Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Our American Madness: About Winning the PEACE -- Not War!

Now in my 75th year and at last retiring from several possible careers -- theology, foreign service, journalism -- as well as my actual one as a legal, political, social philosopher, I am appalled by the madness that seems so deeply embedded in our American mentality. WW2 killed off something in the area of 50 million innocent people. Some 54+ thousand American soldiers died in the pointless Viet Nam war. I, myself, was fortunate that Eisenhower ended off the Korean war just before I would have had to commit to naval officer service.

The numbers of war killings engraved in my conscious memories are in the multi-millions. I remember Hitler's rants from our Movie Tone news reports that were blood chilling. Hitler, Mussolini and whoever was running Japan back then make Osama ben Laden look like a sandbox toy grabber -- pathetic reject of a wealth Saudi father with deep resentments towards the world in general. Any organization that sends young people to blow themselves up killing innocents is criminally insane!

Okay, so the U.S. had never experienced a direct attack on its homeland. The 9/11 horror was deeply disturbing to us. I felt it personally as my beloved wife had gone down there to a meeting and she could not reach me until she had walked out to a working phone several hours after I learned of the people destruction. But let us not forget the London Blitz with its thousands of lost lives, the Tokyo bombings that we executed with hundred of thousands fried well done -- also Dresden burned to a crisp by us, a city known only for producing quality pottery. And the totaled cities -- Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- destroyed in instants with long lifetimes of cancer affliction for the survivors.

None of the above speaks for our 'war' on an unseen enemy -- here, there, and elsewhere.

We have now learned that we have pretty well destroyed Iraq -- 15% refugees in and out, 1/3 destitute and dying from disease and malnutrition.

But them we hear that to wage 'the war' we must pump billions into military supplies for Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others to be designated. We know the Saudis are now funding the Sunnis in Iraq who are shooting at our troops and the Iranians are funding the Shia -- Maliki, now on vacation so as to avoid any commitment to peace for his country. And we conveniently forget that our CIA destroyed democracy in Iran under Eisenhower in 1954!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mossadegh


The American madness -- assuming that by playing good cops/bad cops we can police the Middle East and successfully wage war on THEM. Who is THEM -- terrorists vaguely identified and located at the fringes of things where we rocket, bomb, shoot and kill -- far more innocent civilians than terrorists so identified loosely by us.

To me all this is madness -- American madness. We have panicked and cannot see the realities before our eyes. We are living a psychosis that has told us that we can win a war by shooting at anything that moves -- or does not move out of our way fast enough!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Monday, July 30, 2007

Supporting Repressive Regimes?

The Bush administration has announced some millions of dollars of military aid to Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- presumably to avoid being accused of favoring Israel with our simultaneous announcement of expanded military aid there:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-US-Arms.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


But one wonders at the seeming reflex continuation of policies supporting repressive regimes initiated during the cold war and now being carried on allegedly to counter 'terrorist' regimes. Needless to say, arming tyrants is a dangerous game -- lest we forget from whence bin Laden and 15 of the 9/11 hijackers came! What could be more hypocritical than claiming that we are supporting democracy in the Middle East when we are in fact now giving military aid to several of the more repressive anti-democratic regimes there.

I don't imagine that there are many informed people in the Middle East and elsewhere that cannot figure the contradiction. Needless to say, it is precisely such support that induces terrorists to do their thing in opposition to our support of oppression in their countries. Lest we forget, Saddam Hussein was Bush I's and Rumsfeld's' pal back when -- and probably some of the neocons are now wishing that we had not taken him out. Of the roughly 25 million Iraqis about 4 million are either external or internal refugees at the moment, roughly 15% or eight million are suffering extreme deprivation according to a recent Oxfam report:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Oxfam-Iraq.html

Democracy in Iraq? With the suffering that we are inflicting, it looks as though our military moves there are more likely to support terrorist recruiting drives and resulting attacks on us and ours. Iraq's latest hero, the captain of its victorious soccer team, has just spoken out -- U.S. get out of Iraq!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Friday, July 27, 2007

15 Saudis Did 9/11

[Lest we forget, 15 of the 19 who carried out 9/11 were Saudis -- bin Laden (also a Saudi) family members were immediately rushed out of the country to secure them from retaliation. Perhaps Bush will now bomb Mecca to teach them a lesson? Ed Kent]

...........................

U.S. Officials Voice Frustrations With Saudis' Role in Iraq
By HELENE COOPER
Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger
at what they say has been Saudi Arabia's counterproductive
role in the Iraq war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/world/middleeast/27saudi.html?th&emc=th

..................
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Total Disconnect Between Bahgdad and Bush

[According to the article below in the Monitor the Iraqi government is falling or has already fallen completely apart. They are in complete chaos over there with our troops stoically trying to keep order where none is possible. I thank the g-ds that none of my family are there, but I weep watching those who are being threatened, killed, and wounded -- and presumably flipping out as reported from time to time and killing innocent Iraqis who frighten them. Imagine wearing all that equipment under these weather conditions reported by Yahoo weather today:

"Baghdad, Iraq: The temperature was 118 degrees at 3:55 p.m. local time under partly cloudy skies. Tonight will be clear with a low of 94 degrees."

Manifestly our continued presence in that virtually destroyed country is to no good end and a loss for all involved. Ed Kent]

.......................

Iraqi government in deepest crisis
US and Iraqi officials are trying to prevent complete disintegration. By Sam Dagher
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0727/p01s05-wome.html?s=hns


Iraqi government in deepest crisis
US and Iraqi officials are trying to prevent complete disintegration. By Sam Dagher
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0727/p01s05-wome.html?s=hns
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Iraq - a Black Hole!

Another reason to vote the Republicans out is that they have allowed both Iraqis and American companies to steal boldly many billions of our tax payer monies rather than securing that poor battered country from the resisting Iraqi insurgents and the terrorists now moving in to exploit the discontent there.

The BBC reports that the current Iraqi government is complaining that it has received less than half of $300 million promised for arming the Iraqi army. That figure is ironic because it is the same reported on a 60 Minutes segment that had been stolen during Paul Bremer's supervision from the funds allocated to arm the Iraqi army -- by Iraqis assigned to purchase them who had departed to lives of luxury in various European countries -- one even boldly boasted of his thefts and good new good life for 60 Minutes interviewers.

And the BBC also reports periodically on the undone projects produced by such as Bechtel and Halliburton (Cheney company which boasts periodically of its massive profits). Deals with such outfits are arranged secretly by the Bushies.

In sum we have been dumping vast sums of money into a black hole (or a rat hole, if you prefer that image) where they are misused in more ways than one can track. Most recently there is some question as to why we are now dumping half a billion into a huge new embassy in Baghdad if we are really planning to depart sometime from that devastated county with its 4 million refugees trying to survive -- 2 million who have fled the country, 2 million displaced within it -- all desperate and representing nearly 20% of its total population. Imagine how we would feel, should some outside force have devastated our country to get at our resources, executed Bush as an international murderer, destroyed our infrastructures and then turned us into desperate mutual murderers?

The sad part of the above is that our news media rarely connect the dots. They report that the Iraqi government (if you can call it that) is complaining about the lack of funding of its military (a dubious venture to start with as some of these guys use their weapons to shoot at our troops) without mentioning that we had done it before only to watch the monies being boldly stolen.

I for one am for getting out of this black hole ASAP with efforts to figure out how we can pay reparations for the millions of lives we have destroyed along with the infrastructure of this poor nation. Iraq is now in third place in numbers of fleeing refugees after the two other hell holes in Africa -- Palestine and the Sudan (Dafur). Imagine living in extreme summer temperatures now with only 1/2 hour of electricity a day -- if you are lucky. What's for lunch that is not already rotted?

See Bremer's own warning comments back in 2004 which were not heeded then -- nor now:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6194092/site/newsweek/#storyContinued
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Another Reason to Distrust the Republicans

It has been pretty clear that the Bush administration has rewarded those generals who agreed with it and dismissed those who pointed out its failures. Here is but another instance of the cover up -- lying is normal terminology. Ed Kent

.........................

