Shmuel Trigano, one of the most astute and penetrating critics of the French scene today, author of many books (helas only in French), the most recent of which is l’Avenir des Juifs de France [The Future of the Jews in France] (Grasset, 2006) and president of l’Observatoire du monde juif, director of the monthly journal, Controverses, has just published an article on media manipulation in, of all newspapers, the French daily Liberation.
Manipulés, les médias réactivent le mythe antisémite du Juif tueur d’enfants.
Guerre, mensonges et vidéos
Par Shmuel TRIGANO
QUOTIDIEN : Jeudi 31 août 2006 - 06:00
Mais où êtes-vous ? Où sont les grandes âmes, le scandale ? Le déclarations des plus hautes autorités politiques du monde ? Depuis le 1 août, je cherche désespérément dans les colonnes des journaux et sur les écrans la condamnation du bombardement d’un orphelinat par l’armée sri-lankaise dans sa lutte contre le mouvement terroriste des Tigres tamouls Quarante-trois écolières tuées, soixante autres blessées. Pas seize enfant sur vingt-huit morts, comme à Cana. On ne peut qu’être abasourdi devant l différence de traitement. Les victimes arabo-musulmanes seraient-elles plu précieuses que les autres ? Pas nécessairement, car qui s’émeut de meurtres de masse perpétrés en Irak par des Arabes sur d’autres Arabes Non ce qui est en question, c’est Israël ou, plus exactement, les Juifs.
No indignation about Sri Lankans bombing an orphanage in their struggle with Tamil Tigers (also famous for their suicide attacks), nor over the death of Arab civilians in Iraq by “insurgents,” but Qana… This is precisely what Charles Jacobs calls “The Human Rights Complex” — it’s not the victim that counts, nor how much the victim has suffered. It’s certain kind of perps who incite indignation.
And it shows. The Israelis, who hold themselves and are held to exceptional standards, know where every bomb goes, and can give maps and legal accountings for their every use of restricted ordinance. By contrast, the Sri Lankans comment on claims that they have killed 48 girls and wounded 60 with:
A military source admitted that air raids had been launched on rebel territory this morning but said they had no details of targets hit or casualties.
Can you imagine the pages of Counterpunch if the Israelis said that?
Toute personne sensée aura remarqué, depuis l’année 2000, quelque chose d’étrange dans les images du conflit : la centralité de la figure de l’enfant, des corps sanguinolents des victimes d’Israël. Il suffit d’ouvrir la télévision française pour voir le projecteur braqué uniquement sur les civils libanais alors que l’image d’Israël se résume à des blindés, des avions ou des soldats. Aucune société civile n’est visible : ni les dégâts matériels, ni les victimes et les drames. Pas de corps ensanglantés, ni de blessés, ni de cadavres ou de cercueils. Ce choix ne fait que réactiver une idée antisémite très archaïque : les Juifs tuent des enfants. Dans l’Antiquité, ils étaient accusés de cannibalisme, au Moyen Age et encore aujourd’hui dans le monde arabe de crimes rituels.
Trigano, who looks at historical developments in attitudes towards Jews (and more broadly, religiosity) has put his finger on something crucial here. There are periods — one can chronicle many of them — when Christians and Muslims become susceptible to a story of Jewish malevolence which, despite its wildly concocted nature, has a fatal attraction for the non-Jews. One of the big periods for this kind of thirst for blood libel was the turn of the 1900s, the period that generated Zionism. In 1892, the Russian Ahad Ha’am spoke of the blood libels as the dominant motif of the day: Gentiles ask rhetorically about the accusations: “Is it possible for the whole world to be wrong and the Jews to be right?” In 1896, Herzl, looking at enlightened France’s delirium over Dreyfus, called for a Zionist Congress. Between 1900 and 1905, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forged.
And now, today, we are witness to a new round, this time played out on the global scale with global media, through a peculiar (and deadly) narrative about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
And the last episode, of course, was the coverage of the Israeli-Lebanese war, with the Lebanese victims and Israeli aggressors. It’s the kind of coverage that, while present in Israel and the USA, actually dominates most of Europe and much of academia, a bizarre and deeply troubling affair between “leftist” radical/revolutionary ideology and the demopathic discourse of global jihad: freedom, dignity, down with the American hegemon. Not coincidentally, the date at which the “radical left” and the global jihadis joined forces publicly and enthusiastically was October 2000, which also marks the beginning of Europe’s “Muslim Street.”
