "I think so." Boetzkes added that a new display on the bombing is being planned.
Asked if Hildesheim’s post-war generations were aware of what the city had looked like before it was destroyed, Boetzkes said very few young people knew about the city’s former splendor.
In an effort to show what the city once looked like, Boetzkes has published a book, Alt Hildesheim in Aquarellen, that contains detailed watercolor paintings of the streets and buildings of old Hildesheim. The paintings were done between 1892 and 1919.
"There was no military or strategic reason to bomb Hildesheim," Boetzkes said. Asked then why the British had bombed the city and left two strategic industries outside of town untouched, Boetzkes said it was "psychological warfare" aimed at traumatizing and demoralizing the German population.
In a recently released film entitled "The Fog of War," former U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara, who participated in the firebombing of Tokyo as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, says if the U.S. had been on the losing side of World War II, he could have been tried as a war criminal.
"There’s a definition of what’s legally acceptable in war – it’s the basis for the war crimes element of the International Criminal Court in the Hague," McNamara says in an interview, "I don’t know whether the Tokyo fire-bombing in March of 1945 was thought to be illegal at the time. I doubt it. It was similar to what was done at Dresden and Hamburg and so on. Today, I think it would certainly be considered illegal."
Dresden, which was devastated in a massive firebombing attack on Feb. 13-14, 1945, has rebuilt many of its cultural landmarks. The restoration of Dresden’s famous Frauenkirche, which lay in ruins for decades, is today nearly complete. As in Hildesheim, in Dresden, where tens of thousands of civilians and refugees died in the holocaust created by the firebombing, there is no central memorial or museum space dedicated to the subject of the destruction of the city.
"I didn’t argue about the legality of the air war," Jörg Friedrich, the German author of two recent books on the Allied fire-bombing said, "this would have hindered the image I intended to draw. The landscape of the destruction has to be described.
"Germany, with the horrors of the Holocaust and the Russian campaign, cannot in any way be self-righteous about this," Friedrich said, "but we should engage in a common fight for the truth.
"You have to look into the face of the past," Friedrich said. "Then you can ask if it was a heroic one or a tragic one – or perhaps a criminal one – or if it included necessary evils in a tragic time. You have to look into this face even if it has a Medusa face, and in the British case the Medusa’s face is the bombing campaigns."
British prime minister Winston Churchill said the fire-bombing of German cities was designed to increase "terror" in a 1945 memo to his Chiefs of Staff: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed," he wrote during the final weeks of the war.
Asked why it has taken so long for this history to be told, Friedrich said, "Until 1989 we were in a state of war, but in 1990 the war was over and the question could be asked, ‘What was the fate of this nation?’"
According to Friedrich, after 1870 the unified German nation posed a serious problem for the British Empire and their allies, who decided that Germany had to be destroyed. "Germany had to be fought by war," Friedrich said, "This had to be done city by city, man by man."
Finis
Additional links:
http://ezinearticles.com/?German-Memory---Firebombing-on-Dresden-and-the-Devastation&id=562646
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Firebombing
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e090217
Firebombing of Civilians: An Act of Terror Revisited?
Firebombing of Japanese Cities during World War II
taken from http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/fire.html
One of the areas that almost everyone knows about concerning World War II is the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the areas that is not as well known, but should be, is the firebombing of Japanese cities which, overall, wrecked more death and destruction than the atomic bombs. Anyone who has seen the Miyazaki film Grave of the Fireflies, though, already has an idea just how horrible this process was.
From the book Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War, 1997: "Dissatisfaction with the damage results of high-altitude bombing with conventional explosives helped renew interest in incendiary bombing, a tactic espoused by Army Air Forces personnel as early as the 1920's."
(For those not familiar with history, the Air Force was not always a separate branch of the military. For a long time it was the Army Air Force, falling under the guidance and control of the Army.)
During the first year of bombing things did not go particularly well. Although the B-29s dropped 1,550 tons of explosives in seven missions only one bomb in 50 hit within 1,000 feet of where it was supposed to hit.
"Shortly after he assumed control of the bomber groups based in the Marianas in January 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay prepared for night-time firebombing of Japanese cities. "
Things did not immediately improve, though. The damage the bombers did was considered to be too little, and the losses to high. In February of 1945 he changed tactics. Instead of the planes simply carrying bombs, they started to carry a mix of incendiaries and fragmentation bombs.
The first test of this was Kobe, a major shipyard city. 159 tons of firebombs and 13 tons of high explosives were dropped, resulting in the destruction of 1,000 buildings and severely damaging two of the shipyards. The next attack was a complete failure, though, as the Nakajima plant in Ota was bombed with 47 of the 97 bombs dropped being duds.
So it was time to change tactics again. This time they decided to give the bomber crews intensive training and napalm was picked as a substance to be used during the bombings. A test of this was an early bombing of Tokyo, and the results were about a square mile of the city being destroyed. LeMay decided to have the planes carry heavier bombs and fly at a lower altitude.
The testing of the new tactics began with the bombing of Tokyo on March 9. 334 B-29s took part flying far lower than ever before on a bomb run. Pathfinder planes dropped napalm bombs every 100 feet to make an "X" on the ground, a target for the rest of the planes to attack. The attack itself took over three hours.
The Japanese later listed over 83,000 dead in the attack; over 40,000 wounded and a total of 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes with the destruction of 265,171 buildings. The intensity of the fire was so much that the water in the rivers reached the boiling point.
The bombing was continued and within ten days 32 square miles of Japanese cities basically ceased to exist. Bomber losses decreased during the process. By the end of April, 11 more square miles of cities had been destroyed. One and a half square miles of Yokohama, three and a half square miles of Kawasaki joined the areas destroyed.
While this was going on there was simultaneously Operation Starvation, which was the mining of Japanese harbors. 36 of 47 supply routes for the Japanese were closed down due to the process.
In May Nagoya became a target with the loss of four square miles of the city. Tokyo lost seventeen more square miles. Nine square miles of Yokohama were wiped out towards the end of May. Osaka faired no better with the loss of over 136,000 homes, 4,200 factories and almost 4,000 casualties.
Smaller targets were also hit. Toyama, a small urban area of 128,000, was 100% destroyed. From May to August , U.S. planes firebombed fifty-eight Japanese cities. Four cities, though, were kept off the firebombing list; those included Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata and Kokura.
"...Reports about bombing seldom mentioned civilian casualties, even when describing a Japanese city as ‘a flaming cauldron.' By 1945 most people accepted the bombing of urban areas, especially Japanese cities. The lack of reference to civilian losses also reflected the pervasive notion that incinerating civilians, however regrettable, was justifiable if it ultimately saved American lives." Before the Bomb
A really good example of this was the title of an article in the Atlantic Constitution: "Keep ‘Em Frying."
The firebombing went so well, in fact, that the military was actually running out of reasonable targets to firebomb and an estimate by General LeMay said they would run out of targets by Christmas of 1945.
From the June 4, 1945 issue of Newsweek, a report on the firebombing:
"Six weeks ago Tokyo had a population of nearly 7,000,000. Last week the Japs cried that Tokyo no longer existed as a city. Using new techniques and new bombs, the largest fleets of B-29s ever to take the air and turned most of the Japanese capital into ashes in two great strikes on May 24 and 26....For 105 minutes the Superfortresses filed over and dropped 700,000 incendiary bombs. ... Two nights later a force of more than 500 B-29s struck the Marunouchi district, the business heart of the Japanese Empire. ... On a target area of approximately 9 square miles the B-29s dropped 4,000 tons in one hour. The wind did the rest."
From the June 11, 1945 issue of Newsweek, another summary of results:
"On the morning of May 28, more than 450 B-29s, escorted by about 150 P-51s from Iwo Jima, roared in on he familiar trail over Tokyo Bay. Reconnaissance photos showed that 51.3 square miles of Tokyo had been burned out. ... the B-29's smothered Yokohama with 3,200 tons of incendiaries."
In July of 1945 the U.S. dropped leaflets on some Japanese cities, warning them that they could end up being firebombed. The next day six of the cities were. This was repeated. The general effect, of course, is to try and demoralize the enemy population by showing the Japanese just how totally helpless they were, and that their own military could not prevent Japanese cities from being attacked directly and bombed, something that had not happened on any scale ever in the entire history of Japan.
( 1853: Admiral Perry sailed into a Japanese harbor and used the threat of force to make Japan open itself to trade with other nations. This was about as close to a direct invasion as Japan had experienced for well over a hundred years.)
What is astonishing is that, despite the incredible losses and the fact that there was virtually nothing Japan could do to stop the bombing, the country kept fighting. No matter how many square miles were destroyed, no matter how many civilians died, the military wanted to keep fighting.
