THOUGHTS & SHARINGS ON NONVIOLENCE

This time I’ve quite a bit to share and to ask. Allow me to begin by sharing two articles from Daily Kos which I think can have some significant bearing on the issues discussed here:
http://click.actionnetwork....
http://click.actionnetwork....
What looks to me like a sticking-point is when someone else (Nazis, Islamists, Christianist Talibans) declares their dignity and/or destiny fulfillment requires your extirpation and/or extermination. My understanding of the Sermon on the Mount has been shaped in large part by Walter Wink’s masterwork, Engaging The Powers. He makes the point how the most ‘difficult’ parts of that sermon are actually ways to assert one’s own human dignity while also respecting that of the other. But when that respect (according to them) mandates your absence from your land and, indeed, from the whole earth, what can one really do but defend oneself? This, by the way, has been the viewpoint of most ‘Palestinians’ toward Israel, including their leadership, but it’s a viewpoint they’ll only express in Arabic between themselves and after being as sure as possible that no Western bleeding hearts (‘useful idiots’ to them) can hear or understand.
On the other hand, that God has placed this dilemma before the Jews can be a wonderful riposte to the ‘supersessionist’ heresies: this is probably something humanity as a whole needs to learn, and guess who’s learning it first? God’s original ‘pilot group’!
Jesus speaks to us to the extent that we can ‘hear’ him today; his meanings were and are primarily directed at that first crowd, nearly all of whom were in…