By William Markiewicz
(As other short items may follow, I've decided to group them together.)
Who will Capitulate -- Netanyahu or Abbas? (9/28)
Certainly Netanyahu will capitulate to the mystical settler-warriors. Now he would like peace! Too late; he has already given the settlers fangs and claws they didn't have before. The conciliatory one, the paradoxically Rabin-type Abbas, would like peace above all, but he has no real power. He must obey the Arab/Muslim world. Israeli hawks, under the Bush - Sharon team, threw away the opportunity when the Arab world proposed acceptance and peace with Israel.
The settlers are driven by faith, like the Taliban and the Crusaders, but the Taliban has demography and topography on its side which could not be said about the Crusaders, nor about the settlers. Tragedy looms. The principal faction refuses to see it.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Think (9/24)
Confucius said, ‘The best king is the invisible king.’ A Japanese Kamikaze wrote before going to his death, “I will hold high my banner of indifference.” The agnostic is not necessarily one who believes or not in God, he is usually one who is not particularly preoccupied with the question. The things we take for granted we can chase from our minds, simply living with them without thinking of them. Reducing things to the essential is to be in the essential and that’s how we really find ourselves. The things you take for granted if you know who you are, if you know your preferences, that's probably all you need to know without particularly displaying or talking about it.
India in Kashmir’s Trap (9/13)
Kashmir’s population, being Muslim, associates itself with Pakistan and India makes a terrific mistake holding a population that does not consider itself to be Indian. In all countries, the ancestral majority population has the primary right to decide its own fate; Ossetia, Abkhazia ... If Kosovo remains in question it’s because it’s almost impossible to know when one part of the population suddenly exploded while another part diminished. Was it during the Second World War under Nazi occupation? In consequence, Kosovo today should not be independent but partitioned between two antagonistic populations.
Act of War (9/08)
If the unending chain of mass killing in Central Asia has become "business as usual," the 9/11 act, not only by its gravity but also by its spectacular singularity, takes its place in history. The current climate is somehow similar to that preceding WW2, meaning nearer the boiling point than the cold war ever reached. The 9/11 punch was an Eastern act of war, while burning of the Koran would be one Western act of war. The supporters of peace do all they can to smooth the atmosphere. The minister of a very small church in Florida may have to cede while attempts at reconciliation limp along.
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William Markiewicz