It is interesting to speculate on what would have been done with the firebombing if a physical invasion of the islands had actually taken place. Firebombing would not have reached any deep bunker defenses, so some of the army would still have been able to fight. On the other hand, firebombing a swath of land maybe fifty or sixty miles wide coupled with firebombing all the farm areas could possibly have cleared an area enough that the U.S. military could have gotten a beachhold without horrible casualties.
Still, though, that beachhold would have eventually have had to been extended further and further. Perhaps intense firebombing of adjacent areas and all crops could possibly have allowed the U.S. military to eventually conquer Japan, but the loss in civilian lives would have been almost unimaginable. It might have prevented the need for using the atomic bomb, and on the other hand it might not have. It's one of those historical questions that can never really be answered.
More links:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0310-01.htm
http://en.allexperts.com/e/f/fi/firebombing.htm
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/WW2/bombing%20of%20Nuremberg.htm
taken from http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/japan/fire.html
One of the areas that almost everyone knows about concerning World War II is the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the areas that is not as well known, but should be, is the firebombing of Japanese cities which, overall, wrecked more death and destruction than the atomic bombs. Anyone who has seen the Miyazaki film Grave of the Fireflies, though, already has an idea just how horrible this process was.
From the book Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War, 1997: "Dissatisfaction with the damage results of high-altitude bombing with conventional explosives helped renew interest in incendiary bombing, a tactic espoused by Army Air Forces personnel as early as the 1920's."
(For those not familiar with history, the Air Force was not always a separate branch of the military. For a long time it was the Army Air Force, falling under the guidance and control of the Army.)
During the first year of bombing things did not go particularly well. Although the B-29s dropped 1,550 tons of explosives in seven missions only one bomb in 50 hit within 1,000 feet of where it was supposed to hit.
"Shortly after he assumed control of the bomber groups based in the Marianas in January 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay prepared for night-time firebombing of Japanese cities. "
Things did not immediately improve, though. The damage the bombers did was considered to be too little, and the losses to high. In February of 1945 he changed tactics. Instead of the planes simply carrying bombs, they started to carry a mix of incendiaries and fragmentation bombs.
The first test of this was Kobe, a major shipyard city. 159 tons of firebombs and 13 tons of high explosives were dropped, resulting in the destruction of 1,000 buildings and severely damaging two of the shipyards. The next attack was a complete failure, though, as the Nakajima plant in Ota was bombed with 47 of the 97 bombs dropped being duds.
So it was time to change tactics again. This time they decided to give the bomber crews intensive training and napalm was picked as a substance to be used during the bombings. A test of this was an early bombing of Tokyo, and the results were about a square mile of the city being destroyed. LeMay decided to have the planes carry heavier bombs and fly at a lower altitude.
The testing of the new tactics began with the bombing of Tokyo on March 9. 334 B-29s took part flying far lower than ever before on a bomb run. Pathfinder planes dropped napalm bombs every 100 feet to make an "X" on the ground, a target for the rest of the planes to attack. The attack itself took over three hours.
The Japanese later listed over 83,000 dead in the attack; over 40,000 wounded and a total of 15.8 square miles of the city were burned to ashes with the destruction of 265,171 buildings. The intensity of the fire was so much that the water in the rivers reached the boiling point.
The bombing was continued and within ten days 32 square miles of Japanese cities basically ceased to exist. Bomber losses decreased during the process. By the end of April, 11 more square miles of cities had been destroyed. One and a half square miles of Yokohama, three and a half square miles of Kawasaki joined the areas destroyed.
While this was going on there was simultaneously Operation Starvation, which was the mining of Japanese harbors. 36 of 47 supply routes for the Japanese were closed down due to the process.
In May Nagoya became a target with the loss of four square miles of the city. Tokyo lost seventeen more square miles. Nine square miles of Yokohama were wiped out towards the end of May. Osaka faired no better with the loss of over 136,000 homes, 4,200 factories and almost 4,000 casualties.
Smaller targets were also hit. Toyama, a small urban area of 128,000, was 100% destroyed. From May to August , U.S. planes firebombed fifty-eight Japanese cities. Four cities, though, were kept off the firebombing list; those included Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Niigata and Kokura.
"...Reports about bombing seldom mentioned civilian casualties, even when describing a Japanese city as ‘a flaming cauldron.' By 1945 most people accepted the bombing of urban areas, especially Japanese cities. The lack of reference to civilian losses also reflected the pervasive notion that incinerating civilians, however regrettable, was justifiable if it ultimately saved American lives." Before the Bomb
A really good example of this was the title of an article in the Atlantic Constitution: "Keep ‘Em Frying."
The firebombing went so well, in fact, that the military was actually running out of reasonable targets to firebomb and an estimate by General LeMay said they would run out of targets by Christmas of 1945.
From the June 4, 1945 issue of Newsweek, a report on the firebombing:
"Six weeks ago Tokyo had a population of nearly 7,000,000. Last week the Japs cried that Tokyo no longer existed as a city. Using new techniques and new bombs, the largest fleets of B-29s ever to take the air and turned most of the Japanese capital into ashes in two great strikes on May 24 and 26....For 105 minutes the Superfortresses filed over and dropped 700,000 incendiary bombs. ... Two nights later a force of more than 500 B-29s struck the Marunouchi district, the business heart of the Japanese Empire. ... On a target area of approximately 9 square miles the B-29s dropped 4,000 tons in one hour. The wind did the rest."
From the June 11, 1945 issue of Newsweek, another summary of results:
"On the morning of May 28, more than 450 B-29s, escorted by about 150 P-51s from Iwo Jima, roared in on he familiar trail over Tokyo Bay. Reconnaissance photos showed that 51.3 square miles of Tokyo had been burned out. ... the B-29's smothered Yokohama with 3,200 tons of incendiaries."
In July of 1945 the U.S. dropped leaflets on some Japanese cities, warning them that they could end up being firebombed. The next day six of the cities were. This was repeated. The general effect, of course, is to try and demoralize the enemy population by showing the Japanese just how totally helpless they were, and that their own military could not prevent Japanese cities from being attacked directly and bombed, something that had not happened on any scale ever in the entire history of Japan.
( 1853: Admiral Perry sailed into a Japanese harbor and used the threat of force to make Japan open itself to trade with other nations. This was about as close to a direct invasion as Japan had experienced for well over a hundred years.)
What is astonishing is that, despite the incredible losses and the fact that there was virtually nothing Japan could do to stop the bombing, the country kept fighting. No matter how many square miles were destroyed, no matter how many civilians died, the military wanted to keep fighting.
It is interesting to speculate on what would have been done with the firebombing if a physical invasion of the islands had actually taken place. Firebombing would not have reached any deep bunker defenses, so some of the army would still have been able to fight. On the other hand, firebombing a swath of land maybe fifty or sixty miles wide coupled with firebombing all the farm areas could possibly have cleared an area enough that the U.S. military could have gotten a beachhold without horrible casualties.
Still, though, that beachhold would have eventually have had to been extended further and further. Perhaps intense firebombing of adjacent areas and all crops could possibly have allowed the U.S. military to eventually conquer Japan, but the loss in civilian lives would have been almost unimaginable. It might have prevented the need for using the atomic bomb, and on the other hand it might not have. It's one of those historical questions that can never really be answered.
More links:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0310-01.htm
http://en.allexperts.com/e/f/fi/firebombing.htm
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Nurnberg/Nurnberg01.html
http://www.century-of-flight.net/Aviation%20history/WW2/bombing%20of%20Nuremberg.htm
Foolster41:15
srizals@gmail.com
I'm sorry to have taken so much time to get back to you Foolster41, it seemed the glitches are over. But just to be sure, have you ever encountered any problems on logging in to this webpage? Sometimes it took like forever for me to get through and even crashed my browser. N could you inform me how long does it take for your comment to get through.
Ok, first of all, what made you think that Gaza is not a concentration camp? Set aside the concentrated Palestinians there, with their homes and lands being taken by the Zionists at Deir Yassin and etc. You like to ask for logical explanation against your common belief. What's your logic of believing otherwise? Can you share with me before I present the logic that you've asked for. I would like to wish you a belated happy Christmas if I may.
I'm sorry to have taken so much time to get back to you Foolster41, it seemed the glitches are over. But just to be sure, have you ever encountered any problems on logging in to this webpage? Sometimes it took like forever for me to get through and even crashed my browser. N could you inform me how long does it take for your comment to get through.
Ok, first of all, what made you think that Gaza is not a concentration camp? Set aside the concentrated Palestinians there, with their homes and lands being taken by the Zionists at Deir Yassin and etc. You like to ask for logical explanation against your common belief. What's your logic of believing otherwise? Can you share with me before I present the logic that you've asked for. I would like to wish you a belated happy Christmas if I may.
