WWJD?

[CSLewis]

Why did Hitler kill the Jews? Didn't he use the reasoning that since the Jews killed Christ he had every right to seek vengence?

He thought that since a people group killed the only perfect being he should take vengeance upon them.

What about abortion? Aren't all of those unborn babies being murdered in our own country? (millions I might add) Couldn't we use the same logic and kill abortionists? This would save lives, would it not? But instead we try to educate people not to make the wrong choice, but when it comes to other people half a world away we nuke 'em without much thought at trying to educate or understand them.

Before 9/11 most Americans didn't care that a dictator across the world was killing his own people there. It wasn't until we got scared for our own lives that we started a war. Isn't this selfish? Don't the people in North Korea or China have just as much right as Iraqis or French or Americans to have freedom? Yet we don't go to war with them we don't go to war with Iran, we only attack those who threaten us.

[secondeve]

Didn't Jesus say to 'turn the other cheek?'

In the case of Hitler, I agree that only violence would check him. There are some dicators who, unless met with force, will just walk right over you. But there are everyday people who suffer in war. What would have happened if Hitler had been assassinated rather than having WWII waged? Would there have been someone charismatic enough to take his place? Or would it have opened the way for peace negotiations? I guess we'll never know.

Some things should not be met with force. The war on Iraq has been ill-handled from the very beginning. Precicely bcause revenge was at the forefront of the war effort, atrocities have occured. A squad of US marines shot and killed men, women and children- even a nursing baby and its mother- and then lied and said they were killed by a bomb, even though the bodies had gunshot wounds. Why would they do that, except that they thought they were fighting the whole of Islam and the whole of the Iraqi people rather than just other soldiers? The Coalition of the Willing was all too happy just to march in because they were angry, without thinking about how best to go about looking after the innocents of Iraq. Have a look at the civilian death-toll. If revenge and violence hadn't been the first thing on military minds, might we have stopped and waited even a month more, to plan how to take down a dictator like Saddam Hussein at the same time as looking after his people? All we thought about in the West was ourselves. Perhaps if we really had turned the other cheek and then struck later under better conditions (and with better reasons), the insurgency wouldn't have banded together so readily to kill every person they saw as supportive of a new regime. If we hadn't been so expectant that a country could don modern democracy like a new hat at the drop of one, without the hundreds of years of adjustment and debate it took for it to be accepted everywhere else in the world, then perhaps we might have had a care for infastructure and the lives of strangers who, though they live and believe differently to us, were innocent of the bloodshed and only human. So often, we forget. We should quote Kennedy at the end of the Cuban Missle Crisis more often:

"For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

[nebula]

Why did Hitler kill the Jews? Didn't he use the reasoning that since the Jews killed Christ he had every right to seek vengence?

That wasn't his reason. He may have threw that stupid line out (why in the world would a Christian want to punish the Jews for the act that brought our salvation?) to win people to his side, but Hitler was no Christian.