Who’s Driving This Peace Train?

I am a supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself and firmly believe that they are in a tenuous situation, but this flagrant display of human rights abuse is beyond the scope of defense. At what point is it a violation of all that is decent and just, to empty a round of bullets into a young girl’s body, a body already deprived of life due to a serious misjudgment of the situation?

How does one say to the family of this child “oops, we thought she had a bomb in her school bag, so we shot her, then after she lay dead, we decided it would be entertaining to just shoot her another 12 times, for, um fun.”?

What in hell is wrong with a person who would do such a thing? Have they lost their basic sense of compassion for children? Are they monsters? Honestly, if you change that story to reflect Nazi soldiers during WWII, it would sound like a predictable scenario.

The world is out of control. We are waging wars on a hunch, destroying lives on a whim, and killing children for fun.

It’s hard to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

Look I am no tree-hugging peacenik, but I am finding myself aligned more and more with a pacifistic point of view. When do we draw the line? At what point to we say “enough violence” already?

President Bush thinks he has been chosen by God to defend us, he is convinced that it is his mission to end terror. I believe he truly feels that he is doing the right thing. But I think that kind of drive and passion is a dangerous weapon in the hands of the wrong person. Prime Minister Sharon thinks he is defending his country and the people of Israel, but the message he is sending the world is “I am a blood-thirsty loon who will stop at nothing,including killing children.”

Isn’t it possible, that the age-old cliche is true, violence begets violence.

Go ahead, dismiss me as a liberal. But remember, I support the death penalty and a strong and technologically advanced military, I just don’t support an undisciplined approach to dealing with terror.

I don’t want to execute say shop-lifters, but I do want to execute rapists and child killers.

I guess my theory is that if you apply the hand of righteousness with precision, then ultimately you are ridding the world of evil, but if you just start spraying a crowd of people with bullets, chancing are you might be killing the next Picasso, Ghandi or Jesus.

I think our world leaders spell “peace” with an “ie” and want theirs to be an automatic.