Syria and the Good
Samaritan
Richard Salbato
Nothing has angered me more than
what is going on in Syria
and what the rest of the world is doing about it. In fact Syria is just
the latest of my anger at so-called Christians,
Catholics and free people for the past 50 years. Other than Afghanistan, where
the USA gave the unarmed mountain people hand-held Stinger Missals to defend
themselves against Russian Tanks and
Planes, the world has stood by doing nothing as hundreds of millions of
innocent helpless people have been slaughtered mostly by their own governments.
I have been upset by this so much
that 40 years ago I started a campaign to re-start the order of The Knights
Templar. I was able to recruit 20 Special Forces Catholics but was not able to
get the real and only official Knights Templar in Sienna, Italy
to sponsor us.
All the way back to my High
School days, I have hated it when the strong abuse the weak. In my school we
had a division between poor Mexican Farmers and very wealth white beach
bums. When the whites abused the
Mexicans, I physically defended the Mexicans, and when the Mexicans abused I
defended the whites. In time because my brother and I defended the weak, we had
peace and integration.
When I see in the news that some
gang of people rape a girl and good people stand by and do nothing I get angry.
When cries for help come from a house and the neighbors do nothing I get angry.
When
Government Politicians say something is not in America’s Personal Interest, I
get violently angry.
These same people would stand by
and watch millions of people abused or killed as long as it did not affect
their own family or nation. That in itself is a grave sin because Christ says that if we know how to do good and do
not we have sinned. But even if it were not a sin to fail to do good, look at
what happened in Afghanistan,
they were abusing the people, especially the women and we did nothing to help
them. In time they attacked America
in 9-11.
Another thing that angers me, and
is related to the above apathy, is this statement:
“We
don’t know if these people (seeking freedom) will be our friends or not.”
This was our excuse for not
helping the people of Egypt,
Somalia, at first in Libya, and now in Syria. I am such a believer that
people should be free and governments should be in the power of people, I do
not care if I agree with them or not. If the majority of the people are nuts
but they want the freedom to be nuts, I will support them. I have only one
condition on this and that is that they allow others to be free or be
different. If the majority of the people in Egypt want a Moslem government but
they allow Christians to live free,
I do not care.
Freedom or Peace
Most people when asked what they
want the most will say “Peace iu the world!” I would
answer that I want everyone to have freedom from force. What does freedom mean?
It means that no one can force you to do something you do not want to do. What
does peace mean? It means absence from violence. You cannot have peace and
freedom at the same time.
And you cannot have freedom
unless you are willing to extend that freedom to all others even from you. The
only people who have real freedom are those who have the power to protect that
freedom. America
is the freest nation in the world and we protect that freedom by laws that
protect me from you and you from me, the government from me and me from the
government. We enforce those laws by being self armed, having local police, and
a self defense army.
You can have peace without
freedom. We had peace throughout the world when Rome ruled the world, but no one had freedom.
Everyone just did whatsoever the Romans wanted. There is peace in jail. There
is peace, where one man has guns and no one else does. Because the world is
divided between good people and bad, freedom requires that we protect that
freedom with force when needed. That is why we say, “Freedom is not Free”.
No Good Samaritan for Syria
I lived in Syria for over
a year and have many very close friends there. Officially there are very few Christians there but actually Christians
might be as high as 35%. When in Syria I saw that the people were
forcibly keep under control by the army. On every corner of the city of Damascus, where I lived,
was at least one army guard watching the people. Thirty years ago the then
dictator, Hafez al-Assad, tried to kill all the Christians
and Jews, but realized that they were the economic foundation of Syria and it
was not in his best interest.
However even when I was there,
the Christians were a second class
race of people. I had
a full time driver who taught me a great deal. They have a jail that is at
least 15 floors deep in the ground with a bear at the bottom. Any people
causing disruption in the prison are fed to the bear. That prison and the
Palestinian camps cannot be photographed or even looked at.
Finally the unarmed people had
enough of this violent Dictator and rose up in mass against him more than a
year ago. I am so proud of these people. In spite of having no protection and
being slaughtered day after day, for over a year now they have daily gone back
into the streets to demonstrate for freedom. Such brave people I have never
seen in my life.
What
does the world and America
do to help them? Nothing!
It is not in
our best interest. They are not my brothers. We have no interest in Syria.
All we need do
to guarantee these people freedom is give them what we gave the Afghan people to defeat Russia, hand
held Stinger Missals. We can easily move them in from Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, Iraqi and Israel.
The Good Samaritan
Jesus was
teaching his followers to love your neighbour as
yourself and a Jewish theological lawyer stood up and asked, "Who is my neighbour?" And Jesus answered by telling them the
story of the good Samaritan.
