This Week’s Links - Hussein’s Execution

Below you will find excerpts and links to several thought-provoking posts about Saddam Hussein’s execution. If you want to read my own thoughts, go here.

The execution

I finally watched Saddam Hussein’s execution. I didn’t want to. I wanted it to go away and to not think about the “Butcher of Baghdad” ever again. After all, this was a man who put people into shredding machines and built prisons for children and who used chemical warfare on his own people. He was an evil, evil man. Youtube wasn’t around for the countless horrors that he unleashed - more than 750,000 people killed during his reign? Imagine the rage that every one of us would now feel towards him if those videos were playing constantly? Picture them - they are the stuff of horror movies. You can hear the screams and see the blood and feel the evil. He was a horrible man. He did horrible things.

(To read more, click on the link above)

Shane Claiborne: Communicating Through a Noose

“What do you think of that man?” the old guy asked in a raspy voice as I settled in next to him on the plane. He pointed to the face of Saddam Hussein on the front of his newspaper with a headline story of the looming execution. I gathered myself, and prepared for what could turn out to be a rather chatty plane ride. I replied gently, “I think that man needs some love.” And the rather boisterous gentleman sat still, perhaps not exactly the response he predicted. Then he said pensively, “Hmmmm. I think you’re right…” And finally, he whispered in a forlorn tone, “And it is hard to communicate love through a noose.”

(To read more, click on the link above)

Brian McLaren: How Does Saddam’s Execution Make You Feel?

I see little or no value to weighing in on the subject of capital punishment. People have their opinions and relatively few seem interested in changing them. But I would like to express in personal terms how I felt after the news coverage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging. I’d like to share it especially for those who support executions, not to change their opinion necessarily, but simply to make a request of them.
The best word to describe my feeling: dirty.

(To read more, you know what to do)

I do not rejoice

“You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. . .

(To read more, look above)

On the Death of Saddam

Saddam Hussein has apparently been executed. Hard to feel much joy or remorse over this turn of events. If anyone ever deserved to die brutally by hanging, Saddam was the one. His evil spirit towered over Iraq like the enormous statues that testified to his delusional fantasies of his place in his history, his seemingly limitless and cruel meglomania. While it is easy to remember his many crimes, it is also important to remember US complicity in some of his greatest acts of evil.

(Same as before)

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