Violence, Bible and Palestine

I wonder if you can get your imagination to a place where you feel so persecuted that you can imagine causing harm to the children of the persecutor?

I have been fortunate to have never come anywhere near this point but I have lived a very safe and sheltered life. I can disagree with the government without fear of arrest. My land borders are not disputed. The authorities take no interest in my clothes or sexual orientation. It has been my privilege not to be persecuted.

My formative teenage years had a backdrop of IRA atrocity. I was in Birmingham's Tavern in the Town the night before a bomb exploded there killing many. I've felt fortunate since then. The further away from it I get the closer it seems.

I found it hard to grasp a cause which dealt with the innocent like that.

Then, in 1988, I read, on an album sleeve of all places, this:

'On October 5 1968, a peaceful civil rights march in Derry (including parents and members of the band) was brutally attacked by the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the instructions of the Unionist-controlled Stormont Government. This was followed by the organised attack of a peaceful student march from Belfast to Derry by Unionist extremists setting a precedent of anti-nationalist violence in the subsequent months and culminating in the British Government's decision to draft in its troops to uphold 'law and order'.

'In the face of such belligerent intransigence, it was a small step from demanding civil rights to demanding a complete severance of ties from Britain and the establishment of a Socialist Irish State. The resurgence of the Irish Republican Army, largely dormant from the late '50s, heralded an age where constitutional politics went from sick-joke status to complete irrelevancy for the nationalist community.'

I make no claims about the factual accuracy of the piece. It simply became a personal tipping point. I understood the gut-led emotional reaction of anger of five young Catholic men utterly helpless in the face of aggression. Of course I am not defending the IRA. And the young men responded with music not violence

Psalm 137 was put on the lips of every young person of my generation in 1978 when Boney M charted with By the Rivers of Babylon. In fact the song was a cover, the original dating from 1970. Psalm 137 is a response to a taunt. People in exile in Babylon are asked by their captors to sing one of their Hebrew songs. They respond, I paraphrase, 'How can we sing the Lord's songs in a strange land?' Songs of the Temple won't work elsewhere.

At the end of Psalm 137 is a verse that Boney M chose not to sing. Again to paraphrase, 'Happy (is he) who takes your little ones and bashes their heads against the rocks.' Maybe, as Robert Alter says, it is a good job the captors did not understand the Hebrew in which the song-response to the taunt was delivered. Whether there was ever any intention of acting so, I doubt. But the song tells of a people angry enough to think it.

The religions of the Book have the highest possible care for the non-combatants during war-time. Hebrew Scriptures emphasise reasonable response (eye for eye, tooth for tooth). The New Testament suggests loving your enemy and praying for those who persecute you. The Quran specifically prohibits the killing of innocent people.

People often deride religions for causing wars. These days it is usually land-grabbing that causes wars and religion is sometimes enlisted for justification on either or both sides. The Hebrew Scriptures are a story of God-condoned land-grabbing and also, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, 'a national literature of self-criticism.'

I lament for the innocent of Israel and Palestine. I don't understand how the national boundaries can be finalised without concessions. I do understand why a first reaction is to bang the heads of the enemy against the rocks. Trouble is, we've been having nothing but first reaction for two and a half thousand years. And the children get their heads smashed in.

Empathy

We began to watch the much-trailed new TV series, Gunpowder on Saturday. Opening, as it did, with the horrific scene of the cruel execution of a Catholic woman for treason (hiding a Jesuit Priest) we chose to turn over. Maybe it is an age thing but I find it less and less entertaining, or helpful, to have to watch inhumanity.

Recently a song I love stopped me in my tracks. I must have sung When I Survey the Wondrous Cross a thousand times. I have even performed it.

I love lines such as:

Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my life, my soul, my all.

But I realised, for the first time, that I didn't like the word wondrous. Which victim of execution, looking towards the gallows, would be glad to imagine the method of  their destruction becoming an object of worship?

Gratefulness better than gaudiness, methinks. When I survey the empty cross, anyone?

Time for a bit of a rethink maybe. The writers of Gunpowder say they wanted the viewers to understand the level of anger that led to the Gunpowder Plot. Did it need to be that graphic? Reviewers are divided. I think they could have demonstrated the cruelty with more dialogue and less  screaming. Sometimes a cutaway says more than a lingering camera.

So why is this about empathy? In Karen Armstrong's excellent Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she has a chapter on empathy and shares this quote:

'...when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow-feeling - and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us.'
(Peter Abelard)

Now I imagine my extremist evangelical reader has probably gone elsewhere now, but should any new ones be around I know that we are saved externally, not by any action of our own. By grace and by God. But take a moment to ponder that any saving that has happened round here was not worth a thing without a response that makes the world less a place of suffering and more a place of love.

Martin McGuinness

One of the things I hate about modern political discourse is the failure of 'sides' to express their 'opponents' position as strongly as possible before disagreeing with it. Points scoring is cheap and nasty. Proper listening and understanding moves everyone forward.

So to Martin McGuinness. He is someone who, if forced to identify such a person, I would have said was my enemy in 1972-4. The IRA tried to kill me. They missed by a day, blowing up a Birmingham pub I had frequented the night before. I didn't lose any friends but my home city lost its vibrancy for a bit.

When he embraced the idea of politics to move things forward there was a lot of suspicion. I think rightly so. Whenever anyone has a change of heart it takes a while to be convinced. Those who suffered at his organisation's hands are clearly going to be the last people to forgive. And so we hear Lord Tebbit still expressing hate, as we might expect from a man who was seriously injured by a bomb which killed some of his colleagues and paralysed his wife for the rest of her life in 1984.

When people who once breathed out murderous threats stop threatening (Saul /St Paul anyone?) it is hard to get on board with them.

