Friday 21 January 2005

Every individual soldier has the moral right to decide whether he will put his life on the line.

    Earlier this week, I came out publicly against the war in Iraq. I'm not the only member of the Labour Party to be opposed to our military participation in this American-led adventure, nor am I the only soldier. In fact, there growing vocal minority within the Territorial Army that is against the war. Nonetheless I am the first one to make it clear, in public, that if called to serve in Iraq, I will refuse.

    This has not been a decision arrived at impulsively. I have never believed in the rightness of this war; in fact I was on the big anti-war March in February 2003. Even then - before the absence of the weapons of mass destruction that Prime Minister Blair and President Bush cited as the principal reason to rush to war was admitted by all - I was astounded that they could take us to war when it was clear the majority of the population was opposed. Members of the Labour Party at the time were talking about practicing an "ethical foreign policy", and yet there was nothing ethical about the way this was being planned and sold to the public.

    It was not as though there was no alternative at the time. Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had both pressed for more time before the final decisions were taken. And much of the rest of the world, both governments and their peoples, were saying, "Let's get this investigation sorted before we start blowing up human beings."

    I could have quietly left the Army then, without fuss; you can resign from the Territorial Army if you've not actually been called up to serve in action. But from boyhood I had wanted to be a soldier; in fact, when I was 22 I had taken advantage of my dual Cypriot-British citizenship, and done national service for the Greek army in Cyprus. Later I had joined the TA, as a medic, and I was proud to be a part of that institution, and bound to my friends and comrades there, some of whom agreed with me about the futility, immorality and illegality of the war. None of us had been called up yet, so we succumbed to the all too human temptation to put off the evil day until it was upon us. In the end, quite a few did resign, and others who were called up deliberately failed their medical examinations.

    But although I stayed on a while longer, in the last year, when two of my comrades returned wounded, I began thinking seriously about what I could do to help end this continuing war. I began to do a lot of research, learning everything I could about the illegality and immorality of our occupation of Iraq. And I started to go on the anti-war demos that continue around the country. I listened to peace campaigners and soldiers who had been out there, and MPs like George Galloway. I would recommend similar research to any soldier who is having doubts about the war.

    Finally, one day about a month ago, I stood up at a demo in my local London borough of Hackney and just said "I want to get out of this, but what can I do?" It became clear that working with Military Families Against the War, I could make public my despair, my anger and my intention to refuse any call-up to serve in Iraq.

    I wanted to leave the TA in the public way I have because, although so many solders are against this war, they don't have a rallying point. There has to be someone who is the first to go. After that, there will be another and another and another. They're out there, the soldiers who want to make plain their refusal to part of this illegal war - I know, I've talked to them.

    Many people, even those who agree with my views on the war, will say that it is not the place of soldiers to decide which wars they will fight; that decision must be taken by their senior officers, and ultimately by the government of the day. But you should only obey orders that are morally right. The WMD claims were untrue, and so many other lies were told in the pursuit of this war. Every individual soldier also has the moral right to decide whether he will put his life on the line. After all, it is his flesh and blood that gets wounded; that gives him the right to an opinion.

    And in the modern army, not every opinion will be the same. No longer do soldiers come from a uniform cultural background. The Army wants lots of ethnic groups, and now that they've got them, they have to accept that there will be different points of view. Think of the position of Muslims in the Army. My own background as Greek Cypriot has made me aware of some distasteful things that the British military did in Cyprus in the Fifties; so I too have a different perspective. If the Government wants their soldiers to fight, they will have to be clear and honest about what they are asking them to do.

    I'm proud to be part of the military family that is against the war. There will be more soldiers coming out soon, and I'll be proud to stand next to them on 19 March at the anti-war demo in London. We can help stop this illegal and immoral war, and that is our duty now.

    If any soldier would like to contact George Solomou or Military Families Against the War, they can do so at the Military Families Against the War Website.

By: Bill McKibben

Have you ever been in a hopeless situation? Perhaps it seemed that nothing good could come out of what was happening. If you have been there, you can empathize with those who experience the helpless feeling that comes at such a time.

Acts 27:18-20 is part of an account written by Luke about a sea journey that came to a point where the situation looked hopeless. He wrote, “And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day they lightened the ship; And the third day we cast out with our own hands the tackling of the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken away.” It seemed things could not possibly get any worse.