Pentagon Study Sees Threat in Guantánamo Detainees
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
A new report is a rebuttal of assertions by detainee
advocates that the American naval station at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, is filled with hapless innocents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/26/washington/26gitmo.html?th&emc=th


..................
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/

The Job of Philosophers

As a reminder to some among our social commentators, the job of philosophers since the time of Socrates/Plato has been to expose the lies of the sophists (spinners in today's lingo) by asking tough questions -- in the pursuit of truth and justice. We do this as carefully and boldly as we can -- sometimes risking personal welfare or even our lives in the process. Generally speaking there are not two valid sides or opinions on a given issue -- that is one of the trick or treats introduced by the TV media to maintain ratings and to fool people several decades back -- those mindless TV instant flips flops on important matters. Richard Rorty of my generation was one of the best at pursuing truth and justice. See this summary of his work as well as the obit below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Ryerson-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

It has a few errors as noted below.

Personally I found myself more or less aligned with Rorty as a pragmatist (problem solver) in disposition, although we undoubtedly differed in our findings at some points. I was much influenced by John Dewey upon whom I did my undergraduate honors thesis. I find the constant name-calling and ideological labeling of people and issues an offensive spillover from the totalitarians of the last century -- to be expunged as a way of thinking as Plato/Socrates did with the Sophists of their day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism

Ed Kent

..........................

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30E13FC3C5B0C728DDDAF0894DF404482

Richard Rorty, Contemporary Philosopher, Dies at 75

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 11, 2007

Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary theory and more made him one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75.

The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Mary Varney Rorty.

Raised in a home where ''The Case for Leon Trotsky'' was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. ''At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice,'' he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.

Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more than a decade, said, ''He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints'' and returned it ''to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.''

Mr. Rorty's enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher's primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.

To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey, Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago. ''There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one's peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,'' Mr. Rorty wrote. In other words, ''truth is not out there,'' separate from our own beliefs and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable thumbs evolved, to help human beings ''cope with the environment'' and ''enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.''

Mr. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine and others. Although he argued that ''no area of culture, and no period of history gets reality more right than any other,'' he did maintain that a liberal democratic society was by far the best because it was the only one that permits competing beliefs to exist while also creating a public community.

His views were attacked by critics on the left and the right. The failure to recognize science's particular powers to depict reality, Daniel Dennett wrote, shows ''flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power.''

Simon Blackburn, a philosopher at Cambridge University, has written of Mr. Rorty's ''extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and laying smoke.''

Mr. Rorty was engaged with and amused by his critics. In a 1992 autobiographical essay, ''Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,'' he wrote that he was considered to be one of the ''smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young''; ''cynical and nihilistic''; ''complacent''; and ''irresponsible.''

Yet he confounded critics as well, by speaking up for patriotism, an academic canon and the idea that one can make meaningful moral judgments.

His reason for writing the 1992 essay, he said, was to show how he came by his particular views. Richard McKay Rorty was born in 1931 to James and Winifred Rorty, anti-Stalinist lefties who let their home in Flatbrookville, N.J., a small town on the Delaware river, be used as a hideout for wayward Trotskyites. He describes himself as having ''weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests'' that as a boy led him to send congratulations to the newly named Dalai Lama, a ''fellow 8-year-old who had made good.''

Later, orchids became another obsession, and his love of the outdoors continued throughout his life. An avid birder for the last 30 years, Mr. Rorty liked to ''head over to open spaces and walk around,'' his wife Mary said yesterday from their home in Palo Alto. His last bird sighting was of a condor at the Grand Canyon in February. In addition to his wife, Mr. Rorty is survived by three children and two grandchildren.

When he was 15, Mr. Rorty wrote, he ''escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school'' to attend the Hutchins School at the University of Chicago, a place A. J. Liebling described as the ''biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Children's Crusade.''

In his early career, at Wellesley and Princeton, he worked on analytic philosophy, smack in the mainstream. As for the surrounding 1960s counterculture, he said in a 2003 interview, ''I smoked a little pot and let my hair grow long,'' but ''I soon decided that the radical students who wanted to trash the university were people with whom I would never have much sympathy.''

By the 1970s, it became clear that he did not have much sympathy for analytic philosophy either, not to mention the entire Cartesian philosophical tradition that held there was a world independent of thought.

Later frustrated by the narrowness of philosophy departments, he became a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia in 1982, before joining the comparative literature department at Stanford in 1998.

Over time, he became increasingly occupied by politics. In ''Achieving Our Country'' in 1998, he despaired that the genuine social-democratic left that helped shape the politics of the Democratic Party from 1910 through 1965 had collapsed. In an interview, he said that since the '60s, the left ''has done a lot for the rights of blacks, women and gays, but it never attempted to develop a political position that might find the support of an electoral majority.''

In recent years, Mr. Rorty fiercely criticized the Bush administration, the religious right, Congressional Democrats and anti-American intellectuals. Though deeply pessimistic about the dangers of nuclear confrontation and the gap between rich nations and poor, Mr. Rorty retained something of Dewey's hopefulness about America. It is important, he said in 2003, to take pride ''in the heritage of figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, and so on,'' he said, and ''to use this pride as a means of generating sympathy'' for a country's political aims.

Correction: June 16, 2007, Saturday An obituary on Monday about the philosopher Richard Rorty misidentified the source of the quotation, ''There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one's peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons.'' It was from Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley in the introduction to the book ''Richard Rorty,'' which they edited; it was not from Mr. Rorty.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Why Are Women More Caring Than Men?

Undoubtedly there is no simple answer to this question -- genetic or experiential answers abound. However, it it not the why but the observed facts that have impressed me over the years.

Relatively early on I discovered that women unleashed could do pretty much the same things that men do before all the options for doing so were opened up in this country. Sarah Lawrence College which made a point of liberating women was my second home during my college years in the mid 1950s (my wife to be's college). Then I had the good fortune to start my teaching at Vassar College during the women's revolutionary years of the early 1960s. My wife and I as dormitory house fellows there for several years encouraged our students to take up the traditionally male professions -- law, medicine, and some of the academic fields including mine in philosophy. After Vassar I got back to Hunter which had been started as a woman's college and thereafter did a visiting year at Barnard. Put together I saw a much more compassionate disposition towards people and the world upon the part of my women students than I had experienced as an undergrad or grad student mainly in male institutions.

In the course of time I came to accept David Hume's psychological explanation of our moral dispositions. Our moralities are based on sentiments (feelings). Some of us care for others and others are psychopaths with a spectrum of betweens stretching out between the poles and, of course, with overlapping gender dispositions. Some men are extremely caring; some women are brutes.

The long and short here is not that I am endorsing Senator Clinton for president, although I am beginning to lean that way. It is that with some Margaret Thatchers apart, I trust women more than I do men to do the right thing. Trying to induce people to be moral through religious or philosophic doctrines is a dangerous business due to the universal tendency to rationalize. Thus, there is none more dangerous than he or she who believes that Jesus told them to kill, kill, kill or who has discovered a moral principal with which to justify the most vicious human atrocities. Check out Manifest Destiny or the New Israel justifications to discover the roots of America's genocidal past.

Bush claims Jesus is the philosopher who told him to invade Iraq -- smirk, smirk? I cringe at each of his news conferences when the questioning touches upon the wars and Bush becomes the Yale DKE frat joke monger and nickname player -- far removed from the human suffering that his actions have induced and which he seems determined to carry out until ousted from office.

May we find some good women who are not determined to kill, kill, kill!

I am worried about two bloggers whom I used to post regularly -- Zena from Beirut http://beirutupdate.blogspot.com/ and Laila, the Mother from Gaza: http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/ They have been off line for quite a time now.

I hope that they are both okay with both Lebanon and Gaza having been virtually destroyed as livable human habitats.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Two More Reasons to Get the Republicans Out!

[Back at the height of the Depression when a huge % of workers were begging for food and money with outstretched tin cups, Roosevelt had a rough time introducing supporting legislation (e.g. jobs through the WPA -- Works Projects Administration, Social Security to support the elderly, etc., etc.) because the Republicans were fighting income taxes tooth and nail. Finally the then right wing Court under pressure of enlargement yielded. The Republicans have once again reverted to attacks on social support instrumentalities such as Social Security and universal medical insurance -- even for children. The Bush administration has sabotaged our progressive tax system, benefiting the super rich to the point where they pay at a lesser rate (equities) than people earning a living by working. Until John Kennedy the top tax rate was 91% on the super rich. He lowered it slightly. Bush has cut it to virtually nothing.

