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At
war???
October 2001 12:31
Published
in Direction Magazine, February 2002
under the title: 'Bin
Laden's Messianic vision' The most vehicled word in the world
today is probably ‘terrorism’. I hardly can open a newspaper or turn on
the radio or TV without being under siege by that word.
"Today Romania is at war alongside NATO against terrorism"
the radio announced gravely one night last month, at a time when the audience
was at maximum.
Life here has become even more stressful.... Because of the security measures
taken at frontiers, the traffic in drugs has collapsed and so have the bodies
of drug addicts who cannot afford to pay the sharp price increases on the
heroine market. Over three hundred have crowded the hospitals in Bucharest
already. This news has added further more anxiety in people’s souls.
Terrorism has become the most dangerous enemy of civilisation. It has acquired
a gigantic attention from media - our daily ‘food’ - a ferocious and
faceless enemy without any respect for the human life. You can hear ordinary
people around talking about it as if it were some new sort of evil spirit
unheard of in the old times, which is not at all so. Terror, and how to wreak
it, has deep roots in the depths of human history and it haunted mankind
violently for the first half of the last century, riding atop the twin towers
of technological progress and totalitarianism.
In this country we tend to forget, being overwhelmed by everyday worries and
hardships, the words in Ecclesiastes that 'nothing is new under the sun'. Our
own totalitarian state system once used terrorists to achieve its political
targets after having first indoctrinated them.
Now, religion is used to support the spread of the death, after its core
message - that of taming our aggressive instincts, has been mutilated. Its
central purpose has in fact been perverted in order to arouse believers to
serve the Death not Life. Let’s face it: Islam is essentially against
bloodletting, but hang on a minute, only within those being part of it. The
other ones, the pagans or infidels, are given a lower status that can be close
to nothingness in the mind of a fanatic.
A few nights ago I watched
on TV a documentary made by a Pakistani woman with a hidden video camera,
inside Afghanistan, the Talibans’ realm. A very courageous woman, indeed God
bless her. Shocking images. Horrifying scenes of women assassinated in a
stadium before hysteria-hit crowds. A decapitated, skinned head of a man in a
house where the wife was shot on the spot and the girls raped - while a
Taliban official stated shamelessly how law and order had been brought throughout the land. Anyone could see the way
have they instituted their
Divine Justice: By slaughter and rape and marauding of their very countrymen.
Of course the main victims as ever are the most unaided: women and children.
Embarrassing images for any honest Moslem, who
believes not in Sharia (strict Islamic law) but in the Human Rights. Yet
Moslem leaders around the world hesitate to promptly and vehemently take a
stand against this Taliban model of a Moslem state and their barbaric means to
realise it.
The realm of the Taliban is more like the model that
prevailed in the Prophet’s time when the Berber tribes made a living in the
Arabian peninsula by attacking caravans in the desert and sharing the loot - a
prosperity achieved by marauding, not hard disciplined work. That was the key
to the successful spread of Islam in the first centuries, that they boast of -
that was how they 'attracted' new converts. Unfortunately this model does not
work any more in our modern times and this seems for many Moslems, hard to
accept.
Now in Afghanistan the religious students (Taliban means 'student'), in trying
to achieve their totalitarian state, are using the most efficient weapon of
all: the man himself. A man who, after an intense process of indoctrination,
emerges as a living or biological bomb. When Osama bin Laden says that he has
plenty of people ready and eager to die for Allah, I believe him. Laden is
cunning, an expert at manipulation, the number one terrorist on the planet - a
bloodthirsty megalomaniac.
This enemy we confront at the dawn of the third millennium has achieved
something incredible a few years ago. It has brought together at the same
table century old rivals - Russia and the European countries along with USA -
in a huge joint effort to eradicate a common enemy: terrorism. What an
incredible change! You have the spirit of death emanating from your IRA, or ETA in
Spain, but it did not foster global co-operation for they, these Prophets of
death (some of them I saw invited to the White House), did not have the
messianic vision like that of the deranged Osama bin Laden. They kill for
more modest reasons, the liberation of their piece of land from foreign
occupation. Osama instead wants to free, according to his TV declaration, the
entire Islamic world from 'infidels'.
By this vague term 'infidel’, just about everyone can be labelled - anyone
who opposes Allah, or his representative, the leader Mr.Laden, which is the
same. (Not so long ago similar coercions were used by our Security Forces to
exert terror on the population under communism. Then, anyone who opposed the
great God Marxism, or its leader, Ceausescu, would be labelled not 'infidel'
but 'revisionist', 'parasite', etc. etc).
