Saturday, July 28, 2012
Three Stories of Extraordinary Forgiveness (via ABC News)
via http://abcnews.go.com/US/cases-extraordinary-forgiveness/story?id=16065270#
In 2010 Yvonne Stern was the target of three hits. Her husband Jeffrey Stern's former mistress later pleaded guilty to arranging them. The first two times, the bullets missed Yvonne Stern. The third time, the bullet went through her stomach, and she recovered from the injury.
Jeffrey Stern has admitted to the affair but denied ex-mistress Michelle Gaiser's allegation that he was the mastermind behind the hits. On Monday, Stern will go on trial for solicitation of capital murder. Gaiser, who got a reduced sentence in exchange for her guilty plea and cooperation with the government, is scheduled to testify against him.
Many people refuse to forgive a spouse for cheating, much less for cheating with someone who then tried -- three times -- to have them killed, allegedly with the spouse's help. But Yvonne Stern is standing by her man.
"I forgive him his indiscretions," Yvonne Stern said in a court appearance.
Here are three other stories of extraordinary forgiveness.
1. Forgiving a Harmful Prank
Which is harder to forgive: a moral lapse like cheating on your spouse or just casual, banal stupidity?
This past fall, Marion Hedges, a New York City mother of two, suffered a serious brain injury and lost the use of an eye after two teens sent a shopping cart crashing down 50 feet onto her at the East Harlem Target shopping center.
The cart hit Hedges, 47, in the head. She was briefly in a coma and spent weeks fighting for her life.
"I wish them well, I do," Hedges said recently of the boys who performed the prank; they pleaded guilty and are now serving juvenile sentences. "I feel very sorry for them. My son is 13 also, and he is a very good boy."
Hedges was at Target that day to buy Halloween candy for underprivileged children.
Hedges' father-in-law, Michael Hedges Sr., was less forgiving, saying he believed the boys should be "hung by their toenails."
2.Two Family Men
"How's your kids?"
That's the question Gary Weinstein found himself asking during a jailhouse meeting with the man who killed Weinstein's wife and two sons, according to the Detroit Free Press.
In a way it was an understandable question. Weinstein and Tom Wellinger lived within a mile of each other in Farmington Hills, Mich. They were both fathers. Their children attended the same schools.
In May 2005, Wellinger, driving with a blood-alcohol content more than twice the legal limit, rammed into the car containing Weinstein's wife and two sons, the Free Press reported.
Members of Wellinger's family had flown to Michigan to mount an intervention about his alcoholism, the paper said. It was scheduled for the day after the accident.
Wellinger's reply to Weinstein's jailhouse question was that he hadn't seen his son in more than a year, because he was underage and therefore not allowed in the jail.
Weinstein told the Free Press that Wellinger asked if he could ever forgive him.
Weinstein answered with a question: "Can you forgive yourself?"
Weinstein has since reportedly offered to speak to Wellinger's children to help them heal while Wellinger serves his 19-30 year sentence for three counts of second-degree murder. He has also formally agreed not to block attempts for an early release, the Free Press said.
3.A Mother's Grief and Mercy
"That has to be the most gracious victim statement I've heard in this courtroom. And I'm not so sure I'd be able to be as gracious as you are, ma'am."
Rankin County (Miss.) Circuit Judge William Chapman spoke these words last Monday at the conclusion of the trial of Jermaine Tyler, 31, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported. Tyler pleaded guilty to murdering Leslie Sheppard Doame, 37, after robbing her parents' home last September.
The victim statement Chapman referenced was by Teresa Sheppard, the victim's mother, the Clarion-Ledger said. Sheppard reportedly told the court and Tyler that she and Leslie's father forgive him and love him, "because Jesus commands that we love our enemy."
"Even when her father and I were crying to the depths of our souls, our first prayers were for the murderers," she said.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Religion has little impact in U.S. race: poll
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The religious faiths of President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney will have little weight in November's presidential election, a poll showed on Thursday.
Sixty percent of voters are aware that Romney is a Mormon, and 81 percent say it does not matter to them, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center. The awareness level is almost unchanged from four months ago, during the Republican primary elections.
"Unease with Romney's religion has little impact on voting preferences," the Pew report said.
"Republicans and white evangelicals overwhelmingly back Romney irrespective of their views of his faith, and Democrats and seculars overwhelmingly oppose him regardless of their impression."
The United States has never had a Mormon president.
Obama is a Christian but the view that he is Muslim persists almost four years into his presidency, with 17 percent of voters saying he is Muslim. Forty-nine percent say he is Christian, down from 55 percent near the end of his 2008 campaign, and 31 percent say they do not know Obama's religion.
Among conservative Republicans, 34 percent say Obama, a Democrat, is Muslim, the poll showed.
Overall, 45 percent of voters are comfortable with Obama's religion, 5 percent say it does not matter and 19 percent are uncomfortable.
About two-thirds of voters - 67 percent - agree with the statement "It's important to me that a president have strong religious beliefs." The level has changed little in the past decade.
But 66 percent oppose churches or other houses of worship endorsing political candidates.
The telephone survey was carried out by Pew's Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press from June 28 to July 9.
