Today's Quote
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Institute Of Information Management Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates(https://updatesonnews.substack.com)
He is a recipient of International Award/Recognition For Excellence In Data And Information Management, with 253 mentions on Academia(academia.edu)as at July 22nd, 2024.
More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Beautiful.
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Cornelius Hamelberg
By “ the holy bible” Chidi is here referring to the so-called “New Testament” and quoting Jesus of Nazareth, that “ No one lights a lamp and then hides it under somewhere ..etc
Somewhere else Jesus says, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
That’s what Israel is supposed to be : A light unto the nations
But instead of shining a light, what the whole world is witnessing is genocidal barbarity trying to extinguish the light , and about the barbarity, we will never agree:
Analysis | Netanyahu's Nine-minute Video Shows He Is Terrified and Will Stop at Nothing
“Netanyahu's statement carried all the unmistakable trademarks of his playbook: serial manipulation, lies, criminal messaging, and attempts to inflame his violent base. This performance marks a new and even more dangerous iteration of the threat he poses to Israeli democracy”
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1092253151898658
Bob Dylan : When something isn't right, it's wrong
If Jesus were to speak this same truth to power today, they would say that he was being “ antisemitic”
https://www.google.com/search?q=Dispute+Over+Whose+Children+Jesus%E2%80%99+Opponents+Are
Jesus “ You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
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Dr. Oohay
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Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Mr. Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA,
Just for the record , here's the telegram:
My sincere apologies, please.
Please accept.
It’s only out of respect
that I’m responding to you
and fully too.
As Teju Cole famously said, recently, over here in Stockholm, “When we talk about respecting people, it’s a practical demand, not a theoretical one”
I’d just like to add that “people” includes the Palestinian People, includes respecting the humanity of the Palestinian people who are also God’s people, just like you and me and
The Saro people say,” Tell fren (friend) true, noh pwell (spoil) fren”
This is degree of free speech observation is not necessarily “psychological warfare“,sos here goes: Even though you are sometimes humble, unnoticed by you, you may be getting too big for your so called poetic boots or may be thinking that undiluted support for the killing machine will get some influential cabal that jumped over Graham Greene because he was perceived to be too anti-American , that jumped over Philip Roth because he was perceived to be too American or as being too universally American as judged by e.g The Swedish Academy’s former Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl, and you may perhaps be feeling giddy or intoxicated with a new inflated sense of accomplishment, the “light” that I suppose you may be talking about, because of the fulsome praise by an unknown entity and readership such as AI, you may think that you're first in line of succession and that the Swedish Academy is about to jump over everybody including Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and award the next Nobel Prize in Literature to a dwarf eagle poet like you.
Disabuse yourself of such a wonderful idea and please don’t shuffle around thinking that, anymore
Me?
The last time I counted - and that was a few years ago, I had read the Five Books of Moses with diverse commentaries and so-called “ interpretations , at least twenty five times (25) and The Holy Quran , fourteen (14) times with diverse commentaries and interpretations including the first volume of Al-Mizan by Allamah Tabatabai.
Unfortunately, I have yet to read all the letters of Paul or John’s Book of Revelation
As for what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:15 and Luke 8:16, there’s nothing abstruse about that and of course you Chidi the poet may chew and digest your own interpretation/s, and nota bene : even if your miracle poetry turned darkness into light it wouldn’t bother me at all, not even if “She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black” or it’s merely Love Minus Zero / No limit
For a change, try being as thick-skinned as Elon Musk who I’m sure doesn't have the time to pay any mind to what a nutter like David Icke has been saying about him in this diatribe
Do you know who killed Umar Ibn Khattab ( radiallahu anhu) the conqueror of Jerusalem ? He was killed by his Persian slave : In 644 ʿUmar was attacked by an enslaved Persian Christian named Abū Luʾluʾah and died from his wounds three days later.
What happened ? Abū Luʾluʾah was complaining bitterly to his master Umar the Caliph and apparently Umar was not listening to him attentively , so Abū Luʾluʾah took out his dagger and daggered him. End of story. Feel free to learn a lesson from the story; you may even interpret it anyway you like…
Me?
I have followed latest developments in the Middle East very closely, almost on a daily basis, since early January 1986, and the only organisation that I have ever been a member of and in terms of any kind of financial commitment (putting your money where your mouth is) is an organisation that was promoting the interests of Jews Of The Baltic States of the Former Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, immediately after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Tallinn which is in Estonia/ Estland, when I visited the synagogue there, the caretaker Michael Friedeman who showed me around, asked me if I knew the difference between now and when Estonia was one of the Soviet Republics. I suggested what the difference could be : “Now you are free”;he smiled, and quoting Groucho Marx he said, “ It was close, but no cigar” - the correct answer to the question is that back then it was Marx and Lenin, now it’s Marks & Spencer.”