What is new is the global dimension of criminal groups with the funds to
support common action toward targets worldwide. Nobody is safe anymore after
11 Sept. I don’t think anybody can predict the course of history but I am
sure it will not be what is wanted by bin Laden and the like.
The collapse of the Twins in New York has awakened mankind from a century long
sleep to the knowledge that the most frightful enemy is not the ever-more
sophisticated weapon but ‘thy neighbour turned suicide killer’. Against
him (my working mate maybe??), no ultra-sophisticated gun can defend me.
I pray for God to bless America, I don't think He is the Allah because He has
Mercy on his side, not Justice, as bin Laden’s. To do justice on behalf of
the Creator!??! Where did this idea come from? - nowhere else other than from
man’s thirst for power. If bin Laden starts to judge the world, than Allah
would become idle; - A nonsense.
Off the cursed wood of the cross, Jesus asked His Father to forgive His
killers, not to do Him justice. What a lesson for mankind to learn, a lesson
for the humanising of the cruel beast in us. Talibans and their assassins with
their appetite for martyrdom, want to wipe away all those long suffering years
from our western culture only to restore the barbaric times within which they
alone feel comfortable, times where just blind and brute force reigned.
My hope is that this long range and unusual war (to launch bombs and food at
the same time!?!) will not degenerate into a religious war between
Christianity and Islam. Let’s pray to God that won’t happen. And that in
the end Love, our Lord, will come on the clouds of faith!
Bin Laden, united in hatred with his death’s angels, will inevitably lose
their war in the long run like his predecessors Hitler, Stalin etc.. History
has in its stomach a lot of these like him, self-called ‘illuminated’
paranoids who fancy themselves to be seen as another Prophet.
I am proud that my people have given full
support to the call for terrorism’s eradication launched by USA. The
thousands of innocent lives lost in the rubbles of the Twins did not leave the
Romanian soul untouched.
God bless America, the guardian of our freedom and civil rights, and England
her most faithful ally
May Love come soon upon the clouds of the Faith on the whole Earth
Miti |
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Street
Angels
It is a highly sensitive topic: the street children.
99.9% of Romanians, both inside and outside the church, would prefer to avoid
it. Not very Christ-like attitude, is it? Actually, what is the purpose of the
church on Earth? I put this question once to a Christian Pastor. His answer
shocked me, it was just like the one I heard once from a high orthodox pulpit:
'To spread the Word!!!'
On our Romanian TV, we spend hours watching an imported program called
'Forgive me'. It's like Television playing Jesus, - they send reporters like
disciples, to find people that for different reasons have not seen each other
for a long time... They are brought from all over the country to ask each
other's forgiveness in front of the cameras. Of course, the designated
mediator for this program comes in the person of a superb blonde wearing a
miniskirt, trying her best to look compassionate toward the distressed faces
brought into the studio.
Today we sit back and watch on TV the human drama of those less lucky than
ourselves. The tears of another are a subject of entertainment for us.
Everyday life is a pool of indifference.
The Good Samaritan parable is the least quoted perhaps, from our pulpits.
Maybe we are afraid to identify ourselves with the expert in the law, the
priest who passed by on the other side? Maybe the extent of his mercy to the
man who fell into the hands of robbers was to preach to him: "You should
have stayed at home". Is that our limit too?
Jesus, our model, came to Earth to do really practical things for the needy
and poor, such as healing and feeding.. Yes again this pedestrian topic -
food! Why not? I remember the Pharisee's girl who he raised from the dead.
After saying "Talita Kumi' ('little girl, rise up' in Aramaic), he
ordered the girl to be given, not a reading from the Prophets or Leviticus,
but - food.
When I have been hungry myself, bread is a very, very material thing to me. I
cannot think of anything else but my stomach. Yes, in this matter I am a
materialist. The false idealist would have me say: 'Man does not live by bread
alone...' Oh but that sounds to me the same as the old communist Party
propaganda, 'Work now and eat tomorrow.' So likewise, is water. On the Cross
Jesus said 'I am thirsty'.
I love Jesus because just like me, he is hungry and thirsty. He offered
Himself to me as spiritual food when I needed it, but I know if he were here
now and saw me hungry, he would offer me first natural food. He wants me to
live for real, in the 'now'. In this life first and foremost, then in the
other. It goes to the heart of Christianity, and challenges us: The starving,
abused and mentally retarded children living underground call us not to pass
by on the other side.
Yes, every loaf of bread coming to feed the needy in
this country is a God given thing. Fortunately, on behalf of Jesus, there are
many charity organisations from abroad that are the only source of staying
alive for hundreds if not thousands, of children in this country. I think that
my brothers in the western countries, and in particular Britain, have a warm
heart for The Street Angels of Romania.
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