The Dark Knight
srizals@gmail.com
Another foiled attempt to assassinate a group of people that has no political significance or a legitimate military target, accept just to instil fear and chaos. Well done guys, keep up the stupid work. You just made the day for Daniel Pipes, Ali Sina and their union of infidels. Thanks a lot morons!
I wake up every morning with a worry whether a terrorist attack would be successful that day or not. And sadly, who would be the drug mule or to be precise the bomb mule. It's hard to convince the West that Muslims aren't terrorists when all the terrorist attack or attempt seemed to come from Muslims only. Since the security hike, almost all terror group went into the hibernation mode. But to make things clear, the Tamil Tigers were defeated. The heighten security measures throughout the rest of the world have finally shown some positive effect, hopefully it would last and this feeling of complacency won't backfire anytime soon now. There's no lost in keeping alert. Letting your guard down would cost a lot.
The terrorists are of no help to the Islamic cause. They are killing everyone, Muslims or Non Muslims. They didn't even make an effort of identifying legitimate military target, like Israel and NATO. To support their hideous ways would made us, the Muslims as the same with the cold blooded robots in the West that support the killings of babies, children and helpless civilians. And for that mark my word, you're going to hell with the rest of the sinners. Your time spent there might be different, but the sufferings would be just about the same.
It doesn't make any sense to be the exact match of the ones that you despised the most. What else of being ended up in the same place and having the same rewards of the ungrateful and sinful servants of Allah. May Allah have mercy on you. The helpers of the evildoers. Whether it is with words or actions. Everything would be held accountable for shying away people from Islam and helping the attackers of Islam.
To the West, scrap out the reason for the terrorists to terrorize you. Stop killing the innocents and supporting the oppressors and showing your might in someone else's fatherland. If you're just being Tu Quoque, then the risk is yours. Shit happens. It is better to play safe and play good rather than play god and finding out the hard way you're just as fragile as anybody else. Remember the law of physics. Each action would have an equal and opposite reaction. Ask your physic teacher or Newton if you don't believe me. It is only a matter of time. Sadly it would affect Muslims more than it would the terrorists, as always. Stop playing their game. You're just the pawn of the Zionists. Wake up to your senses and be the man who you really are.
Another foiled attempt to assassinate a group of people that has no political significance or a legitimate military target, accept just to instil fear and chaos. Well done guys, keep up the stupid work. You just made the day for Daniel Pipes, Ali Sina and their union of infidels. Thanks a lot morons!
I wake up every morning with a worry whether a terrorist attack would be successful that day or not. And sadly, who would be the drug mule or to be precise the bomb mule. It's hard to convince the West that Muslims aren't terrorists when all the terrorist attack or attempt seemed to come from Muslims only. Since the security hike, almost all terror group went into the hibernation mode. But to make things clear, the Tamil Tigers were defeated. The heighten security measures throughout the rest of the world have finally shown some positive effect, hopefully it would last and this feeling of complacency won't backfire anytime soon now. There's no lost in keeping alert. Letting your guard down would cost a lot.
The terrorists are of no help to the Islamic cause. They are killing everyone, Muslims or Non Muslims. They didn't even make an effort of identifying legitimate military target, like Israel and NATO. To support their hideous ways would made us, the Muslims as the same with the cold blooded robots in the West that support the killings of babies, children and helpless civilians. And for that mark my word, you're going to hell with the rest of the sinners. Your time spent there might be different, but the sufferings would be just about the same.
It doesn't make any sense to be the exact match of the ones that you despised the most. What else of being ended up in the same place and having the same rewards of the ungrateful and sinful servants of Allah. May Allah have mercy on you. The helpers of the evildoers. Whether it is with words or actions. Everything would be held accountable for shying away people from Islam and helping the attackers of Islam.
To the West, scrap out the reason for the terrorists to terrorize you. Stop killing the innocents and supporting the oppressors and showing your might in someone else's fatherland. If you're just being Tu Quoque, then the risk is yours. Shit happens. It is better to play safe and play good rather than play god and finding out the hard way you're just as fragile as anybody else. Remember the law of physics. Each action would have an equal and opposite reaction. Ask your physic teacher or Newton if you don't believe me. It is only a matter of time. Sadly it would affect Muslims more than it would the terrorists, as always. Stop playing their game. You're just the pawn of the Zionists. Wake up to your senses and be the man who you really are.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
The Act of Shame
srizals@gmail.com
It's amazing what shame can do to us. Some say that without any feeling of embarrassment, one would find it difficult to define the human beings from other beings that exist side by side with them, being so similar in some particular ways. Without the feeling of shame, one would not have a problem of walking naked in public and do whatever he feels like it. I'm not quite sure what is the basic limitation of the body parts that one can expose under the scrutiny of the naked eyes, but since I'm a Muslim, I would try to explain briefly if I may, the limitation of exposure of the human body.
According to the Hadith and interpretations from the scholars of Islam, which is a common acceptance here in the lands of the Malay, the face, the voice and the hands, starting from the wrist are not considered as forbidden to be shown and seen by others. The body curves are also considered as sacred and are not allowed to be shown to strangers. Some Muslims go beyond that, with their own interpretations and school of thoughts, based on their geography confinement and culture that existed.
I went for a holiday recently, and my kids were so enthusiastic of visiting a water world theme park. As always, one cannot escape the reality of the world that we live in. Half embarrassed, I just ignored the amount of exposure by the people there. But I really have to say this; sometimes it is better to keep your body to yourself. Honestly. But don't worry. I have this special ability to divert and filter my senses. It helps to keep my thought as pure as it can be. The ablution or wudhu' helps a lot too in washing away our daily sins, of course.
To my disappointment, a considerable amount of Muslims were over exposed too. I thought they had invented burqini or some decent swimming attire that Muslims can wear without restraining themselves to the worldly enjoyment. Maybe it's our own fault of not advertising it hard enough to make Muslims know about the existence of the burqini or the proper attire in going through our daily lives and leisure. Maybe a separation of gender is in order? In certain events, I would have to say, I'm in favour of separatism.
For me, in order for Muslims to be an example to the rest of mankind, one must not be too strict or too lenient in setting the boundaries especially in the world of fashion that plays an important role and has a high impact on one's self esteem. To show extremity, to the lower end or to the higher end I'm afraid, does have its impact on the face value of Islam itself. The question is, what are we going to do about it? As always.
It's amazing what shame can do to us. Some say that without any feeling of embarrassment, one would find it difficult to define the human beings from other beings that exist side by side with them, being so similar in some particular ways. Without the feeling of shame, one would not have a problem of walking naked in public and do whatever he feels like it. I'm not quite sure what is the basic limitation of the body parts that one can expose under the scrutiny of the naked eyes, but since I'm a Muslim, I would try to explain briefly if I may, the limitation of exposure of the human body.
According to the Hadith and interpretations from the scholars of Islam, which is a common acceptance here in the lands of the Malay, the face, the voice and the hands, starting from the wrist are not considered as forbidden to be shown and seen by others. The body curves are also considered as sacred and are not allowed to be shown to strangers. Some Muslims go beyond that, with their own interpretations and school of thoughts, based on their geography confinement and culture that existed.
I went for a holiday recently, and my kids were so enthusiastic of visiting a water world theme park. As always, one cannot escape the reality of the world that we live in. Half embarrassed, I just ignored the amount of exposure by the people there. But I really have to say this; sometimes it is better to keep your body to yourself. Honestly. But don't worry. I have this special ability to divert and filter my senses. It helps to keep my thought as pure as it can be. The ablution or wudhu' helps a lot too in washing away our daily sins, of course.
To my disappointment, a considerable amount of Muslims were over exposed too. I thought they had invented burqini or some decent swimming attire that Muslims can wear without restraining themselves to the worldly enjoyment. Maybe it's our own fault of not advertising it hard enough to make Muslims know about the existence of the burqini or the proper attire in going through our daily lives and leisure. Maybe a separation of gender is in order? In certain events, I would have to say, I'm in favour of separatism.
For me, in order for Muslims to be an example to the rest of mankind, one must not be too strict or too lenient in setting the boundaries especially in the world of fashion that plays an important role and has a high impact on one's self esteem. To show extremity, to the lower end or to the higher end I'm afraid, does have its impact on the face value of Islam itself. The question is, what are we going to do about it? As always.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Hideous and Revolting
srizals@gmail.com
In the memory of the victims of Angkar, the godly atheist organisation if I may, that ruled Cambodia under another godly human figure; one could not imagine the horrors that ruled the day. They were atheists like the Bolsheviks and the unconfucious Chinese that preyed on their own brethren to impose their beliefs and ways of life that they considered as higher and wiser than the ways of those who had religion.