La fabrication délirante de ce mensonge suit les mêmes chemins qu’au Moyen Age. Affabulations et «mystères de la foi» mettent en scène et «prouvent» le meurtre, en construisant de toutes pièces une narration, un exemplum édifiant, comme l’a si bien analysé Marie-France Rouart dans le Crime rituel ou le sang de l’autre (Berg International, 1997.). Le récent scandale (vite étouffé) de la photo truquée de Beyrouth en flammes, diffusée par l’agence Reuters, face émergée d’un ensemble de trucages, nous montre comment l’ exemplum est fabriqué avec des images, alors qu’auparavant on agençait des mots pour mettre en forme le fantasme.
Par exemple, cette photo du magazine US News où l’on voit un terroriste du Hezbollah en pose guerrière devant un avion israélien abattu et en flammes : examinée de plus près, la photo révèle en fait l’incendie d’un dépôt d’ordures. Le trucage de l’image du réel est le plus souvent moins grossier : ce n’est pas la photo qui se voit manipulée mais son angle ou sa composition, avant prise de vue. Le spectacle des destructions de Beyrouth est ainsi surdimensionné. Ce sont toujours les mêmes prises de vue qui passent en boucle à la télé, pour donner une impression d’étendue. Le spectateur innocent pense que tout Beyrouth est en flammes. Comment saura-t-il que, en dehors du quartier qui sert de QG au Hezbollah, les gens vont à la plage ou sont attablés aux cafés ? Ou alors, on place, comme à Cana, dans une photo de destruction, un objet insolite : un nounours (bizarrement très propre au milieu des gravats), une robe de mariée (très blanche), un petit Mickey (très coloré)… La suggestion est ici encore plus forte que des cadavres: l’enfant absent, la jeune mariée promise aubonheur mais déplacée… On n’a jamais vu les «combattants» du Hezbollah, ni leurs bunkers systématiquement placés au milieu des civils, utilisés comme boucliers «moraux». On a gommé le caractère de milice fasciste du parti, ses provocations, ses tirs centrés sur la population civile israélienne.
This is crucial. The ability of the media to frame the story so it looks like what we’re being told it is — Beirut destroyed — is systematically exploited by people who know just what horrifies us most, the death of innocents. We don’t see them, partly because they manipulate our emotions and we look away. To question the authenticity of the tragic death of innocents is such bad taste!
Ce sur quoi il faut attirer l’attention de l’opinion, c’est la résurgence de l’accusation du meurtre rituel, c’est-à-dire le retour d’un stéréotype antisémite classique. Il est sciemment mis en oeuvre, de façon massive, par les médias arabes : la mort filmée «en direct» de Mohammed al-Dura à Gaza, puis Jénine, puis la plage de Gaza, puis Cana. Nous avons là une série d’événements pour le moins douteux quant à leur réalité exacte, qui nous sont parvenus à travers une mise en scène théâtrale par des reporters sous le contrôle de l’Autorité palestinienne, du Hamas ou du Hezbollah. Filmer dans ces régions dépend en effet, comme tous les journalistes le savent, de l’autorisation des pouvoirs en place, qui exercent un étroit contrôle sur les images et les accréditations qu’ils donnent aux reporters.
The degree of intimidation is, I suspect, as intense as is the denial of most journalists. The Fox reporters are again only the beginning. The media seem very much like dhimmi towards Arabs/Muslims and the products of their media, eager to be ingratiating and not to challenge them. This is not merely either ideological or pathological, it’s simple pragmatism in a culture where violence lies just below the surface.
Des simulations sont créées de toutes pièces au point que certains experts, comme le professeur Richard Landes, de la Boston University, parlent aujourd’hui des studios de «Pallywood» (du mot «Palestine»).
Thank you for the plug. With such a kind introduction, let me take the point one step further. Someday, we’ll be able to write an article entitled: “The early directors of Pallywood: The Golden Years, 1982-2006.”
