LA Times has a very interesting though touchy article about Israel and Gaza, by Ben Ehrenreich.
I stumbled upon one sentence that summed up what I think, feel about the conflict:
“Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.”
The list of ethnic cleansings of the 20th century is impressive. Not much to add…
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A Sikh taking a morning holy bath at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. By Jingye.
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As for certain things in your daily life that you never think of questioning, I realized reading Freedom at Midnight that I knew nothing about the Sikhs, and their religion Sikhism.
Yet they account to 25 millions worldwide, including 19 millions in India and 6 millions in the rest of the world. It’s the fifth largest religion in the world, and is only 400 years old.
So here is, in brief and for the neophytes like me, what Sikhs and Sikhism are.
Continue reading ‘What is Sikhism and who are the Sikhs ?’
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Two weeks ago, I won an photo contest from my company (Air France KLM) with this picture, and the prize was 2 return tickets anywhere in the world. After a few discussions about where we could go (Iran, back to Burma, Philippines, Uzbekistan were discussed) we eventually settled to do what every backpacker has to do at some point, India. And where to “start” in India if not in the Rajasthan (wiki).
The decision was motivated by a recent gift: I am reading an amazing book about India, a best seller from 1975 written by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins: Freedom at Midnight (amazon).
Freedom at Midnight is a detailed and novelized account of all events that occurred in 1947 and 1948 in India and in the UK that led to India’s independence and partition. It’s a fascinating stack of 800 or 900 pages that flew in just a few weeks. But especially, it made me realize how little I knew about India recent history, and how much there was to know !
Continue reading ‘Freedom at Midnight, and the Partition of India’
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If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither, let my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. (Psalms, 137, 5-7).
Continue reading ‘O Jerusalem, Gaza strip and West Bank settlements …’
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Homosexual sodomy rocks the Holy Land ! Shlomo Benizri, a Knesset (Israeli parliament) politician and member of the Shas Party, seems to think so: he blamed the parliament laxism towards gays for 6 earthquakes that rocked the region in the last 3 months. The Shas party is said to be ultra-orthodox, close to Hasidic Judaism and supporting the Great Israel.
Continue reading ‘“Criminalised” homosexuality ?’
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My understanding of the Shi’a and Sunni schism inside the Islamic religion has always been approximative, a gathering of the information I collected watching and reading the news.
Continue reading ‘The Islamic schism: Sunnis and Shiites’
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