Sarah Alice M4J speech

 "How many women have to go ignored? How many women have to die? We’ve raged, we’ve mourned, we’ve held vigils, we’ve worn their stupid fucking ribbons while the victims wear their scars, and we’ve stood in these same places too many times demanding change. 

This is somewhere I never expected to be. As a transwoman, I wasn’t sure about being in this space or talking about this topic.

But the reality is, that the very things we are here protesting against, including the entitlement of men and their violence toward women, the patriarchy and the institutions they use to silence women

ARE the exact same things transwomen experience

It’s also important I stand before you today, because the conservative right and the Australian Christian Lobby are targeting groups like the trans community and sex workers to steam roll legislation through, that WILL further oppress women and WILL remove already hard fought for rights. 

And this all comes on top of the erosion of the Family Law Courts, which is only going to put more women and children in danger. 

The outcomes after all the pretty words and empty gestures always amount to nothing, and the time for change needs to be now. 

We are tired of our sisters having to face this, day in and day out. And we will not stand down until the culture of misogyny that runs through our parliament, our workplaces, and our homes is changed; we will not stand down until justice is served and integrity returned to our places of leadership. 

We aren’t a mob out with our pitchforks demanding a pound of flesh… we are voters demanding justice. 

Whether you are a First Nations woman, a woman of colour or white, 

poor… middle class… or wealthy, 

Regardless of your sexuality, we are women.  

We are mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and family, demanding that justice is done for every woman; We cannot let the status quo stand, we cannot let the blatant lack of equality and safety carry on. 

Australia demands change now

We are the bar to which they need to rise

Today we say ENOUGH"

Time for something different: A draft

Once upon a time...

In a forest...

A big forest... 

I mean... a REALLY big forest...

where there were lots of animals... 

and trees that grew so tall they cast shadows as far as the eye could see. 

It was in this forest, amongst all the other animals, there lived a duck named Bella and her companion, Sparks the rat. Bella was a curious duck, for as long as anyone could remember she had always been asking questions about everything and working out why things happened the way they did. 

One day, while all the animals were sitting around the gathering rock in the middle of the forest, eating mushrooms and sharing stories, Bella got to thinking about all the places she had been in the forest and how she had never seen past the edge of it all.

Bella looked at Sparks, who was reluctantly chewing on a mushroom while listening to the fox talk about how playful her litter of pups were. "Sparks?" she said, laying down on the grass beside them "what do you know about the edge of the forest?"

Sparks raised an eyebrow as she turned to look at her, "The edge of the forest?" said Sparks, "only that it's a long way off, and that we don't really need to go any further than it". 

"Have you ever wondered though? what it looks like? what's on the other side of it?" Bella was half daydreaming as she talked about it, almost losing herself in what she imagined it to be like. "We should go!" she said to Sparks as she pounced on them, knocking the mushroom from their hand.

"Alright, let's go!" Sparks said, grabbing some extra mushrooms for them to eat on their way to the edge of the forest. "What do you think we will see when we get there?" they asked

Bella grabbed Sparks’ hand as they walked, "I have no idea..." said Bella excitedly, "maybe it's a place where a giant dragon lives!". Sparks giggled along with her.

The pair had been walking for half a day before they could see the last line of trees in the distance that signalled the edge of the forest. Hunny and Bella looked at each other and grinned. They were so excited!

"Are you ready?" Bella asked Sparks... but as she finished her question a raven squawked nearby. They both turned to see the raven sitting on a branch in a tree near the edge preening itself.

"Must go alone Bella..." the raven squawked... "Must go alone..." and it flew down and perched itself on the ground beside Sparks. "Don't worry bout Sparks... we will talk, they and I, while you look over the edge"

Bella looked at the raven and then to Sparks, a bit scared of going out there alone. On all her big adventures Bella had always had Sparks by her side. How odd it was to have to do something and not have them with her.

"Okay..." Bella said, not being able to resist what was waiting beyond the trees. "I will tell you all about it when I come back!" Sparks walked over to Bella and hugged her tightly, and then she was off, walking the last few steps to see what was over the edge of the forest.

As Bella passed the last tree she took a deep breath. She had never seen anything like it. At the edge of a forest was a great lake of crystal clear water. "Wow!" she said as she looked out over it, her eyes catching sight of fish leaping out from the rippling lake.

