Posted by panch from ? (204.120.48.3) on Friday, March 29, 2002 at 6:32AM :
am morally against land expropriation such as that exhibited by Jews, British, US, Kurds, etc. There must be some compensation at least for stolen land, stolen from people who have lived on it for millenia. Perhaps it is because I'm Assyrian, but so be it. We cannot seperate our views from our background. For those that say I'm living on Native American land stolen by Europeans, I think God will forgive me since he knows what has happened to my family and my people is no less barbaric than what was done to the native Americans.
+++This is curious reasoning...in fact it isn't "reason" at all but justification. First of all no one has an inside track to what God thinks, therefore if one says God would agree with what suits us, we prove that men created God and not the other way around. Is god in the business of condoning the Two wrongs make a right notion?
++++If you happen along later, after a crime was committed and participate in the benefits reaped from that crime, are you not in some way culpabale or complicit by sharing the ill gotten goods, which were after all the purpose of committing the crime?
+++You could tell the police that you didn't steal the goods...just bought them from the ones who stole them. But the Law says that's a crime too, because selling them to someone, you, was the point of the crime...without your willingness to buy, there would be less incentive to steal.
+++A judge in Oakland, California made history some years back when she dismissed all charges brought against prostitutes, declaring she would no longer accept any new ones until the police brought in the men who were buying what the women were selling. Takes two and all that.
Even if I had the power, I don't have the heart, for example, to force Kurds out of a land they themselves stole from us, without compensating them so that their children would not suffer. Now that I have my own daughter, I understand what is meant by innocent children.
Raman
+++Well that's heartening at least.
-- panch
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