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AMERICA'S MOST WANTED: A BE-Attitude Adjustment
marty kleva
April 4, 2007
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shlama—(the peace and understanding under and in accord with God's Will)
>>>> Featuring: The Be-attitudes from the original Aramaic <<<<
During this time in the history of the Earth, there is great urgency, challenge, and opportunity to seek options to what seems to be inevitable. This week the inevitable that is being speculated about is a pre-emptive strike by the U.S. on Iran, said to come on this Good Friday.
Within the last year there has been a great deal of fear being escalated via Western nations by proclaiming that Iran has been carrying on a clandestine nuclear weapons program. These proclamations are reminiscent of similar proclamations that Sadaam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD’s).
Of course it’s 4 years later, and Sadaam has been hanged for the crimes he committed at the time when the U.S. was great friends with him. Now 4 years later, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military are dead.
In addition, the country of Iraq is decimated and covered with depleted uranium dust from American munitions used both presently and during the Desert Storm engagement. The result is that many babies born since then in Iraq have one eye, or no arms or legs. Similar reports have also been cited with babies born to U.S. military ME veteran’s families. We now know for sure that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. This is a costly bit of hindsight.
What shall we do with this lesson?
It appears that today more Americans are willing to pay attention to facts and apply logical reasoning to the political situation that has been raised about Iran, and they see that the fear mongering bandied about Iraq is similarly being applied here by the same Western country, namely the U.S..
There are pertinent facts available, and independent international organizations that are responsible for monitoring all nuclear operations by the member countries. Such an organization is the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of which Iran has been a member since 1974 with the construction of a nuclear research reactor by an American company AMF. Identical reactors were also simultaneously constructed by American companies in Pakistan and Turkey.
This establishes that Iran has been carrying on a nuclear research program for over 30 years without major problems; all within the historic time-window of the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the present form of Iranian government. That form when it overthrew the Shah did not withdraw from the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and did sustain its membership within the IAEA and NPT obligations.
During the time period of U.S. contracts with Iran made prior to 1979 to supply new fuel for Tehran’s 5 MW Research reactor under the Agency’s comprehensive Safeguards to produce radioisotopes for application in medicine, agriculture and industry, the U.S., “neither gave the fuel nor the two million dollars received for” it, according to Ambassador A.A. SOLTANIEH in the Conference paper delivered at the “Forum On Iran’s Nuclear Program And The Evaluation Of Recent Developments, 16 October 2005”.
As Deputy Director General of the International Political Affairs of Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Former Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the IAEA, Mr. Soltanieh outlines the history of Iran’s association with the IAEA. In it he puts forth Iran’s willingness to work within the parameters of IAEA policy and in fact to go even further by providing information no member country is legally obliged to do.
Barely over one year ago, in this December 2005 address, Mr. Soltanieh also states that IAEA Director General, in his report to the Board of Governors, confirmed that “Since December 2003, Iran has facilitated in a timely manner Agency access under its Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol to nuclear materials and facilities, as well as other locations in the country, and has permitted the agency to take environmental samples as requested by the Agency.”
So what is the real problem here? Is it that Iran has had a history of non-compliance within the parameters that every member nation must document? It does not appear so. In fact it seems that Iran has a very credible report card in this area of cooperation and willingness to comply with the standards and practices of the IAEA. Even further, it appears that Iran has always been willing to go the extra step, as Mr. Soltanieh states:
“It is a great concern and disappointment that the more Iran cooperated and took additional steps mostly beyond its legal obligations, and the more outstanding questions were resolved, and the more stringent Safeguards measures applied; the language of proposed resolutions by US and EU3 became tougher and the inspections were conducted in much more stringent and robust manner. The following information exerted from the DG report to the Board of Governors and resolutions supported the assertion regarding the unjust and frustrating trend.
In June 2003 Iran was first requested: Not to introduce nuclear material at the pilot enrichment process. Gradually in subsequent meetings, September 2003, November 2003, February 2004, March 2004, June 2004, September 2004, November 2004, Iran was requested to expand its voluntary suspension to the testing, assembling of the machines, manufacturing of centrifuge components, production of UF6, and finally to suspend complete uranium conversion at UCF, and not to conduct R&D.”
Note the word “voluntary” in the above quote. Mr. Soltanieh continues on to clarify the explosion of outcry among the Western community when in an IAEA meeting the U.S. delegate asked a question of the Deputy General of the IAEA “how many centrifuge and atomic bombs Iran will be able to make with 4000 pieces of small magnets which it had in mind to buy . . . but had not purchased.” The Deputy General responded incompletely that those magnets would be enough to make two nuclear explosives! And suddenly overnight, Iran was reported in the West to have nuclear capability when nothing would be further from the truth.