Paul the Apostle had appealed his case to Caesar and was being taken to Rome. After the ship set sail, there were problems—the weather turned against them. The ship floundered in the tempest, and all hope of rescue or of safely making it to land was gone. There was nothing left to do but wait for the end. However, though the men on board that ship were certainly helpless in the face of such a storm, they were not hopeless. You see, God was aware of their situation. With God, we are never hopeless.
A number of accounts in the Word of God illustrate this. In Mark 5, we read of the man who lived among the tombs of Gadera. A demonic spirit possessed him, and that spirit had such power that when the people tried to bind him with chains, he broke the fetters. No doubt it seemed like a hopeless situation to the people in the town of Gadera—but it was not. One day Jesus made His way into the region, and when He came upon this poor, tormented man, He told the evil spirit, “Come out of him.” Just a short time later, the people of Gadera came and found that man clothed and in his right mind, and seated at the feet of Jesus. There are no hopeless situations with God!

In 2 Chronicles we read of a king named Jehoshaphat. He was confronted by a military situation that appeared to be desperate. His enemies, the Moabites and the Ammonites, had decided to come down and destroy his land, and destruction was imminent. He looked at all the resources at his disposal, and realized that they were insufficient—they were going to lose the battle. Jehoshaphat took the right steps. He went to God and told him the situation, saying, “Neither know we what to do . . . our eyes are upon thee.” In what seemed like a hopeless situation, he turned to God for hope, who intervened on his behalf. God always has the answer, even when it seems there is none! We serve a God in whom all hope dwells.

I recently heard a story about a man, in a country overseas, who had spent his life building a home, a little business, and an orphanage next to the business. He was trying to do his best to win people in his area to Christ. His country was engaged in a civil war, and one day soldiers came through and completely destroyed the orphanage, his business, and his home. As he sat there and watched the smoke going up from his life’s work, someone came to him and said, “It’s hopeless; it is all gone.” The man looked up and said, “But we still have Christ!” What inspiring words! When all is gone, if we have Christ, we are not hopeless.

When Luke penned the words about his sea voyage with the Apostle Paul, he was looking back at quite a momentous journey. They were in a tempest like none they had ever seen before. They had given up every hope of being saved. An interesting thing happened about that time, though. The Apostle Paul appeared on deck. He said to the people on the ship, “And now I exhort you to be of good cheer.”

Speculate for a moment how those people might have reacted to Paul’s words. Don’t you love it when people come to you and say, “Cheer up!” when you are going through a trial? Oh, we may smile and say, “Thank you,” but what we would like to say to them is, “You don’t have a clue as to what is happening. You don’t know the pain I’m going through. You don’t know how hard it is on my job, in my family, with my children. You don’t understand!”

But maybe they do understand! Maybe they know the God who brings hope. Maybe they know that God can take a seemingly impossible situation and turn it around through His power. Paul told the people that day, “Be of good cheer: for there shall be no loss of any man’s life among you, but of the ship. For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve, Saying, Fear not, Paul; . . . lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with thee. Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe God.” Situations are not hopeless if we believe God!

Several years ago, I was pastoring a small church in central California. My wife and I had two children, and life was going smoothly. Then we found that we had another child on the way, and that was a blessing. Early one Thanksgiving morning, we took a trip to the hospital and a little girl was born. Even when it is your second or third child, birth is such a miracle. We were in awe and so happy as we prepared to take our new little daughter home.

As we were packing to leave the hospital, the doctor came in and said, “I would like to take an X-ray of your baby. I heard something funny with her heart.” They did the X-ray and the doctor said, “There is nothing to worry about.” I was relieved, but then he added, “However, you should bring her in tomorrow.” The next day, we did so. He listened to her heart and said, “There is nothing to worry about, but I would like for you to make an appointment with a specialist at the children’s hospital about an hour from here.”

We went home and made the appointment, and about one week later we made the trek to the city of Fresno, to the office of a pediatric cardiologist. He listened to her heart, and finally said, “I don’t think there is anything to worry about, but I would like to schedule her for a test at the hospital.” I was getting tired of hearing that there was nothing to worry about but that more tests were needed.

