Like love, hatred too is blind…

There’s a famous and much over used line that says ‘love is blind’ but I guess the same thing can also be said to be true about hatred.

With the lives of thousands of innocent civilians hanging in the balance, more and more leaders of the international community have been making appeals to the LTTE to lay down their arms and surrender in order to bring about an end to the bloodshed.

While this seems very heartening to note, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of messages floating around the blogosphere that calls for a continued armed struggle. Even if it means that every single civilian is forced to bear arms and be killed in a vain attempt to buy time for the beleaguered LTTE leadership!

While I do understand to some extent the feelings of the Tamil diaspora, I really find it hard to relate to the fact that they can continue to call for the war to continue. I mean aren’t they even a little bit affected by the way in which these civilians are suffering?

When visiting certain pro LTTE blog sites, it’s pretty obvious that the most vociferous of these voices belong to a generation of Tamils who have never even set foot in Sri Lanka. Yet they insist on commenting about how Tamils are being systematically wiped out throughout the country. How can they make these claims without ever having visited Colombo or any other part of Sri Lanka?

One such comment went like this:

“Better the children die fighting the genocidal sinhalese, rather than surrender and be murdered by them. Should they be tortured and have their necks cut with a knife, like many in Jaffna? Or should they stand like men with guns in their hand giving their lives to protect their people?…”

How can anyone in their right minds make such a statement?

These are children you’re talking about for God’s sake! Children who should be given the right to have a future that’s not decided for them by someone who sits in the comforts of a western country and feels very patriotic about sending a few dollars every month for the purchase of arms and ammunition!

If anyone feels they have a right to fight for a separate homeland, that’s their own prerogative, and they should have the courage to stand up and fight for their beliefs. But when instead they decide to live thousands of miles away from the fighting and scream encouragement to children to take up arms and die for these beliefs, it just proves them to be heartless cowards who are blinded by hatred.

It seems the LTTE if nothing else have achieved one thing. They have taken a peace loving community and changed it into a hate spewing monstrosity that seems blind even to the deaths of its future generations.

So i guess as far as certain elements of the Tamil diaspora are concerned, hatred is blind, is the most popular axiom to live by.

Diaspora comedian… MIA

Having seen the latest flurry on the blogosphere regarding MIA and her various interviews, I’m struggling to figure out what exactly it is she hopes to achieve with her new found star status.

I have to admit I haven’t personally listened to any of her songs, as listening to rap music is possibly the last item on my ‘things to do before I die’ list, but I’ll take her fans’ word for it that she’s pretty talented. You would definitely have to be talented to be asked to perform next to all those other bling overflowing rap stars ya?

But judging from how successfully she manages to insert her foot in her very talented mouth every time she tries to do anything apart from singing, I believe she has yet to explore her biggest inborn talent… Stand up comedy!

I mean think about it for a second, she definitely has all the makings of becoming the next Russell Peters, with the added advantage of having boobs! Much like the celebrated Mr.Peters, MIA too comes from an Asian country and has lived much of her life in the west, and her talent for exaggerating Sri Lankan issues (Genocide, Nazis, Foreign journo’s shot, etc) puts even his ‘how the Chinese/Indians/Jamaicans behave’  act to shame!

I can just picture little MIA standing up there in the spotlight and doing a rib tickling parody of a sarong clad, pistol toting, Nazi slogan spouting, Sinhalese Buddhist politician from the paradise isle.

Seriously, I tell you, this girl is so totally missing out on the greatest talent she has to achieving superstar status!

So the next time you listen to or watch one of her interviews, just imagine her talking like Russel Peters and tell me if I’m totally nutters here or not.

A big ’shout out’ to MIA… The world’s next comedy queen…!

Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka…

Lately, wherever I seem to go on the net, the words ‘genocide’ and ‘Sri Lanka’ seem to be linked together like Siamese twins, so I thought I would look the word up, just to see if it actually meant what I thought it did.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about it,

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”^[1]

Having read this, I somehow have to agree that it’s justified for the International Community (IC) to associate Sri Lanka and genocide when it comes to what is happening to the Tamil population.

But, I think the IC and all those others who are jumping on the genocide bandwagon, seem to have made a bit of a ‘boo boo’ when it comes to placing the blame on who’s actually responsible for this situation.

When looking at the Wikipedia definition and comparing it to what has been done to the Tamil population over the past 30 years, I’m more and more inclined to think that it’s the LTTE who have been and are continuing to be the perpetrators of a genocide on their own people.

I may be wrong, but let’s take a look at the definition point by point and see how it works out ya?

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”

The Tamil people of Sri Lanka definitely do fall into the Ethnical group category, so that’s ok.

“killing members of the group”

The past track record of the LTTE and even their present strategy has been to systematically assassinate leading Tamil citizens and even use their suicide bombers in places where Tamil refugees gather.

“causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;”

Here again, when we look at what the LTTE has done to members of the Tamil community, and continue to do by preventing them from crossing over to declared safe zones, it’s pretty easy to see the extreme bodily and mental harm being deliberately inflicted on the civilians.

“deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”

Right now many thousands of civilians are being deliberately held in a war zone by the LTTE in the twisted hope that the ever increasing destitution and loss of life will trigger a last minute rescue mission by the IC. So it seems the LTTE is making a ‘calculated’ move to bring about the ‘physical destruction’ of these people.

“imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;”

I believe there was much publicity given to the extreme discipline that was enforced within the ranks of the LTTE, any co-habitation between members of the opposite sex was strictly prohibited by the leadership. Now, IMHO, this would definitely fall under the category of ‘imposing measures’ that prevent births within this community.

“[and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”

With the final point of the definition I was a little stuck, but then what about the many child soldiers who have been forcibly recruited by the LTTE? Isn’t it true that they have been ‘forcibly transferred’ from their family group and put into a ‘group’ that is only interested in changing them from children into foot soldiers?

Judging from the above definition, it seems quite plain that the LTTE and Prabhakaran have very deliberately gone about destroying the entire future of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. They have created an attitude of animosity towards the Tamils in general, killed and maimed thousands of Tamils, turned the future generations into canon fodder and presently continue to put thousands of innocent civilians in the direct line of fire.

So where then should the ‘genocide’ accusations of the IC actually fall?

I think it’s high time the IC and the Tamil people around the world came to their senses and actually look at the immense amount of destruction the LTTE have caused in the name of so called independence and freedom!