The two items below are all too typical: lack of regulation has allowed lenders to rip off students at precisely the time in life when they are most vulnerable with loans and the expenses of starting families.

Children are dying because they cannot get medical care for such simple things as an abscessed tooth!

I for one want to see us regain our national self respect through public assistance to all those in need to be paid for by those who are making unlimited monies by controlling and manipulating our economic institutions without regulation -- those CEOs who vote themselves annual incomes and perks in the hundreds of millions! Until Bush is gone we will need 67 votes in the Senate to override his promised vetoes such as that he says he will direct to medical care for kids. Ed Kent]

...................................

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-studentloans-congress.html

Senate Backs Crackdown on Student Loan Problems

... on misconduct among student loan firms, including a ... on lenders giving loans to schools to get on ... federal subsidies to student lenders, such as Sallie ...
July 24, 2007 - By REUTERS (Reuters) - News

............................

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/us/25health.html?ref=health

G.O.P. Leaders Fight Expansion of Children’s Health Insurance

By ROBERT PEAR
Published: July 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, July 24 — Republican leaders of the House and Senate on Tuesday attacked proposals that call for a major expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, to be financed with higher tobacco taxes.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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Monday, July 23, 2007

Albany Times-Union 7/21/07 (T.Papa Op.): Forgiveness at the heart of change

[Given the lack of jobs for so many in our society, it is time that we found better ways to cope with those convicted with drug offenses. While we are at it our mentally ill (16% of our prisoners) with the closure of our mental hospitals are often those so convicted. If any saw the 60 Minutes program last night - or many of the others similarly reporting the 16% mentally ill imprisoned -- with one of these who died 4 days after incarceration of dehydration, you will have a vivid recollection of the brutalities of our penal system which allows unqualified guards to kill same. One of my own students, a young Orthodox Jewish woman, was similarly dumped in prison for offending a local Yeshiva and nearly died there. Ed Kent]


Subject: Albany Times-Union 7/21/07 (T.Papa Op.): Forgiveness at the heart of change
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 10:40:30 -0400
From: Tony Papa
To: Tony Papa


The Times Union (Albany, New York)

July 21, 2007 Saturday
1 EDITION

Forgiveness at the heart of change

BYLINE: By ANTHONY PAPA

SECTION: RELIGION; Pg. B3

LENGTH: 681 words

Forgiveness at the heart of change


By ANTHONY PAPA
First published: Saturday, July 21, 2007

God works in mysterious ways. Sometimes life's path is cut out for you in ways that might not fit your liking.

This was true for me when, in 1985, I was sentenced to 15-years-to-life stemming from my involvement in drugs. My life was dramatically altered forever. At the time of my arrest I was 29 years old, married, with a 6-year-old daughter. I made the biggest mistake of my life when I delivered a package of four ounces of cocaine for the promised sum of $500.

Nothing in the world could have prepared me for life in prison. I was sent to Sing Sing, a maximum security prison in Ossining. It was a living nightmare. Not only did I lose my family, I lost my life as I knew it.

When I arrived at the prison I was surrounded with a sea of faces of men who had lost all faith in their lives. It was the lowest point in my life and I surely thought that God had abandoned me.

Soon after, I was walking past a row of cells that sat on the top tier of the A Block housing unit. I inhaled the odor of paint and followed its trail to a cell. I looked in and saw the most magnificent paintings. They belonged to a prisoner named Indio. We became friends and he taught me how to paint.

I began absorbing myself in my art. I was hooked. In 1988, I was sitting in my cell when I picked up a mirror and saw a reflection of a man who was going to be spending the most productive years of his life locked in a cage. I set up a canvas and captured the image. I named it "15 to Life." As my art became more and more a center point in my life, I realized that God had not abandoned me but, instead, given me a vehicle to find real meaning and purpose in my life.

I entered a graduate program in 1994 offered by the New York Theological Seminary at Sing Sing prison. I studied liberation theology with an emphasis on urban ministry. The center of our teaching was based on praxis. We were taught that we could talk all we want about tradition and the Bible but that, without a tangible action, our intentions would be meaningless. The program's director, the Rev. Bill Webber, who became my spiritual father, had given me vision to become an agent of change and transformation.

In 1995, my self-portrait, "15 to Life," was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I received a lot of media attention and, in 1997, I received clemency from Gov. George Pataki. My art became my ministry. I had exhibits and used my art as instrument to speak out against inhumane drug laws.

At the same time, I made trips to Albany to speak with legislators. Most of them had a dual view of reforming the laws. Their public view was that the Rockefeller Drug Laws were working fine. Behind closed doors they agreed the laws needed to be reformed. But they were afraid of publicly speaking out against them because it would cause their political deaths. I decided at that point that I was spinning my wheels by trying to convince them.

I remember reading a book titled "The Upside Down Kingdom" by Donald Kraybill. It basically spoke about how Jesus created change from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

My idea then was to try and change the way politicians thought about New York's drug laws by changing their constituents' views. I took that concept and, in 1998, I co-founded the Mothers of the New York Disappeared. This advocacy group was comprised mostly of family members of those imprisoned by the Rockefeller Drug Laws. We formed a street movement that generated tremendous press by utilizing the human element of the issue.

It was a long row to hoe, but we managed to shift public opinion and exert public pressure on the politicians. In 2004-05, the first reform changes were passed with hope that more will follow.

Forgiveness and redemption -- especially forgiveness of oneself -- are crucial to promoting social change. What gets in the way are the psychological and spiritual walls we build to separate us from one another. If we apply these concepts, we can break down these barriers so that positive change can take root and grow.



Anthony Papa is a communications specialist for the Drug Policy Alliance.

LOAD-DATE: July 21, 2007

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper


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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Uri Avnery: A Trap for Fools

[Grimly, we are going to have to live with Bush until 1/09. To impeach him would put Cheney in the seat. By all reports Bush was and is a jerk who makes his way by glad-handing. His academic record at Yale was pathetic -- all C's except for one B-.
His extra curricular activities consisted in being president of the jock fraternity (although his only sports activity had been as a cheer leader in school -- much as his only military activity had been avoiding service in Viet Nam by staying in the National Guard from which he was AWOL for the last obligatory year.

Bush is a dumb fraud who stays the course upon which others have have steered him. His glad handing give-you-a-nickname personal tactic does not work in the international community. He is for cutting taxes for the super rich and basic support funds for those in need. We are a nation collectively and individually deeply in debt and the ceiling could fall in at any moment with a threatening terror event or economic crash somewhere vital to us. The wars have been horrendously mismanaged over there and Bush's only other extra-curricular activity at Yale as a member of Skull and Bones -- Buckley's and his daddy's secret society -- is all too emblematic of his effects both at home and abroad. How many Iraqis did we kill today and how many of ours got killed or wounded. There has been no more disastrous presidency in the history of the U.S.

So read Uri Avnery's column here for a clear picture of him from over there. Here is his identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Avnery

Ed Kent]

............................

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1185055294/

Uri Avnery's Column

A Trap for Fools

21/07/07


IN A classical American western, the difference is as glaring as the midday sun in Colorado: there are Good Guys and Bad Guys. The good ones are the settlers, who are making the prairie bloom. The bad ones are the Indians, who are blood-thirsty savages. The ultimate hero is the cowboy, tough, humane, with a big revolver or two, ready to defend himself at all times.

George Bush, who grew up on this myth, sticks to it even now, when he is the leader of the world's only superpower. This week he presented the world with an up-to-date western.

In this western - or, rather, middle eastern - there are also Good Guys and Bad Guys. The good ones are the "moderates", who are the allies of the US in the Middle East - Israel, Mahmoud Abbas and the pro-American Arab regimes. The bad ones are Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran, Syria and al-Qaeda.

It is a simple script. So simple, indeed, that an 8-year-old can understand it. The conclusions are also simple: the good guys have to be supported, the bad guys have to bite the dust. At the end, the hero - George himself - will ride off into the sunset on his noble steed, while the music reaches a crescendo.