But as she got used to what she saw, she caught sight of something in the distance. On the other side of the great lake was a forest, much like the one she had just come out from... and at the edge of the forest looking out across the great lake at her... was a duck... that looked identical to Bella

Bella stood there and thought for a few moments about what she was seeing. "How completely strange!" she said to herself, and all of a sudden it made perfect sense. She laughed to herself, then waved to the duck on the other side of the great lake, and as it waved back at her she turned and walked back to Sparks and the raven.

When she got back to the patch of grass where she had left the raven and Sparks, she saw the most curious thing. They were both rolling around on the floor, laughing so hard they couldn't stand up.

"What's so funny, you pair?" she asked, walking over and grabbing one of the mushrooms Sparks squirrelled away.

"Raven here was telling stories about how all of the other animals came to the edge of the forest and refused to go any further..." Sparks chuckled and walked over to Bella, giving her a huge hug.

When they got back home to the middle of the forest, they sat around the rock listening to the others tell their stories. Sparks looked at Bella and put their arm around her, "So what did you see at the edge of the forest?"

Bella smiled and kissed Sparks on the nose as she leant her head on his shoulder, "I saw that all I will ever need, I have right here with me... I saw another duck as well, on the other side of a great lake... she looked an awful lot like me..." as she closed her eyes she smiled at Sparks... "One day, we will cross that lake, you and I"

Sermon - Advent 1 2018(?) - Hope

“From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
From the people come the power
From this power come the change”

Peter Gabriel’s ‘Fourteen Black Paintings”. It’s a simple song. Five lines long. But it ties in so perfectly with the theme of today; the first week in Advent… Hope.

I was tempted to do that thing where we find our favourite writer or theologian and talk about their perspectives on a certain time of year or idea. Instead I thought I’d be selfish and rant a little about how I have been seeing things in the lead up to Christmas.

I was also tempted to do the easy thing today and talk about how coming up to Christmas and how exciting it is that we’re close to the time of year Jesus was born. There’s all this joy and mirth, talk of goodwill, and for the most part people really try to make good on that talk. It’s a beautiful time of year, so full of optimism. Of Joy. But it’s hard to do this, or appreciate it completely unless we see it in its context.

Imagine over here we have Jesus; amazing person, we gush about how great He is all the time, and all the things that He brings. Bright, wonderful, a light that outshines all others. This is what Christmas is for a lot of people.

But, imagine over there… there is this place beyond the light. It’s cold, it’s lonely, and sometimes for people who find themselves here don’t know whether they are able to trust the person who walks past them because it’s possible they are either there to verbally abuse, torture, or turn them in to the authorities. Unfortunately, this is what Christmas is for an increasing number of people.

This is the world we’re living in. The brexiteers, Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson… Peter Dutton. All of them targeting people who are most vulnerable, the sick, the unemployed, those seeking asylum, the LGBT community. We’ve been at war in another set of countries since around 2002 / 2003, bombing the countries that asylum seekers are coming from for more than ten years. Our government has the audacity to tell them they can’t come here, thrown in torture camps that probably equate to Guantanamo Bay.

Our leaders.

I wondered how this would fit in with the Matthew reading… it’s all very doom and gloom. I mean, as I speak there is a clock that indicates that we are three minutes from proverbial midnight. The closer to midnight this clock moves, the more likely we are to bring about our own destruction. Not since 1981, at the height of the Cold War have we ever been so close.

I find it harder and harder every day to not get caught up in this whole “end of the world” thing, the signs are there… but the same signs have been there throughout human history, really. Point to a period in time and I’m pretty sure you’ll find someone with their boot on the throat of someone else.

We really don’t know, though. Jesus says to keep watch. The Son of Man will come when you least expect Him.

It’s here I think we need to look back at the two sides of this situation, the one around hope. The light of Christ on one side, the darkness on the other, and from this point of being able to glimpse it, to feel just the slightest breath of cold, and to imagine the despair of someone lost in this place even for a moment, it grants us a perspective on how truly crucial and incredible hope is.

Jesus is that hope.

But more than that…

We are that hope.

Because we can be better people. We can forgive. We can welcome. We can love.

Jesus is the role model we should aspire with all our hearts to be.

