23 churches were attacked here in Sri Lanka between 24 December 2003 and 31 December 2003, and 26 from 01 Jan 2004 to 15 Jan 2004.
There is no indication of the extent of the attacks – vandalism? arson? theft? – but this is the first I’ve heard definite numbers on anything remotely approaching official. It was on the evening news.
On another note, yesterday, when Fahim and I were walking to his work, he read a poster – and when posters here are plastered, it’s not just one or two posters – it’s something like six posters long by two or three high, or whatever the surface they’re covering allows – if they could post six posters high by thirty long, I think they would – and it said something along the lines of condemning all NGO’s that are against Buddhists. NGO’s are Non-Governmental Organizations, which, in my mind, is the same as a non-profit organization, or a charitable organization. Fahim isn’t positive that they’re non-profit, but he suspects they are.
That means that companies like YA-TV, which Fahim works for, could be targeted. It’s an NGO, and while they’re not against Buddhism, they are for peace and equality and getting along without tension, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or whatever. Could that be seen by extremist Buddhists as against Buddhism? I dunno.
It seems to me that some of those extremists are no longer content with racial division. They want to add religious division to the mix.
Bloody hell.
This is not good.
While we’re so busy in Canada being politically correct and practicing, in some places, affirmative action and doing, sometimes, almost all we can to avoid racial tension, and as far as I can tell, mostly succeeding (except for the problems with the Sikhs in Surrey, if I remember correctly), here, almost no one is even talking about things like that. Not that I agree with affirmative action as it is practiced in some areas – I don’t – but I can see why some would see it as necessary.
Being pro-peace, anti-racism or anti-prejudice of any kind doesn’t seem to come up anywhere, or rather, hardly anywhere. Not in advertisements that I’ve seen (in English). Granted, I know that YA-TV does pro-peace programming, but I only caught one of those episodes once.
Back to the news. A couple of religious leaders were also on the news publicly condemning the violent acts against church buildings. That’s all well and good, sort of, but I wonder how them using the words "We condemn these acts" will be viewed by the type of people who’ll do this sort of thing? Will it only inflame them even more?
If they’re going to be so stupid as to vandalize Christian churches just because, even with absolutely no evidence at all, they think that the Buddhist monk who died in December was killed by a Christian, or even a small group of Christians, therefore all the Christians must be punished? What kind of narrow minded stupid thinking is this?
On that basis alone, I guess I should kill every single Muslim because there were some Muslims involved in the September 11th attack on the WTC. Never mind that most Muslims condemn those particular extremist Muslims for their actions, dammit, all the Muslims in the world ought to die!!!!
And oh, think about the Catholic sex scandals. Some priests are sexually abusing children, so let’s kill all the Catholic priests! Naw, why stop at that? Let’s just kill all the Catholics!
Oh hey, remember that FLQ crisis in Quebec (Canada for those of you not in the know) in the 1970s? There were Quebecois involved in that. So let’s kill all the Quebecois! Hell no, let’s kill all French speaking people everywhere!!!!
Well hell, we can think back to the Crusades. Christians killing Christians, Christians killing Muslims and Jews. Muslims killing Christians and Jews. Kill all the Christians!!!! Kill all the Muslims!!!!
Oh hey, what about Pol Pot in Cambodia? What religion was he? Burn all of them, too! And what about Idi Amin? Anyone who belongs to the same religion or race as him ought to be killed. Guilt by association.
For @#!@!!’s sake, stop the insanity! I want to get off!
