Posted on 01/01/2005 7:23:40 AM PST by Prospero
"Words fail," they say, and they do, they do indeed.
Having just finished a first-stage restoration of my father's 45 year-old home movies, which included scenes of Djakarta, where our family briefly lived, I've always felt a sub vocal kinship with Indonesia and her millions.
They say I spoke Bhasha, the Malay tongue spoken there, and would translate for my parents instructions for the house servants, who were probably also spies for the Junta, the Communists, or both. Perhaps I dream in that language, occasionally, but this week I retreated into a walking nightmare, early on after the first indications that the Banda Aceh Christmas Earthquake of 2004 had swamped the parameter of the east Indian Ocean, strongly hinting at what the world would find when the northern end of Sumatra was finally heard from.
In America, for days, we could watch a handful of the same "amateur videos," from Phuket and Sri Lanka, and the horror there was bad enough. The only such video I've seen of the torrent that scraped over Banda Aceh, however, appears to have taken almost a week to make it to the Internet. I have yet to see it's like on television. It makes what happed to the beaches in Thailand and Sri Lanka look like a creek over running its banks after a brief summer storm.
Let's just say, what happened to the sex tourism spots and coasts and more distant islands elsewhere is nothing in comparison to the fate of Banda Aceh and the western shore of Sumatra. Since so many can't find the words, here are a thousand of them:
Now, if you had told me a week ago that an American Marine expeditionary force would be in Banda Aceh on New Years Day, my first reaction would have been that the President had decided upon a bold and unexpected strike in the War on Terror, jumping ahead on the timeline of that effort's multi-generational strategy. I might have thought it was a bold and necessary move, and I would have believed you if you had said they had located and captured Osama Bin Laden there.
As it was, in our shock, probing in from the parameter toward the epicenter of the Banda Aceh Earthquake, only a few have considered whether the hand of the Almighty reached out and sliced off a decade from what still promises to be a protracted conflict with Islamo-Fascism.
Consider that Indonesia is largely a Muslim country with a population similar to that of the United States, and developments there have been "the elephant in the living room" few wanted to consider as we cleaned out Islamo-Fascist terror nests in Iraq, Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.
Banda Aceh was, until a week ago, home of a Taliban-like, semi-autonomous government that had succeeded in establishing the Sharhia Islamic law, though the central government on Java nominally "allowed" this legal code on a "separate but equal" basis, for Muslims only. That was in 2002, and it was hoped the restive Islamo-Fascist insurgents who have fought for independence from Djakarta for more than twenty years would be satisfied. The locals had even just recently succeeded in putting into place, shall we say, "heavy legal penalties" for anyone who tried to prosthletize a citizen of Greater Islam... meaning Christians, of course.
Not a week passes without stories emerging from Indonesia of an on-going persecution of its Christian minorities, and the central governments failure to put a stop to it, especially the further one travels further from Djakarta to the myriad islands of the Indonesian archipelago. Remember the bombing of the nightclub in Denpasar on Bali, the only refuge for Hindus in Indonesia? The Australians haven't.
When he was forced to leave Sudan, Osama Bin Laden considered moving to Yemen, Afghanistan and Banda Aceh. He decided upon Afghanistan, of course, and may still be holed up there, or on the border with Pakistan, or under the nervous refuge of the Mullah regime of Iran. In fact, the Grand Mosque in Banda Aceh is right up there with Karbala, Qom, Medina and Mecca in everyone's top ten list of Muslim "holy places."
Today, it's an open air morgue, and if they find Osama among the dead there, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Sooner or later, we were going to have to deal with Indonesia, in general, and Aceh in particular. And things weren't looking too good.
Things are looking up.
Consider that the Christian Reformation, perhaps even the American Republic, has roots in the Black Death of 1349. People faced with such tragedy question their Worldview, abandon or are, at least, forced to examine their beliefs and habits, and the rebirth of Philosophy and the scientific method in the West began again in the centuries immediately after the plagues of the 14th Christian Century. They certainly questioned the magic of their priests and closely examined the "mysteries," resulting in a rebirth of Bible study that continues to this day. Unquestioned obedience to Rome ended with the Black Plague, and the True Belief of many a young muslim, of their Imams, may come to an end in the aftermath of the Christmas Earthquake.
Now, some might think I'm suggesting the God of Abraham did an angry thing of "biblical proportions" when He decided to shake Sumatra, and that he's on our side, loves George W. Bush, answered the humble prayers of the persecuted, etc., etc. But, this natural tragedy doesn't strike me that way at all. You won't find me cheering the deaths of a million people on Sumatra, and particularly in Aceh.
"Rather fear," I would think, betting on the "beginning of wisdom" might be the best response to this Catastrophe.
But... after you've digested the indigestible scope of the Christmas Earthquake, consider what you might have thought if Kabul under the Taliban had been wiped off the face of the Earth a week or so before our first boots hit the ground there after the destruction of the World Trade Center.
What has happened in Banda Aceh is no less miraculous and undreamed of a possibility, and, at this hour, American Marines are handing out water and food to the pitiable handful who escaped the 20 foot high, hundred mile wide river that swept over their island, again, making what happened in Thailand and Sri Lanka look like a simple storm surge in comparison. The Epicenter of fierce hatred, a sanctuary of Islamo-fascism is no more, as though Falluja had been hit with several hydrogen bombs.
Now you see them, now you don't.
Some of those locals, who have waited for almost a week for food and water, helping off-load our nation's charity are wearing T-Shirts with the image of Osama on them.
We certainly didn't cause this tragedy, but we'd be fools not to take advantage of the strategic miracle God has handed to us.
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If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.