I told you that little story previously, HERE in this thread FWD : Calling Russia’s Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets U.S. Off the Hook
My purpose is not to offend you - and you should be strong enough to take, to bear, to put up with and to withstand whatever collateral damage may come your way for your unstinted support for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other crimes being committed against non-Biafran populations and other Palestinian and Arab sections of God’s creation, namely the Human Family.
“Clear the air! Clean the sky! Wash the wind!
Take the stone from the stone and wash them.
The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts
and ourselves defiled with blood.”
But please feel free to be offended -that's another freedom. You may even put me in stocks like the Prophet Jeremiah, if you don’t like what you hear and the rest of what I am about to say .
You are no doubt familiar with the saying “those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones”
Take note : I am the monarch of all I survey etc
When you’re my age and not as stupid
when you’re my age and like King David, still virile
and - relatively speaking, fragile
you are more careful with even the poetic
the colourful, the descriptive or prescriptive
ad hominem , no matter how weak, decrepit
thin-skinned or cowardly your opponent or enemy
at the literary and debating society may be
“I didn’t realize just what I did hear
I didn’t realize how young you were”( One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
I don’t suppose that you are familiar with Pope’s An Essay on Criticism
What about The Gestalt Prayer ?
Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West ?
Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations
Me attack you?
Not even if you were officially the Sleepy Joe Biden
Or the commander-in-chief of The Israel Defense Forces
Or Nigeria’s Poet Laureate chilling in Warri or Tel Aviv
Because I am infinitely less likely than you, to join
Islamic Jihad or Hamas or Hezbollah or some future Biafra
Or Biko Haram or Nigerian Armed Forces & Mobile Police
Me attack you?
Break your bones
As if my words are
Made out of stones?
One of the nursery rhymes I learned as a child, began, Sticks and stones may break my bones
To tell you the truth,
if I told you what was on my mind
Ojogbon wouldn’t print it
not even to have it floating around
idly, unattended, unread and uncomprehended
by you hanging like Saddam Hussein in cyberspace
I almost wrote “ outer space”
and not the Owerri Motor Park
or the other place
There’s the expression
You add to those two Jews
An unalloyed goy like you
And we probably have more than three
The same number as the holy trinity
About the difference or differences of opinion business
Consider : There was a time when nothing existed
Consider: There I was sitting at the Owerri Motor Park
With Say Tokyo Kid out of rizla and wanting to put
The finishing touches to his joint, a real rocket , so
What did he do? Come on baby light my fire, so
He tore off a page of the New Testament
And used that instead ( to wrap his spliff
Now, if the kindly Cardinal Arinze had been there preaching at your Owerri Motor Park, trying to save some souls, I suppose that he would have reprimanded Say Tokyo, and what would he or you say about a lesser crime than that, poetically speaking somebody ripping a leaf off your yet to be published poetry anthology and wiping his entire black arse with it ?
Finally, something most nice for Chidi of Owerri:
Salif Keita : Dery
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Cornelius Hamelberg
“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love” -
so begins The Canonization by John Donne
In the 21st century vernacular,
I say, for Christ’s sake, Opara
What's all this about?
I still just don’t get it.
You posted a quote of what Jesus said / is reported to have said, I commented on the post , even applied it - applied his yardstick to the very contemporary reality, barbarity, the most accurate word that’s available in the English Language to describe the evil that God’s so-called “chosen people” are still doing in Gaza.
Here’s an opinion piece by the eloquent Femi Fani-Kayode giving us his synoptic bird's eye view of A history of Zionist atrocities which should elicit less eloquent prose and more unpoetic sanctimonious twaddle from the likes of Opara and maybe, if he has the time for it, some hell, brimstone and fire from my friend Ted Belman, the commander-in-chief of ISRAPUNDIT .
Talking about friends, old friends, I wonder how Paul Eidelberg is doing
Question : What’s in my response to your posting that warrants such sanctimonious twaddle from you, about “my”, as you say “ interpretation of the quote” ?
Light, means light - what Jesus said is clear and straightforward; did I interpret it? Does the clear meaning of that quote need to be interpreted ? Where did I Interpret it ? And do you for example need to interpret the clear text of The Ten Commandments - thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal etc?
By the way, - just for the record, talking about light, the most difficult novel that I have read so far is - Light - by Torgny Lindgren - the marvellous Torgny Lindrgen who wrote Bathsheba - a must read for the author’s imaginative insights and his human portrayal of King David and Bathsheba etc )
Of course, I don’t know what your interpretation of that Jesus quote is , and , by all means you are entitled to be defined by whatever beliefs and opinions you hold , what you say and what you do; you don’t have to rehash Voltaire who you probably first encountered the day before yesterday, the Voltaire who famously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” and throw it in my face , because that’s the point that ‘s being made, that you are entitled to your opinion, so is Jesus, so am I, and not only “ in a civilized setting like here”
Indeed, “ The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” and it’s no surprise that sitting over there in your Owerri Motor Park, you may also believe yourself to be “civilised “. I have no doubt that you probably are , and so is the allusive Bob Dylan ; as for me, I have no problem with civilisation - or with reading The Jerusalem Post and the left wing Haaretz ( by the way, just in case , you could check out the meaning of Am ha'aretz ) and me? I’m just a regular jungle African - not House, and not Field; I said JUNGLE.
