"Wake up, stand by me and look, Yahweh, God of Sabaoth, God of Israel, up, now, and punish these pagans, show no mercy to these villains and traitors! Slaughter them, God, before my people forget! Harry them with your power and strike them down, Lord, our shield! Destroy them in anger, destroy, until they are finished!"
     Psalm 59: 5, 11, 13. The Jerusalem Bible

What is it about your holy name, my Lord that so begs to be despoiled by the most unholy evil our minds can create? As for me, allow me the strength and wisdom to never soil that lovely name with the idea that its beauty can obscure or justify such sin. Not as long as poppies grow, and grow, in those bloody fetid fields. Amen

A Reporter's Last Dispatch.
Dateline, October 1192, The Middle East ...
I cannot tell you exactly where I am because the military unit I'm embedded with is still mopping up pockets of resistance. However, as this may be my last dispatch before I return home, now that hostilities are mostly over, I cannot help but write about some things that for months have weighed heavily on my mind. As a reporter, I have had to keep certain personal feelings away from my dispatches. However, professionalism cannot keep at bay -- this one last time -- two particularly strong feelings that have taken root and grown within me since my arrival in this war zone.

The first is that I simply hate these people. And secondly, I do so distrust ... and maybe even detest their religion. I hate them mostly because of their effrontery when it comes to disrespecting our cherished beliefs, and for their vile disregard for the most basic respect of human life; both of which led them to attack US. After all, don't forget that's why we're here today.

Without provocation, people from their countries attacked us on our own soil and killed thousands of our innocent people. All in the name of twisted ideas, founded on distorted religious beliefs, that are a perversion of everything we know is moral. So, for all intents and purposes, we're here to defend our homeland; and God is on our side.

But also, and maybe more than I hate them, I distrust this thing they flaunt as a religion; this caricature of the beliefs and ideas of their founder. I have read their holy book; I know this to be true. Just look at what they do in their own countries in the name of religion.

-- Their religious leaders vie for political position and often wealth, at the expense of their moral imperatives.

-- Their secular leaders like to cloak themselves in a mantle of faith, yet more often than not they live lives steeped in debauchery and sin.

-- In the name of religion (but in vile desecration of their stated beliefs) they cut off the heads, torture, or even burn alive those who disagree with or oppose them. This, even if their victims views are morally right, and even if they are true believers in their own faith.

The fact is, that in just over the one thousand years their religion has been on this earth, they have managed to bastardize the words and teachings of their founder and, in the process, have turned their religion and its potential good, into a joke.

Well, we too belong to a young religion. And we too have made mistakes. But I would like to believe that despite our own youth we have managed to take the words that form our faith and build with them, as with golden bricks, a temple to a set of guiding principles and beliefs that rival those of any other faith.

I imagine this will not be the last time we will have to fight these immoral people, these despoilers of truth, these true infidels. But that does not matter. As God was on our side this time, he will be on our side always. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel that we face also another danger, possibly an even worse danger; one that the very youth of our own faith could make us heir to.

For having seen all that I have since coming here, and having experienced so much of war's perversion of basic goodness in all that time, I cannot help but feel indeed that ... if we're not careful, if in fact we do not learn from the mistakes of these faithless people, then in less than a thousand years time, we may wind up becoming no better than them.

But then, only three days ago, as I looked for the first time on Jerusalem, and saw beyond that holy city the army of the infidel Richard scattering towards the sea, there to slither with his Great Crusade back to the open sewer that is Europe, I could not help but feel that such a time could never come.

That no matter what, Allah would always be on our side; that the words of the Prophet are immutable; and that we will always be better than them.

Reporting from near the walls of Jerusalem, this is Omar Ibn Massoud Al Akbar, embedded with the army of Saladin the Great, with whom Allah is greatly pleased, Sultan of Egypt, Father of the Ayyubids, Defender of the Faith and Champion of Islam.

Does it ever change, my Lord? In a thousand years, countless wars will wear down countless men in your name; their corpses to rot in bloody fields. A thousand years more, and countless others fertilize your earth. Then, another thousand years. Then another. Always in your name.

Contributed by Jose A.
Published Monday June 2, 2003
Week 27 of Liturgical Year B