morepraxis

The Campaign

Significant disputed petroleum resources, worth tens of billions of dollars, lie beneath the Timor Sea. Despite these resources lying closer to East Timor than Australia, both countries are staking a claim on the proceeds.

No maritime boundary has ever existed between Australia and East Timor: a boundary drawn in accordance with contemporary International law would deliver all of the resources on East Timor’s side of the median line to East Timor.

The Australian Government is stalling the negotiations and bullying the East Timorese Government to give up billions of dollars’ worth of entitlements. In the meantime, Australia is unilaterally depleting oil fields in disputed areas and taking all of the government revenues.

East Timor is unable to take the matter to an international arbitration because two months before East Timor���s independence, Australia suddenly and secretly withdrew from the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea.

The Timor Sea Justice Campaign is demanding that the Australian Government gives East Timor a fair go.

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. A revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast between poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists in the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America only to take profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’”

Martin Luther King Jr.

“To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened in and to a world and a Christian church that had asked for it – that had prepared the moral consciousness of humanity to do and to justify the
unthinkable.”

Just as feminism was able to demonstrate, language itself is often one of the biggest barriers to finding a sensible solution to a problem.

���The War on Terror��� is an unfortunate phrase, and while ever we insist on using it we���ll never be able to win it. The more I���ve been thinking about this, the more convinced I am. You simply can���t declare war on a noun as vague as this. Just like the war on drugs, you end up fighting an amorphous, ill-defined and ever changing enemy. Fighting an enemy as indeterminate as this ensures that the charade is able to continue indefinitely.

The British have been dealing with terrorism for decades, against groups like the IRA. Countries around the world have dealt with terrorism in one form or another since the dawn of time. Do we honestly believe that this is something new? September 11 was without doubt a major tragedy, and on a grand scale. Why are we constantly being urged to believe that ���things have changed��� since that moment? Have they really?

Apparently some things get lost in the translation. In a chinese dub version of “Revenge of the Sith” the english subtitles reveal the real name of the The Jedi council to be “presbyterian church”

As part of the Micah Challenge and Make Poverty History Campaign to see that governments around the world live up to there promise to halve global poverty by 2015, J.I.M is inviting Uniting Church congregations to follow the example of Uk Churches and display white banners with the slogan Make Poverty History. Or you may want to make up your own slogans, perhaps linked to biblical verses

Below is some a couple of paragraphs from an article about the London Bombings by Vinoth Ramachandra for Sojourners
….If my experience of the 25-year conflict in Sri Lanka has taught me anything, it is that what often begins as a legitimate struggle for political rights very quickly loses direction and implodes into an endless [...]

CAR CRUSHING HIGH HOPPING
FREE-STYLING SOUL-SAVING
Action!!

Watch as JESUS crushes and destroys all of his enemies
then finshes them off with the STIGMATA BLASTER��*
All in the name of GOD!!!