Nobody, to my mind, has touched on one thing that would have been hardest for Martin McGuinness. He had to take the IRA with him. That this was difficult was emphasised by a batch of atrocities committed by the 'Continuing IRA' as the peace process began.

I was brought up to hate Irish Republicanism. I never grasped their complaints. I did not have their case put to me as strongly as possible. They had no face in the media and for a time their words were spoken, on the news, only by actors.

It was, of all places, on the sleeve notes of an album by a fine band That Petrol Emotion, that I read the material produced here.

High unemployment, job discrimination, gerrymandering of political boundaries, a derisory public housing provision and the linking of the right-to-vote with a property qualification led in 1967 to the formation of a broadly based non-political and non-sectarian civil rights movement composed of all shades of non-Unionist opinion. By peaceful protest demonstrations, it demanded such reforms as 'one-man one-vote' (universal suffrage), an anti-discrimination act, reform of local government and the abolition of the draconian Special Powers Act.

On October 5 1968, a peaceful civil rights march in Derry (including parents and members of the band) was brutally attacked by the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the instructions of the Unionist-controlled Stormont Government. This was followed by the organised attack of a peaceful student march from Belfast to Derry by Unionist extremists setting a precedent of anti-nationalist violence in the subsequent months and culminating in the British Government's decision to draft in its troops to uphold 'law and order'.

In the face of such belligerent intransigence, it was a small step from demanding civil rights to demanding a complete severance of ties from Britain and the establishment of a socialist Irish state. The resurgence of the Irish Republican Army, largely dormant from the late '50's, heralded an age where constitutional politics went from sick-joke status to complete irrelevancy for the Nationalist community...

(End of the Millennium Psychosis Blues -  Virgin Records Ltd 1988)

For the first time I understood why Northern Irish Republicans felt as they did. I related it to the appalling sentiment expressed in Psalm 137 (the bit we rarely emphasise) that the Israelite who dashed Babylonian babies against the rocks would be happy so doing.

I am not condoning what many chose to do thereafter; merely showing a strong expression of the Republican case.

In the 1980s and 1990s, some back channel work went on, quite counter to the 'We don't talk to terrorists' sound-bite regularly wheeled out by politicians. If someone is so angry they will gladly dash the heads of innocent babies against the rocks it behoves us to find out why in any way possible. It was very brave of some people to do this.

McGuinness never revealed where the bodies were buried. I don't know, but I imagine, that at every step after renouncing violence his own life was in danger from those who didn't want to do that. Especially when they saw him and Ian Paisley laughing together and being nicknamed the Chuckle Brothers.

So, for me, he was not a good man, nor a bad man, but a man of contradictions. Some of the truth he took with him to the grave. I understand those who don't want him ever to rest in peace. And those who do.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

In the American political drama 'The West Wing' news of a coup in the imaginary African country of Equatorial Kuhndu reaches the White House. President Bartlett asks Will Bailey, one of his speech writers, 'Why is an American life worth more to me than a Kuhndunese life?' 'I don't know sir' says Will, 'but it is.'

He is commended for speaking a hard truth to power.

Last week there were terrorist atrocities in Beirut, Baghdad and Paris. The highest loss of life was in Paris but the other events were not insignificant.

Two things diminish our capacity to care - distance and repetition. A suicide bomber in a place far away where these things seem common doesn't move us the way a local one does.

Now the French are our obvious neighbours and friends. It didn't happen so far away.

A man once asked Jesus who was his neighbour. As reply he got the well-known but often misused parable of the Good Samaritan. A priest and a Levite pass by a wounded Jew but a Samaritan, a traditional enemy, does the decent thing and looks after the victim.

Jesus turns the question round. 'Who was neighbour to that man?' 'The one who had mercy on him', says the questioner. 'Go and do likewise' says Jesus.

If you want to know who your neighbour is find someone to whom you can be merciful.

My condolences, of course, to any who are personally affected by tragedy today. Maybe the most solidarity-inspired action we can take in response to the harm suffered by our neighbours in Paris, Baghdad or Beirut is not to seek vengeance but to have mercy on someone. Anyone who needs it. Go on. Pay it forward.

Quote Book Index 591-600

More P.J.O'Rourke:

591. Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming.

Gun Crime - Some Stats

In one of the more alarming stories of the day I read that, since the mass shooting at the Newtown, Connecticut school, sales of small arms in the United States have gone up to record levels. I hope it isn't true; I fear it might be.

You can sort of see what people think. 'If only someone nearby had had a gun that guy would never have been able to commit such an atrocity. He'd have been taken out. Arm teachers.' Sounds true.

In the United Kingdom in 2011 there were 14 shotgun fatalities out of a population of 60 million or so. We came 39th in the league (not a good league).

The United States had 9369 cases out of 300 million people and came fourth. In case you wondered, South Africa was the worst, followed by Columbia and Thailand.

The United States has an enshrined constitutional right for its citizens to bear arms. So many people bear arms that you can see why they might find it hard to see the country becoming safer by their giving up their weapons. Legislation is the only thing that would make it unilateral and yet it is often said that the political will is not there. What level of atrocity might achieve that do you wonder?

I have no idea how, post-Dunblane, the UK got the hand-gun banning legislation through so quickly but it has had a dramatic effect. If our percentage was mirrored in the States their victim numbers would fall from 9369 to just 70.

By banning hand guns and making it almost impossibly difficult, and socially unacceptable, to own a weapon, Japan has virtually eliminated gun crime. Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the Newtown massacre, took his mother's guns. She had three, apparently. She was the first person he shot.

We must say, 'If only the guy had not had a gun he would never have been able to commit such an atrocity.' I rarely say this, but end of.