Slaughter of the innocents

Each New Year is a time of hope: particularly so in 2009, as we look forward to a new and very different President in the USA. Billions of people look to Barack Obama to uphold the highest aspirations of the American people, rather than serving their basest economic greeds, as his predecessor has sometimes done.

Like all human beings, he is doomed to fail, of course.

But I believe he will achieve a lot for all of us. America has a written constitution, unlike the UK, and this sets out ideals like religious freedom, peace, justice and welfare. These have often been ignored both hat home and abroad, and if Obama can re-establish the USA as the great and good power it aspires to be, he will have fulfilled all we can reasonably hope.

Justice. This means a lot in Palestine and Israel today. It means that it is wrong to launch missiles against civilian targets – and also that it is wrong for a powerful government to cut off supplies of fuel, food, and water to a neighbour, as the Israeli government ahs done.

Of the two, perhaps the greater wrong is that perpetrated by the Israeli government: after all, the greatest wrong of the Twentieth Century is probably the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis. How can a nation that includes so many who remember (and even survived) the Holocaust allow its own government to strike against a nation mainly comprising the poor and innocent?

British experience in Ireland shows that it is only the costly forgiveness that Jesus preached that brings peace. Demanding an eye for an eye makes everyone blind.

We are all sinners: we acknowledge this weekly. One of the things we do not often do is examine the acts of our government – and other governments – and ask them to live up to our ideals.

2009 is the year to do this, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.