I still remember driving down Highway 384, looking at the fruit trees on both sides. The trees had no leaves, and that is how I felt—a sort of dead feeling. Our baby was in a car seat in the back, and my wife was sitting next to me. I looked over at her and saw the tears running down her face. Finally she took my hand and said, “What are we going to do?” I did not feel very brave, and my words seemed a bit hollow, but I said to her, “I guess we will do what we have always done—we will just trust God.” I did not have a lot of faith that day, but I did not know what else to do. I felt so helpless.

We went home and laid our little girl in her cradle. We knelt down next to it and prayed, “God, we gave her to You before she was born, and she is still Yours. You take care of her.” On the scheduled day, we went to the hospital, and there the doctor told us that our daughter had something wrong with a heart valve. He drew pictures and said, “I can hear a noise and see what is happening. There is no back pressure. This situation always creates certain problems, but it is not creating these problems this time. We will need to watch it.” Well, Someone was watching the situation long before the doctor began watching it. We now have a healthy daughter who can keep up with anyone. She may need testing later, but we are not without hope.

Whatever your situation, God has the answer. If you are living without Christ in your heart, you might think your life is a mess and that it can never be unraveled. You might think the devastation in your situation is unfixable. However, though you might be helpless, you are not hopeless. Jesus is here to make a difference in your life like He did for the man in the tombs of Gadera, for King Jehoshaphat, and for my family.

Perhaps you serve the Lord and have not told anyone that the storms have been raging in your life, that the tackling has been thrown overboard, and that you have not seen the stars for many days. Be of good cheer. The God you serve is on the scene of your life today! God can make a way when it seems there is none. Toss your helplessness at His feet, and hope in Him. God will make a way for you!

And remember, whatever your state is today, you can have a hope of eternal life—a hope that someday all tears will be gone, all suffering will be over, and you will spend eternity with God. What a glorious hope is ours!

Bill McKibben is the pastor of the Apostolic Faith Church in Richmond, California.

Back to the Brothel

Naka Nathaniel/NYTimes.com Srey Mom.

Two Misplaced Souls Decide They Might as Well Live

Strand Releasing Birol Unel and his bride, Sibel Kekilli, in "Head-On," a German film set among immigrants in the gritty reaches of working-class Hamburg.

ove doesn't just hurt in the jagged German romance "Head-On"; it cuts and bleeds and even kills. A story about a lonely man and a still-lonelier woman fighting against their worlds and what often seems like their own best interests, the film has caused a stir in Germany for the murky, troubling light it sheds on the lives of the country's Turkish immigrants. Its popularity made it a fleeting social phenomenon and a minor cultural footnote. But it doesn't explain why this film about two strangers with suicidal tendencies and a deep commitment to self-aggrandizing drama is the first very good movie of this very young year.

One of the truisms about romances, even those shaded pitch black and set to banging rock music, is that you have to fall in love with the characters when they're falling for each other. It takes a long time for Cahit (Birol Unel) and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) to get inside each other's heads, much less anywhere else.

The couple meet in a nasty, classically punk fashion at a mental institution, where they have both landed after trying to commit suicide. Cahit drove a car into a brick wall; Sibel slit her wrists, and probably not for the first time. He is dying for a drink and likely dying from drink. Meanwhile, what Sibel needs more than anything else, more than a nip or a prescription for Zoloft, is a Turkish husband.

The only daughter in a strict German-Turkish family, Sibel has a broken nose and scarred arms, and is living a life of everyday brutality.

The character was born in 1980's Hamburg, but for Fatih Akin, who both wrote and directed "Head-On," she might as well be living in another century or any cloistered society where women are kept captive by their fathers and brothers and called whores for wearing short skirts. Sibel's father happens to be a conservative Muslim. Yet for Mr. Akin, the son of Turkish guest workers who immigrated to Germany and ended up in Hamburg, where he was born, religion is not specifically, or at least exclusively, the problem. The problem is how faith becomes dogma, a prison sentence and worse.

