LEST WE FORGET...

Dear All,
 
I am just old enough to remember the discovery of the death camps in Germany, and now know that my Jamaicaness would not have saved me  if I happened to be in Germany at the time of the holocaust as I am also part ethnic Jew...

Unfortunately the European Jews who survived were determined to carve a Jewish  homeland out of Palestine, and in the heat of their success , treated the indigenous Jews in the area as second class citizens because they were non European,  and treated the non Jews even worse.  The holocaust of the people occupying the land that the Israelis want  continues.  So very recently Barack Obama has asked Israel not to build any more settlements in the land they captured from surrounding states, so that a peace deal can we worked out. But what do the Israelis  do?  Have they learnt nothing from their own history about not repeating the past?
 
The holocaust of Jews in Germany while reprehensible is not the only holocaust. Where is the remembrance and memorials for the slaughter of one tribe by another  in Uganda and Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa? And where are the tears for all the Europeans in the states of mid-Europe who were murdered one by the other on religious and ethnic grounds?
 
And how much do we West Indians invest in a belief and practise of a Caribbean Brotherhood forged by the brutality of slavery, indenture, the plantation system and colonialism? Just Monday , someone  full of hate and resentment at nothing in particular shouted after me that I was  Jamaican, and should go back there.
 
View the attached programme because it is important  LEST WE FORGET. But neither  let us  forget other less documented  atrocities of the present, and the urgent need for  a movement to wipe out hatred and man’s inhumanity to man. For example THINK before you send out any more of those hate mails  about Muslims, and film clips purportedly showing Sharia law being carried out. (Many of these are as fake as the pictures of Obama eating doubles).  How can we point fingers when Christian nations  have hardly been exemplary in their behaviour towards other nations, and other peoples. We should be ashamed that our Christian brothers and leaders are motivated not by the wish for world peace but by   greed and thirst for power.
 
The behaviour of Christians in Caribbean history is a dreadful burden we have to bear, for  as grateful as we are for our Christian faith, it is difficult to find a way to celebrate the arrival of Christianity in our beautiful nation of Grenada when Christianity  came with the French who lied to the Kalinago Indians, with priests who said Mass on the beach, and then proceeded to bless Fort Louis from which would proceed the eventual extermination of the Kalinago as the French “Final Solution” to the occupation of Grenada by the people whose rightful land it was.  
 
Let us not forget that it was Christians all over the Caribbean who thought that the Africans brought here to replace  the indigenous people were beasts without souls.
 
We have a lot to live down as Christians, and I suggest we start  by obliterating hatred in whatever way we can. So In honour of all who died in the Nazi Holocaust, and all other holocausts perpetrated by God’s children against God’s children, let each and every one of us resolve to bring peace  on earth through tolerance, love and brotherhood.
 
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Saint Francis of Assisi

Beverley Ann Steele