Silence in the face of evil -- the Middle East conflict David Meir-Levi (06/21/2007)
I am continuously puzzled by the fact that so few commentators on the topic of the Middle East conflict turn their attention to what I call the great moral divide.
It seems to me that this moral divide should be a really big factor in how westerners look at the dynamics of the conflict. Instead, it is almost never mentioned; and in fact, in my opinion many commentators assiduously avoid dealing with it, intentionally obfuscate it, or even lie about it.
Such obstructionist behavior makes me feel that the great moral divide must be really important....otherwise commentators would not be so reticent to deal with it.
As I see it, there are two aspects to the moral divide:
1.) What the Arab terrorists (*) do, say they want to do, and boast about what they have done or are going to do.....is all really evil by any standard of western morality. No matter how it is spun by the various pundits and journalists and politicians and clergy and academicians and pseudo-statespersons who serve as cheerleaders for the terrorists, the obvious bottom line behavior and goals, based upon the terrorists' own words and deeds, are:
genocide, attempted genocide, incitement to genocide, diatribe of genocide,
targeting of civilians for murder, attempted murder, mass murder, attempted mass murder,
kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, of Israelis and other non-Muslims
suicide/homicide,
hate speech, hate preach, hate teach,
pressing women and children in to terrorist service (some times without their knowledge and/or against their will),
theft, embezzlement, re-directing/mis-directing billions of dollars from intended civilian beneficiaries to terrorist activities or to secret private accounts,
routine running of criminal activities, auto theft, extortion, kidnapping their own for ransom,
and international trafficking of weapons and hard drugs for profits to fund terrorism,
impoverishing a whole population so that foreign aid can be embezzled and used for terrorism,
denying a whole population its civil and human rights and its right to political self-determination via the democratic processes promised it by the UN and the USA and Israel.........
..........all of these are galactic violations of a host of international legislation regarding civil and human rights, international laws of war, international interdictions regarding genocide, international conventions, and internationally canonized rights of women and children and non-combatants.
All of these are just plain evil.
And all of these are the defining characteristics of the Arab terrorists and various Moslem and Arab governmental authorities which support and fund and shelter and train and arm the terrorists.
The Arab Palestinian terrorist cause is the only cause in the world, and across all of world history, for which the sole defining paradigm is terrorism, and the unique and unrelenting goal is the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of its people. It is obvious that such a cause cannot be a just cause. But even if it were, its methods are evil, its intentions are evil, its aspirations are evil, its words are evil, and its deeds are evil. The Palestinian terrorist movement is just plain evil(*).
Silence (obfuscation and justification all the more so) in the face of evil is complicity. Complicity with evil is evil.
The Palestinian terrorists and their cheerleaders are evil.(**)
2.) What many of the leaders (*)of many Arab and some non-Arab Moslem states say and do and teach and preach in support of the Palestinian Arab terrorists is evil.
Openly, knowingly, enthusiastically cheering and supporting and harboring and funding and training and deploying evil is evil.
Never before, in all of human history, has there been such massive expenditures of money, resources, human efforts, and energy that many Arab and some Moslem state leaders have been making, for over three-quarters of a century, in order to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jews; either with their own forces, or by support of proxy Arab terrorist forces. Even the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe never reached the multi-national dimensions and umpteen billions of dollars of expenditures and endless relentless international propaganda campaigns of Arab leaders and Arab states -- and all for the sole purpose of destroying one small nation and its Jewish citizenry.
Where else in the world, and in all of human history, do we find the leaders of so many sovereign states endlessly diverting resources, for decades, from their own people, and neglecting their own people's needs, in order to eradicate a sovereign state?
Where else in the world, and across all of human history, do we see such enormous energy poured into international collaboration for the propagation of the PR and propaganda and revisionist history and political machinations and mendacious mis-information that have characterized the Arab political and propaganda assaults on Israel? And these assaults have been maintained within the family of nations and at the UN and in the intellectual arenas of the Western world, for decades ...and all with the sole intent to demonize Israel so that it will lose the support of its allies, and thus be easier prey when its Arab enemies are ready to launch their great final jihad?
The sheer obscenity of such a heinous endeavor is beyond description; but no one seems willing to comment on the pure evil of such design.
Consider too the commitment that these state leaders have made to an education system that systematically demonizes Israel and Israelis (and in some cases Jews and Judaism), in order to create in the minds of their youth (today's sophomore is tomorrow's Senator) the cross-generational trajectory that will keep the evil alive far in to the future, and will provide justification for those evil expenditures and evil goals.
Teaching children to hate is child abuse raised to the level of public policy. Child abuse is evil.