This dogma, that saw humanity at the brink of annihilation seems miraculously unconnected with the current atheist movements throughout the world, sadly even among Muslims, lacking with understanding of their own faith of course.
Some tried to inflict Muslims of being the same democide or genocide perpetrators, but one could not imagine the horrors and the dire situations that they were facing at that time, the Turks I mean. They were being overrun and facing their extinction. Bad things would of course happen in such a time. They were facing the world and the Christians that were loyal subjects before, had betrayed them and joined the feeding frenzy of the Turks at that time. But unlike the other genocide and democide that happened throughout the century, the world seemed reluctant to declare that Turkey was like the USA or the West, exterminators of the great Indian civilisations of America, both north and south.
Tu Quo Que I think, but still, the efforts had not been abandoned. What I failed to understand is why don't they show some efforts in stopping the current genocide that is still taking place, right here, right now in Palestine?
I read a very dark story in my local newspaper today. It seemed that Israel had been extracting internal organs, especially cornea from the dead without consent. What troubles me is among the dead were Palestinians. How could you be sure that they weren't dead because of the importance of their spare parts? You see, it brings my attention to the stark similarities it has with the Khmer Rouge. One of their methods of disposing their own people is the destruction for blood. Those who were condemned in such a manner, would be tied up both legs and arms and pumped up dry to their death. Yes, just like what Dracula did.
But nowadays atheists that are so proud of themselves, have nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge. They are nicer, gentler and wiser, even if the stark resemblance of not believing in God is not considered a dogma that is slowing down the human race. The only difference I reckon is that they are killing others in millions compared with the Khmer Rouge, if you accept the claims by Christians and Atheists alike that the USA is becoming an Atheist State rather than a country built on religion. I may be wrong but this perception is not mine.
In Islam, killing a soul without any just cause is seen as killing the entire human race. The sin is so great that the perpetrator that had done it, must pay the ultimate price for his hideous crime. But let me tell you a secret. In Shariah, the family members of the victims have a say in the execution. If they choose not to ask the killer to pay the ultimate price, the killer would get to walk, scot free! I mean he won't get to ride the lightning. The killer had to compensate the family of the dead of course. That is how precious life is, in the eyes of Muslims. The hideous examples of the non practicing Christians, if I may, in killing indiscriminately non combatant Muslims is triggering the memory when the Turks were fighting for their survival. It’s amazing what people could do in the face of annihilation, don’t you think?
In the memory of the victims of Angkar, the godly atheist organisation if I may, that ruled Cambodia under another godly human figure; one could not imagine the horrors that ruled the day. They were atheists like the Bolsheviks and the unconfucious Chinese that preyed on their own brethren to impose their beliefs and ways of life that they considered as higher and wiser than the ways of those who had religion.
This dogma, that saw humanity at the brink of annihilation seems miraculously unconnected with the current atheist movements throughout the world, sadly even among Muslims, lacking with understanding of their own faith of course.
Some tried to inflict Muslims of being the same democide or genocide perpetrators, but one could not imagine the horrors and the dire situations that they were facing at that time, the Turks I mean. They were being overrun and facing their extinction. Bad things would of course happen in such a time. They were facing the world and the Christians that were loyal subjects before, had betrayed them and joined the feeding frenzy of the Turks at that time. But unlike the other genocide and democide that happened throughout the century, the world seemed reluctant to declare that Turkey was like the USA or the West, exterminators of the great Indian civilisations of America, both north and south.
Tu Quo Que I think, but still, the efforts had not been abandoned. What I failed to understand is why don't they show some efforts in stopping the current genocide that is still taking place, right here, right now in Palestine?
I read a very dark story in my local newspaper today. It seemed that Israel had been extracting internal organs, especially cornea from the dead without consent. What troubles me is among the dead were Palestinians. How could you be sure that they weren't dead because of the importance of their spare parts? You see, it brings my attention to the stark similarities it has with the Khmer Rouge. One of their methods of disposing their own people is the destruction for blood. Those who were condemned in such a manner, would be tied up both legs and arms and pumped up dry to their death. Yes, just like what Dracula did.
But nowadays atheists that are so proud of themselves, have nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge. They are nicer, gentler and wiser, even if the stark resemblance of not believing in God is not considered a dogma that is slowing down the human race. The only difference I reckon is that they are killing others in millions compared with the Khmer Rouge, if you accept the claims by Christians and Atheists alike that the USA is becoming an Atheist State rather than a country built on religion. I may be wrong but this perception is not mine.
In Islam, killing a soul without any just cause is seen as killing the entire human race. The sin is so great that the perpetrator that had done it, must pay the ultimate price for his hideous crime. But let me tell you a secret. In Shariah, the family members of the victims have a say in the execution. If they choose not to ask the killer to pay the ultimate price, the killer would get to walk, scot free! I mean he won't get to ride the lightning. The killer had to compensate the family of the dead of course. That is how precious life is, in the eyes of Muslims. The hideous examples of the non practicing Christians, if I may, in killing indiscriminately non combatant Muslims is triggering the memory when the Turks were fighting for their survival. It’s amazing what people could do in the face of annihilation, don’t you think?
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
How to Defeat the Local Terrorists
srizals@gmail.com
My luxury of free time is coming to an end. Even now I have to prepare materials and paper works to start another session of another kind of jihad that not all are aware of, even Muslims themselves. The jihad or the struggle of bringing enlightenment or knowledge to others and sacrificing and risking your own in helping others to be wiser than before. Yes, I got well paid of course, almost, but it's just one requirement, because you see, I am a two in one person, my heavenly part doesn't need food n drinks but my earthly part needs most of what earthly being needed of course. It would be illogical to ask me to teach for free. How am I going to sustain my children and wives, ops sorry, wife?
There's nothing wrong with that. It is needed in this life of ours. Materialism in some aspect does serve us, for a good purpose that is, but it is not undeniable having too much of it or putting a higher priority to it could be damaging in the end. To our heavenly part and sooner or later to our earthly part also. So it is left entirely to us to observe this delicate balance. How much did we spend on good? How much did we spend on evil? And how much did we spend between those two? Whether it is our wealth, health and time, each one of them is going to be asked for by our Lord and Creator that had granted them all in the first place to us in this test we call life.
I kept on hearing the annoying sound of chainsaws of illegal loggers cutting down precious tropical hardwood in my neighbourhood. You see, Malaysia is facing a siege of illegal loggers and those who are burdened with ensuring the safety of this delicate precious wealth of my land seemed to be losing out. I don't know what exactly is the hindrance since Malaysia doesn't have that too fancy road system or the vastness of the great plains of the USA, laziness I presume? Lack of transport? Lack of wits? You see, a teacher could never left his school without consent, or playing truant, I wonder if this is applicable to the officers in charge with our safety and wealth.
I'm being annoyed by traffic summons which I've never commit. It seems I'm being a speed demon almost 400 km away from my average roaming domain and they said they caught me on camera and I have to proof that it wasn't me by driving all the way there and buying the picture of me making some fancy drift move. My, my, what a very logical and understanding officer of the law that I have in the developing lands of the Malay! Why didn't they stop the driver that was pulling the stunt, photographed his handsome face with his, sorry my look alike car and registered number and save me a lot of time and money that I'm not going to spend for such poorly executed road safety counter measure. No wonder the menace of Mat Rempit and accident fatalities seemed uncontrollable by the ones who are burdened to ensure otherwise. If a teacher would have such privileges, I wonder what would happen to our future generation.
Please do your job kind officers. If one can't be perfect, at least put some effort to achieve perfection. The recent hike of almost 40 to 50 percent pay should increase you commitment or presence in where you are required most, such as prone areas of illegal logging usually took place like the roads leading to precious trees, or streets known to be a ring for speed demons and snatch thieves. It ain't so hard to figure it out if you don't mind squeezing your brains a little bit. Don't make a habit of hanging out in your fancy air conditioned rooms or social gatherings, laughing and having a ball, it would make our tummy bigger, raised our blood pressure and also made us prone to diabetes. Forget workouts, do your job and sweat on it, dearly. Let the culprits run for their lives, always and tiredly gasping for air in doing their evil deeds and you too while doing your good deeds. CCTV won't work. The foot soldiers must be there, camouflaged of course. Stop wasting our wealth on fancy things with little effectiveness.
I'm not kidding. The snatch thieves that stole RM30 to buy some drugs while killing their victims in the process and stroke fear in every one's heart, the illegal loggers that made billions by plundering our wealth and speed demons that are endangering road users are the unglamorous terrorists. They maimed and killed for the stupidest reason of them all, just for their own fancy. And that made them the hideous terrorist of them all. The casualties and loss of money are very real and taxing too.