But we need to understand that it means getting dirty. Sitting with the sick, the lonely, the outcast. Being fearless and speaking truth to power. Speaking up and telling people that their god is not our God… that a God of love and hope would never condemn creation the way theirs is happy to. We can’t just pray and hope things will get better.

It’s time for us to be like Peter and walk out to Jesus on the water, and I feel like we don’t use this example of Peter nearly as much as we should. It’s in those moments where Peter for the briefest of moments achieved what was possible for humanity and *became* like Jesus, and in that moment he shows us that everyone is capable of taking that radical ministry to the streets.

We aren’t an impossible distance away from embodying this... it’s a choice, it’s a decision, to believe not just in yourself but something bigger. Whether you believe Jesus and Peter actually walked on water isn’t the point, even if it’s just a metaphor (and the gospels are full of them) for that transformation or purification of something into something *better*, like Jesus turning water into wine, the point is that at the heart of all of these things is a message to people about their potential.

Our potential to love.

Our potential for change.

Our potential embrace those on the edge and lift them up out of poverty.

Our potential to liberate the oppressed.

Our potential to call out systems of injustice and demand change.

I’d like to finish by quoting someone else, and I’ll give a cookie to whoever can tell me who penned it:

"Cause love's such an old-fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is ourselves under pressure"

The Twin Pandemics: Coronavirus and Stupidity

Stupidity: it has a higher R0 than the coronavirus...

There’s always been an element on the internet who would find anything to be paranoid about. If there’s a political power, new technology, new method of producing food, new vaccines (or old vaccines – vaccines at all), there’s a group of people who would think it’s a means of control.

Of course, when the SARS-CoV2 outbreak happened, these people started doing their thing. First it was a Chinese bioweapon used on their own people to get rid of the elderly; then a war that was being fought without soldiers. Eventually people started saying it was connected to and controlled by 5G towers; and the inevitable evolution of this (because Lord knows that wasn’t batshit (see what I did there?) crazy enough) was that the eventual vaccine would be a way to control the virus in individual people and take them down if they stepped out of line through use of implants.

Yep, implants to control a bio-weapon through next-gen mobile tech that wasn't even installed in some countries with the coronavirus. Not even Mulder and Scully had gone this far down the rabbit hole. 

Everyone from your usual Facebook conspiracy theorists all the way to people who you’d assume would know better, especially since they are university educated like Dr Naomi Wolf (love her for going after Angus Taylor and support during 19/20 bushfires; really confused by everything else). But here we are. Going toward the second half of 2020 we have to remind ourselves that educated doesn’t mean not daft. It turns out one can be both.

But it’s here that 2020 would give us one of the greatest comedies ever lived – had it not been paired with such a dangerous and globe threatening virus. The illiterati have risen fearless, steeled with the paranoia of Q and QAnon, the Venn diagram that makes up these groups is now nothing more than overlapped circles with only slivers of outliers on the edges. So thin is the space that you have to label the outside and draw arrows to direct the gaze toward the section you’re referring to.

In America, people protesting the supposedly draconian and purely unconstitutional lockdowns took to the streets, armed with all manner of semi-automatic weaponry that could only be described as extreme overcompensation for what they’re lacking in the boxers. Yes, this would inevitably lead to a spike in Covid-19 cases after people attended these events.

How do you use big guns with such small hands?

What’s worse though, is that the stupidity travelled.

It made its way over to Australia, egged on by Australia’s own tin-foil crown holder Pete Evans. Deciding that there was no such thing as “too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole”, Pete ramped up his posting of the ridiculous, peaking (at least we thought) in the unveiling of his $15,000 Van der Graf generator with neon light attachments for the Apocalyptic Woo Disco you never knew you wanted to attend. It wouldn’t be until Channel 7 dropped him from one of the n+1 reality cooking shows on television would he show us just how much tin-foil he was wearing (hint: he’s likely keeping a company afloat just on his own) by straight up posting QAnon memes.

Now we have antivaxxers protesting in Melbourne and people get up in arms about the civil liberties of people being trampled because the police arrested a woman who tried to use her child as a human shield. For ages we prided ourselves on the notion that we weren’t America, we were smarter, and certainly a little more civilized. Like everything else this pandemic has shown us, it was a lie. A cohort of Australians are three Trump tweets away from injecting bleach, and I can’t say that I would be terribly upset.

