If this is man..

If this is man then perhaps it would be better not to be man.

Last night, some harrowing images. First, 'Escape from Isis' which had some heart-wrenching interviews with Yazidi women who had been forced to convert to Islam, gang-raped and sold on as slaves. The few that were brought to safety were taken to the temple (above) to bring them back to their faith. 

What can one say?

Earlier, snatches of a programme on the role of Britain in the slave trade. And this never fails to amaze you: America harps on all the time about freedom but was based on the near genocide of the native peoples, a century of slavery and a century of segregation. And how much of Britain's wealth was founded on this dark, dark trade?

The bookkeeper of Auschwitz. Not actually part of the mass killings (according to him) but complicit. Pictured above, Eva Kor who was experimented upon at Auschwitz. (One has to read those words slowly to get the full force of them..experimented upon).

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The swami, who watched this programme aghast, recounted a story...back in 1947 in Lahore or was it '48, a man was going around the markets with a pair of scissors, telling women and young girls that "two" pigtails was un-Islamic (one, apparently, was okay). He cut the hair of three women. Perhaps this was just the case of a lone, frustrated madman (incidentally, a few years ago there was a similar story of a man roaming around Liberty Market telling women to cover themselves until he was beaten up). But I think what she was getting at was that the impulse was the same, even though at a vastly different level. 

Then she told me of her own aunt who was being followed by some spook who told her that her dupatta was not on properly.At which point she threw it off completely and said, "I don't want to wear it now, what are you going to do about it!"

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To think of Cordoba or Baghdad now makes you wonder if they ever really existed. In any case, that's over. What we're faced with now is something very dark. What, you wonder, would the fundamentalists make of:

Combine Arabic faith, Jewish intelligence, Iraqi education, Christian conduct, Greek knowledge, Indian mysticism and the Sufi way of life - this would be the perfection of humanity.
---The Brethren of Purity