To the officers of law and enforcement that sweat it out and totally committed, always thinking two steps ahead of the bad guys and not choosing the easy way out, I salute you. If not for you guys, the bad guys would always have their ways. Alhamdulillah.
My luxury of free time is coming to an end. Even now I have to prepare materials and paper works to start another session of another kind of jihad that not all are aware of, even Muslims themselves. The jihad or the struggle of bringing enlightenment or knowledge to others and sacrificing and risking your own in helping others to be wiser than before. Yes, I got well paid of course, almost, but it's just one requirement, because you see, I am a two in one person, my heavenly part doesn't need food n drinks but my earthly part needs most of what earthly being needed of course. It would be illogical to ask me to teach for free. How am I going to sustain my children and wives, ops sorry, wife?
There's nothing wrong with that. It is needed in this life of ours. Materialism in some aspect does serve us, for a good purpose that is, but it is not undeniable having too much of it or putting a higher priority to it could be damaging in the end. To our heavenly part and sooner or later to our earthly part also. So it is left entirely to us to observe this delicate balance. How much did we spend on good? How much did we spend on evil? And how much did we spend between those two? Whether it is our wealth, health and time, each one of them is going to be asked for by our Lord and Creator that had granted them all in the first place to us in this test we call life.
I kept on hearing the annoying sound of chainsaws of illegal loggers cutting down precious tropical hardwood in my neighbourhood. You see, Malaysia is facing a siege of illegal loggers and those who are burdened with ensuring the safety of this delicate precious wealth of my land seemed to be losing out. I don't know what exactly is the hindrance since Malaysia doesn't have that too fancy road system or the vastness of the great plains of the USA, laziness I presume? Lack of transport? Lack of wits? You see, a teacher could never left his school without consent, or playing truant, I wonder if this is applicable to the officers in charge with our safety and wealth.
I'm being annoyed by traffic summons which I've never commit. It seems I'm being a speed demon almost 400 km away from my average roaming domain and they said they caught me on camera and I have to proof that it wasn't me by driving all the way there and buying the picture of me making some fancy drift move. My, my, what a very logical and understanding officer of the law that I have in the developing lands of the Malay! Why didn't they stop the driver that was pulling the stunt, photographed his handsome face with his, sorry my look alike car and registered number and save me a lot of time and money that I'm not going to spend for such poorly executed road safety counter measure. No wonder the menace of Mat Rempit and accident fatalities seemed uncontrollable by the ones who are burdened to ensure otherwise. If a teacher would have such privileges, I wonder what would happen to our future generation.
Please do your job kind officers. If one can't be perfect, at least put some effort to achieve perfection. The recent hike of almost 40 to 50 percent pay should increase you commitment or presence in where you are required most, such as prone areas of illegal logging usually took place like the roads leading to precious trees, or streets known to be a ring for speed demons and snatch thieves. It ain't so hard to figure it out if you don't mind squeezing your brains a little bit. Don't make a habit of hanging out in your fancy air conditioned rooms or social gatherings, laughing and having a ball, it would make our tummy bigger, raised our blood pressure and also made us prone to diabetes. Forget workouts, do your job and sweat on it, dearly. Let the culprits run for their lives, always and tiredly gasping for air in doing their evil deeds and you too while doing your good deeds. CCTV won't work. The foot soldiers must be there, camouflaged of course. Stop wasting our wealth on fancy things with little effectiveness.
I'm not kidding. The snatch thieves that stole RM30 to buy some drugs while killing their victims in the process and stroke fear in every one's heart, the illegal loggers that made billions by plundering our wealth and speed demons that are endangering road users are the unglamorous terrorists. They maimed and killed for the stupidest reason of them all, just for their own fancy. And that made them the hideous terrorist of them all. The casualties and loss of money are very real and taxing too.
To the officers of law and enforcement that sweat it out and totally committed, always thinking two steps ahead of the bad guys and not choosing the easy way out, I salute you. If not for you guys, the bad guys would always have their ways. Alhamdulillah.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Dr. Maurice Bucaille: The Quran and Modern Science
The Quran and Modern Science
In contrast to the Bible, statements about scientific phenomena made in the Qur'an are perfectly in conformity with the modern sciences, states French surgeon, Dr. Maurice Bucaille.
As most people in the West have been brought up on misconceptions concerning Islam and the Qur'an; for a large part of my life, I myself was one such person. Let me cite one or two specific examples to indicate the kind of inaccurate ideas generally current.
Misconceptions
As I grew up, I was always taught that 'Mahomet' was the author of the Qur'an; I remember seeing French translations bearing this information. I was invariably told that the 'author' of the Qur'an simply compiled, in a slightly different form, stories of sacred history taken from the Bible; the 'author' was said to have added or removed certain passages, while setting forth the principles and rules of the religion he himself had founded. There are moreover Islamic scholars today in France whose duties include teaching and who express exactly these views, although perhaps in a more subtle form.
This description of the origins of the Qur'anic text, which is so out of touch with reality, might lead one immediately to assume that if there are scientific errors in the Bible, there must also be errors of this kind in the Qur'an! This is the natural conclusion to be drawn in such circumstances, but it is based on a misconception. We are well aware that at the time of Muhammad - the Qur'anic Revelation took place between 610 and 632 A.D - scientific obscurantism prevailed, both in the Orient as well as in the West.
In France, for example, this period corresponded roughly to the reign of King Dagobert, the last of the Mrovingians. This approach to what was supposedly the Qur'anic text may on first sight seem logical, but when one examines the text with an informed and impartial eye, it becomes clear that this approach is not at all in keeping with reality. We shall see in a moment the truth of this statement, which is obvious from the texts.
Whenever there is textual proof of the existence in the Qur'an of statements that are in agreement with modern knowledge, but which in the Bible are related in a manner that is scientifically unacceptable, the stock response is that, during the period separating the two Scriptures, Arab scientists made discoveries in various disciplines which enabled them to arrive at these supposed adaptations. This approach takes no account whatsoever of the history of the sciences. The latter indicates that the great period of Islamic civilisations, during which, as we know, science made considerable progress, came several centuries after the communication of the Qur'an to the communication of the Qur'an to man.
Furthermore, scientific history informs us that, as far as the subjects dealt with in this present book are concerned, no discoveries were made during, the period separating the Bible from the Qur'an.
When this aspect of the Qur'an is mentioned in the West, however, we are likely to hear it said that while this may indeed be so, nowhere is this fact referred to in the translations of the Qur'an which we possess today, or in the prefaces and commentaries that accompany them.
This is a very judicious remark. Muslim - and indeed non-Muslim - translators who have produced a French version of the Qur'an are basically men of letters. More often than not, they mistranslate a passage because they do not possess the scientific knowledge required to understand its true meaning. The fact is, however, that in order to translate correctly, one must first understand what one is reading. A further point is that translators - especially those mentioned above - - may have been influenced by notes provided by ancient commentators often came to be regarded as highly authoritative, even though they had no scientific knowledge - nor indeed had anybody else at that time. They were incapable of imagining that the texts might contain allusions to secular knowledge, and thus they could not devote attention to a specific passage by comparing it to other verses in the Qur'an dealing with the same subject - a process that often provides the key to the meaning of a word or expression. From this results the fact that any passage in the Qur'an that gives rise to a comparison with modern secular knowledge is likely to be unreliably translated.
Very often, the translations are peppered with inaccurate - if not totally nonsensical - statements. The only way to avoid such errors is to possess a scientific background and to study the Qur'anic text in the original language.
Scientific Errors
On the subject of man, as well as the other topics mentioned earlier, it is not possible to find any corresponding data in the Bible. Furthermore the scientific errors contained in the Bible - such as those describing man's first appearance on earth, which, as we have seen, may be deduced from the Genealogies that figure in Genesis are not to be found in the Qur'an. It is crucial to understand that such errors could not have been 'edited out' of the Qur'an since the time they first became apparent: well over a thousand years have elapsed since the most ancient manuscripts and today's texts of the Qur'an, but these texts are still absolutely identical. Thus, if Muhammad were the author of the Qur'an (a theory upheld by some people), it is difficult to see how he could have spotted the scientific errors in the Bible dealing with such a wide variety of subjects and have proceeded to eliminate every single one of them when he came to compose his own text on the same themes. Let us state once again, that no new scientific facts had been discovered since the time the Bible was written that might have helped eliminate such errors.
In view of the above, it is imperative to know the history of the texts, just as it is essential to our understanding of certain aspects of the Bible for us to be aware, of the conditions in which it was written.
As we have noted earlier, experts in Biblical exegesis consider the books of Old and New Testaments to be divinely inspired works. Let us now examine, however, the teachings of Muslim exegetes, who present the Qur'an in quite a different fashion.
