Letters to the Editor

Dear sir:

Your August editorial invites a response on many levels, In South Africa, my country of birth, where I grew up during the height of the Apartheid movement, it was the liberal leaders and the white women of the Black Sash movement who worked tirelessly and bravely to oppose the government’s anti-black, repressive regime which ultimately lead to the freedom of Mandela and a bloodless revolution.
      In Canada, the country that has been my home for the past 48 years, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government recently replaced, for many of us, the hated Harper Conservative government. Sadly, it appears that Trudeau, the Liberal, is now following an aggressive Harper-style foreign policy that has actively involved Canada in the current heated international affairs leading us to World War III.
     Noteworthy too, is that President Milosovic, on March 24, 2016, was found NOT GUILTY by the I.C.T.Y. (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia). Milosovic, while being tried for war crimes by the Hague Tribunal, died in 2006, under suspicious circumstances in a NATO prison, before the trial came to an end. He has been exonerated of his alleged crimes, but the recognition of his innocence has come too late for him. Is it not time to look at Democrat President Bill Clinton’s role in the Bosnian/ Serbian war and the vilification of Milosovic?
     The New Testament does indeed give many examples of Christ’s thinking, a blue-print to be used by us all for moral and ethical behavior to our fellow human beings. He does, however, also exhibit revolutionary tendencies: “Think not that I come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace but a sword.” Later He contradicted his previous statement: “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.” This has been explained as ‘those who reject God and the only way of salvation through Jesus, will find themselves perpetually at war with God.’ For those of us who like to think of ourselves as ‘liberals,’ should we not be questioning the support we give our governments who take us into unjust wars that result in the murder of millions of innocent people? Finally, Christ said: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesars, but render unto God that which is God’s.”
     We liberals come in many stripes, and should be mindful of our bi-partisan tendency to fall prey to cognitive dissonance...

Gabriella Blair