Your short treatise culminates in the word enemy
Take note, this is a friendly letter ; just like you, I'm also capable of changing gear, poetic gears that can evade all censorship
I can imagine you as an MP in the British House of Commons ( “a civilised setting”) debating immigration with Kemi Badenoch and George Galloway or better still debating poetry and civilisation with Nigel Farage …
In Islam, there’s the concept of Love and hate for the sake of Allah
When it comes to the Hebrew Faith there’s this constant reminder via the interpretative translation of some of the 613 Commandments :
37. Not to love the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
38. Not to cease hating the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
39. Not to save the missionary—Deuteronomy 13:9
40. Not to say anything in his defense—Deuteronomy 13:9
41. Not to refrain from incriminating him—Deuteronomy 13:9
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/756399/jewish/The-613-Commandments-Mitzvot.htm
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA
Cornelius Hamelberg
Idiot,
When someone talks about you
or does a written or oral review,
is he or she not promoting you?
Academia: "252 Papers Mention Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM, CDOA"
That must give a tremendous boost to your hungry ego, hungering and thirsting for more ogogoro : Over 252 academic papers mentioning you must surely give a boost to some claim to fame, and that's what you want us all to know, right ? You want to give us the impression that in 2024 you are among the shakers and movers. Chidi the new kid on the block! Hosanna ! You’re the new Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney, and that’s why you’re keeping us posted, that you’re Nigeria’s budding T.S. Eliot , and if not quite that yet , we should at least know that in 2024 you are among the Nigerian poets to watch out for.
There’s no harm or haram in blowing your own horn and promoting yourself in this internet technology era, Mr Opara, FIIM, CDOA
I understand that you recently learned the word divergent - a word that no one has a monopoly over, I also understand that it sounds academic, belongs to BIG ENGLISH and does not belong to the unusual pidgin. Please, if I may humbly ask, how do you translate “divergent” into Nigerian pidgin?
You “ will never see (me) or any other with a divergent opinion as an enemy.”
As if on some higher plane, we are having a philosophical argument and in this chasm of existence, suddenly there’s an enormous gulf between us, a breakdown in good relations because of a trivial or not so trivial difference of opinion.
Your misunderstanding or incomprehension of a simple text or a straightforward line of poetry - in this case your quote of Jesus resulted in this reaction from me in response to which you babble on here and I still don’t know what you’re talking about
You’re not exactly a spring chicken either since you were born on the 8th of August, 1963, barely 29 months old at the start of that heinous mass slaughter known as the January 15, 1966 Nigerian coup d'état and later, almost four years old at the start of the Biafran war (July 6, 1967 – January 15, 1970) which means that you could have been one of the starving urchins caught up in that war and that’s why it’s difficult to understand what comes across on this your poetic platform as a complete lack of empathy for the children that are being starved in Gaza , about the STARVATION IN GAZA
I have had the opportunity of talking to and keeping the company of quite a few survivors of The Holocaust/ The Shoah, I am acquainted with some of the vast literature, the history, histories, including witness testimonies , it’s only the films including documentary films about the Holocaust that I don’t have the stomach for. In Sweden our Prime Minister was the power behind issuing a small book titled TELL YE YOUR CHILDREN - which I think should be distributed in Nigerian schools. In Nigeria, I listened to many first person accounts of the Biafra War which I followed in real-time on an almost weekly basis whilst it was actually raging, listened to a couple of Ojukwu’s broadcasts live and direct with Igbo students, whilst the war was raging on, celebrated the end of the war in my second week in Ghana, in January 1970…
In that piece by Yomi Chibuikem Folaranmi about Soyinka’s Abiku poem that I posted, he invokes that Keatsian term “ negative capability” which I cannot and hesitate to apply to anything - any of the snippets that I have come across by you , so far, speak less of empathy, lest you misunderstand what you yourself are saying and start braying about human rights to hold divergent opinions. As Mr Inyang, my geography teacher in the third form used to protest when we corrected him, “ Pronunciations vary !”; in retrospect, I imagine Mister Opara the poet ( I almost wrote parrot) would have come to the rescue, on his behalf telling us, “ it is your opinion, though divergent from mine, but I respect your right to hold that opinion. I will even fight to defend that fundamental right of yours to hold even a different opinion from mine. I will never see you or any other with a divergent opinion as an enemy.“
There are people dying and indifference is not just a matter of “a difference of opinion”
Mr Shlomo Berlinger once told me that every question is a moral question
My objection to the carnage in Gaza is not merely “a difference of opinion” ,nor is what I think of the Nazis, and The Nuremberg Laws and The Nuremberg Trials
Check this out , roll back as many months as you can:
https://www.facebook.com/vjeko.benzon