This must have
angered most of the Jews, just like this article is angering many Christians, because Jews and Samaritans hated each
other. Although Samaritans are Jews, they were not even allowed to talk with
each other. Jesus tells of the man half dead in the side of the road and people
walking by without helping him. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Even
the priests passed by without helping. Then came a Samaritan, who did
not ask if the man was a Samaritan or not, but did everything possible to help
the man and most likely saved his life. This Samaritan had nothing to gain
personally by this, but it is the love God not only wants but commands.
Look into your
soul and ask yourself if you want America
to help these people in Syria
or not. If you are one of those who thing it is not in our best interests, you
are not a real Christian. I am very
serious about this because love is the essence of Christ’s
law.
WE ARE TO "LOVE ONE ANOTHER"...
Jn 13:34-35; 15:12,17 Ro 13:8; 1Th 4:9 1Pe 1:22 1Jn 3:11 Ro 15:7 Ro 14:19 Ga 5:13 Ga 6:1-2 Ep 4:32 Ep 5:21 He 3:12-13 He 10:24-25 1Pe 4:8-10
Richard Salbato March 26,
2012
Note One:
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
As Jesus was talking to His
disciples, a certain lawyer stood up and asked, "Who is my neighbor?"
And Jesus answered by telling them this story:
A certain man went down from
Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who robbed
him, stripped him of his clothes, and, wounding him, left him on the road half
dead. By chance there came a priest that way, and, as a teacher of religion to
men, he should have stopped to help the poor man. Instead of this, he pretended
not to see, and passed by on the other side of the road. Then there came by a
Levite, who also, as an official of the church, should have given help. But he
merely came and looked on the injured man, and passed on the other side as the
priest had done.
Afterwards there came by a
Samaritan, and, when he caught sight of the wounded Jew, he went over to him
and was very sorry for him. Now the Jews hated the Samaritans, and were their
enemies, so that it would not have been surprising if he, also, had done as the
priest and the Levite did. But, no! Though it was his enemy, he could not pass
him by and leave him on the road, perhaps to die. He examined his wounds and
bound them up; doing all that he could to soothe them.
Then he lifted him carefully on his own beast, and brought him to the nearest
inn, and took care of him through the night. The next day, when the Samaritan
departed, he paid the man who kept the inn, and said to him, "Take care of
this poor man until he is well, and whatever it may cost for his lodging and
food, that I will pay thee when I come again."
"Which of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among
thieves?" The lawyer answered, "He that showed mercy unto him."
Then said Jesus, "Go, and do thou likewise."
Note Two:
Samaritan
History
According to Samaritan
tradition, Mount Gerizim was the
original Holy Place
of the Israelites from the time that Joshua conquered Canaan and the
tribes of Israel
settled the land. The reference to Mount Gerizim
derives from the biblical story of Moses ordering Joshua to take the Twelve Tribes of Israel, (the number of
which did not include the priestly tribe of Levi) to the mountains by Nablus and place
half of the tribes, six in number, on the top of Mount Gerizim,
the Mount of the Blessing, and the other half in Mount Ebal, the Mount of the Curse. The two mountains were
used to symbolize the significance of the commandments and serve as a warning
to whoever disobeyed them (Deut. 11:29; 27:12; Josh. 8:33).
The Samaritans have insisted
that they are direct descendants of the Northern Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh,
who survived the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722
BC. The inscription of Sargon II records the deportation of a relatively small
proportion of the Israelites from Samaria (27,290, according to the annals),[12]
so it is quite possible that a sizable population remained[13] that
could identify themselves as Israelites, the term that the Samaritans prefer
for themselves.
Samaritan historiography
would place the basic schism from the remaining part of Israel after the tribes of Israel conquered and returned to the land of Canaan, led by
Joshua. After Joshua's death, Eli
the priest left the tabernacle which Moses erected in the desert and
established on Mount Gerizim, and built another
one under his own rule in the hills of Shiloh. Thus, he established both an
illegitimate priesthood and an illegitimate place of worship.
Abu l-Fath, who in the 14th century AD wrote a major work of
Samaritan history, comments on Samaritan origins as follows:[14]
Tension
between the Samaritans and the Jews
The narratives in Genesis
about the rivalries among the twelve sons of Jacob describe tensions between
north and south. Those were temporarily united under the strong kingship of
David and Solomon, but at the death of Solomon, the kingdom split into two:
northern Israel with its
capital Samaria and southern Judea with its
capital Jerusalem.
The Deuteronomistic
Historians, writing in Judah,
saw northern Israel
as a sinful kingdom, divinely punished for its idolatry and iniquity by being
destroyed by the Assyrians in 720 BC. (Ironically, the Chronicler is very
generous to the south Judah
and considers it God's will to recover the chosen people that they were
destroyed by Babylon and exiled to Babylon.)