And consider the cost of the lost opportunities. What would the Middle East look like today if Arab leaders had been willing to cooperate with the Zionists in the application of western agrarian technology, medicine, epidemiology, industrial technology, and science in general, to the Arab waste lands and to the impoverished peasantry who barely eked out a subsistence living on those waste lands? And how much more so, had neighboring Arab states been willing to make peace with, and work with, and build with, both Israel and the state of "Palestine" which would have come into existence with the UN partition plan of 11/29/1947?
Look at the sand dunes 8 miles north of Jaffa in 1911. Then look at Tel Aviv today, built on those sand dunes. Something similar could have happened in the desert south of Damascus, in the waste land north of Amman, in parts of the Sinai desert east of Egypt, on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, and more, had Arab leaders chosen to work with Zionists rather than try to exterminate them.
The cold, bitter, implacable, brutal, primitive and baseless hatred that so many in the Arab world bear toward Israel, Israelis, Zionism, Jews and Judaism – that hatred is evil. And those Arab leaders who nurture this hatred, and who use it to run others, for decades -- they are evil. And evil too are their intellectual collaborators in both Arab and western nations, who try to spin for us a new pseudo-reality in which that hatred has “just cause” and that terrorism is spawned by “real grievances”.
Baseless brutal hatred is evil. And all the more so when it impels the haters toward violence and war and destruction and terrorism and mass murder and genocide.
But what about Israel? Judging from the level of hysteria in the endless anti-Israel diatribe from the UN and much of the media and mosques in Muslim and western countries, one might conclude that Israel is the world’s worst violator of human rights -- far surpassing China or North Korea or Libya or Arabia or Cuba or Venezuela or Iran or Russia or any of the failed states whose misdeeds have been documented but have drawn no ire from the civilized world.
Certainly there are evil people among Jews, Israelis, Zionists, as there are among all groups across the world. Israel as a state, and Zionists as active participants in the creation of that state, have done some bad things, some times, to some people, as have all states at some time, somewhere.
But there is a radical and substantive difference between a state doing some bad things, making some mistakes, harming some people…..and a state or group whose core intentions and goals and methods and deeds and official policies are evil.
No state is perfect. No society is flawless. And this is certainly true of Israel as a state and as a society. But even if all the lies that Arab PR and propaganda have perpetrated about Israel were true (they are not, but even if they were), the fate that the Arab terrorists, and their state enablers, and their mendacious cheerleaders, all avidly seek for Israel would not be justified. The extermination of an entire people cannot be justified, ever, except in the hearts and minds of truly evil people.
No Jewish leader, no Zionist leader, no Israeli leader, ever, during the entire history of Zionism and the State of Israel, ever perpetrated the heinous acts which are par for the course in the Palestinian Arab war against Israel: acts which are the hallmarks of the Arab terrorists and their enablers; and which are part of the very core of Arab political and religious ideology.
Yet, almost no one discusses the sheer evil of the Arab anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) program. It is as though the Arabs get a free pass to be evil, and to do evil and arouse no ire save that of their victims.
Consider the long and discouraging list of utterly evil actions in Victor Davis Hanson’s essay (“When should we no longer support Israel?” Victorhanson.com, March 30, 2004) which characterize Palestinian terrorism and terrorist government:
“……we should no longer support Israel, when:
Mr. Sharon suspends all elections and plans a decade of unquestioned rule.
Mr. Sharon suspends all investigation about fiscal impropriety as his family members spend millions of Israeli aid money in Paris.
All Israeli television and newspapers are censored by the Likud party.
Israeli hit teams enter the West Bank with the precise intention of targeting and blowing up Arab women and children.
Pre-teen Israeli children are apprehended with bombs under their shirts on their way to the West Bank to murder Palestinian families.
Israeli crowds rush into the street to dip their hands into the blood of their dead and march en masse chanting mass murder to the Palestinians.
Rabbis give public sermons in which they characterize Palestinians as the children of pigs and monkeys.
Israeli school textbooks state that Arabs engage in blood sacrifice and ritual murders.
Mainstream Israeli politicians, without public rebuke, call for the destruction of Palestinians on the West Bank and the end to Arab society there.
Likud party members routinely lynch and execute their opponents without trial.
Jewish fundamentalists execute with impunity women found guilty of adultery on grounds that they are impugning the honor of the family.
Israeli mobs with impunity tear apart Palestinian policemen held in detention.
Israeli television broadcasts to the tune of patriotic music the last taped messages of Jewish suicide bombers who have slaughtered dozens of Arabs.