According to Mr. Soltanieh, what the Deputy General did not say is that “in addition to couple of small magnets costing couple of dollars one needs over ninety more items in order to make one centrifuge machine . . . . “ and that “this kind of attitude and non-technical approaches at the Board of Governor, has and will undoubtedly put the credibility of the IAEA, the sole pertinent international technical organization, in jeopardy.”
Perhaps it is this point that should be duly noted. If there is any credibility to Mr Soltanieh’s assertion that “non-technical” attitudes and approaches have been the order of the day in a very technical arena, and that they have been consistently leveled by the U.S. against Iran for over three years without letup despite Iran’s consistent willingness to supply records and undergo surveillance, then one can see that eventually, Iran would come to the day when it would say “Enough!”
True that months later Iran’s President Ahmedinejad declared that Iran had enriched uranium to a level used in nuclear power plants (level of %3.5). But this does not give Iran the bomb. And The U.S. Administration shoots itself in the foot when it makes outrageous demands of Iran in order to even talk with Washington. Again we see radical personalities on both sides of the table taking center stage, when it is the more conservative majority that should be listened to.
Add to the mix that geographically, Iran sits between the two countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, both occupied with U.S. nuclear powered troops, and is a close neighbor of a very U.S. friendly Israel, also with nuclear capabilities.
Given the rich natural oil reserves Iran has and its location on the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, shouldn’t they be concerned for their nation’s safety? It has certainly not escaped their notice that the U.S. has concertedly made nuclear DU dust of the region around them, and that their country, more than three times larger than Iraq, has even greater oil reserves.
When the U.S. wants what someone else has, and historically goes about procuring it regardless of the cost to the integrity of the geographical region or the number of human lives lost, would it not be prudent for countries such as Iran to be alert?
The attitude in the corporate U.S. is if it exists, we want it and we will go to any lengths to get it. Our need for fulfillment is as transparent as the cars we drive, the movie stars we adore, the weekend bashes we can lose ourselves in, and the amount of credit we can spend. We live in a DisneyLand mentality thinking that everything in the U.S. is the most Perfect, and believe that this is reality. We are the world’s minority having a teen-age funk waking up to the realization that our stash is quickly running out, and we plan and plot to steal away the resources of others who haven’t been so greedy or hooked on habits of destruction.
Our addictions are so overwhelming and our denials of them so properly civil that we cannot see that we do not need to consume the rest of the world in order to be happy; we only need to stop our addictive habits.
I for one believe that there is always a way out of a dilemma; one that given time and awareness, will show up.
One might say that time and place showed up for the Iranians and perhaps prophetically for the rest of the world too when the Iranians took advantage of the recent situation where they claim 15 UK sailors were in Iranian waters, and subsequently seized them.
This happened on the eve of a UN meeting to sanction Iran on its belligerent notification to not discontinue their nuclear research program. Now through the imperialistic attitude of the U.S., that entire 30-year history of Iran’s good report has been taken out of the jurisdiction of technical professionals within the IAEA into the political arena of the UN.
There are too many similarities here to the Iraq and Sadaam Hussein situation to be ignored. It was the U.S. who set up a credibility issue with the UN’s weapons inspectors in Iraq. Those inspectors repeatedly said that there were no WMD’s in Iraq and that Iraq could account for all past records. But the U.S. administration did not want to accept that it could be true. They wanted Sadaam out of there and he was not cooperating. So they systematically set him up with a scheme to destroy Sadaam and take over Iraq, a scheme that went so far as to include the U.S. administration’s outing of their own top-secret CIA agent. With friends like that in high places, who needs enemies? Somewhere in there they also commingled Osama bin Laden to help confuse anybody who did not pay enough attention to realize that there was no connection between Osama and Hussein in Iraq.
The U.S. administration went on parade to the American people and to the world, deliberately misusing false evidence and in some cases outright lying against the recommendation and findings of their own intelligence reports.
As a result we have total disaster in Iraq and Lebanon, and another one in the making if what the reports about the planned “sneak attack,” named Operation Bite on Iran to come this Good Friday say are true.
Reports circulating throughout Europe and the Middle East cite “about 20 targets are marked for bombing; the list includes uranium enrichment facilities, research centers, and laboratories. The US attack plan reportedly calls for the Iranian air defense system to be degraded, for numerous Iranian warships to be sunk in the Persian Gulf, and for the most important headquarters of the Iranian armed forces to be wiped out.”
