Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Tolerance...Except in select circles, it’s a word you don’t often hear any more in this age of growing political incorrectness. But it remains the single-most important key to community by community peace. As such, it is also the prime key to world peace. That said, although the need to imbue people with tolerance may not be an innate necessity, the societies, often indeed the families, into which we are born, tend to start undermining, from the time we are very small, the natural tolerance with which we come into the world. An infant doesn’t care what color the skin is of the person who is caring for him or her. Infants couldn’t care less what religion their care-giver professes, what sports team they are a fan of, how much money they have, what social class they belong to, where they went to school, whether they are literate or illiterate, whether they are gay or straight, or whom they voted for in the last election. The only thing small children care about is the care and...

For a time, early on in US President Donald Trump’s administration, a week seldom went by without a government rant of some sort concerning the nuclear accord struck by the prior administration with Iran and five other leading nations. Today, little mention is made of the accord in Washington, following the decision earlier this year by the Trump administration to remove Washington from the equation, despite the United States’ having been the chief architect of the seven-nation pact. Trump-Rouhani...face-off This silence—despite new attempts by the US president to impose further sanctions on Iran—is unusual but hardly incomprehensible. Unusual because Mr. Trump tends to be highly and continually vocal about his ostensible successes and actions. Comprehensible, however, because his much-heralded pullout pretty much fizzled like wet fireworks. It was apparent that Mr. Trump’s purpose in withdrawing from the pact with nothing to replace it was based more on his constant rivalry wi...

By now, there can be little doubt in any realistic person’s mind that Saudi-born journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he was briefly tortured and interrogated before being brutally murdered by agents of the Saudi government, his body apparently later cut up and removed from the consulate in several containers and disposed of in an as yet undisclosed location. Jamal Khashoggi The original Saudi government narrative that Khashoggi visited the consulate and then left was swiftly exposed by Turkish authorities as a lie, when they publicly declared that they had security camera footage and audio that proved the Washington Post editorialist had been murdered inside the consulate. The Saudis didn’t bother to ask how Turkey’s Erdogan government had come by this evidence. It was obvious that they had it and that the jig was up regarding the lie about Khashoggi’s having left the Saudi diplomatic mission. It was a story that wasn’...

After reading through the latest UN report on global climate change, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way we humans can maybe manage to survive climate change. The bad news is, if we don’t implement, within the next decade or so, immediate, urgent and serious steps to ensure human survival in the near future, we’re toast. And the news gets worse. The ceiling for keeping absolute catastrophe at bay is a total rise in global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Period. The climactic phenomena that we have been witnessing in recent years—prolonged drought, vast wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record summer heat, record winter storms, much more frequent and much more powerful tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes, much increased cyclone activity, etc.—are all the result of a single-degree increase in global temperature above pre-industrial levels. On our current course, in which a small group of countries is...

In its most damning report yet, a United Nations investigative team has flatly accused the government of Myanmar (ex-Burma) of perpetrating gross genocidal crimes against the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya people. The main focus of genocidal incidents has taken place in Rakhine State, where the largest Rohingya settlements have traditionally been located. But the UN study also drew on testimonies regarding criminal abuse in Kachin and Shan States. The Rohingya people claim that their roots in Myanmar go back at least a thousand years. Their name—which is also the name of the Indo-European language that they speak—means, literally, “the people of Rohing”. Rohing was the ancient name of the kingdom that would later be known in British colonial times are Arakan, and today is known as Rakhine State. The Rohingya, therefore, justly consider themselves indigenous to the region. The Myanmar government, for its part, brands the Rohingya as “foreigners”—refusing to term them...

The exponential increase in the pace of evolution is not really anything new. It has been at an amazing pace that evolutionary change has been increasing practically since the beginning of time. Scientists believe that the process known as evolution started some four billion years ago. At that time, the process of change was so slow that it took about two billion of those years for unicellular organisms to become multicellular organisms. But once that first step was taken, it only took about another 200 million years—a relative blink of an eye—from the birth of the first mammal until the birth of our first ancestor, the first Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari is a scholar who has delved deeply into the possible future that awaits human beings in the technological era. According to his vision, humans are on the verge of seeking to become gods. He refers to this process—as the title of his book indicates—as homo deus . What he means is that as of the 21 st century, the human race ...