Showing posts with label weapons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weapons. Show all posts

Friday 21 October 2016

The American clouds of Anti-Semitism

Image of New Statesman Cover from wikipedia co...
Image of New Statesman Cover from wikipedia commons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
69 years old Larry Jacob who was born and raised in New York had not his ears and eyes closed the last months. He is aware of the danger that lures around the corner.

In his article "Modern anti-Semitism" for the Times of Israel he notices that
Many modern-day American Jews are unaware of the current depth and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism (“AS”) in the U.S..
Therefore he warns them they are feeling too much at ease, thinking that their rights are protected by anti-discrimination laws, such as Title VI. A problem may be that
 they are too busy earning a living and raising a family to focus on AS.
Jacob understands that but
that does not diminish the clear and present danger it represents.
In the previous moths we have seen many documentaries on the American white evangelist lobbies who promote weapon bearing and could hear how they think about "the Jews who killed Jesus". I myself had some correspondence with such 'devout' American evangelicals who are convinced that Jews are the evil of the world and who are convinced the world better could be cleansed from that race.

Anti-Semitism (AS) and other forms of discrimination may officially be prohibited by various federal and state laws in the United States of America, but it looked lie this was only on paper and not something for the reality or to be taken serious by a big group of American citizens.

Jacob writes
 it is also true that attitudes and beliefs cannot be completely controlled by laws.  AS has not yet risen to the level of the 19th Century Russian pogroms or the organized terror of 1930s Nazi Germany, but, ...  AS is still present in the 21st Century, even in the US.  Often, it is more subtle, but, nevertheless, it permeates many areas of our culture.
Also Adele M. Stan the same as we could not do without the idea where Trump could have got the mustard from. Looking at Trump his speech she wrote on AlterNet
The speech was hinged to the original purpose of his campaign: to trade on the resentments of a restive remnant of white America — angry white men and the women who love them — and set the stage for mayhem in the wake of his likely electoral defeat.
This was not your standard, off-the-cuff Trump rant. This was a scripted speech, delivered with a teleprompter. It was crafted. It featured the key words of right-wing complaints: “sovereign,” “global bankers” and “slander.” Really, it came right out of a Nazi propaganda playbook. And when one considers the themes common between Nazi propaganda films and the films made by top Trump campaign staffers Stephen K. Bannon and David Bossie (as analyzed by AlterNet), we should hardly be surprised.
Our thought that Trump sees everywhere a conspiracy against him was confirmed in the debate, him beginning with an attack on the New York Times (whose majority owners are a Jewish family), which he said was engaged in a conspiracy of global proportions with the Clintons, international bankers and major corporations, all to stop him from winning the presidency.

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Please continue reading

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Preceding article: Jews the next scapegoat for Donald Trump

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Thursday 6 March 2014

Outreach to rednecks

I wonder what we do have to understand under "rednecks"?

Chuck McAlister to me seems to have weird ideas about Christian behaviour and how to lure the nonreligious into the fold.
There is a huge interest among unchurched men in the state of Kentucky regarding guns and gun rights that is even more of a draw than a toaster or money would be.
The Kentucky Baptist Convention wants to “point people to Christ” by giving away guns at Second Amendment Celebrations hosted across the state.

Chuck McAlister, an ex-pastor, master storyteller and former Outdoor Channel hunting show host who presides at the events as the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s team leader for evangelism, said 1,678 men made “professions of faith” at about 50 such events last year, most of them in Kentucky.

In Louisville, he said, more than 500 people showed up on a snowy January day for a gun giveaway at Highview Baptist Church, and 61 made decisions to seek salvation.
McAlister’s boss, Paul Chitwood, the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s executive director, said such results speak for themselves. “It’s been very effective,” he said in an interview.




It is good to know that by those Americans some other clergy question what guns and gun rights have to do with with sharing the Gospel. People should come to understand the Gospel of the Good News has everything to do with Peace and not with peace brought under the eye of a gun.

Rev. Joe Phelps, pastor of Louisville’s independent Highland Baptist Church says:
“How ironic to use guns to lure men in to hear a message about Jesus, who said, ‘Put away the sword.’ ”
Jesus was against any form of violence and against weapons. Those who attacked him he approached in love and even healed them who attached him and his followers.

In case you have to arm yourself against your neighbours, you should wonder if nothing is wrong in the relationship with your neighbours. They also should consider when nobody can buy weapons, there would not be to be feared that somebody would put a gun against you.

