Excerpts from: Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut
The blood is fresh...the tears find their old grooves within the faces of a people destined to live life in constant turmoil and wonder at what their futures might bring...May Allah protect you our Brothers and Sisters in the middle of this war and all wars...the once chained are now the ones to chain...disturbing how history repeats itself.
~Amaana03
Excerpt from: Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut
"Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.
And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead...
Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.
I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".
Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot..."
I have a question. I am generally supportive of Islam, though I myself am not a practitioner. There is one issue that I have not been able to understand, however. I learned during the recent Jyllands-Posten controversy that many Muslims believe that no one should be allowed to create or display images of Mohammed, regardless of their religion. If I am not Muslim, why should a Muslim care whether or not I create images of Mohammed? If Muslims are not willing to respect my personal beliefs regarding Mohammed, how can they ask for that respect in return?
ReplyDeleteAsalamu Alaikum:
ReplyDeleteI am a muslim and beleive in Allah and mohamad as his final messnger but I personally do not put full faith in hadiths- as they were written years after the Prophets death, by human beings who could have manipulated and changed things around and thrown things in there as they saw fit. I know we are supposed to treat the teachings of the prophet as the word of Allah but i really just dont trust a bunch of men compiling facts and treating them like Allah(swt)'s spoken truth no matter how "authenticated" they may be based upon how much everyone trusted and respected them. They are human too. I treat the hadiths as knowledgeable wisdom that i try and learn from not gods spoken truth. But do people who dont follow hadith pray? Thanks so much for ur time!! Salamz =)