A voir les photos les unes après les autres, on retrouve souvent, dans des situations différentes, les mêmes acteurs, jouant des rôles différents. Quoi qu’il en soit de la réalité exacte des différentes affaires et il ne s’agit pas ici de justifier tout , on constate qu’un scénario du type du légendaire «génocide de Jénine» (56 morts parmi les milices palestiniennes contre 23 soldats israéliens, au terme d’un combat au corps à corps pour éviter les victimes civiles) sous-tend tous ces exemples. Un scandale mondial est à chaque fois orchestré par les médias, avant que l’examen des faits n’en réduise la portée, et toujours en isolant comme par enchantement l’événement de son contexte et de la guerre menée contre les populations civiles israéliennes, sans doute, elle, jugée «juste». Entre-temps, l’impact a
été gravé dans l’imaginaire collectif. Le plus terrible est que cette camelote puisse trouver acheteur dans la gent médiatique occidentale sans aucun recul critique.
Precisely. The worst is that these fevered nightmarish narratives, designed to create hatred and incite to violence, are done so shoddily. How is possible that such cheap and obvious fakes should find such a vast audience in the western media?
Comment les journalistes peuvent-ils sous-traiter enquêtes et reportages auprès d’acteurs engagés dans le conflit aux côtés de mouvements totalitaires ? Que recherchent-ils ? Le spectacle brut et violent ? Les belles images ? Se rendent-ils compte que celles-ci incitent à la haine et au meurtre ?
That’s the hope — that the people in the media don’t realize what they’re doing. Because if they did, and did it anyway, on purpose!, that would be terrible… as terrible as the Palestinian accusations of crimes about the Israelis which, so far, our media uncritically replicates.
Le mal est profond, car la facilité avec laquelle de nombreux médias acceptent ce récit montre que subsiste un fond archaïque, toujours vivace. Le discours sur Israël est hanté par une forme nouvelle de l’antisémitisme, un antisémitisme compassionnel qui se focalise sur la «victime» des Juifs, forcément innocente et pure comme un enfant, sans pour autant formuler directement le nom du bourreau cruel et inhumain que sa victime désigne. Un antisémitisme «par défaut», que la moralité conforte.
The mal (sickness, evil) is deep, because the facility with which so many media accept this tale shows that there is an archaic bedrock, still lively. The discourse about Israel is haunted by a new form of antisemitism, a compassionate antisemitism that focuses on the “victim” of the Jews, automatically innocent and pure like a child, not explicitly naming the cruel and inhuman executioner which his victim designates. An anti-semitism “by default” conforted by morality.
Not sure what the last lines mean, although one reading might imply that the obsession with the victim of the Jew is part of a larger discourse intended to make of the Jew (the inhuman executioner of this tale), the victim of “justice.”
In any case, whether or not we call this anti-semitism or anti-judaism (I prefer the latter for most of the European part of this folly, the latter for the radical left and the jihadis), it sure is Judeophobia. And it’s dangerous not just for the Jews, but for the people foolish enough to believe these tales, and thereby throw open their gates to the worst hatreds and violence.
However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy.
This statement presumably reflects complete credence in the dominant Mainstream Media version of events in Lebanon. You, Mr Gaarder, have taken as accurate that which the Arab photographers and journalists who consider themselves combatants in the war against Israel have produced, the echoed by your media, who are addicted to the narrative of the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian (and now Lebanese) David. Given the gathering mountain of evidence that many of these images are fabricated – especially those at Qana, which is presumably the major provocation for your prophetic outrage – don’t you think you need to pause before jumping in with both feet?
Israel’s “unscrupulous art of war” here is nothing other than the selective and credulous attribution of accuracy to what Arab media produce. Few statements better illustrate why Pallywood works: it appeals to precisely this thirst for ammunition to use against Israel. How treacherous the ground on which your moral indignation stands!
It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.
Again we find the classic tropes of “progressive” anti-Zionism, invoking interpretations of international law as if they were already decided, and a UN whose deep corruption on both an ideological and fiscal scale goes unmentioned. This statement is a good example of a trajectory that we can draw from Muhammad al Durah to Durban to Jenin to the divestment and boycott campaigns. I understand you feel fully justified in your position. But as we shall see, not only is there important evidence you are mistaken, but that if you are, the consequences are truly frightening for everything you hold dear.