If you have money in the bank and in your wallet, and you have some spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If you woke this morning with more health than illness you are more blessed than the million who will not survive the week.
If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harrassment, arrest, torture or death, you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 500 million people in this world.
If you can read these words, you are blessed because two billion people in the world cannot read at all.
If you can hold up your head with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority of Americans can, but do not.
I have seen the coastal towns of Indonesia and Sumatra. I've watched the little brown skinned kids running and playing in the water.
I've talked to the people, ate with the people and laughed with the people. They wouldn't know Osama bin Laden if you showed them his picture. All they're trying to do is survive day by day.
They've never been to Jakarta or Bangkok or Khuala Lumpur. They couldn't care less if they're controlled by Muslims, Christians or Buddhists. They're concerned about getting enough food to eat one more day.
These are the people to whom we are making donations.
These are the people who perished. I didn't know them, but I know they were there, and now they're gone.
I mourn for them.
God has watched over this land and it's people since our founding. Our strength lies in His blessing, and He blesses our benevolence.
I don't know whether it's Constitutional for the President to allocate money for relief aid. I'm not a Constitutional scholar.
What I do know is that our Founding Fathers depended a lot on their feelings of what is the right thing to do.
Like redrock said, this is the right thing to do.
534 posted on 01/02/2005 4:04:03 PM CST by TexasCowboy (Texan by birth, citizen of Jesusland by the Grace of God)
Posted by permission from another thread..It says it all.
This morming (Sunday Jan 2), a BBC commentator on NPR was discussing the South Asia tsunami disaster. They mentioned their popular wisdom that President Bush had been slow to acknowledge the disaster and commit American assistance, but not a word about how Kofi Annan, also on vacation, had not been available to state the UN’s support until a day after Bush’s announcement. Then the BBC reporter got going on a tangent of what the US response ought to be, specifically that of using our military assets in the area. He could have started out by crediting us for having the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln already on the scene, dispatching aid with its helicopters and preparing to process and deliver potable water from its on-board purifying plants. These are facts and a good newsman might want to start with some good factual information. But no, he and the NPR host had a conversation which involved musing about the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which went something like this:
Q: Doesn’t the US have an airbase on Diego Garcia?
A: Yes, they (the US) used it in support of the Afghan war against the Taliban.
Q: Was it damaged by a tsunami after the earthquake?
A: There haven’t been any reports of any damage, we don’t know at this time.
Q: Well if the US base is intact wouldn’t it have excavating and earthmoving equipment, bulldozers and such that might be useful in clearing debris and restoring roads in the flooded areas?
A: Well yes it probably does have such equipment.
Q: Well, why isn’t the US moving this equipment to the disaster areas now to begin helping out?
A: Well yes that’s something the US definitely could be doing etc.
The conversation went on in this vain but I lost it and flipped off the radio. I cannot endure the presumption of these self-righteous a**holes sitting in their studios pontificating how and if the US who has the means to help (which they don’t) are going to help, and that they can tell the US exactly how its assets should be committed. Right now it’s the Aussies and us with men and women on the ground, in the flood zones, spearheading the relief effort. Meanwhile the BBC, NPR, and their ilk are already shifting from their spiel that the US is stingy, to complaining that the US is forming its own coalition and not cooperating fully with the UN. Well yes we are. We are organizing, as we should, with like-minded capable people, from Australia and Japan who act now and make speeches later, and we are not letting the UN take over and mishandle corrupt the relief effort, in the name of PC, which happens whenever the UN is in charge. We cannot let the likes of NPR, BBC , and the UN lobby control this debate.
The Blue Beanies can play games but Banda Aceh's destruction has given us an opportunity and victory in the War on Terror... The U.N. can suck a bug.
Beyond the PR war with the U.N., with Djakarta perhaps more dubious about the presence of Yanks and Aussies in it's most contentious province than ancient Aceh itself... this situation may swell into a problem quicker than the situation in Iraq, especially after the elections there.
Happy New Year... we'll see how long it takes the LSM to get a clue. And NPR? Forgetaboutit!
Blessed indeed, and may God take whatsoever there is of my gratitude and make it sufficient unto His praise, through the finished work of Christ on the Cross.
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bump.
This link: http://tv.reuters.com/ifr_main.jsp?st=1104611591746&rf=bm&mp=WMP&wmp=1&rm=1&cpf=true&fr=110704_045639_17d5d2ax10014b24db2xw68ba&rdm=659780.1373135487
Didn't work meg. What was there?
That link is loaded with video clips. {It works for me)..Reuters news..I think that time it featured flooding in the featured clip..Many times it has raw footage..no voiceover..
Right now it features a haughty voice speaking of the "slow start" to the relief by Bush...I haven't had enough coffee to endure the Reuters real fantasy UN version of the the real stingy Americans.
UPDATE: More on "The UNcredibles": WFP (World Food Program) has "arrived" in the capital with an "assessment and coordination team." The following is no joke; no Diplomad attempt to be funny or clever: The team has spent the day and will likely spend a few more setting up their "coordination and opcenter" at a local five-star hotel. And their number one concern, even before phones, fax and copy machines? Arranging for the hotel to provide 24hr catering service. USAID folks already are cracking jokes about "The UN Sheraton." Meanwhile, our military and civilians, working with the super Aussies, continue to keep the C-130 air bridge of supplies flowing and the choppers flying, and keep on saving lives -- and without 24hr catering services from any five-star hotel . . . . The contrast grows more stark every minute.
http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/
Rather a stupid and bigoted statement.
Excellent point.
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I have read the Quran, at least twice in my life - both times with an Open Mind. Thanks for the recommendation, although I'm not at all certain just what your point was with regard to the posting.
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