When Muhammad was roughly forty years old, it was his custom to retire to a retreat just outside Mecca in order to meditate. It was here that he received a first message from God via the Angel Gabriel, at a date that corresponds to 610 A.D. After a long period of silence, this first message was followed by successive revelations spread over some twenty years. During the Prophet's lifetime, they were both written down and recited by heart among his first followers. Similarly, the revelations were divided into suras(chapters) and collected together after the Prophet' death (in 632 A.D.) in a book: the Qur'an. The Book contains the Word of God, to the exclusion of any human additions. Manuscripts dating from the first century of Islam authenticate today's text, the other form of authentication being the recitation by heart of the Qur'an, a practice that has continued unbroken from the time of the Prophet down to the present day.
Uncorrupted Nature of the Quran
In contrast to the Bible, therefore, we are presented with a text that is none other than the transcript of the Revelation itself; the only way it can be received and interpreted is literally. The purity of the revealed text has been greatly emphasized, and the uncorrupted nature of the Qur'an stems from the following factors:
First, as stated above, fragments of the text were written down during the Prophet's lifetime; inscribed on tablets, parchments and other materials current at the time. The Qur'an itself refers to the fact that the text was set down in writing. We find this in several suras dating from before and after the Hejira (Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.) In addition to the transcription of the text, however, there was also the fact that it was learned by heart. The text of the Qur'an is much shorter than the Old Testament and slightly longer than the New Testament. Since it took twenty years for the Qur'an to be revealed, however, it was easy for the Prophet's followers to recite it by heart, sura by sura. This process of recitation afforded a considerable advantage as far as an uncorrupted text was concerned, for it provided a system of double-checking at the time the definitive text was written down. This took place several years after the Prophet's death; first under the caliphate of Abu Bakr, his first successor, and later under the caliphate of Omar and in particular that of Uthman (644 to 655 A.D.) The latter ordered an extremely strict recension of the text, which involved checking it against the recited versions.
Text of Quran Uncorrupted
After Muhammad's death, Islam rapidly expanded far beyond the limits of the area in which it was born. Soon, it included many peoples whose native language was not Arabic. Very strict steps were taken to ensure that the text of the Qur'an did not suffer from this expansion of Islam: Uthman sent copies of his entire recension to the principal centers of the vast Islamic empire. Some copies still exist today, in more or less complete form, in such places as Tashkent (former U.S.S.R) and Istanbul. Copies have also been discovered that date from the very first centuries after the Hejira; they are all identical, and all of them correspond to the earliest manuscripts.
Today's editions of the Qur'an are all faithful reproductions of the original copies. In the case of the Qur'an, there are no instances of rewriting or corruption of the text over the course of time.
If the origin of the Qur'an had been similar to those of the Bible, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the subjects it raised would be presented in the light of the ideas influenced by certain opinions of the time, often derived from myth and superstition. If this were the case, one might argue that there were untold opportunities for inaccurate assertions, based on such sources, to find their way into the many and varied subjects briefly summarised above. In actual fact, however, we find nothing of the kind in the Qur'an.
But having said this, we should note that the Qur'an is a religious book par excellence. We should not use statements that have a bearing on secular knowledge as a pretext to go hunting after any expression of scientific laws. As stated earlier, all we should seek are reflections on natural phenomena, phrases occasioned by references to divine omnipotence and designed to emphasise that omnipotence in the eyes of mankind throughout the ages. The presence of such reflections in the Qur'an has become particularly significant in modern times, for their meaning is clearly explained by the data of contemporary knowledge. This characteristic is specific to the Qur'an.
Unexpected Discoveries
It was not until I had learnt Arabic and read the Qur'an in the original that I realised the precise meaning of certain verses. Only then did I make certain discoveries that were astounding. With my basic ideas on the Qur'an - which to begin with were inaccurate, just as those of most people in the West - I certainly did not expect to find in the text the statements that I in fact uncovered. With each new discovery, I was beset with doubt lest I might be mistaken in my translation or perhaps have provided an interpretation rather than a true rendering of the Arabic text.
Only after consultations with several specialists in linguistics and exegesis, both Muslim and non-Muslim, was I convinced that a new concept might be formed from such a study: the compatibility between the statements in the Qur'an and firmly established data of modern science with regard to subjects on which nobody at the time of Muhammad - not even the Prophet himself - could have had access to the knowledge we possess today. Since then, I have not found in the Qur'an any support given to the myths or superstitions present at the time the text was communicated to man. This is not the case for the Bible, whose authors expressed themselves in the language of their period.
In La Bible, le Coran et la Science (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science), which first appeared in the original French in 1976 and which subsequently appeared in English in 1978, I set forth the main points of these findings. On November 9, 1976, I gave a lecture to the Academie de Médecine (French academy of Medicine) in which I explored the statements of the origins of man contained in the Qur'an; the title of the lecture was Données physiologiques et embryologiques du Coran (Physiological and Embryological Data in the Qur'an). I emphasised the fact that these data - which I shall summarise below - formed part of a much wider study. The following are some of the points which arise from a reading of the Qur'an:
*
a concept of the creation of the world which, while different from the ideas contained in the Bible, is fully in keeping with today's general theories on the formations of the universe;
*
statements that are in perfect agreement with today's ideas concerning the movements and evolution of the heavenly bodies;
*
a prediction of the conquest of space;
*
notions concerning the water cycle in nature and the earth's relief, which were not proven correct until many centuries later.
All of these data are bound to amaze anyone who approaches them in an objective spirit. They add a much wider dimension to the problem studied in the present work. The basic point remains the same , however: we must surely be in the presence of facts which place a heavy strain on our natural propensity for explaining everything in materialistic terms, for the existence in the Qur'an of these scientific statements appears as a challenge to human explanations.
That does not mean to say, however, that the statements in the Qur'an - especially those concerning man - may all of them be examined in the light of the findings of modern science. The creation of man as described in both the Bible and the Qu'ran totally eludes scientific investigation of the event per se.
Similarly, when the New Testament or the Qur'an informs us that Jesus was not born of a father, in the biological sense of the term, we cannot counter this Scriptural statement by saying that there is no example in the human species of an individual having been formed without receiving the paternal chromosomes that make up one half of its genetic inheritance. Science does not explain miracles, for by definition miracles are inexplicable, thus, when we read in both the Qur'an and the Bible that man was moulded from the ground, we are in fact learning a fundamental religious principle: Man returns from where he came, for from the place he is buried, he will rise again on the judgment.
Side by side with the main religious aspect of such reflections on man, we find in the Qur'an statements on man that refer to strictly material facts. They are quite amazing when one approaches them for the first time. For example, the Qur'an describes the origins of life in general and devotes a great deal of space to the morphological transformation undergone by man, repeatedly emphasizing the fact that God fashioned him as He willed. We likewise discover statements on human reproduction that are expressed in precise terms that lend themselves to comparison with the secular knowledge we today possess on the subject.
Interest to Men of Science
The many statements in the Qur'an that may thus be compared with modern knowledge are by no means easy to find. In preparing the study published in 1976, I was unable to draw on any previous works known in the West, for there were none. All I could refer to were a few works in Arabic dealing with themes treated in the Qur'an that were of interest to men of science - there was, however, no overall study. Over and above this, research of this kind requires scientific knowledge covering many different disciplines. It is not easy, however, for Islamologists to acquire such knowledge, for they possess a mainly literary background. Indeed, such questions hardly seem to occupy a place in their field of classic Islamology, at least as far as the West is concerned. Only a scientist, thoroughly acquainted with Arabic literature, can draw comparisons between the Qur'anic text - for which he must be able to read Arabic - and the data supplied by modern knowledge.
There is another reason why such statements are not immediately apparent: Verses bearing on a single theme are scattered throughout the Qur'an. The book is indeed a juxtaposition of reflections on a wide variety of subjects referred to one after the other and taken up again later on, often several times over. The data on a precise theme must therefore be collected from all over the Book and brought together under a single heading. This requires many hours' work tracking down verses, in spite of the existence of thematic indexes provided by various translators, for such lists may perhaps be incomplete and indeed, in many cases, they often are.
Taken from The Origin of Man, by Dr. Maurice Bucaille.
Dr. Maurice Bucaille is an eminent French surgeon, scientist, scholar and author of "THE BIBLE, THE QUR'AN AND SCIENCE" which contains the result of his research into the Judeo-Christian Revelation and the Qur'an. It is a unique contribution in the field of religion and science.