THE CLASSICAL western, of course, does not show us the heroic pioneers stealing the land from the Indians. Or the United States Cavalry attacking the camps of the Indians, burning down the tents and killing their inhabitants, men, women and children. How the US government, after signing formal treaties with the Indian nations, breaks them one after another. And how it drives the remnants into desolate regions, long before the term "ethnic cleansing" was first used.

Denial runs through the classical western like a purple thread, as it does through this speech of Bush's. This finds its main expression in a simple fact: the occupation is hardly mentioned at all.

In the Palestinian community, for example, there is a struggle between the "moderates" and the "extremists". The extremists are killers. Why are they killers? There is no why. They are killers because they are killers. It's in their nature. They were just born that way. The moderates are moderates because they are moderates. Some people are just born good.

So the whole problem is a Palestinian problem. They must decide. They must choose between moderates and extremists. If they choose the moderates, they will get everything they can imagine: colorful glass beads and gallons of whisky. If they choose the extremists, their end will be bitter.

The Jewish Israelis do not have to choose between good and bad. Why? Simply because there are no Bad Guys among them. They are just good. They must help the good Palestinians. "Release" the Palestinian tax moneys and give them to "Prime Minister (Salem) Fayad". Not to the Palestinian government, but to one specific named person, the darling of Bush.

What else is required from the Israelis? They must understand that their "future lies in developing areas like the Negev and Galilee - not in continuing occupation of the West Bank". (That's the only time the occupation is mentioned at all.) They should remove unauthorized outposts and end settlement expansion. Also, they may "find other practical ways to reduce their footprint (in the West Bank) without reducing their security". Meaning: the occupation can continue, but it would be nice if we take some steps to make it less visible.

A long time ago, the United States viewed all settlements as illegal. When the Israeli government continued to expand them, James Baker, the Secretary of State under Bush the father, imposed financial sanctions upon Israel. Bush the son at first demanded that all settlements established after January 2001 should be dismantled. Later he withdrew all opposition to the settlement blocs ("centers of population"). In the "Road Map" he decreed that Israel must immediately freeze the enlargement of the settlements. Now he is satisfied with a sanctimonious request to "remove unauthorized outposts" (with no article) - that's to say, some of those put up without the official authorization of the Israeli government itself. All this without "or else" or any mention of sanctions.

In the last few years, only one such outpost, Amona, has been dismantled, and this week Ehud Olmert decided to pardon all the fanatics accused of attacking the police during that event. The Israeli government knows that Bush is only paying lip service, and does not take him seriously.

IN MANY classical westerns there appears a crook selling a patent medicine to heal all ills: headaches and hemorrhoids, tuberculosis and syphilis. George Bush has his own patent medicine, which appears in the speech again and again. It will heal all diseases and ensure the final victory of the Sons of Light over the Sons of Darkness.

The label on the bottle says "Building Palestinian Institutions".

How come we didn't think of this until now? Why did we go chasing off after all kinds of solutions, and did not find this one, so simple, lying in front of us for all to see?

It is an egg of Columbus, with a whiff of Alexander the Great's sword cutting the Gordian knot. The Palestinians have no institutions. The two good people, "President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayad…are striving to build the institutions of a modern democracy." This means: "security services…ministries that deliver services without corruption…steps that unleash the natural enterprise of the Palestinian people…the rule of law…"

All this under occupation, behind roadblocks, walls and fences, while the main roads are barred to Palestinians, while the West Bank is chopped into pieces and cut off from the rest of the world. By the way, in this matter Bush has another patent medicine: all Palestinian exports will in future go through Jordan and Egypt, not Israel.

In order to realize the vision of "building Palestinian institutions", Bush is sending along his poodle. According to Bush, the sole task of Tony Blair is indeed this: "to coordinate international efforts to help the Palestinians establish the institutions of a strong and lasting free society." (Like which example? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Jordan? Pakistan? Morocco? Or perhaps even Iraq?)

Let's hope no one is rude enough to mention the fact that the Palestinians held democratic elections for their Parliament, not so long ago, under the strict supervision of ex-President Jimmy Carter. As far as Bush is concerned, that just did not happen, since the majority of the people voted for Hamas. Therefore, Bush mentions only the elections held before that, when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president, practically without opposition. Everything else has been wiped off the slate.

So this is the up-to-date vision: "democratic Palestinian institutions" will be in place, free of corruption (as in the US and Israel), and "capable security forces" will be functioning, and Hamas will be eliminated, and the armed factions will be dismantled, and all attacks on Israel will be stopped, and the security of Israel ensured, and the incitement against Israel ended, and everybody will recognize Israel's right to exist as "a Jewish state and a homeland for the Jewish people", and all the agreements that were signed in the past will be accepted - then "we can soon begin serious negotiations towards the creation of a Palestinian state." Wow!

What a wonderful sentence! "Soon" - without a timetable. "Serious negotiations" - without fixing a date for their conclusion. "A Palestinian state" (again, without the definite article, which Bush seems to detest) - without specific borders. But a hint is given: "mutually agreed borders reflecting previous lines and current realities, and mutually agreed adjustments." Meaning: the settlement blocs and much else will be annexed by Israel.

IT SEEMS as if the speech writers, after finishing the product, noticed that it was pitifully devoid of content. Nothing new, nothing that could cause a self-respecting newspaper to give it a headline.

I imagine the media advisor saying: "Mister President, we must add something that will look new." Thus the "international meeting" was born.

"So I will call together an international meeting this fall of representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel's right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties. The key participants in this meeting will be the Israelis, the Palestinians, and their neighbors in the region. Secretary Rice will chair the meeting."

Wonderful. A meeting which has no date yet, but has a season of the year. And for which no location has yet been fixed. And no list of participants. And no planned conclusions, except the general statement: "She (Condoleezza) and her counterparts will review the progress that has been made towards building Palestinian institutions. They will look for innovative and effective ways to support further reform. And they will provide diplomatic support for the parties in their bilateral discussions and negotiations, so that we can move forward on a successful path to a Palestinian state." The meeting will not review the progress made towards the removal of the outposts, for example.

It is not by accident that Bush omitted to identify the governments he intends to invite. Clearly, he will try to fulfill one of the most cherished dreams of Olmert: to meet publicly with a top representative of Saudi Arabia. For Olmert this would be an immense achievement: an official meeting with the most important Arab country which has no peace agreement with Israel. A meeting for which he will not have to pay any price. A free lunch.

It is dubious whether this wish will be fulfilled. The Saudis are very cautious. They do not want to quarrel with any party in the Region - not with Syria (which will not be invited, though it is a "neighbor" of the Israelis and the Palestinians) and not with Hamas. Unlike Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia cannot be bribed with money. It has enough of its own.

THE FINAL objective is a "Palestinian state", the "two-state solution". That is a far-far-off aim. Not for nothing is it called a "political horizon", since a horizon, as is well-known, recedes in the distance as one tries to approach it.

In his poem "If", Rudyard Kipling describes all the tests an Englishman has to endure in order to be considered a "man". One of them is: "If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools…"

We, the small group of Israelis who raised the banner of the "two-state solution" more than fifty years ago, now have to endure George Bush turning it into a rag to cover his nakedness. In his mouth, it is an empty, deceitful and mendacious slogan. Only a fool will fall into this trap.

As Chaim Weizmann, the prominent Zionist leader and first president of Israel, once said: "No state is given to a people on a silver platter." The Palestinians, too, will not get their state without struggle, not as baksheesh from Bush nor as a '"gesture" from Olmert. Nations achieve their freedom by political or military struggle. Every struggle, violent or non-violent, is a matter of power.

And power means first of all: Unity.



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Friday, July 20, 2007

Divide and Conquer?

It looks as though this is the latest game in the Middle East. The U.S. and Israel are dividing the Palestinians into hostile factions (partially their own fault, needless to say) and the U.S. is splitting the Iraqis -- supporting some of the Sunnis which is driving Maliki up the wall along with his fellow Shiites.

