No Way Through

Palestine. Israel. Regardless of your thoughts, this video is worth watching.



Via: Africa Is a Country

Media/Advertising

The popular media often catches a lot of flak for their shameless self-promotion, their focus on consumerism, their use of sex to sell, their ignorance of justice issues, etc...

Which is probably why I truly love to see a great ad campaign, one that bucks the trends and uses images to send a truly powerful message. The medium is not the fault, simply the message.

So I pass on to you an interesting ad campaign via one of my regular reads, Africa is a Country.

You can check it out here and the blog is titled, "History is written by the winners."

The World Needs Women

This picture is from an ad for Health Care services and makes me chuckle whenever I see it.

But it's true as well, not only from a beauty or reproductive point of view.

In Africa and other developing countries there has been a push to target aid initiatives towards women because, not only are they often marginalized in their locations, but also they are much more adept and using the aid to assist their family and sustain development.

I guess the world does need women! (Really not much of a shocker from my perspective.)

Terrorist Alert!

Look at the picture carefully. This man is a terrorist. Or at least that's what Canada's immigration people tell us. Ok, maybe they don't think he is actually a terrorist but he supports terrorists and talks about terrorists. So he is not allowed into Canada.

To many others in the world the above picture is one of George Galloway, British MP. He speaks out against war, including those in the Middle East, has been known to support Leftist philosophies, has argued for the poor Muslims that have been bombed by the Bush alliance (which included his Prime Minister) and has been known to support organizations such as Hamas.

He was to come to Canada to speak at an anti-war rally in Toronto. But, because Hamas has been labeled a terrorist organization in Canada (rather than recognized as an elected ruling party) and we don't allow terrorists to come into Canada - George Galloway must stay at home.

In other news, George Bush was recently allowed across the border to speak in Calgary.


Not only did we allow him in, we had him meeting with officials and talking at a $400 a plate banquet.

If we, as Canadians, are allowing Dubya to come into Canada and speak on his beliefs, why are we not allowing Galloway? I thought we had a little thing called free speech....

Something seems a little "off" to me.

In the News

Best Headline of the Year nominee?

Naked Man Flees from Flaming Tanning Bed in Regina

Oh Regina.

Personal Jesus

There's a lot of talk in evangelical circles about personal relationships with Jesus. He wants to walk with you. He's your best friend. You need to have an intimate, personal relationship with him. Prayer is just like talking on the phone to your best friend. You can tell him anything. You get the idea.

And this is what we have created. Buddy Jesus.

This is not to say that we shouldn't have a personal relationship with Jesus. Not to say that he doesn't walk with us. Not to say that you can't tell him anything. But I wonder if what we have done is boxed him up, created a Jesus that is "the guy next door", created a Jesus... that works for us.

We've sanitized all the things we don't like. The wrath. The holy anger. The cross we're supposed to bear like him. The sacrifice that love demands. The suffering we're supposed to rejoice in. We've taken it all away and made Jesus a suburban Dad who likes to golf on the weekend and take his kids to Dairy Queen.

Now don't get me wrong, the God I believe in is a God of love and of compassion and of grace and has unlimited quantities of these things. But he's also pretty radical which doesn't always go over so easy in my cushion-filled life. Do we tend to focus too much on the overflowing love and not on the commitment/sacrifice factor? Probably. Love and mercy are a hell of a lot easier to sell that's for sure.

Not really sure if there is a conclusion to this but I simply wonder if maybe we have shot ourselves in the foot a little. We've pushed the "Buddy Jesus" to make Christianity more palatable and have forgotten to tremble in fear at his awesome might. I know there have been books like "Your God is Too Safe" and tons of Narnia quotes ("He's wild") but I still wonder if we really grasp something of God beyond him sitting in his pajamas, painting his nails while he listen to our laundry list of complaints. What do you think?

Propaganda War

Propaganda is: Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause.

I remember the first time I watched the movie Black Hawk Down. It was quite a popular movie and when it opened with the setting of Somalia I vaguely tied to to Bosnia, Chechnya, and other war torn areas in the news and ending with -ia. I remember thinking how valiant the soldiers looked in the middle of horrific battle. These 19 men died for freedom, for helping others.

Now I watch the move (as I did this morning) and wonder at what a masterful job the creators did of shaping a piece of propaganda meant to shape the way we see a certain event in history.

Two times in the beginning monologue they refer to the U.S. troops "restoring order" in Somalia with their presence. Or as this order restoring was earlier called in Africa - pacification. The killing of whoever represented a threat to 'security'. And casualties be damned. An American sense of security must be restored to a vital region. Vital to American security concerns. Anything so we can be 'secure'.

The events of Black Hawk Down are inextricably tied to the following Rwandan genocide. Due to the loss of life during operations in Somalia the U.S. was understandably a little more reticent to send in troops to another African country intent on self-imploding. So they sat back and watched the genocide happen, all the while refusing to call it a genocide, because if it was indeed a genocide they would be required by UN sanctions to intercede. They did not call it a genocide and did not intervene.

So at the beginning of this movie one of the Somali's tells an American, "It's a civil war, there is no place for you here." And all self-righteously the American responds, "No, it's a genocide."

It was not a genocide, it was indeed a civil war and remains so to this day. And yet the movie makers needed, in light of Rwanda, to insert this comment to show that Americans take this oh so seriously. That they're not afraid to intervene in a genocide. Somalia and Rwanda are tied together by these events and you, in your Hollywood movie, toss around genocide in attempt to ease your national conscience and to get people to believe that you actually care about what happens in Africa.

Alright, so maybe I'm a little tight about the whole thing. I actually found the movie a little hard to watch this time around. I had to stop part way through, give myself a break, and then keep going. The war in Somalia still rages. Mogadishu is still a ghost town torn apart by daily violence. And now the U.S. is involved again... in a safer way. They don't want to lose more American boys so they arm Ethiopians to go in and 'defend democracy'.

I remember talking to a Somali man I met in Ethiopia (there are many who have fled the country) and he talked about his family, his life there. Nothing profound. Except that this man now had no country to return to, no place for his family to be safe. This was real. It was not just the rabid crowds you see in the movie, attacking the soldiers who are there to help them. It is the pent up anger of decades of American interference, of civil war, of the inability to escape violence. All this, affecting real lives like yours and mine.

And yet, for all that most people know, it's just like they show it in Black Hawk Down. US Boys dying for human rights, fighting against the barbarian horde.

Jesus Camp

Forget the Blair Witch project, you want scary? Watch the documentary, "Jesus Camp"... that's scary.

Scary because it shows a part of Christianity that is anti-Bible and anti-Christ.

Scary because it shows this as the sum and whole of Christianity.

Scary because it shows the abuse of childhood innocence.

I was really torn by watching this movie. The movie shows my two largest pet-peeves with the American brand of Christianity: the reliance on war metaphors and the twinning of Church and State.

And yet the film makes go out of their way to say that this is a accurate, unbiased representation of Evangelical Christianity. This is ONE arm of it and the ugliest arm. Why not make this distinction in the movie? This is unbiased like Michael Moore is unbiased. And yet like Moore it seems to have hit something on the head.

The parents and pastors in the movie make it very clear: children shouldn't learn, they should be indoctrinated with the truth. If we, as Christians, have the truth... should it not stand up to scrutiny? Should we not allow children to 'test and approve' what they parents tell them? Will they not find it good and pure and right?

This movie just brings up bile on every level for me. The god of the film is not the God I worship. And yet I know that this is an accurate picture of some Christians. And I know that they are deadly serious about their beliefs. And it makes me sad.