Anti-War

After his recent visit to Gaza Jon Snow shares some personal reflections on his visit. What he manages to do successfully in this piece is step outside the propaganda judgements being fired from both sides and recover the one salient reality that overrides them all - innocent people are being killed - and many of the them are children.

Rene Girard talks about the 'escalation to extremes' of human violence. It suggests that when Jesus showed us the how to live a life of love as an alternative to our uncontrolled violence it was not so much that we could enter heaven as a result after we die as that it would help us avoid our oblivion as a species here on earth. Jon Snow is one of the few mainstream journalists who calls on us to stand up and take responsibility for this violence and avoid our possible oblivion as a species.