So over fifty more innocent people lost their lives this week. They’re not the first, they won’t be the last. Unless we stop. Stop the cycle of hatred, violence and revenge. Without delving a great deal into the specifics of the parties involved here, these incidents always start with hatred. Although at school I was taught ‘sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you’, you have to ask the question ‘where does it start, the hatred?’ Yes, it does start with words – words to scare you, indoctrinate you, words which are falsehoods, misunderstandings…

So I guess I’m right to get mad when I see people being rude to each other and showing a lack of respect for each other, which may seem a trivial thing. But it’s not. Because at the end of the day, rudeness leads to prejudice and prejudice to discrimination. Then there’s no end if discrimination becomes institutionalised. That CAN be reversed, like it was in South Africa, but it takes TOO LONG. Life’s too short so let’s begin now. Look how much physical violence starts because people have been rude or called each other names.

If innocent people are killed, it does not help the terrorists’ cause. Freedom of information now means that we can also see that treatment of innocent Iraqis has not helped the cause of the ‘Coalition’ either. When Will Smith said at Live 8 ‘It’s not the declaration of Independence, it’s the declaration of Interdependence’, he was saying something more profound and more widely applicable than to world poverty. ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, said Jesus. And in the film ‘Schindler’s List’, the Commandant is persuaded that the really brave thing to do is NOT to shoot. We are answerable to our fellow human beings before God.

I’m a Christian, but as I grew up I had some very positive experiences with Islam. I found it contained a tolerance which allowed me, as ‘a person of the Book’, to be shown around a mosque. I developed a mutual respect with Muslims with whom I worked. So I cannot accept that these killings were committed in the name of Islam.

When I was a student in China, I learned an important lesson. An American man became engaged to a Chinese woman, very unusual in those early days of collaboration in the early eighties. The local press wanted to tell their side of the story. Some section of the American press wanted to tell theirs. None of this was helpful to the couple, and those of us with access to both sides of the debate, Chinese and Westerners alike, who possessed the capacity to think independently, could see that the truth of the issue lay somewhere in between.

There is the danger that we become totally paranoid about our ‘way of life’ being attacked. This suggests that we have something more precious, more worth protecting, than others. Compared to those that don’t have a democracy, this is true. I remember that, at the height of the Cold War, while I was a student in East Germany