An outstanding scientist, he was selected to treat the mummy of Merneptah (Pharaoh) which he did. During his visit to Saudi Arabia he was shown the verses of the Qur'an in which God says that the dead body of the Pharaoh will be preserved as a "Sign" for posterity. An impartial scientist like Dr. Bucaille, who (being also a Christian) was conversant with the Biblical version of Pharaoh's story as being drowned in pursuit of Prophet Moses. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that unknown to the world till only of late, the Qur'an made definite prediction about the preservation of the body of that same Pharaoh of Moses' time. This led Dr. Bucaille to study the Qur'an thoroughly after learning the Arabic language. The final conclusion of his comparative study of Qur'an and the Bible is that the statements about scientific phenomena in the Qur'an are perfectly in conformity with the modern sciences whereas the Biblical narration's on the same subjects do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Taken from http://www.islamfortoday.com/bucaille01.htm
srizals@gmail.com
Got to find his book somehow, somewhere just in case someone asked me of unbiased resources again as if his were not that bias, of course. I did find another such website by a non Muslim, but sadly my data were destroyed when some viruses got through my defence. What a shame. I’ve lost lots of important links to precious websites, among others, authorised websites discussing the Hadith and the ways of the Prophet. But never mind. I would have to explore the vast ocean of the Worldwide Web like I did when I started with zero, as always.
In contrast to the Bible, statements about scientific phenomena made in the Qur'an are perfectly in conformity with the modern sciences, states French surgeon, Dr. Maurice Bucaille.
As most people in the West have been brought up on misconceptions concerning Islam and the Qur'an; for a large part of my life, I myself was one such person. Let me cite one or two specific examples to indicate the kind of inaccurate ideas generally current.
Misconceptions
As I grew up, I was always taught that 'Mahomet' was the author of the Qur'an; I remember seeing French translations bearing this information. I was invariably told that the 'author' of the Qur'an simply compiled, in a slightly different form, stories of sacred history taken from the Bible; the 'author' was said to have added or removed certain passages, while setting forth the principles and rules of the religion he himself had founded. There are moreover Islamic scholars today in France whose duties include teaching and who express exactly these views, although perhaps in a more subtle form.
This description of the origins of the Qur'anic text, which is so out of touch with reality, might lead one immediately to assume that if there are scientific errors in the Bible, there must also be errors of this kind in the Qur'an! This is the natural conclusion to be drawn in such circumstances, but it is based on a misconception. We are well aware that at the time of Muhammad - the Qur'anic Revelation took place between 610 and 632 A.D - scientific obscurantism prevailed, both in the Orient as well as in the West.
In France, for example, this period corresponded roughly to the reign of King Dagobert, the last of the Mrovingians. This approach to what was supposedly the Qur'anic text may on first sight seem logical, but when one examines the text with an informed and impartial eye, it becomes clear that this approach is not at all in keeping with reality. We shall see in a moment the truth of this statement, which is obvious from the texts.
Whenever there is textual proof of the existence in the Qur'an of statements that are in agreement with modern knowledge, but which in the Bible are related in a manner that is scientifically unacceptable, the stock response is that, during the period separating the two Scriptures, Arab scientists made discoveries in various disciplines which enabled them to arrive at these supposed adaptations. This approach takes no account whatsoever of the history of the sciences. The latter indicates that the great period of Islamic civilisations, during which, as we know, science made considerable progress, came several centuries after the communication of the Qur'an to the communication of the Qur'an to man.
Furthermore, scientific history informs us that, as far as the subjects dealt with in this present book are concerned, no discoveries were made during, the period separating the Bible from the Qur'an.
When this aspect of the Qur'an is mentioned in the West, however, we are likely to hear it said that while this may indeed be so, nowhere is this fact referred to in the translations of the Qur'an which we possess today, or in the prefaces and commentaries that accompany them.
This is a very judicious remark. Muslim - and indeed non-Muslim - translators who have produced a French version of the Qur'an are basically men of letters. More often than not, they mistranslate a passage because they do not possess the scientific knowledge required to understand its true meaning. The fact is, however, that in order to translate correctly, one must first understand what one is reading. A further point is that translators - especially those mentioned above - - may have been influenced by notes provided by ancient commentators often came to be regarded as highly authoritative, even though they had no scientific knowledge - nor indeed had anybody else at that time. They were incapable of imagining that the texts might contain allusions to secular knowledge, and thus they could not devote attention to a specific passage by comparing it to other verses in the Qur'an dealing with the same subject - a process that often provides the key to the meaning of a word or expression. From this results the fact that any passage in the Qur'an that gives rise to a comparison with modern secular knowledge is likely to be unreliably translated.
Very often, the translations are peppered with inaccurate - if not totally nonsensical - statements. The only way to avoid such errors is to possess a scientific background and to study the Qur'anic text in the original language.
Scientific Errors
On the subject of man, as well as the other topics mentioned earlier, it is not possible to find any corresponding data in the Bible. Furthermore the scientific errors contained in the Bible - such as those describing man's first appearance on earth, which, as we have seen, may be deduced from the Genealogies that figure in Genesis are not to be found in the Qur'an. It is crucial to understand that such errors could not have been 'edited out' of the Qur'an since the time they first became apparent: well over a thousand years have elapsed since the most ancient manuscripts and today's texts of the Qur'an, but these texts are still absolutely identical. Thus, if Muhammad were the author of the Qur'an (a theory upheld by some people), it is difficult to see how he could have spotted the scientific errors in the Bible dealing with such a wide variety of subjects and have proceeded to eliminate every single one of them when he came to compose his own text on the same themes. Let us state once again, that no new scientific facts had been discovered since the time the Bible was written that might have helped eliminate such errors.
In view of the above, it is imperative to know the history of the texts, just as it is essential to our understanding of certain aspects of the Bible for us to be aware, of the conditions in which it was written.
As we have noted earlier, experts in Biblical exegesis consider the books of Old and New Testaments to be divinely inspired works. Let us now examine, however, the teachings of Muslim exegetes, who present the Qur'an in quite a different fashion.
When Muhammad was roughly forty years old, it was his custom to retire to a retreat just outside Mecca in order to meditate. It was here that he received a first message from God via the Angel Gabriel, at a date that corresponds to 610 A.D. After a long period of silence, this first message was followed by successive revelations spread over some twenty years. During the Prophet's lifetime, they were both written down and recited by heart among his first followers. Similarly, the revelations were divided into suras(chapters) and collected together after the Prophet' death (in 632 A.D.) in a book: the Qur'an. The Book contains the Word of God, to the exclusion of any human additions. Manuscripts dating from the first century of Islam authenticate today's text, the other form of authentication being the recitation by heart of the Qur'an, a practice that has continued unbroken from the time of the Prophet down to the present day.
Uncorrupted Nature of the Quran
In contrast to the Bible, therefore, we are presented with a text that is none other than the transcript of the Revelation itself; the only way it can be received and interpreted is literally. The purity of the revealed text has been greatly emphasized, and the uncorrupted nature of the Qur'an stems from the following factors:
First, as stated above, fragments of the text were written down during the Prophet's lifetime; inscribed on tablets, parchments and other materials current at the time. The Qur'an itself refers to the fact that the text was set down in writing. We find this in several suras dating from before and after the Hejira (Muhammad's departure from Mecca to Medina in 622 A.D.) In addition to the transcription of the text, however, there was also the fact that it was learned by heart. The text of the Qur'an is much shorter than the Old Testament and slightly longer than the New Testament. Since it took twenty years for the Qur'an to be revealed, however, it was easy for the Prophet's followers to recite it by heart, sura by sura. This process of recitation afforded a considerable advantage as far as an uncorrupted text was concerned, for it provided a system of double-checking at the time the definitive text was written down. This took place several years after the Prophet's death; first under the caliphate of Abu Bakr, his first successor, and later under the caliphate of Omar and in particular that of Uthman (644 to 655 A.D.) The latter ordered an extremely strict recension of the text, which involved checking it against the recited versions.
Text of Quran Uncorrupted
After Muhammad's death, Islam rapidly expanded far beyond the limits of the area in which it was born. Soon, it included many peoples whose native language was not Arabic. Very strict steps were taken to ensure that the text of the Qur'an did not suffer from this expansion of Islam: Uthman sent copies of his entire recension to the principal centers of the vast Islamic empire. Some copies still exist today, in more or less complete form, in such places as Tashkent (former U.S.S.R) and Istanbul. Copies have also been discovered that date from the very first centuries after the Hejira; they are all identical, and all of them correspond to the earliest manuscripts.
Today's editions of the Qur'an are all faithful reproductions of the original copies. In the case of the Qur'an, there are no instances of rewriting or corruption of the text over the course of time.
If the origin of the Qur'an had been similar to those of the Bible, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the subjects it raised would be presented in the light of the ideas influenced by certain opinions of the time, often derived from myth and superstition. If this were the case, one might argue that there were untold opportunities for inaccurate assertions, based on such sources, to find their way into the many and varied subjects briefly summarised above. In actual fact, however, we find nothing of the kind in the Qur'an.