We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.
This is choice language. Although you claim this is a warning, your judgment of Israel is remorseless. No turning back, no mercy, no relenting… and from a man who claims the moral high ground. Add to it the extraordinary claim that by laying down its arms Israel will have peace, or perhaps you mean that Israel will be destroyed but the world shall have peace. Do you, Mr. Gaarder, really believe this? Most Israelis would find this really malicious double-speak. But maybe it’s a reflection of some profound confusion, some feverish pacifist dream divorced from all reality.
Again, please put on your scientist’s thinking cap: What if the Israelis are not the problem? Will feeding them into the maw of global Jihad quiet the flames? Did giving Hitler Czechoslovakia work? If you are wrong, you have not only sacrificed the Jews – again! – but at your own peril. Does it make sense to be so supremely confident in your (and your media’s) judgment when so much is at stake, both existentially and morally?
Without defense, without skin
May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.
I take this as a partial answer to my question. Spirit and word obviously applies to the moral spirit and the thunderous words with which you, Mr. Gaarder and your approving audience believe you all speak. May you have the power of the word to bring down Israel’s (evil) defenses.
Israel is (read: should be) without defense, without skin… in other words, the way the Jews were before the Holocaust, during the times of pogroms which, you have assured us, were the justifiable reason for a Jewish state that could defend itself. Now, because in defense of their people, Jews have killed some civilians – again, nothing that any country at war has not done – you want them defenseless again. Defenseless Jews certainly appealed to the Judeophobes of the Middle Ages who legislated that they could not bear weapons.
Here’s where we come to the crux of the issue of judgment about what is happening in the Middle East. The Israelis believe that they are surrounded by genocidal enemies. You, Mr. Gaarder, seem completely unaware of the evidence for this: are you aware of this. Have you ever visited Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI to see how the Arab and Muslim media speak of Israel and of Jews? If this is even partially true, then the defenseless posture you call for is a recipe for the slaughter of Jews. Of course no less a moral giant than Gandhi advised Ben Gurion to try non-violent resistance to the Nazis. Are you suggesting the same? Why not suggest it to the Lebanese? Disarm entirely and Israel will never again attack you.
And yet, even as you call for a situation that will likely trigger massive civilian massacres – just what your morality abhors – you add a touching concern for the “civilian individuals” of Israel, may “the world” have mercy on them. Never mind that the surrounding enemies of Israel do not think there are any civilians and want to kill them all. Again we are faced with two possibilities: you genuinely pray for mercy for the Jews in Israel even as you demand that they be defenseless, in which case you are at best a fool; or this is hypocritical piety, crocodile tears shed as a moral posture even as you demand the holocaust of the Jews you so despise.
We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.
I’m sure the people of Israel are touched by your pious wishes, and I hope you can understand if they don’t rush to thank you for your benevolence.
And if you don’t like the moral taste of Jaffa oranges, please, take them from some other country you think is morally superior to Israel… hopefully at least a place with no capital punishment. But while you’re at it, let me recommend that you watch out for the poisons that flood the media you so readily imbibe. They may be far more toxic, and their effects far more dangerous.
They celebrate their triumphs
We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.
Now we return to the theological subtext of your moral tirade, and we find familiar phenomena: gross ignorance and malevolent projection. In particular, the phrase “We do not believe…” is quite striking. On what basis do you not believe? Because the Israelis who apologize look like used car salesmen? Or because it is so vitally important to your moral outrage that they have done this killing on purpose – murder – that you cannot allow them the possibility that it was both accidental and regrettable? Why do you believe whatever the Lebanese sources – partisan, manipulated, and/or intimidated by Hizbullah – tell you, but you refuse to believe Israeli spokesmen, even on so personal issue as their feelings?