As most of the Palestinians cannot stomach the corruption of the Abbas operation of yore and the Iraqis are already involved in a civil war which needs no more oil on the fire, I imagine both moves will turn out to be disastrous over the long run. Both simply add good reasons for Muslim extremists to go on the attack. Rather than criminals, they are now being cast as national and religious heroes. That's the way to go Israel and the U.S. Arrrrrrrrhhh!!
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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The Last Time I Was Six Feet from the Queen

was one dark night as her train flew through the Oxford railroad station where I was working as a heavy freight porter. In those days before security prevailed as a primary concern, we would be warned of her trips from London to Balmoral Castle, the royal family's vacation hang out in Scotland, so that we would not be caught pulling a heavy load of stuff across the tracks -- shortly after my last stint there two of my mates were caught by a rushing train trying to get their wagon across and sadly killed. Oxford was a major transfer point, so that we were kept busy moving stuff from one train to another.

Blue collar work in Britain in those days was very different than in the States in that it was totally class bound. The British gave all kids then what was called an 11 plus exam which at that early age divided them into 3 categories -- a very small percentage not benefited by private school tuition -- would be directed into public "grammar" schools to prepare for the few universities (a smaller percentage made it among the Brits than African Americans prior to the civil rights reforms). A second general category was assigned to comprehensive schools that might prepare them for low level business or whatever more or less on the level of our own two-year colleges. The great bulk were to end off their formal educations at age 14 and go into jobs -- factory to shop girl -- as apprentices or whatever. And these class lines were tightly maintained. The Beatles came as a great shock to the system.

My railroad work was interesting -- 12 hour shifts, 7 days a week between trimesters to earn some money for our travel and such -- my marvelous college principal had given me estimates of costs based on his own undergraduate days. I actually had a choice -- committing to write for Time Inc. for a year which would have messed up my graduate school plans or taking what the local government employment agency had to offer -- not much for us foreigners, e.g. male model for the Art School (very strenuous as one had to remain motionless in odd positions for long periods of time -- try it and you will know how those being tortured at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib felt) or the station. I really enjoyed the work. It was mentally relaxing and we were an interesting group of odds and ends from here and there -- Hans, a former war prisoner from Germany who had decided to remain in Britain, a young Irishman who loved operas (which were fortunately available in Oxford at low prices, thanks to the governmental subsidies).

Some differences there were. My mates were startled to have an Oxford student among them. The Brits did not share cigarettes when lighting up as we Americans did and so I set a new pattern in motion which nearly drowned me with cups of tea from the station tea room.

Dangers there were as noted above. I managed to injure myself twice -- gashing my forehead when a bag slipped as I was trying to put it in a rack which led to some free and excellent stitching by the local medical services free to all. I also bunged up a thumb caught in a fire hose when I was washing down the fish car from London, getting ready to unload it before dawn one day. Thumb still bends both ways. Was again patched up by kindly local doctors -- free -- a small part of my wages went to medical.

Back to the Queen -- one felt for her being thrust into that demanding lifetime role when her father, King George, died relatively young at 56 in his sleep in 1952. I was also there that year as a "public" school (private in the British lingo) and recall the town crier in Uppingham sounding the traditional announcement through the town -- "the king is dead, long live the queen."

Imagine having your youth and relative personal freedom suddenly cut short for the rough life that she has had to live, constantly on display with what looks to be a bit of a klutz as husband and ditto for a son. Diana must have been a breath of fresh air for her, as must also be William and Harry. Judging from the Queen mother, she may be good for a couple of more decades before the kids begin to bear the heavy burdens of the crown.

"Carry your bags, sir?" I startled my college principal with that one on evening.

"Is that you, Kent?" He could scarcely believe.

Also in those days no persons of the opposite gender were allowed in the colleges -- which really bugged my wife -- no nice lunches there. But my college was the first to bring on board married students and now has a woman principal. Such gender separation probably explains the disposition towards the gay relationships at the university level of those days. Shortly before dons were not allowed to marry and so sought out the sweetest of the young nubile arrivals -- as also happened among the students in the public schools as well. "Fag" was the term for student servants to upper class men. The typical university Brit often married the first member of the opposite sex he/she encountered post university.

And so it was when Elizabeth II became queen.
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Khalid Amayreh: The two-state solution is dead

[Khalid is a good email friend whom I met through several of the peace group lists. He cares deeply and is a realist who writes frequently about matters over there (he was trained in the U.S. as a journalist). His sense that current events are some sort of fairy land version of reality is more than sound. One wonders why we do not encounter such realities more frequently in discussions of the conflict and any possible resolution of it. Khalid favors non-violence, but the festering wounds of the Palestinians will not deter violent responses to Israel's occupation by Muslims who have had it over there. I would not want to be dependent on the protection of the Bush administration, were I an Israeli. Pakistan which has nuclear weapons may go up in flames at any moment. The wall that Israel has constructed is no defense against rockets bearing g-d knows what. One hopes for the best, but things do not look good. Read Khalid for the perspective of someone who cares deeply and sees things as they are. Ed Kent]

The two-state solution is dead



By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

http://www.p4pd.org/lifestories1.html


19 July, 2007



Like confused, disoriented children, Palestinian leaders and politicians keep babbling about building a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, as if the prospect of creating such a state is still real.



Some of these leaders, like PA president Mahmoud Abbas and his "eternally-optimistic" Prime Minister Salam Fayadh, even have the audacity to refer to their hapless Ramallah fief as "state of Palestine."



I really can't comprehend how these people, who are entrusted with the national burden, continue to deceive themselves and their people, in such a scandalous and obscene manner, by incessantly talking about an impossible state that will never ever see the light, not now or after fifty years.



Are they drunk? Are they blind? Are they stupid?



Well, one doesn't have to be a great authority on the Israeli-Palestinian strife to realize that there is no longer any realistic possibility for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank.



Israel simply has killed that possibility by building as many as 200 Jewish towns and colonies on the very small territory these misguided leaders are still dreaming of building their putative state.



Moreover, Israel has already transferred over half a million fanatical settlers onto the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which really renders any prospect of establishing a Palestinian state worthy of the name utterly unrealistic if not outright impossible.



A few years ago, this writer asked the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat during a reception at the Hebron University where he would establish "the Palestinian state" when the West Bank was already congested with Jewish-only settlements.



Arafat had no answer. And after a moment of silence, he said the following: " We can't belie God's words, and God says that Jews will gather in Palestine, only to be vanquished into smithereens."



Then Arafat recited a Quranic verse which prophesied the creation of Israel and then its ultimate destruction at the hands of "true servants of God."



Arafat died a mysterious death in November 2004 and many Palestinians and foreigners point an accusing finger toward the Israeli intelligence. Hamas leaders last month accused former Gaza strongman Muhammed Dahlan of having "killed" Arafat on Israel's behalf.



Arafat's successors, who have apparently decided to place themselves squarely into Israel's and America's laps, mainly in order to isolate Hamas at any price and by whatever means necessary, don't have the courage to recognize the obvious, namely that there is no real prospect for a Palestinian state.



Sadly, they will continue to hanker after a mirage, thinking it is water, until they faint and collapse and die of thirst.



Of course, Israel doesn't like to hear anything about the death of the two-state solution. Israel wants the two-state solution to die practically a quiet and gradual death but hopes to keep it alive formally. This is exactly what has happened as the Israeli government continues to assert its commitment to Palestinian statehood while doing everything possible on the ground to eviscerate such a prospective state of substance.



In so doing Israel has actually succeeded in desensitizing the world community, including the Arab world, against what would have been a great shock at seeing the prospect of a viable Palestinian state torn into smithereens.



Non the less, Israel still wants to give Palestinians a "state," namely a deformed entity made up of Bantustans, enclaves and townships, an entity with a form but without substance, cut off from each other and tightly surrounded by Jewish settlements, without Jerusalem, without sovereignty, without freedom, and without future.



Needless to say, such a hapless and disfigured entity, the kind of which Israel and her guardian-ally would be a solution for Zionism's demographic problem, not for the Palestinian question.



It is a "state" onto which Israel would eventually dump all unwanted Palestinians, including Israel's own Palestinian citizens.because "Israel is a Jewish state and you are not Jews."!!!!



In fact Israel has a satanic scheme and it seems to work like this.



Israel will continue to create facts on the ground all over the West Bank until it reaches the point at which a further expansion becomes undesirable.



At that point, Israel would appeal "earnestly" to "our Palestinian cousins to come to the peace table and, please, give peace a chance."