But having said this, we should note that the Qur'an is a religious book par excellence. We should not use statements that have a bearing on secular knowledge as a pretext to go hunting after any expression of scientific laws. As stated earlier, all we should seek are reflections on natural phenomena, phrases occasioned by references to divine omnipotence and designed to emphasise that omnipotence in the eyes of mankind throughout the ages. The presence of such reflections in the Qur'an has become particularly significant in modern times, for their meaning is clearly explained by the data of contemporary knowledge. This characteristic is specific to the Qur'an.
Unexpected Discoveries
It was not until I had learnt Arabic and read the Qur'an in the original that I realised the precise meaning of certain verses. Only then did I make certain discoveries that were astounding. With my basic ideas on the Qur'an - which to begin with were inaccurate, just as those of most people in the West - I certainly did not expect to find in the text the statements that I in fact uncovered. With each new discovery, I was beset with doubt lest I might be mistaken in my translation or perhaps have provided an interpretation rather than a true rendering of the Arabic text.
Only after consultations with several specialists in linguistics and exegesis, both Muslim and non-Muslim, was I convinced that a new concept might be formed from such a study: the compatibility between the statements in the Qur'an and firmly established data of modern science with regard to subjects on which nobody at the time of Muhammad - not even the Prophet himself - could have had access to the knowledge we possess today. Since then, I have not found in the Qur'an any support given to the myths or superstitions present at the time the text was communicated to man. This is not the case for the Bible, whose authors expressed themselves in the language of their period.
In La Bible, le Coran et la Science (The Bible, the Qur'an and Science), which first appeared in the original French in 1976 and which subsequently appeared in English in 1978, I set forth the main points of these findings. On November 9, 1976, I gave a lecture to the Academie de Médecine (French academy of Medicine) in which I explored the statements of the origins of man contained in the Qur'an; the title of the lecture was Données physiologiques et embryologiques du Coran (Physiological and Embryological Data in the Qur'an). I emphasised the fact that these data - which I shall summarise below - formed part of a much wider study. The following are some of the points which arise from a reading of the Qur'an:
*
a concept of the creation of the world which, while different from the ideas contained in the Bible, is fully in keeping with today's general theories on the formations of the universe;
*
statements that are in perfect agreement with today's ideas concerning the movements and evolution of the heavenly bodies;
*
a prediction of the conquest of space;
*
notions concerning the water cycle in nature and the earth's relief, which were not proven correct until many centuries later.
All of these data are bound to amaze anyone who approaches them in an objective spirit. They add a much wider dimension to the problem studied in the present work. The basic point remains the same , however: we must surely be in the presence of facts which place a heavy strain on our natural propensity for explaining everything in materialistic terms, for the existence in the Qur'an of these scientific statements appears as a challenge to human explanations.
That does not mean to say, however, that the statements in the Qur'an - especially those concerning man - may all of them be examined in the light of the findings of modern science. The creation of man as described in both the Bible and the Qu'ran totally eludes scientific investigation of the event per se.
Similarly, when the New Testament or the Qur'an informs us that Jesus was not born of a father, in the biological sense of the term, we cannot counter this Scriptural statement by saying that there is no example in the human species of an individual having been formed without receiving the paternal chromosomes that make up one half of its genetic inheritance. Science does not explain miracles, for by definition miracles are inexplicable, thus, when we read in both the Qur'an and the Bible that man was moulded from the ground, we are in fact learning a fundamental religious principle: Man returns from where he came, for from the place he is buried, he will rise again on the judgment.
Side by side with the main religious aspect of such reflections on man, we find in the Qur'an statements on man that refer to strictly material facts. They are quite amazing when one approaches them for the first time. For example, the Qur'an describes the origins of life in general and devotes a great deal of space to the morphological transformation undergone by man, repeatedly emphasizing the fact that God fashioned him as He willed. We likewise discover statements on human reproduction that are expressed in precise terms that lend themselves to comparison with the secular knowledge we today possess on the subject.
Interest to Men of Science
The many statements in the Qur'an that may thus be compared with modern knowledge are by no means easy to find. In preparing the study published in 1976, I was unable to draw on any previous works known in the West, for there were none. All I could refer to were a few works in Arabic dealing with themes treated in the Qur'an that were of interest to men of science - there was, however, no overall study. Over and above this, research of this kind requires scientific knowledge covering many different disciplines. It is not easy, however, for Islamologists to acquire such knowledge, for they possess a mainly literary background. Indeed, such questions hardly seem to occupy a place in their field of classic Islamology, at least as far as the West is concerned. Only a scientist, thoroughly acquainted with Arabic literature, can draw comparisons between the Qur'anic text - for which he must be able to read Arabic - and the data supplied by modern knowledge.
There is another reason why such statements are not immediately apparent: Verses bearing on a single theme are scattered throughout the Qur'an. The book is indeed a juxtaposition of reflections on a wide variety of subjects referred to one after the other and taken up again later on, often several times over. The data on a precise theme must therefore be collected from all over the Book and brought together under a single heading. This requires many hours' work tracking down verses, in spite of the existence of thematic indexes provided by various translators, for such lists may perhaps be incomplete and indeed, in many cases, they often are.
Taken from The Origin of Man, by Dr. Maurice Bucaille.
Dr. Maurice Bucaille is an eminent French surgeon, scientist, scholar and author of "THE BIBLE, THE QUR'AN AND SCIENCE" which contains the result of his research into the Judeo-Christian Revelation and the Qur'an. It is a unique contribution in the field of religion and science.
An outstanding scientist, he was selected to treat the mummy of Merneptah (Pharaoh) which he did. During his visit to Saudi Arabia he was shown the verses of the Qur'an in which God says that the dead body of the Pharaoh will be preserved as a "Sign" for posterity. An impartial scientist like Dr. Bucaille, who (being also a Christian) was conversant with the Biblical version of Pharaoh's story as being drowned in pursuit of Prophet Moses. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that unknown to the world till only of late, the Qur'an made definite prediction about the preservation of the body of that same Pharaoh of Moses' time. This led Dr. Bucaille to study the Qur'an thoroughly after learning the Arabic language. The final conclusion of his comparative study of Qur'an and the Bible is that the statements about scientific phenomena in the Qur'an are perfectly in conformity with the modern sciences whereas the Biblical narration's on the same subjects do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Taken from http://www.islamfortoday.com/bucaille01.htm
srizals@gmail.com
Got to find his book somehow, somewhere just in case someone asked me of unbiased resources again as if his were not that bias, of course. I did find another such website by a non Muslim, but sadly my data were destroyed when some viruses got through my defence. What a shame. I’ve lost lots of important links to precious websites, among others, authorised websites discussing the Hadith and the ways of the Prophet. But never mind. I would have to explore the vast ocean of the Worldwide Web like I did when I started with zero, as always.
Debunking Christianity Got Debunked: CBS Survivor Won: A Coincidence?
On CBS Survivor God Had a Chance to Show the World He Answers Prayer and Blew it!
By John W. Loftus at 12/18/2009
Last night God blew it. Plain and simple. He had a chance to show the world he answers prayers. But he was a no-show, which is par for the course, again. The episode took place during the reward challenge and starts at 3:30 through 14:40 seen here in this link (sorry about the ads). Natalie and two others prayed to win the challenge, calling herself a "prayer warrior." Watch what happened. Oh, but nothing will change the mind of a believer, right? It just wasn't God's will, right? Failed prayer is always explained away like this. But then what could ever count as evidence against faith?
1:15 AM, December 21, 2009
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Blogger Manifesting Mini Me (MMM) said...
Okay, I don't watch Survivor,and I am only going by the post here and the newsflash about this Natalie girl, BUT, I was way wrong to judge that God didn't answer Natalie's prayer!
Apparently, from what I read on the posts here, Natalie prayed for one meal, but today I read that the winner of Survivor (and,apparently a way hefty paycheck!!) is Natalie!
It looks like God chose to let Natalie win the whole shmeal deal challenge so that now she has enough for wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-y more meals!!! That is just like Him!! I bet she's gonna share her winnings with the poor too! Yay!!! Sorry God for getting infected with doubt!
Hey John, It sounds like God heard your complaint and decided to show you how He answers prayers. You were probably expecting Him to give Natalie one lousy meal - but no!!! Now, are you convinced???
Ya know, this has really reminded me of something ---while we're all here debating and talking about God, He's out there preparing a banquet -- I think I'm gonna go and accept the invitation ---
See ya!
3M
1:57 AM, December 21, 2009
I'm over excited and had to post this one pronto, if Natalie didn't win actually, it would be a bummer. But what if she did? Does this mean DC had been debunked by God himself? Wise Atheists, any comments?
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