" As I listen I am so conscious that for me this is just one more terrible thread in a pattern I am still learning how to read. For them it is a nightmare that will never go away, an inescapable agony at the very centre of their lives. How must it be to wake every day into the knowledge that they, along with their whole society, have no place of refuge, nor expectation of respite, from these deep injustices and horrific crimes." "All that is human in me recoils from this" A background note : " By the beginning of the ninth millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct.38 In this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agricul
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51