The News w/b Sunday 17th August: Three Card Trick – Hiroshima, Hamas, Hurricane Erin
If I were a magician, I’d be saying ‘pick a card’, but I’m not, so it’s three paragraphs on the above The Three Hs that have been astride the media in the past few days.
Hiroshima Genbaku Dome - somehow survived the blast directly below the explosion
1. Hiroshima
On August 6th, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B29 bomber released the ‘Little Boy’, an atom bomb, exploding at a height of 1900 ft above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000, some of whom were school children on their way to school. I’ve been listening to BBC R4’s John Hersey’s Hiroshima to mark the 80th Anniversary of the bombing (of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the consequent surrender of the Japanese to bring the war to a close. My parents lived through WWII. My father was a colonel in the US Army, and my mother, English, worked for the US Army. (Yes, you can put two and two together). Little was said about the war in the Far East; their involvement was restricted to serving the Allies’ defeat of Nazi Germany. Wisdom, the bible says, is known by its fruit. So, constructing an ethical lens to peer into the past to form a sound judgement about the rights and wrongs of using such destructive force calls on skills that I don’t believe I possess. If the fruit was ending the war, all I can offer is that this must be brought into the weighing scales of whatever ethical lens you are using to judge Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
2. Hamas
Jerusalem - still longing to fulfil its name ‘city of peace’. The bible urges us to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. No more so than now.
I have written a few times about Hamas. To my mind, they are no better than Hitler’s Nazi thugs. Hamas have long since disregarded any value in the sanctity of life and consider their sworn enemies – the Jews in Israel – with the same irrational hatred that Hitler employed against the Jews…vermin that need to be eradicated. Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7th 2023 against unarmed civilians in kibbutzim villages and at the Nova music festival, was beneath contempt. Whatever their grievances, justified or not, that led to stooping so low cannot be employed in justifying such a barbaric assault. They have brought upon their own heads, and the lives of Gazans they were elected to serve, such utter horror - and still they refuse to surrender and hand over the hostages that were taken by their armed gangs in order to end the war and the endless suffering of Gazans. Their violations of basic human rights, disregard of international law, war crimes, and their vows to destroy the State of Israel make them undigestible. In the same way as we worry, ethically, about the Enola Gay operation to end WWII in Japan, we wring our hands at Israel’s military operation to remove Hamas and liberate the hostages. And we should. At least in Israel, the proof, almost, of a healthy society, is that Jews in their tens of thousands are permitted to protest against Netanyahu’s military campaign without fear of reprisal, whereas, across the border in Gaza, anti-Hamas protests by Gazans are ruthlessly suppressed.
3. Hurricane Erin
‘A 600 mile wall of rain’ and other dramatic headlines are a welcome break from reports from war-torn Gaza and Ukraine, as journalists seek out other news in August and spend an inordinate amount of time blue-sky thinking (yes, I know), trying to come up with the most eye-catching headlines. For me, ‘A 600 mile wall of rain’ wins hands down! Alas, all the tabloids seem to be carrying this phrase, so, sadly, I cannot award the trophy to any one journalist. Hurricane Erin, a tropical storm at the moment on the other side of the Atlantic, is likely to be great disappointment to those who are desperate for dramatic weather, but that is no defence against the newspaper proprietors' need to sell print, albeit electronic print these days. As Mark Twain said ‘Never let truth get in the way of a good story’ especially in pre-autumnal August. We press on.