Imagine one of these people standing there with a syringe.

You ask them what they are doing.

They say “Trump said disinfectant cures the coronavirus”

You try to explain to them that it’s a bad idea.

They insist they know what they’re doing.

My response to this situation would be a sarcastic “no don’t” while deciding whether to dial 000 or film the moment Darwin’s theory was proven correct (again).

This is where we’re at.

2020, you’re exhausting.

Australia: Beta Testing The Apocalypse

Crisis? What Crisis?

If the LNP government has taught us anything over the Christmas period, it is how utterly incompetent it is when it comes to keeping Australia safe.

If it has taught us anything since the new year started, it's that they are utterly corrupt and refuse to be made accountable for their rorting of taxpayer's money.

It's not like Labor is much better. Albanese should be using this to effectively begin his campaign against the LNP toward the next election. They (the coalition) are basically scoring goals for them, and they know he could use it as a platform against them, which is why any press conference he gives is cut off by Morrison.

With no clear policy and no real commitment to transition away from fossil fuels, the ALP are maintaining the status-quo as the country experiences a "new normal" in extreme weather events and mass devastation of wildlife and flora. It is estimated that over a billion animals have now been decimated by fires, while other native animals have been struck down by hail from freak storms tearing up the eastern seaboard.

This bushfire season has shown us that it's the beginning of a new world, for better or worse. Tipping points have been pushed and it feels like the powers that be, whether corporate or government, are going full speed ahead to strip as much profit as they can from a continent now experiencing dangerous weather conditions.

I'm not saying the option is the Greens, either. Di Natale and co do nothing more than pointing the finger and engaging in their trademark absolutism. If they were a comic book character, at the moment they'd resemble Rorschach from Watchmen. No, that's a tad harsh. I'd trust Rorschach with anything sharper than a boiled egg.

The Greens have some good policies, but they think they are more important or have more power than they actually do, and to maintain any connection to their mission statement or ethos, they are bound to at least mostly vote in line with the ALP. Straying from this isn't an option under the LNP, as there's nothing that the LNP would give them that would make them compromise themselves. At least, not yet.

Policies of the past now need to be reassessed and rewritten.

Not even twenty years on from the September 11 attacks, and I will have seen the world change twice. It wasn't a change for the better after 9/11, and the way things are going, I don't think this is going to be something that brings people together under the leadership of a government that has the best intentions and safety of its citizens in mind. Instead it is cruel, duplicitous, and relies on the charity of people within our borders and beyond them to do the heavy lifting in the wake of devastation. How do we even begin to unpack these issues when more are piling up?

Crimes Of The Century

Charities now loaded with donations to help fire affected people and wildlife are holding onto the money after only dispersing a fraction of it. The Australian Red Cross are only allocating a third of the total $95 million in donations received to help those affected by the fires, then released a statement saying that the rest would be spent over a three year period. St Vincent De Paul similarly raised $12.5 million in donations and allocated $1.1 million so far.

Hillsong and ACCI have only spent $78,484 of over $2.8 million, with a portion of the remainder being spent to send "chaplains" into fire affected communities.

The cynic in me (or perhaps, the realist) sees this as nothing more than the most perverse exercises in proselytism; using a disaster to try and frame this as God telling them to repent and come to Jesus and all will be forgiven. It's a type of mission and conversion that's entirely perverse, as there would be the occasional person who would end up becoming a member of the church and being suckered in to the tithe deal, so they make back a portion of what's given over from the donations.

I'm sure I don't need to point out how this flies in the face of the ministry of Jesus. It's possibly the most disgraceful set of actions carried out by a political party claiming to be Christians Australia has seen in recent history.

As this was unfolding, questions started being asked about Georgina Downer and why she was handing out cheques for sporting grants issued by the LNP. Digging revealed that the 100 million dollars allocated for funding sports clubs around the country had been used as a pre-election slush fund to effectively buy the votes of marginal LNP seats, and other grants going to seats that politicians like Scott Morrison, George Christensen, and bigger sums of money going to places that absolutely didn't need it like Mosman Rowing Club. 