The apparent source of this information came through the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli, in which he cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account. Asked by RIA-Novosti to comment on the Uglanov report, retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov confirmed its essential features in a March 21 interview: “have no doubt that there will be an operation, or more precisely a violent action against Iran.”
Given the penchant for this U.S. administration for drama and need to show force, this report and those like it cannot be dismissed as dis-information, and in fact may have lead the Iranians to look for a trump card to play. As is suggested by many in the West, the Iranians may in fact use the 15 British sailors as human shields against such an attack.
There has been a lot of melodrama since the capture of the 15 sailors. The situation has gone from condemnation of Iran to the possible acknowledgement that the UK may have been inside Iranian waters. One thing that is not widely reported is that those very waters do not have agreement as to the boundaries between Iraq and Iran and are in fact officially disputed. So we notice a softening of attitude by the British and a possibility of some mutual agreement around the situation.
There is also the report of the U.S. attempt and failure to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq which has lead to the crisis now 10 weeks later with the Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.
According to a NYT's report:
"Tehran remains in the middle of a dispute with the United States over the detention in January of six of its officials in the Iraqi city of Erbil, taken from the Iranian consulate there. The U.S. insists the six were being investigated in regard to aiding Iraqi insurgents. Washington has referred all inquiries in the current incident to the British Ministry of Defense. Meanwhile, Iran has kept official silence, mainly because of the celebrations surrounding the Persian New Year."
Ultimately however is the issue of attitude by the West toward the Middle Eastern countries exempting the Saudi Bush-friendly families and the Christian-friendly Jewish state of Israel. To put it bluntly, many Americans are outright in fear of anything that stands for foreign, looks foreign, speaks foreign or believes foreign. That of course includes, not exclusively, the Muslim world.
We are so insulated in our own belief systems and ways of looking and being DisneyLand perfect that anything outside of that box is automatically threatening. We have lost our objectivity about the things that relate us with every other human being. We have allowed the corporate driven and created system of Consumerism to become the god of our culture.
Christ has been truly relegated to the Market Place as is evident in the accompanying photo Mosaic. We say we are a Christian nation. We bellow and bluster when a State elects a Muslim to Congress, and raise our righteous fists against homosexuality and condemn pedophilia and make all kinds of outrageous laws against it, all in the name of Jesus and the Almighty Christian God.
Meanwhile behind closed doors and sometimes in more publicly known places, we find that those very people who condemned it all are in fact the very same themselves. Such are those as Mark Foley, Rev. Ted Haggard and many more God-fearing public officials who fill the pages of sex scandals involving children and homosexuality. The power of Christian retribution is so great that they live in the constant fear of being found out. They can never accept that they are who they are, so they must advocate against it in public.
America especially has a self-destructive bent originating out of our Puritan Judeo-Christian backgrounds that outwardly appears as the Christian-based condemnation of others. The more violent the finger shaking, the deeper the psychological need to blame others for something that cannot be tolerated within ourselves and so we preach sin from the pulpit holding the Bible in our other hand.
What we need is an attitude adjustment to take us out of that miserable place of chastising others.
What we need is an opening to see the other side or even just another side. Some will say it is blasphemy to suggest that any Christian sect look at anything other than the King James version of the Bible, or whatever version their religion holds to be the true Bible.
Recently in looking for the Beatitudes online, I came across an interesting item named The Be-Attitudes From The Aramaic, in which the historically interpreted beatitude, Blessed are those mourning their wrongs, they will be comforted. is in the original Aramaic translated as, You abili (who love Truth and profess your errors and the errors of your society), you shall be nitbeyoon (freed of mental stress).
In Aramaic Dimensions of the Holy Spirit, Harvey J. Martin III writes that, “The sacred literature of the Israelites was originally written in Aramaic and Hebrew. The seventy apostles that Jesus sent (Luke 10:1) went East, beyond the confines of the Roman Empire into the countries of Iraq, Iran, and Mesopotamia and as far East as China and India. With them, they brought the gospels written in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.”
These teachings in Aramaic were preserved by Assyrian Christians and were brought out of the mountainous stronghold in Northern Iraq by a scholar George M. Lamsa who was raised there in a society of shepherds and who with the help of friends founded the Aramaic Bible Society. He published the entire Bible from Aramaic for the first time in 1957 and devoted his life to finding and correcting the translation errors and contextual misrepresentations in the modern Bible.