"Our children and your children deserve to live in peace, let us stop bloodshed, let us forget the past, let us try to build a prosperous future for our two peoples," Israeli leaders and spokesperson would then say, with all the honesty in the world appearing in the tone of their voices.



The deceitful, poisoned words, reflecting "the New Israel" would leave an instant positive impression on Naïve Europeans and North Americans, and the Jewish-controlled media in the west, especially in North America, would just parrot and prominently feature "the earnest calls for peace coming from Israel".



Hundreds of high-sounding captions, glorifying the new dawn of peace in the Middle East, would hit the front pages of Zionist-influenced American newspapers from New York times on the eastern coast to LA Times on the western coast. Moreover, CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News, BBC and even Aljazeera would celebrate the long-awaited dawning of "New Israel" with breaking news and euphoric live coverage.



Furthermore, the American congress would hold a special session to endorse and bless Israel's peace drive and to urge the Arabs and especially Palestinians to be realistic and abandon the "culture of hate."



Even the UN Security Council would hold a special session at US request, praising Israel's "good-will toward the Palestinians," and calling on Palestinians to reciprocate.



In short, the whole world would celebrate the final consummation of the murder of Palestine.



And in case the frustrated and thoroughly tormented Palestinians cried out for justice, they would harshly be silenced and accused of wanting to perpetuate war and conflict and set the clock of time backward when peace was finally getting a real chance.



There is no doubt that this is Israel's ultimate plan for the Palestinians and their homeland



However, there is also no doubt that this scheme will fail, because then, with nothing to lose, and with the world conspiring to bring about the final chapter of the Palestinian people's national annihilation, every single Arab and every single Muslim on the face of earth would be forced to morph into a potential human bomb.



And yes, an existential and open-ended war of a different kind would ensue , and would end only when Israel was no more. Such a war would consume millions, if not tens of millions of people. A nuclear holocaust of some sort would not be out of question. In short, the world, or much of it, would not be a nice place to live in. And many many people would wish they were dead.



Palestine, Zionists and their American benefactors should understand , is not an isolated Muslim enclave in the heart of Europe, like Bosnia or Kosova. Palestine is the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, and every Muslim on the face of earth will continue to recite "Glory be to Him who summoned His servant by the night, from the Sacred Mosque ( in Mecca) to the Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem), whose surroundings we have blessed, in order to show him some of our signs. Verily, He is the Hearer, the Seer"



Hence, there is a very little likelihood that the world's 1500 million Muslims would allow Palestine to go into oblivion.



Of course, this doomsday scenario can be avoided but sooner rather than later.



Today, Israel hasn't only killed the two-state solution, it has also effectively killed the prospect of peace between Islam and Judaism, because Palestine is the anvil point of both religions.



But there is still a slim chance to avert the unthinkable which is not really unpredictable, given the history of the Middle East.



This chance lies in the creation of a single democratic and civil state in the area extending from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan.



In such a state, Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace and equality, without any discrimination based on religion, color or race.



It is either one state for all, or war, death and destruction for many many years to come.



Because Palestinians, who already make up 50% of the population of Palestine-Israel are here to stay. They won't leave. And they won't accept occupation and apartheid for ever.



(end)
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Rumsfeld Have Completely Mucked It Up!!!

The explosion near Grand Central during the evening commuting hours yesterday scared the Hell out of us New Yorkers. We had a phone call from a family member working near the site before it was publicized asking us to find out what had happened and were we facing another terror attack?

We New Yorkers had one of those and few did not know someone who perished as a consequence of 9/11 or who is not ill now from working on the clean-up at the site which was not supervised either by Christie or Rudi who are dodging blame for the grave illnesses now affecting the thousands who worked at Ground Zero in good faith.

The security reports have made clear several things. The empathy and support of the world for our 9/11 tragedy has been completely dissipated by the attack on Iraq -- to satisfy the oil barons.

We know that we are now once again prime targets for the terrorists revitalized by the Bush and Co. crusade being read by Muslims as a religious war. Who can blame them? Cheney now apparently wants to attack yet another Muslim country, Iran. And we blew our chances to destroy al Qaeda before it could become established in Pakistan where our guy is now in the line of fire from assassins who have grounds to accuse him of being the ally of their enemy, Bush.

With children and grandchildren at risk, I, as all New Yorkers, am feeling despair at what our own government has done to us -- they have completely mucked it up!
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

IF THIS IS SUCH A RICH COUNTRY, WHY ARE WE RUNNING SCARED?

[I suspect that a spin-off of the degeneration of our American religions is that those in need are being cast aside and left to vastly inadequate private charities which the right wingers know full well cannot do the job that governments in developed countries must do. But the further catch here is that those of us being hit go far beyond the traditional poor to include about 80% of Americans. Check out the pensions of the fairly well off families that have paid mortgages, collected debts for college tuitions for their children, run up debts for this and that as they approach retirement age, lost a key job or been hit with major illnesses. Ed Kent]


IF THIS IS SUCH A RICH COUNTRY, WHY ARE WE GETTING SQUEEZED?
By Heather Boushey, Joshua Holland, AlterNet
While the rich are getting richer, they're slashing social
security, medicare and other social programs for the rest
of us. What gives?
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/57180/
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FindingHumaneJobs
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

What We Are Not Told About Iraq

Needless to say much of the information that we Americans get about Iraq is pre canned and distributed by our pr operations -- Bush administration stuff. It is, then, deeply depressing to get non edited materials that tell things as they really are. A prime example is the figures that we receive about deaths of Iraqis -- supposedly on the decline (but only in Baghdad where we can count them). Those out there occasionally get reported when there is a major blast. However, many simply are lost as there is no news coverage outside of the Green zone except by occasional reports and not all killings are reported. One of the grimmer reports this a.m. on the BBC was of the town below Baghdad at a bend in the river where bodies -- often headless and manifesting torture before death -- wash up and need to be buried in (decomposed states). Most are men. However, of the 500 recent arrivals there, 10 were women. How many more are being slaughtered while we debate how to wage a war on terror? Looks to me as though we are the Terror. Ed Kent
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
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http://www.bloggernews.net

Monday, July 16, 2007

Angel on a mission to save uptown

http://www.nydailynews.com/boroughs/manhattan/2007/07/16/2007-07-16_angel_on_a_mission_to_save_uptown_print.html

Clem Richardson
Angel on a mission to save uptown

Monday, July 16th 2007, 4:00 AM

Ask Carolyn Kent to talk about herself and she stuffs a résumé in your hand and says look at it later.

Kent has other things she wants to discuss. Foremost is her battle to somehow halt the construction of a 200-foot-tall, 300-unit luxury apartment building on a stretch of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine campus that sits on the northwest corner of theintersection of Cathedral Parkway and Morningside Drive.

Kent, a preservationist who, as a member of a variety of community groups including the Morningside Heights Historic District Committee and the Morningside Heights Residents Association, has saved numerous west Harlem buildings by securing landmark designation, is not at all deterred by the excavation underway at the construction site.

"Can't we just leave this world-renowned site alone?" Kent said as she walked through the cathedral campus near the diocesan house, the back wall of which abuts the construction site. "When I come here, I feel like I am in the land of God. Why disrupt this beautiful place?"

Noting that the condominiums will tower over the three-story diocesan house, she added: "I have nightmares that one day I'll look up and see people walking around in their bathrobes."

Kent has been active in west Harlem preservation efforts almost since she started graduate studies at Columbia University in the late 1950s.

Working with a variety of groups like Community Board 9, the Sugar Hill Preservation Committee, the 5 block Protection Association and the Hamilton Heights/West Harlem Community Preservation Organization, Kent has been involved in securing landmark status for buildings and communities uptown, including the Hamilton Theater and Lobby Building, the Croton Aqueduct 119th St. Gatehouse, Riverside Church, the Plant and Scrymser Pavilions at St. Luke's Hospital and the Claremont Theater building.

Last month, 85 people, including a bevy of uptown elected officials, gathered at a Hamilton Heights home to honor Kent for her preservation work with the first Preservation Angel award.

"I admire her ability to get major institutions like Columbia University and churches in west Harlem to appreciate their role in this community," said state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem), who has worked closely with Kent on many preservation issues.

