Many liberal bloggers I’ve been reading today have been talking about Martin Luther King Jr.’s anti-Vietnam War speech. While topical, I still think his “I have a dream” speech is the ideal we should be striving for. Everything else will follow from that. “Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring — when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics – will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ”Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!“
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“He broke from them and then he broke from himself”
All right, allow me one more indulgence and then I will keep quite for a while. I am a pacifist. I am also pragmatic and take responsibility for my actions. I subscribe to the Kurtzian view of war. If you are going to fight a war, fight it to win. War is an act of barbarism. Thus, to have rules such as the Geneva conventions govern the conduct of fighting and treatment of combatants, to me, seems ridiculous. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now argued for the right to drop the bomb on the Chinese and the Vietnamese. He understood the horror…
Where is Osama?
I was recently called to task, and rightly so, for not being specific about failed DOJ cases, and few come to mind: Yaser Hamdi (I seem to recall that a US citizen cannot be coerced by the gov’t into giving up his citizenship, and it strikes me that’s what happened here…. Detroit Sleeper Cell Brandon Mayfield (2, 3) James Yee (2) (Yes, I know this isn’t a DOJ case, but I’m working to establish a larger pattern in the gov’t in general) Terrorism Cases That Weren’t (but it doesn’t mean they weren’t guilty of something) Lackawanna Six (2, 3) Portland Seven José Padilla’s case is still pending, but I don’t know how much traction the gov’t will get with him.
The Mahdi
Father Jake had a question regarding the Mahdi and the use of the name “Mahdi Army” by Muqtada as-Sadr. He’s gone out and done a fair amount of research, and I wanted to add my two cents. From a theological perspective, the idea of the Mahdi is incredibly ill-defined, because the idea of the end days are ill-defined in the Qur’an. While we have a sense that the mountains will crumble, stars will fall from the sky and the sky itself will tear, there is no equivalent to the Book of Revelations in the Qur’an. (For a wonderful discussion of…