The tensions continued in
the postexilic period. According to the books of Ezra
and Nehemiah, Ezra-Nehemiah is hostile toward its northern neighbors and
considers the northern Israel
except for the "true Israel"[clarification
needed]. Chronicles is more inclusive than Ezra-Nehemiah
since for the Chronicler the ideal is of one Israel
with twelve tribes; the Chronicler concentrates on Judah
and ignores northern Israel.[15]
Unlike the Chronicler, the
Samaritans claimed that they were the true Israel who were
descendants of the "lost" tribes taken into Assyrian captivity. They
had their own temple on Mount
Gerizim
and claimed that it was the original sanctuary. Moreover, they claimed that
their version of the Pentateuch was the original and that the Jews had a
falsified text produced by Ezra during the Babylonian exile.
Both Jewish and Samaritan religious leaders taught that it was wrong to
have any contact with the opposite group, and neither was to enter each other's
territories or even to speak to one another. During the New Testament period, although
the tensions went unrecognized by Roman authorities, Josephus reports numerous
violent confrontations between Jews and Samaritans throughout the first half of
the first century.[16]
According to the Jewish
version of events, when the Judean exile ended in 538 BC and the exiles began
returning home from Babylon, they found their
former homeland populated by other people who claimed the land as their own and
Jerusalem,
their former glorious capital, in ruins. The inhabitants worshiped the Pagan gods, but
when the then-sparsely populated areas became infested with dangerous wild
beasts, they appealed to the king of Assyria
for Israelite priests to instruct them on how to worship the "God of that
country." The result was a syncretistic religion, in which national groups
worshiped the Hebrew god, but they also served their own gods in accordance
with the customs of the nations from which they had been brought.
According to 2 Chronicles
36:22–23, the Persian emperor, Cyrus
the Great (reigned 559 BC – 530 BC), permitted the return of the exiles to
their homeland and ordered the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem (Zion). The prophet
Isaiah identified Cyrus as "the Lord's Messiah" (Meshiach;
see Isaiah
45:1). The word "Messiah" refers to an anointed one, such as a king or
priest.
Ezra 4
says that the local inhabitants of the land offered to assist with the building
of the new temple during the time of Zerubbabel, but their offer was rejected. According to
Ezra, this rejection precipitated a further interference not only with the
rebuilding of the temple but also with the reconstruction of Jerusalem.
The text is not clear on
this matter, but one possibility is that these "people of the land"
were thought of as Samaritans. We do know that Samaritan and Jewish alienation
increased, and that the Samaritans eventually built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, near Shechem.
(The rebuilding of the
Jewish Temple in Jerusalem
took several decades. The project was first led by Sheshbazzar (about 538 BC), later by Zerubbabel and Jeshua, and later still
by Haggai and Zechariah (520–515 BC). Work was
completed in 515 BC.)
The term "Cuthim" applied by Jews to the Samaritans had clear pejorative
connotations, implying that they were interlopers brought in from Kutha
in Mesopotamia and rejecting their claim of
descent from the ancient Tribes of Israel. This claim, however, that the
northern tribes of Israel were all exiled by the Assyrians and therefore those who
occupied the land were of a non-Israelite origin is rejected by the Bible, 2
Chronicles 30:1-31:6, which states that not all of the people from the northern
kingdom were exiled by the Assyrians and some still remained even after the
Assyrian conquest of the land in the 8th century BC.
[edit] Assyrian
account of the conquest and settlement of Samaria
However, the following
account of the Assyrian kings, which was among the archaeological discoveries
in Babylon,
differs from the Samaritan and Jewish Biblical accounts:
[the Samar]ians [who had agreed with a
hostile king]...I fought with them and decisively defeated them]....carried off
as spoil. 50 chariots for my royal force ...[the rest of them I settled in the
midst of Assyria]....The Tamudi, Ibadidi,
Marsimani and Hayappa, who
live in distant Arabia, in the desert, who knew neither overseer nor commander,
who never brought tribute to any king--with the help of Ashshur
my lord, I defeated them. I deported the rest of them. I settled them in
Samaria/Samerina.(Sargon II
Inscriptions, COS 2.118A, p. 293)
Also,
The inhabitants of Samaria/Samerina, who agreed [and plotted] with a king [hostile to]
me, not to do service and not to bring tribute [to Ashshur]
and who did battle, I fought against them with the power of the great gods, my
lords. I counted as spoil 27,280 people, together with their chariots, and
gods, in which they trusted. I formed a unit with 200 of [their] chariots for
my royal force. I settled the rest of them in the midst of Assyria.
I repopulated Samaria/Samerina more than before. I
brought into it people from countries conquered by my hands. I appointed my
eunuch as governor over them. And I counted them as Assyrians.(Nimrud
Prisms, COS 2.118D, pp. 295-296)