Jewish marchers parade in the streets with their children dressed up as suicide bombers, replete with plastic suicide-bombing vests.
New Yorkers post $25,000 bounties for every Palestinian blown up by Israeli murderers.
Israeli militants murder a Jew by accident and then apologize on grounds that they thought he was an Arab, to the silence of Israeli society.
Jews enter Arab villages in Israel to machine gun women and children.
Israeli public figures routinely threaten the United States with terror attacks.
Bin Laden is a folk hero in Tel Aviv.
Jewish assassins murder American diplomats and are given de facto sanctuary by Israeli society.
Israeli citizens celebrate on news that 3,000 Americans have been murdered.
Israeli citizens express support for Saddam Hussein’s supporters in Iraq in their efforts to kill Americans.
So until then, I think most Americans can see the moral differences in the present struggle.
If the Palestinians wish to hold periodic and open elections, establish an independent judiciary, create a free press, arrest murderers, subject their treasury to public scrutiny, eschew suicide murdering, censure religious leaders who call for mass murder, embrace non-violent dissidents, extend equal rights to women, end honor killings, raise funds in the Arab world earmarked only to build water, sewer, transportation, and education infrastructure, and pledge that any Jews who choose to live in the West Bank will enjoy the same rights as Arabs in Israel…………then they might find Americans equally divided over questions of land and peace.
But all that is a lot of ifs. And so for the present, Palestinian leaders should not be too surprised that Americans increasingly find very little in their society that has much appeal to either our values or sympathy. If they continually assure us publicly that they are furious at Americans, then they should at least pause, reflect, and ask themselves why an overwhelming number of Americans, not Jewish, not residents of New York, not influenced by the media, are growing far more furious with them.”
As Dr. Hanson notes, were these atrocities perpetrated by Israelis, the world would rise up in righteous ire, heaping calumny on Israel. They are typical of the Palestinian terrorist government -- and the world is silent.
And, not surprisingly, the same is true of Arab much ballyhooed and state-supported Holocaust denial.
Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an alleged and invented story with no basis."
Such Arab viewpoints are not exceptional. A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers. The records of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show that only one Arab leader at or near the highest level of government -- a young prince from a Persian Gulf state -- has ever made an official visit to the museum in its 13-year history. Not a single official textbook or educational program on the Holocaust exists in an Arab country. In Arab media, literature and popular culture, Holocaust denial is pervasive and legitimized. (Robert Satloff, “The Holocaust’s Arab Heroes”, Washington Post, 10.8.06).
This denial, criminal in some countries in the West, is standard government policy in many Arab and some Moslem countries.
Finally, consider as well the tragic fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where anti-government demonstrations can muster up to 400,000 (June, 1982) proclaiming their opposition to a war (in this case it was the Lebanon war), even as the Palestinian Arab terrorists in Lebanon rain terrorist rockets on civilian communities. Has there ever been an anti-war demonstration in any Arab country, anywhere, at any time?
Israel is the only country in the Middle East where anti-war activists can demonstrate outside of the Parliament building against the closure of crossing points in to Gaza (because it makes life harder for the Gazan Arabs), even as Hamas’ Qassam rockets from Gaza rain down on Sederoth.
That fact, perhaps more than any other, depicts for us the great moral divide in this conflict.
David Meir-Levi
=============================================================
(*) Nota Bene! I'm talking ONLY about Arab terrorists, and the state leaders who support them, and the rank-and-file terrorists who join their terrorist groups, and the broader population throughout the world which supports them.
I am NOT talking about your average Arab/Moslem man-on-the-street, regular person, nice civilian, non-terrorist, non-militant, who (I presume) wants nothing more than to lead a normal life, raise crops and a family, give his kids a good start in life, and leave the world a bit better off than he found it....same as you and I.
=============================================================
(**)And the evil is not limited to the Arab – Israel conflict. Arab attacks on Arab healthcare workers, misuse of the neutrality of Arab patients and ambulances, destruction and violence and genocide of Moslem against Moslem in Sudan (Darfur as well as South Sudan), Iraq, Mauritania, Yemen, Algeria, Somalia, Lebanon, and Gaza, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- this evil abounds throughout the Moslem world and has been a characteristic of the Moslem world since the days of the first Caliphs. And the common thread through all of these calamities is the deep-seated religious and racial intolerance that causes Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis to massacre each other in mosques and markets and funerals and weddings, drives the ethnic cleansing of Darfur that has resulted in deaths and displacement by the hundreds of thousands, and the bona fide genocide in south Sudan which has resulted in the deaths of more than two million black African Christians and animists.