The justification for the rowing club's money being that girls didn't have to get changed behind trees or in their cars any longer. But the icing on the cake was when it was discovered that Bridget McKenzie, the deputy leader of the Nationals, was the one who coordinated the whole affair and even the rifle club she belongs to didn't miss out on any of the money from the trough.

At the time of posting this blog, there's been no indication yet that Prime Minister Morrison was involved in this; but it's a big enough orchestration for him not to be involved or even the one who ordered the use of the funds in this manner.

It's been three weeks into the new year, and I haven't even covered the character assassination of Bruce Pascoe over a 15 year old book, Murdoch's media hate machine running overtime on climate denial, Barnaby Joyce and his marvellous Christmas message, and Gina Rinehart's passive aggressive slapback in regards to whether she was contributing to the recovery of Australia.

Usually there is some snippy commentary or a few quips and a couple of gifs. I'll double up on them next time.

This girl is exhausted. 

We deserve better.

The Q, The Bad, and the Ugly - Part 1: A Beginner's Guide

The Internet is for...

The internet is responsible for a whole raft of things that we sometimes wish hadn’t become a thing. One of these things that I am sure anyone with a reasonable sense of social conscience could agree that 4chan may fit in to this category, and from this pit of sleaze and hatred came Q.

I was asked to describe 4chan once, and the only way I could articulate it with any degree of certainty or accuracy was like this: imagine that the internet was a person and decided one night to hit the town. Well, 4chan is the place the internet ends up after too many jaeger bombs, and lines snorted from the breasts of wannabe socialites. Semi-conscious, rolling around nauseated and about to purge everything that’s been consumed over the last 24 hours; 4chan is the corner the internet unloads in before falling asleep in its own mess.

You might be asking yourself “why is it so bad?” or “if it is that bad, has anything good come from it?”. To answer those questions (and because I kind of enjoy the tapping sound of my new keyboard), I shall elucidate.

4chan as an imageboard (or an extremely frustrating to keep track of forum) is, or used to be, home to a userbase that could post and discuss anonymously everything from anime, conspiracy theories, and horror stories right through to politics, social commentary, and child pornography. Now, it’s basically this list of things (minus the anime) that this post focuses on, but I will touch on a few important parts of 4chan’s history that might provide a clear track for how this got from problematic internet site all the way to potential domestic terrorist threat.

A Brief History of Shitfuckery:

•       Founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole (aka “Moot”)
•       Initially focused on anime content and “random” (aka /b/)
•       Suffers downtime after child pornography uploaded to site
•       Gave us cute captioned photos of animals or “lolcats”
•       Undertook “Project Chanology” where Anonymous identifying people from around the world united to protest, hack, and harass the Church of Scientology. The human rights violation was an afterthought, but gave Anonymous a brief window of social conscience to bring light to a cult that practiced abhorrent disconnection tactics and punishments that bordered on torture.
•      Whatever goodwill Anonymous would work to gain for itself would be very quickly undone with the resurgence of things like child pornography on the site, cyberbullying, hacking campaigns, trolling campaigns, and involvement in gamergate.
•       Q appears on 4chan’s /pol/ board in 2017 dropping information that is near gibberish in how cryptic it is, clinging to Trump’s comments about the “calm before the storm” made during the October 5 photo op with senior military officials.
•       Q and the supporters “QAnon” are kicked off 4chan for basically overrunning the site and turning it into a bigger haven for antisemitism and white supremacy than it already was.
•       Q appears on 8chan and continues the stream of cryptic nonsense to keep the right wing conspiracy breathing ferals amused.
•       8chan goes offline after the NZ mosque shooting and is later allowed to exist on a Russian server, because who else but the Russians would take advantage of something so politically divisive?

And now for something completely different...

To explain what the Q conspiracy is, you need make your brain shift gears. To do this, imagine you’ve just recovered from a self-administered lobotomy, because that’s the kind of territory we are heading in to. Nothing is unbelievable.

You’ve been warned.

