This blog entry is much more serious than the last one. Anyone who has read my poem "Elegy for the people of Israel and Palestine" will know how grieved I am about the violence that has flared up in Gaza once again. I said in one of my comments on this piece: "If only we could make the extremists on both sides see reason...".
I am also thinking of Robert´s poem "A meeting", an account of how people can get along with each other despite their different backgrounds, when I say: "Nobody has been born an extremist, they are brain-washed into becoming one."
The people I hold responsible for all the wars in the Middle East (and many others, like WW II, which was triggered by such a person coming to power in my home country), are the ones who are doing the brain-washing, not their victims, who turn extremist after being brain-washed.
When I was in London in the summer, I went to Speaker´s Corner. 99% of the speakers were either fundamentalist Muslims or fundamentalist Christians. I was shocked about all the heinous things they were shouting, half of them not to be found anywhere neither in the Bible nor in the Koran (which I both have read).
There was only one speaker who was different. He was holding up a sign saying "Everything is okay". My friend and I immediately decided to join him, just because he promised a change with this message.
Then he turned the sign around, and on the back it said: "Do not believe anyone including me".
We were hooked. I am not going to repeat everything he said, he said it so much better than I could. But he talked about brain-washing at length, about how we are being made paranoid by politicians, the media, religious extremists...
Soon, there were quite a lot of people gathered around him, some of them openly saying they were Muslims, Buddhists, Jews or Christians. We were all standing there, very close together, and listening to him. The only person who was not listening and started shouting at him was yelling something about Jesus Christ being the saviour...
This made me realize once more that extremists are the same in every religion.

For those who are interested in what this man had to say: If you are in London, go to Speaker´s Corner and look if he´s there. If you are somewhere else on this planet, check out his blog. It´s www.dannyshine.blogspot.com

You can also send me a private message if you would like me to send you his leaflet.