I was thinking about a snark I did yesterday on Persecution, then a friend posted about persecution on her LJ and it got me thinking:
Pagans really don’t have a candle to hold to anyone on the persecution scale.
I heard this piece coming into work this morning on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6349532
One of the things that struck me is that the fighting between the Suni and Sheite groups is causing diversified communities to be one or the other. Steve Inskeep, the comentator on that piece said “in some communities, the clensing….is complete.” Meaning that one sect KILLED OFF the entirety of the other sect, or forced them out.
Part of the process is to grab people off the street, call their homes and ask relatives to confirm that their loved one is Suni or Sheite. It’s a crap shoot as to whether or not they get home at that point.
Consider this for a moment. You as a pagan are sitting in your house. You get a call. On the other end of the phone you hear a voice you don’t recognize who tells you they are with the “Freedom Feris” and they have your loved one. They then demand that you confirm that your loved one is Black Forest Tradition. You know that if you say the wrong thing, then you are never going to see that loved one again, until you identify the body. What do you say?
You say something and the phone goes dead in your hand. Now comes the worry time. Does your loved one get home, or did you sentance them to being shot in the street like a dog?
And this is not an isolated incident, this HAPPENS EVERY DAY in Iraq. Multiple times a day. AND if they don’t kill the Suni they picked up, they may ransom him back, so now these people are pauperizing themselves to buy the freedom of those they love.
And little playgans are bitching about having “Happy Samhain” erased from the campus whiteboard?
Listening to the stories that came out of WWII and the Jewish Holocaust, listening to these horror stories coming out of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan (where the Taliban executed people in the street because they weren’t dressed right) is eye opening.
I read in National Geographic about the Taliban when December rolled around in 2001. I knew nothing about them. This was a philosophical movement among college students to return to some of the roots of Islam. It got so hemmed in with rules that men’s beards were measured for length and they could be jailed if the beard wasn’t long enough. That’s like Fred Phelps having the authority to execute anyone that didn’t have the right brand of hat on.
Stories about a school being on fire, and THE STUDENTS NOT BEING ALLOWED TO ESCAPE BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T HAVE THEIR VEILS ON. So those women and girls DIED in screaming, flaming agony while the firefighters forced them back in to either get their veils or die.
But little Wicletts think they are persecuted.
Repost this. As soon as I can I’m going to open this up to the Public, but I want these idiots who think that being Pagan is as hard as it gets to go spend some time as a white person in the Congo, or to have to dress in a burqua and walk the streets of Saudi Arabia to learn what persecution REALLY is.