Martin writes that “Dr. Lamsa discovered that the obscure scriptures were incomprehensible because they were mistranslated.” and relates the revelation of his own misunderstanding when looking to the original Aramaic:
“As a child, I always thought that the reference to a 'camel getting through the eye of a needle' was surely a death sentence for anyone who had the 'misfortune' to be rich. It turns out that in the days of Jesus, Jerusalem was a walled city. At night the main gates were closed, and entry was only possible through a narrow gate through which a camel could not pass without much difficulty. This gate was called "kheta," Aramaic for needle. A camel could pass through the "needle" it turns out, but not without difficulty. The translation of the passage from the Greek was both a translation error and a contextual error. Needless to say, this is a very serious error. Every error that Dr. Lamsa found increased the discomfort of Western religious scholars. If the rich aren't doomed to hell, as implied in the Western translation, then we must wonder what other serious errors may have been made.”
In the article The Be-Attitudes From The Aramaic, it states that Jesus taught in his native Aramaic. But in the sixth century, “all known Aramaic bibles were burned and many foreign ideas, unsupported by His actual words, were put into His mouth. As Jesus' teachings passed from Aramaic to Greek, Latin, Old English and finally to modern English, increasing numbers of distortions occurred.”
Many see the release of this information as an intent to undermine the religious system that they have been reading and believing in for all their life, when the Aramaic form has existed for hundreds of years.
What many will not see is that the discovery of this piece of information may be the opening to spiritual growth and even perhaps a closer relationship to Jesus, the great Teacher.
What this world needs now is an attitude adjustment and on this occasion of Holy Week in the Christian world, I take the opportunity to print in full the text of the Aramaic form of the Beatitudes:
≈ The Be-Attitudes From The Aramaic ≈
Touveyhoun, the first word in Aramaic of each Be-Attitude, is historically interpreted as a bestowed "Blessing." Jesus' words spoke of an earned reward. He delivered simple and practical teachings in His native tongue, Aramaic. In the sixth century, all known Aramaic bibles were burned and many foreign ideas, unsupported by His actual words, were put into His mouth. As Jesus' teachings passed from Aramaic to Greek, Latin, Old English and finally to modern English, increasing numbers of distortions occurred.
The following explanation of the Be-Attitudes is based on Aramaic and is as faithful as possible to the actual words of Jesus. It shows that the Be-Attitudes are in truth instructions and methods for evaluating progress and supporting us in achieving an exciting, reachable goal. Here Jesus provided the "how to's" for living the "Greatest" and "Second" Commandments_ the keys to peace and life and health. His objective was so urgent that He used the word Touveyhoun repeatedly in this, His first public teaching!
This statement before each Be-Attitude more accurately carries the lost meaning of Jesus' word.TOUVEYHOUN: God implanted in your mind neural structures, which will guide you when they are active. If they are active, you who follow these instructions will come into conscious possession of and be able to use this latent guidance system, designed to make available thoughts and actions that will increase your happiness and well-being:
≈ You who have a maskenii (home) in Ruhka (the active forces from God), yours is a malkoota d'shmeya (heavenly estate).
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
≈ You abili (who love Truth and profess your errors and the errors of your society), you shall be nitbeyoon (freed of mental stress).
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are those mourning their wrongs, they will be comforted.
≈ You who have makikh (humility - the mental quality of perceiving and cooperating with the good desires of others), you shall nartoun (gain the earth).
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the earth.
≈ You who hunger for kenoota (the mind structure underlying the attitude, judgment and behavior described as just or fair behavior between people), you shall attain it.
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they shall be filled.
≈ You who have rakhma (pure love, encompassing judgment and behavior), you will therefore receive rakhma (pure love).
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are the merciful, they shall obtain mercy.
≈ You who have dadcean (a completely purified mind,) you will (comprehend) mikhazounAlaha (the Invisible Source of Creation).
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God.
You who abdey (through service, work effectively to produce) shlama (the peace and understanding under and in accord with God's Will), you will be called the children of God.
Historically interpreted as - Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called the children of God.
≈ The "Greatest" and "Second" Commandments: "You shall tidrakhim (maintain the condition of pure love) for Alaha (the Invisible Source of Creation) in your entire mind and with your whole naphshak (true self) in all your actions and in all your thoughts. This is the greatest commandment and takes precedence over all. The second, which is like unto it, you shall tidrakhim (maintain pure love) for karebak (neighbor_anyone near or thought about) as your naphshak (true self). Upon these two Commandments hang the Law and its prophets.
Touveyhoun —
Tidrakhim for Alaha with our entire naphshak.
Con Amore,
~ mek
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Labels: BE-Attitudes, Christ In The Market Place, Iran, nuclear, U.S. preemptive strike