title=-- href="http://usccb.org/bible/readings/090714.cfm." target="_blank">Readings for 23 rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: EZ 33: 7-9; PS 95: 1-2, 6-9; ROM 13: 8-10; MT 18: 15-20
We've met the enemy and it is us!
Indeed! Over the past number of weeks, we've been introduced to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Its militants seem to have somehow appeared from nowhere.
However, as Tom Engelhardt has pointed out, ISIS militants actually represent the largely Sunni blowback from U.S. policies over the last 13 years. In fact, ISIS would not exist were it not for the United States.
Think about it. ISIS is the direct result of:
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and its over-the-top, loosely-target response to 9/11.
The 2003 criminal occupation and destruction of Iraq.
The thoughtless dismantling of Saddam Hussein's army with its largely Sunni command structure (which is now directing ISIS).
The crimes of Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha, and other massacres perpetrated by barbaric elements in the U.S. military.
The more than one million Iraqis who have lost their lost their lives as their country has been systematically pulverized by bombings, white phosphorous, and the nuclear waste called "depleted uranium."
Former President Bush and Vice President Cheney bragging about ordering the war crimes of water boarding and other forms of torture.
U.S. soldiers urinating on the bodies of Iraqi insurgents and on copies of the Holy Koran.
The horrors of the film clip, "Collateral Murder" released by Chelsey Manning.
Drone strikes across the world in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere routinely killing women and children, revelers at weddings and mourners at funerals.
Blind U.S. support of Israel's pogrom aimed at "the Jews' Jews" concentrated in the world's largest open-air prison camp called Gaza.
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