Nancy Jo Kemper, pastor of New Union Church in Versailles and the former director of the Kentucky Council of Churches, said:
 “Churches should not be encouraging people in their communities to arm themselves against their neighbors, but to love their neighbors, as instructed by Jesus.”
“Second Amendment Celebrations” in church make a “travesty” of that message,
she said, adding,
 “How terrible it would be if one of those guns given away at a church were to cause the death of an innocent victim.”

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Find the article: Kentucky Churches Giving Away Guns To Help People Discover Jesus – Christianity

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Tuesday 14 January 2014

Maker of most popular weapon asks for repentance

In the world we can find many designers of instruments that can kill human or animal beings. they manage to create a thing able to destroy elements of nature, parts of the creation.

We can wonder how such creators can feel.

Just six months before his death in December Mikhail Kalashnikov described his struggling with the “unbearable spiritual torment” of knowing the carnage the AK-47 rifle wreaked upon the world.

The AK-47, the iconic assault rifle,  best known as the Kalashnikov [Avtomat Kalashnikova (Russian: Автомат Калашникова)], is widely regarded as one of the best - and deadliest in the world. It is is a selective-fire, gas-operated 7.62×39mm assault rifle, first designed in 1945 in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov and in 1948 it became introduced as the fixed-stock version into active service with selected units of the Soviet Army.


Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919 to a farming family in rural Russia. His family was viewed unfavorably by the Soviet establishment and deported to Siberia where the young Kalashnikov was forced to hunt with his father's rifle to feed the family. He was a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weaponry to design arms that achieved battlefield ubiquity.
Seeing the drawbacks of the standard infantry weapons at the time, he decided to construct a new rifle for the Soviet military. During this time Kalashnikov began designing a submachine gun.

Mikhail Kalashnikov himself personally negotiated many contracts for weapons exports and licensing.  Over the course of his career, he evolved the basic design into a weapons family.
He created the AKM , the RPK, the general-purpose PK machine gun.

On his 90th birthday on 10 November 2009, Kalashnikov was named a "Hero of the Russian Federation" and presented with a medal by President Dmitry Medvedev who lauded him for creating "the brand every Russian is proud of".

In the months before his recent death, the world's greatest gun-maker Mikhail Kalashnikov suffered 'unbearable' pain over the lost lives caused by his weapons, an extraordinary new letter reveals.  
He sought urgent spiritual guidance from Russia's top churchman on whether he was guilty in the eyes of God, according to his emotional appeal to the Orthodox Patriarch.
"The pain in my soul is unbearable,"
he wrote.
 'If my machine gun has taken lives of people, does it mean that it is me, Mikhail Kalashnikov, aged 93, the son of a peasant, an Orthodox Christian, who is guilty of the deaths of people, even if they are enemies?'
"The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he's just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!"
In his letter to Kirill, which was reproduced by the Russian daily Izvestia on Monday morning, the aging designer explained how he turned to God as he grew older.

Mr Kalashnikov wrote that he his conversion began with the sense of “excitement” he felt when he first entered a church at the age of 91, later being baptised into the Orthodox faith.

A spokesman for the Church said Patriarch Kirril had welcomed the letter and even written a reply.

“This letter was very welcome at a time of attacks on the Church. The Patriarch thanked the legendary designer for his attention and position and answered that Mikhail Timofeevich was himself an example of patriotism and appropriate attitude to the country,”
Patriarch Kirill’s spokesman Alexander Volkov told the paper.

When we look at the answer we only can find it strange that those who call themselves man of God can give such a reply:
"If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it."
The poor excuse of Mr. Alexander Volkov did not help:
“He invented that weapon for the defence of the country, not for the use of Saudi Arabian terrorists.”
This clearly should let the members of that church think about the closeness of that church with the Creator and should wonder how much love they have for the Creation of the Supreme Being.

It is good to notice that this reply may not have comforted the dying Kalashnikov, who began visiting Church at the age of 91 in his working hometown of Izhevsk. At his old age perhaps the sense of responsibility for what one does came to him and made him question all his previous actions.

Even when Kalashnikov would not have killed any people himself, he should have been aware of what the tanks he worked at, the guns he designed and let been manufactured would have done to many people and destroyed many families. His designs remains eminently deadly to this day.

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