For Sibel, the solution to that problem is a husband who can pass muster with her father, which is how she and Cahit end up under the same roof. Movingly played by both Mr. Unel and Ms. Kekilli, the couple enter the arrangement with no illusions, their relationship developing in reverse of the typical romance: they start off steeped in cynicism and doubt, and in separate beds. Cahit, who's on a long downward spiral, betrays little interest in Sibel and the world from which she comes, and it soon becomes clear why. During the couple's wincingly comic courtship, when Cahit is playing nice and sober opposite Sibel's sanctimonious father, her thuggish brother sneers about the suitor's fumbling Turkish, asking what he did with it. Cahit answers coolly, "I threw it away."

In time, Mr. Akin reveals why Cahit lets this lost lamb into his fold, though he doesn't really try to explain the character's rationale or go spelunking in the darker recesses of his mind. People are strange and filled with contradictions, and sometimes that's all you need to know.

Cahit is as haunted by the past as Sibel is plagued by the present. Both are slaves to loves: he of heartbreak, she of her father and his God. For his troubles, Cahit wears the mantle of tragic hero, a role the charismatic Mr. Unel embraces with exuberant, tangible heat. Sibel, meanwhile, embodies the film's divided conscience. Split between two cultures, yearning for life and for death, the character is struggling to declare not just her independence, but her very being.

"Head-On" may offend those who endorse cultural relativism, no matter how noxious its consequences, or forget that freedom from religion is as essential as freedom of religion. Mr. Akin's commitment to his characters is uncompromising, as is his humanity, which makes a mockery of the kind of politically correct pieties that often plague stories about cultural outsiders. Unlike, say, Ken Loach in his last film, the nauseatingly smug "Ae Fond Kiss," Mr. Akin doesn't presume to know how to tie up religious, cultural and sexual differences in a neat package.

Germany, it emerges, is no more hospitable to Cahit and Sibel than the couple's own family and background. It also isn't any better for non-Turkish Germans. That's tough on this unlikely pair, but it's not the end of them, either.

Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, "Head-On" is a hopeful film, if for no other reason than Cahit and Sibel can't be sized up or pinned down, their troubles filed under immigration and assimilation. Their tribulations are at once specific and universal, by turns grimly funny and darkly ironic. Set principally against the grubby environs of working-class Hamburg, in dives and derelict apartments, the film has a terrific sense of place. The city's grubbiness works a vivid contrast to the visions of Turkey that flicker throughout the film. Istanbul looks beautiful, but then so, too, does Cahit's wreck of an apartment, where anarchy and the freedom it promises linger as stubbornly as the smell of stale beer and cigarettes.

'Head-On'

Opens today in Manhattan.

Written (in German and Turkish, with English subtitles) and directed by Fatih Akin; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Andrew Bird; artistic director, Andreas Thiel; produced by Ralph Schwingel, Stefan Schubert and Wüste Filmproduktion; released by Strand Releasing. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Birol Unel (Cahit), Sibel Kekilli (Sibel), Catrin Striebeck (Maren) and Guven Kirac (Seref).

Harry refuses to to go Auschwitz

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Prince Harry on Thursday ruled out visiting Auschwitz as atonement for wearing a Nazi uniform at a party just two weeks before the 60th anniversary of the death camp's liberation.

Jewish groups had demanded the 20-year-old grandson of Queen Elizabeth make the symbolic gesture as a way of apologizing for wearing a swastika armband and an army shirt with Nazi regalia at a costume party on Saturday.

The prince has apologized for his "mistake" but Jewish rights groups and politicians said he should do more.

"This was a shameful act displaying insensitivity for the victims, not just for those soldiers of his own country who gave their lives to defeat Nazism but to the victims of the Holocaust ..." said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He added in a statement: "We strongly urge Prince Harry to accompany the British delegation on January 27th to the Auschwitz death camp to commemorate 60 years since liberation. There he will see the results of the hated symbol he so foolishly and brazenly chose to wear."

A royal official said he understood the calls for the prince to go to Auschwitz but there were no plans for him to attend any of the ceremonies.

"It would be a distraction and a detraction from the importance of the occasion because it would become a different story in media terms," the official told Reuters.

"He recognizes he made a very bad mistake and he apologizes for that. There are no plans for him to say anything more."

The Nazis murdered six million Jews and millions of others including Poles, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners and Gypsies. Millions more were imprisoned or forced to work as slaves.