First, there’s the scandal dubbed “pizzagate”, where the Clintons and Democrats are involved in a pedophile ring that has dungeons in the basements of inconspicuous buildings throughout the world. The pizzagate example in particular claimed that there were coded messages in the leaked Podesta emails “acquired” by Wikileaks in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Louise Mensch would later investigate Wikileaks, JulianAssange, and their connection to Russia, to conclude (like anyone else who hasn't drunk the Kool Aid) that there's little doubt at all that Wikileaks and Assange are assets used almost exclusively to undermine democracy in the United States. It's also safe to assume that Wikileaks as an organisation is nothing more than a tool to gather intelligence from other nations to benefit Russia's campaign of destabilization for its own ends.

As an aside, my citing this information doesn't mean I support what is happening to Assange since he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy. There's rules for the treatment of prisoners that should be adhered to, and there are better ways to make an example of someone without stripping them of their basic human rights. 

Where this fits in with Q, QAnon, and 8chan is strange in the sense that for the most part QAnons wants Assange hung, drawn, and quartered for his role in the 2010 "Collateral Murder" leak. However, they refuse to acknowledge any involvement from him in regards to not just delivering the DNC email dump that helped hand Trump his election win, but also the Podesta emails that formed the basis for the longest running conspiracy theory surrounding satanic pedophiles who torture children and drink their blood in an "adrenochrome" harvesting ritual. Supposed video evidence of this is purported to be contained on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.

Like everything Q and QAnon circulate though, it either doesn't exist or it is fraudulently constructed. The hostility from Q and QAnon toward Assange and Wikileaks however? That's clever, if nothing more than for the sole purpose of now keeping two assets linked back to Russia from being connected among the fevered egos of the adherents already walking a precariously thin line between faux-patriotism and treason.

Part 2 – The Crumbling Foundation

As the impeachment process lurched on toward its inevitable conclusion where the Democrats (save 2 who are “Democrats in name only”, and Tulsi Gabbard who is basically hedging her bets and voted “present”) voted to impeach, and the Republicans predictably voted in unison against. It was in the wake of this historic vote to protect a constitution under attack from the President and his administration that Christianity Today made the move to call for Trump’s removal from office.

In the article, CT’s editor Mark Galli runs through the reasons why he thinks Christians should turn their backs on Trump from a place of conviction and love. To be fair, this isn’t the first time that this particular publication has posted articles and commentary critical of the now impeached President, but only in such a way that it pushes people of faith to trust that God will answer prayers and guide the President to the right path.

Galli cites first and foremost the criminal charges Trump was impeached on, which is fair, he’s repeatedly committed criminal offences whilst in office and these are things that reflect upon a Christian’s morality when backing him. Despite his supreme court choices being reflective of a misguided perspective of what religious liberty looks like, as well as the apparently strong economy under 45/3. It’s only right that a Christian publication hold Trump to account for his breaches of morality.

The editorial goes further to connect the immorality of Trump to Bill Clinton, who was the president before him to be impeached for obstruction relating to his affair with an intern. Unfortunately, this is where the moral indignation ends, and here it is where we see again the Evangelical community and their obsession with sex. We see them invoke morality when sex is involved and someone of power has had an extra-marital affair and use this as the nail in the coffin for the argument for Trump’s removal.

Where then does this leave us in terms of anything that resembles a more holistic repudiation of Trump that raises issues of morality in relation to his treatment of asylum seekers? Of children being torn from their families? Of white supremacy? Of attitudes toward vulnerable minorities in his own country?

There is no mention of the over 5,400 children taken from their families by US immigration. No mention of the incitement of racial hatred that resulted in the deaths of American citizens and inspired a killer to open fire on a New Zealand mosque, nor the rallies where a white supremacist in Charlottesville drove his car into a crowd killing Heather Heyer. No condemnation of his emboldening of police to use excessive and lethal force on people of colour. No moral outrage over the increasing number of Americans in poverty.

You know, the things that Christ would have railed against, flipped tables over, and chased people out of the temples with a whip for. There’s no reflection upon the sermon of the mount, calling for a president to embody grace and compassion, and most importantly mercy.

There is none.

With the editorial from Christian Today we see the Evangelical publication maintain its insistence on Christianity being co-opted and distorted through the lens of both rich and white America, as well as the effectively gospel illiterate lower-class Republican voters.

This is the hill they’ve planted their cross upon, a particular cross that Jesus didn’t die upon…

But one fashioned from the guns and money they idolize so brazenly, and glistening with the constantly flowing blood of the innocent who die as a result of their beliefs.