<\/a><\/p>\nMan Haron Monis, the deeply trouble Iranian-born refugee who caused so much havoc and fear in Sydney, appears to have been so completely deranged as to be almost divorced from politics, but whatever madness possessed him drew him to adopt radical and violent ideologies. Stone, who had fought in Iraq, returned damaged, beyond the nation\u2019s capacity or willingness to salvage. Both of these men proved to be murderous examples of the collateral damage associated with whatever Orwellian title you want to give the ongoing conflicts (War on Terror, Clash of Civilization, Oil Wars) in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Such violent, tragic outbursts are not political statements against policy, but are the vivid, real life consequences of the policy. If a land is bombed and destroyed by an invading nation, both those that do the invading and those that suffer at their hands are damaged in irreparable and unimaginable ways\u2014the experience poisons the soul. There is no winner in such a war, except for the economic machinery that profits from it. The rage, pain and loss of those on the ground can never be measured or contained, and will forever bleed back into the world, manifesting as a furious, sucking whirlpool of such force that everybody is affected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first image that I saw from the hostage crisis in Sydney was this<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[3083,889,3085,177,3080,1161,2777,3081,53,3087,3090,568,881,363,3086,3082,1964,333,3088,3079,622,934,3084,2059,3089],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4958"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4963,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions\/4963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}