Photographs of the younger son of the late Princess Diana and heir to the throne Prince Charles in Nazi attire appeared in Britain's Sun newspaper, in Israeli papers and on Web sites around the world.

Harry, third in line to the throne, said in a statement he was sorry if he had caused any offence. "It was a poor choice of costume and I apologize," he said.

Can You Imagine?:
Hussein Was Right & Bush Was Wrong

by Harry Browne

January 15, 2005     

You may remember that in 2002, the year before the Iraq War began, the United Nations Security Council ordered Iraq to produce a report detailing all of its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons — past and present. Iraqi officials complied and produced an 11,800-page report on Iraq's weapons programs. The report described all the chemical and biological weapons the country once had — where they came from and what was done with them — as well as what had happened to Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Although the report was prepared for the United Nations, U.S. officials intercepted the report, edited out 8,000 pages (over two thirds) of it, and delivered its Reader's Digest version of the report to the UN.

A German reporter managed to obtain a copy of the original report from Iraq, and then compared it with the truncated copy the U.S. gave to the UN. He found that the missing parts covered the Iraqis' acquisition of chemical and biological weapons from the U.S., the delivery of non-fissionable materials for a nuclear bomb by the U.S. to the Iraqis, and the training of Iraqi nuclear scientists at U.S. nuclear facilities in Los Alamos, Sandia, and Berkeley.

The basic points made in the report were:

• Iraq once had chemical and biological weapons.

• Some of those weapons were destroyed at the end of the Gulf War; the rest were destroyed under the supervision of the UN weapons inspectors.

• Iraq once had a program to develop nuclear weapons.

• Some of the nuclear weapons facilities were destroyed at the end of the Gulf War; the rest were destroyed under the supervision of the UN weapons inspectors.

UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said the conclusions stated in the report were basically true — that Iraq no longer had dangerous weapons.

Colin Powell dismissed the report, calling it a "catalogue of recycled information and flagrant omissions." Of course, as we now know, the information was recycled because it happened to be true, and the omissions were flagrant because U.S. officials had done the omitting.

Hussein said he would like to bring the UN weapons inspectors back to Iraq. (They had left for safety reasons in 1998 when President Clinton resumed air strikes against Iraq.) President Bush called Hussein's offer a "cynical ploy" and managed to nip any such idea in the bud.

Hussein also invited the U.S. Congress to send representatives, accompanied by experts, to inspect any facilities in Iraq that they wanted. President Bush said this changed nothing, and he managed to derail the sending of a Congressional delegation.

Over and over, George Bush told us that Saddam Hussein was lying, that he was dragging his feet, that Iraq had dangerous weapons, that Hussein was a threat to the whole world,

Now here we are, over two years later. What have we learned?

• The hunt for Weapons of Mass Destruction has turned up exactly nothing, and so the hunt has been called off.

• Everything Hussein said about the weapons has turned out to be true.

• Everything George Bush said about Iraq's weapons has turned out to be false.

The Bush administration is trying to sugar-coat the above conclusions by saying that the recently concluded weapons hunt by Charles Duelfer and the CIA's Iraq Survey Group (ISG) discovered an "intent" by Hussein to renew his WMD programs if the U.S. would only stay out of Iraq. However, Duelfer has provided absolutely no hard evidence of such an "intent." Once again we're getting firm assertions backed up by nothing.

Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter has summed it all up very well:

One of the tragic ironies of the decision to invade Iraq is that the Iraqi WMD declaration required by security council resolution 1441, submitted by Iraq in December 2002, and summarily rejected by Bush and Blair as repackaged falsehoods, now stands as the most accurate compilation of data yet assembled regarding Iraq’s WMD programs (more so than even Duelfer’s ISG report, which contains much unsubstantiated speculation). Saddam Hussein has yet to be contradicted on a single point of substantive fact. Iraq had disarmed; no one wanted to accept that conclusion.

In other words, the Butcher of Baghdad was correct; the President of the United States of America was wrong. The Butcher of Baghdad will be put on trial for "war crimes." The President of the United States of America was reelected to "lead" the country for four more years.

It's a sorry state of affairs in America when you can trust the words of Saddam Hussein more than those of your own President.