The poll sampled 2,973 adults, including 2,373 registered voters. The margin of error for adults was 2.1 percentage points and 2.3 percentage points for voters.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Bill Trott)
Balkan in Syria?
via dailybeast.com
The fighting and bombings in Damascus suggest the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is finally coming to an end. It will likely be ugly and dangerous. Some kind of international peacekeeping force is probably going to be needed, perhaps sooner rather than later.
The brutal and violent civil war between Assad loyalists and the rebels has served to inflame bitter sectarian tensions in Syria. Many Sunnis hated the long dominant Alawite minority and its Christian supporters before the conflict began in March 2011. After all, Bashar's father, Hafez al-Assad, killed up to 20,000 Sunnis in Hama in February 1982. It was an appalling mass slaughter. The legacy of Hama terrified Syrians for 30 years. After the many massacres of the last year, the Sunni desire for revenge has only become stronger.
So, paradoxically, one of the priorities of the international community after Assad falls will be to protect the Alawite community and its allies from vengeance. Most live along the mountainous coast bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and they may try to set up a ministate there, an Alawi fortress to protect themselves. That would only prolong the civil war. A peacekeeping force to protect the region makes sense. Since many Alawis and most Christians live outside the coastal region, some means of ensuring their safety will also be needed in the rest of the country as well. It will need to be strong enough to deter revenge, but also credible and impartial enough to gain Sunni support.
Bashar also sits on the Arab world's most lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, hundreds of chemical warheads and dozens of Scud missiles that can deliver them anywhere in the Levant. Now there are reports that the regime is moving these weapons out of their usual storage facilities for reasons unknown. They will need to be secured.
Like almost everything else in Bashar's Syria, the country's arsenal of missiles and chemical weapons is his father's legacy. After Syria was defeated by Israel in Lebanon in 1982, Hafez ordered the development of chemical weapons as a deterrent against his Israeli enemy. Syrian scientists developed an effective chemical-weapons program using the nerve agent sarin, a substance discovered by German scientists in the 1930s that is 500 times more toxic than cyanide. Syria paired the nerve agent with Scud missiles acquired from the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.
A member of Free Syrian Army burns a portrait of Bashar Al Assad in Al Qsair, Syria. (Alessio Romenzi / Corbis)
Would Bashar use chemical weapons against his own people? We can't rule it out as the regime collapses. Using them on Syria's Sunni Muslim majority would antagonize the entire world and set Bashar and his cronies up for even more war-crimes trials. It would mean terrible reprisals by the Sunni sooner or later. Would he fire some Scuds at Israel as a final act of vengeance against the Jewish state? We can't rule that out either.
The fact of Syria's chemical and missile arsenal is well known to NATO governments and Israel. There is no reason it should discourage support for ending the Assad dictatorship. It does argue for caution in how to do so. Any military operation to end the Syrian civil war or a peacekeeping for after Assad collapses needs to be prepared to operate in a deadly chemical environment.
Bashar also sits on the Arab world's most lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, hundreds of chemical warheads and dozens of Scud missiles that can deliver them anywhere in the Levant.
The end game in Syria is particularly bad news for Iran and its Lebanese ally Hizbullah. Syria has been Iran's key ally in the region since the early 1980s, when the two states collaborated to create Hizbullah after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. Its first act of terror was to murder my boss Bob Ames and several other CIA officers by blowing up the American Embassy in Beirut. Syria has been a major source of Hizbullah's missiles (now estimated to number more than 50,000) since the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. Bashar is a particularly enthusiastic Hizbullah supporter, and there is a good chance he will try to get at least some of his chemical arsenal into its hands now.
What comes after Assad is unknowable today. It could be chaos like the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s. A Sunni military dictator may emerge. The Muslim Brotherhood, which led the 1982 Hama revolt and plays a large role in the current insurrection, may emerge dominant. Almost any conceivable successor regime to Assad's will likely be hostile to Hizbullah and Iran. A hostile Syria will find many allies in Lebanon eager to turn on Hizbullah.
Hizbullah may already be preparing for a post-Assad world. Former Israeli national security adviser Uzi Arad has blamed Hizbullah for the deadly bombing in Bulgaria that killed Israeli tourists this week. Arad believes it was retaliation for the Israeli assassination of Hizbullah master terrorist Imad Mughniyah in Damascus in February 2008. It may also be Hizbullah's effort to refocus Arab attention on Israel and away from the Syrian end game. That would also be very dangerous. The Mossad appears to have foiled another plot in Cyprus on July 7 to attack Israeli tourists there. It is too soon to come to hard judgments about these attacks—other evidence points to al Qaeda, which has attacked Israeli tourists before in Kenya—but it suggests that a very hot summer in the Middle East is getting hotter.
Any international effort to get a peacekeeping force into Syria will need Turkish assistance and bases. Jordan can play an important supporting role, but Turkey is the key. That is the lesson of a recent war game on Syria played out at the Brookings Institution. Geography alone makes Turkey's role critical, but so too does its credentials as a moderate Islamist state and NATO member. A peacekeeping force should be primarily but not exclusively Muslim in composition. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar should pay for it. If Russia and China refuse to support it at the United Nations, then the Arab League should be the sponsor.
President Obama has been cautious in responding to the Syrian civil war for the last 18 months. We can be certain that extensive contingency planning and consultations with allies have been underway for the next stages in this crisis. Now we will see how Obama manages an ugly and dangerous challenge in the most volatile place in the world.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)