Hamilton Heights/West Harlem Community Preservation Organization President Ronald Melichar said his group created the Preservation Angel award in Kent's honor.

"I know no one who has given such personal attention to preservation issues in our community as Carolyn has," Melichar said. "If you walk down Broadway from 110th to 150th St., which is the spine of our community, I don't think there is a block that you can look down and not see something, big or small, that Carolyn was involved in saving for future generations."

Avra Petrides, artistic director of the Bridge Stage of the Arts on W. 78th St., said Kent helped her group find the Hamilton Theater, a shuttered vaudevillian theater the Petrides group plans to renovate into a performance space.

"Carolyn is a spirited and fierce defender of the architecture and communities of Morningside Heights, Hamilton Heights and Manhattanville," said Petrides, who organized the program honoring Kent. "She is unafraid to take on thorny issues, sometimes completely alone."

"That's why she got the first Preservation Angel award," said Perkins. "She set the bar pretty high."
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
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http://www.bloggernews.net


The Sad Fate of Our Religions

* LA Church 'in record abuse deal' *
The Catholic Church in Los Angeles reportedly agrees to pay $660m to hundreds of alleged sex abuse victims.
Full story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/1/hi/world/americas/6899391.stm

...............................

We are now apparently to be presented with periodic reports of the child abuse inflicted by priests over the past half century in the U.S. Needless to say the great bulk of Catholics and their clergy are decent people. But their church is dying now a slow death while less decent and honorable ones in the U.S. flourish. As one who has been around the world of theology for a half century, I would have to observe that our religions generally have been dumbed down and diverted following a brief period of scholarly excellence and social responsibility that did much to bring us expanded civil rights for those who had been suppressed by our history of racism and ethnocentrism.

When I was a college student in the mid 1950s I literally had to editorialize in my Ivy League college against anti-Semitic exclusion of both Jewish students and faculty. In a class of 1,000 my brilliant African roommate was one of 3 students of color in my class and in the college. Martin Luther King, Jr. and all our other religious groups pulled together to open the doors.

However, the decline began to set in about the time I entered divinity school in the U.S. and Britain. The scholars and activists for social justice were already being replaced by feel good religionists. Religion, as Freud, had intimated was being pushed as a sort of medicine regime that would make scared people feel safe. The big daddy in the sky would make things all right -- just hang in there and follow the pack.

Needless to say this was also a time frame in which those who were trained in theology were losing what used to be called faith. Those with social concerns were shifting careers to law, medicine, teaching, etc. So the field was left open for the pedophiles and scam artists to move in to exploit the naive and defenseless.

I wish I saw a change for better things down the line. But it is a well known fact that the Catholic church can no longer enlist new young clergy to man its churches and the same is pretty much the case with other religions as well. The mega churches with their posturing TV types have very little to do with our fine religious traditions that once upon a time gave people a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives. Now we have the war enthusiasts who want to kill their enemies -- Muslims against Jews against Christians and the reverse. It is nightmarish to see these three Western religions reverting to the barbaric worlds of the ancients which saw their gods as the Deciders in Chiefs who would lead their peoples to war against other Deciders in Chiefs and their tribes.

May the gods spare us an apocalypse in which our WMD become the ultimate destructive tools of people competing to survive on an over crowded and deteriorating planet.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Friday, July 13, 2007

Peace Keeping vs. Pacifying (Occupying)

One of today's dangerous Republican Party misconceptions is that peace-keeping a divided population which wants a mediator to help them keep the peace among themselves is not vastly different from pacifying or occupying a HOSTILE one!

One of my daughters happened to be briefly doing medical training in the military during the Clinton watch and was proud of the prospect of helping a Bosnia or a Kosovo keep the peace between conflicted groups.

But occupying and pacifying a country is an entirely different ball game. The Nazis made that mistake when they assumed that their fellow "Aryans" (Brits, Nordics, etc.) would welcome their interventions in their nations to bring true Aryan values to fruition. Apparently the Bush administration assumed that the Iraqis and (Afghans) would welcome American troops as their liberators. Remember when the costs of the invasion of Iraq were going to be paid by the increased oil production with the assistance of grateful Iraqis liberated from Saddam Hussein?

Needless to say both the Nazis and the neocons who seemed to have been running Bush were madly mistaken in their analyses. We are now seeing the deep resentment of Iraqis and Afghans who want us OUT OF THERE! The so-called governments in each are scared stiff that they will face the fate of Norway's Quisling (which word became a synonym for TRAITOR!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisling

No one in his right mind in either of those governments is going to play along with us -- without a quick flight out with a pile of bank notes readily available. Karsai is complaining about the numbers of innocent Afghans we are killing and the so-called government in Iraq is playing hard ball with Bush & Co. while openly negotiating with the Iranians.

Only a Decider-in-Chief who does not read anything and only listens to his sycophants could be living in the la la land that he presented to us yesterday.
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

U.S. Mobility in Decline

[Recently I was challenged on a list about the decline in social mobility in the U.S. I had been noting the 50% unemployment figures in NYC for young African American men and worrying about a possible increase in crime due to same. I did not point out that our prisons are already overcrowded with ever increasing numbers -- now somewhere around 2.2 million or 1/4 of the world's prison population!

Not only college opportunities, but solid jobs out of high school are now fading here in the U.S. and many are simply being left stranded mid career. I imagine that the current anti immigrant fervor has something to do with job anxiety?

My family lives in Morningside Heights near Columbia University where we have seen the switch over from people earning less living comfortably with their neighbors to our culture of gentrification in which children must now inherit to find a secure place for themselves. Our neighborhood buildings have been converted to coops from rentals and one must plunk down a million dollars or more for a family sized living space. Columbia is making a grab for a large slice of lower West Harlem to create a new campus for itself -- and to hell with those living there now! Those not well educated are simply at risk of being rejected or dumped by our economy -- with Columbia seeking to implement eminent domain as the evicting agent!

We are a society becoming increasingly divided, a plutocracy run by our wealthy ones rather than a democracy. Our political decisions are determined by who can buy which of our pols. And we academics who try to tell things as they are are now being subverted in the public mind by the constant right wing attack dog challenges to our findings that are all too evident when one does the research.

See the two reports following. They remind me too much of the early days of the Nazis when they were exploiting the economic crisis in Germany and undermining the all too frail Weimar Republic there with a joint appeal to the corporate heads and the unskilled and unemployed masses (Lumpenproletariat) ready to take up their banners. The Jews were their scapegoats. Who will be ours? Ed Kent]

.......................................

SKEPTICISM OF FACULTY AND TENURE
New poll finds majority of public believes bias is problem in
college classrooms and questions role of tenure.
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/07/12/poll

The Land of Opportunity?
Recent research found that mobility in the United States is
lower than in other industrial countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/opinion/13fri2.html?th&emc=th
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PeaceEfforts
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EndingPoverty
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/440neighborhood
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StudentConcerns
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AcademicFreedom
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrivacyRights
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Israel_Palestine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FindingHumaneJobs
http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Catholic Church only true church, Vatican says????

[One could see this one coming a way off. Ratzinger, former Nazi youth and supporter of Opus Dei (right wing organization similarly disposed), has been signaling his attack on the ecumenical outreach supported by John Paul II.

Ratzinger schemed his way into the papacy and is now following the party line of the first Christian heretic, St. Paul, originally Saul who became a 'convert' from Judaism and then proceeded to pervert the message of Jesus with his personal hate themes. These included anti-Semitism such as that now reintroduced by Ratzinger with the Roman mass, hatred of women (marry them only if you are burning with lust and ban young Christian widows from the church), ugly anti-Semitism, and sycophancy towards the 'divinely sanctioned' most brutal of political authorities (e.g. the murderous Roman emperor of his days). All of these hatreds culminated in Nazism which the then pope allowed and the Holocaust against the Jews, people with disabilities, Gypsies, and true Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoffoer who gave his life to protest the massive Nazi murders.

Ratzinger (Alexander XVI) sadly spells the bitter end of the Roman Catholic Church -- not with a bang but with a whimper. Most of Paul's horrors which Ratziger is replaying are spelled out in his Letter to the Romans. One finds in another of his letters the charge that the "Jews killed Jesus!" which was the Christian abomination that sounded down the ages and which was recently replayed by Mel Gibson (The Passion of Christ).

Contemporary biblical scholars are discovering that the editing of the Christian sources was done aggressively by early Christian theologians. Ugly stuff such as the Pauline hate themes which supported the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic church upon which the First Vatican Council based the absolute authority (infallibility) of popes was selected in. Much else with differing stresses was extinguished. Ratzinger, having conspired for the post for several decades, is now running with the ball, having attacked Muslims he is now on to Jews and fellow Christians and those of us who despise his pretentious costly dresses, white socks, and red slipper approaches to major contemporary moral and political issues.

I studied theology formally for 3 years, have had many friends amongst those wrestling with the moral issues among the representatives of our Western religions, and am appalled by this descent into Hell by this arrogant fraud who drove out of his church its leading theologians and others that might have rescued it from such demonic arrogance. Ed Kent]

........................


http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/07/10/vatican-church.html


Catholic Church only true church, Vatican says
Last Updated: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 | 10:27 AM ET
CBC News

The Vatican issued a document Tuesday restating its belief that the Catholic Church is the only true church of Jesus Christ.

The 16-page document was prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a doctrinal watchdog that Pope Benedict used to head.

[snip]
--
"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
--
Ed Kent 212-665-8535 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation
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http://BlogByEdKent.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloggernews.net

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Ratziniger Takes His Church Back to the Evils of the 19th Century!

[Back in the 19th century a reasonably liberal but none to bright pope called what has become known as the First Vatican Council:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Vatican_Council


Unhappily at that time Italy was going through the turmoil of replacing the old feudal order with democracy and Pio Nono panicked and at the same time the more liberal cardinals either sickened and died or had to get back to their scattered jobs around the world with slow and undependable transportation (1868). The upshot was that the conservatives (always centered in the Vatican inner circles) passed a series of conservative measures (establishing absolute papal "infallibility" to determine issues with pronouncements from on high, anti-abortion stuff, denial of conscientious objection to soldiers unless the Vatican declared a war unjust (which it did NOT do with Hitler), etc., etc.

John 23 called the Second Vatican Council:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council

in an effort to reverse some of the evils of the prior event. But he died in process and popes since that time have been reverting to the reactionary precedents set in the earlier council and the most recent, Ratzinger, who comes out of the center of the right wingers, is further sabotaging the church with reversals such as the present one, insults to Muslims and Jews, etc., etc.

A sad business. Some extraordinarily fine Catholic leaders have been silenced by this degeneration and/or driven out of the church entirely.

Ed Kent]


http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/07/08/vatican_grants_a_revival_for_old_style_latin_mass/

Vatican grants a revival for old-style Latin Mass

By Michael Paulson, Globe Staff | July 8, 2007

The aficionados of the Latin Mass in the Roman Catholic Church are a committed bunch.

The Rev. Charles J. Higgins was ordained to the priesthood in Boston long after the Latin Mass had been relegated to the history books -- but he read about it, heard about it, and became so enamored of its beauty that he taught himself to celebrate the age-old rite by watching a training tape.

Christine Quagan of West Roxbury is so passionate about the old-style Mass -- complete with whispered prayers, a priest facing away from the congregation, and periods of silence -- that she organized a group of Catholics from the area to agitate for wider use of Latin Mass.

Most importantly, from the point of view of church officials, the switch from Latin to English in the 1960s is one of the reasons an estimated 1 million people worldwide have left the Catholic Church. The disaffected include some who worship at an unauthorized Latin Mass in West Roxbury and another that gathers weekly in Norwood.

The minority of Catholics who have clung to the Latin Mass, formally known as the Tridentine Rite, are celebrating yesterday's release at the Vatican of a new document in which Pope Benedict XVI , reaching out to alienated traditionalists, opened the door to wider use of the Latin Mass by allowing priests to say the Mass without requiring authorization from their local bishop.

But the step is troubling liberals, who worry the move could be the first step toward a broader rollback of a variety of modernizations that have taken effect since the Second Vatican Council ended.

Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston, one of two American bishops invited to meet with the pope last week to discuss the change, is urging both sides to keep the change in perspective. He said that the pope specifically said that worship in Latin will continue to be the exception, not the rule.

"There are some conservative Catholics who feel that everything ended with the [Second Vatican] Council, and some liberals who think that everything began with the Council, and this Holy Father is trying to say that this is continuous growth, that it's the same church, and that we must try to avoid allowing the liturgy to become a battleground rather than a point of unification and communion for believers," O'Malley said in a telephone interview.

O'Malley, 63, grew up attending Latin Mass, and for a decade after his ordination in 1970 he continued to pray daily in Latin. Now, however, he says his daily prayers in Spanish, and celebrates Mass primarily in English, but also in Spanish and Portuguese.

O'Malley said he has no plans to expand the number of worship sites in Latin in the Archdiocese of Boston, although if demand increased, he would be willing to do so.

Currently there is one weekly Mass in Latin, recently relocated from Holy Trinity Church in Boston to Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Church in Newton, which is attended by about 250 people out of an estimated 373,000 who attend Mass on the average Sunday in the archdiocese.

O'Malley also said he does not see a need to change the training of future priests studying at the archdiocese's two seminaries, St. John's and Blessed John XXIII.

"In the United States, this is not a burning issue," he said. "Obviously, I think most Catholics would prefer the newer form of the Mass. But still, it's striking that a number of young Catholics are attending these Tridentine Masses, people who grew up after the [Second Vatican] Council but have been caught up by the beauty and the solemnity and the sense of the sacred that they find in that celebration."

O'Malley said his primary hope is that the document will help reconcile the church with people who have broken away, adding that "actually, we've already reached out to some of them."

The group in Norwood, called the St. Botolph Chapel, is associated with the Society of St. Pius X, the main international association with which the pope seeks reconciliation. The group in West Roxbury, called St. Roger/St. Mary, is independent.

"We hope that they will reconsider their situation and see that the Church will welcome them back and that their attachment [to the Latin Mass] would not be an obstacle to their reintegration," O'Malley said.

The Tridentine Rite, in Latin, was the official form of worship for Catholics until 1970, but priests had begun experimenting with the use of English translations about six years before that as a result of changes set into motion by the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 to 1965. About 60 percent of today's US Catholic population was born after the new worship rite went into effect, according to Bryan T. Froehle , an associate professor of sociology at Dominican University.

"I find a greater spiritual awareness of the presence of God," Quagan said of the Latin Mass. Quagan is the leader of the Boston chapter of Una Voce, a group advocating for great use of the Latin Mass.

Scholars say the Latin Mass evokes a different set of emotions for many worshipers than today's Mass, which tends to be more informal and participatory.

"There's something that's clearly religious and sacred about the old rite -- there's something mysterious about it, the sense of the holy, awe before something that's a lot bigger than you -- and a lot of people are unhappy with the way they are experiencing mystery in the current rite, which does not convey the same thing at all," said the Rev. John F. Baldovin , a professor of historical and liturgical theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge. "But I think this is the wrong way to go about redressing some of the mistakes of the last 40 years, and a lot of crazy people are now going to come out of the woodwork, people who are discontent with the way the church has gone for the last 40 years."

Some scholars fear that advocates of the Latin Mass also want the Vatican to roll back its efforts at interfaith and ecumenical relations, lay participation, and other changes since the Second Vatican Council. And the Anti-Defamation League has objected to wider use of the old rite because it includes on Good Friday a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.

"Clearly, the pope is attempting to respond pastorally to a small group of disaffected former Catholics who were very disturbed by the Vatican II liturgical reforms, but potentially this runs the risk of being misinterpreted as calling into question the Second Vatican Council," said the Rev. Keith J. Pecklers , a professor of liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Higgins, who now leads the weekly Mass in Latin in Newton, disagreed, and said he is hopeful that the document will allow more people to discover the richness of the old rite.

"You have to distinguish between people for whom the Latin Mass is the rallying cry and people who simply like the Latin Mass," he said.

Higgins called the Vatican document "very significant," saying that "it gives a place in the mainstream church for people who are very attached to the traditional Latin Mass. Their legitimate aspirations are now being officially recognized by the pope."

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
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