Some of the answer seems to come with your immediate switch to the biblical account; and here we come face to face with your (unconscious?) supersessionism. The invocation of the Israelite celebration at punishment meted out to Egypt is particularly interesting. First, the only incident you can refer to relates the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Re(e)d sea, since at no other time in the narrative do the Israelites rejoice over the plagues that Pharaoh sends (they even shared some of them). Apparently you are not aware of the famous rabbinic tale of how the angels came to sing their morning song and God rebuked them, saying: “Forbear! My children [the Egyptians] are in distress, and you would sing!” This is the basis of considerable discussion both religious and political.
So, if we have this level of scruple over the enemy’s soldiers who planned to slaughter and enslave them, why would you, Mr. Gaarder, dismiss so blithely any protests of Israelis that they do not rejoice in the deaths of innocent Arabs? On what basis do you “note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs”? Do you have any evidence of this? Are you aware of how often the Arabs celebrate? Do you care?
Is it that believing the blood libel – Jews murder innocent gentile children – is too important to let relevant information get in the way? Or is it that, however you feel about “fundamentalist” Christianity, you still accept their version of the Jews, no matter how that image has been distorted by a chosenness concept that cannot see the Jews for what they are, but needs to see them as the negative “other”?
Certainly, your confident dismissal of what the Israelis say about themselves, and your resounding silence about what Israel’s Muslim enemies say about themselves, suggests that you are not interested in an “I-thou” relationship with either group. And given what you say, it certainly seems that you are not dealing with real Jews, or that you know anything about Judaism and the Jewish ways of reading the biblical text. You are projecting your negative reading on to them and condemning them for your projections. The Jews have to be your fall guy; the Muslims just embarrass you. You can see neither for who they are, but only for who you need them to be.
This profoundly negative and projective reading of the “God of the Old Testament” is a common feature of zero-sum supersessionist Christianity: our God, of the New Testament, is loving and forgiving, but your Old Testament God is vengeful and violent. Of course the post-modern reality is otherwise. This Christian “grand narrative” of personal superiority at once underestimates the place of apocalyptic vengeance that lies embedded not only in the terrifying cataclysmic drama of Revelation, with its rivers of blood, but also the pervasive present of a loving and forgiving God in the Hebrew Bible. An understanding of the multiple narratives within both — let’s add Islam — all three monotheistic traditions reveal a far more complex and interesting dynamic at work… one in which your projections — are these from your Christian upbringing or from anti-clerical Enlightenment atttitudes? — produce far more heat than light.
But there’s more to this than just misreading the Jews. This rabbinic reading of the destruction of the Egyptians at the Red Sea offers insight into a key issue about the relationship between text and religious culture that accepts those texts as sacred. You have read the text as a fundamentalist (simple, literal, violent version), and assume that the Jews reads it your way. But the rabbis, for whom the God of the “Old Testament” is not primarily a God of vengeance, but one of love, have read it according to their understanding, just as they read “eye for an eye” as a form of egalitarian law handled by compensatory money damage payments. Here the Jews have read a compassionate God into the story, who weeps even over his chosen people’s worst enemy — the God of positive-sum for whom everyone counts; whereas you a (former?) Christian sees an insatiable sadist. Is your portrait of the Jews and their God a projection?
And yet this difference helps us address the larger and very troubling question of sacred texts and religious movements. Do anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament mean that Christianity, the religion of love, is inevitably committed to hatred? Or do the violent Jihadi passages in the Quran mean that Islam, the religion of peace is inherently violent and warlike? The point is not what the text says, but how people – individuals, communities, elites – read them.
So now let me answer your question about the value of another’s life. First of all, there are no people at war who do not treat their own people’s lives as more valuable than that of the enemy and their own civilians more valuable than that of the enemy. Caring about one’s neighbors is a moral luxury that civil societies can afford, and it does wonders for everyone’s well-being. But in the martial world of hard zero-sum it is not even possible without being suicidal.
Second, if we must make invidious comparisons about who cares more about the others’ life, what do we do when we discover that a) Israelis care more about Arab innocents than Arabs care about Israeli innocents — pin-point bombing vs. deliberately random bombing; b) Israelis care more about Arab innocents than Arabs care about Arab innocents — trying to avoid civilians vs using civilians as shields; andd c) Europeans like yourself care most about Arabs when the Israelis have killed them, not about Arabs killed by Arabs, or any other civilians killed by non-Israelis — where’s your outcry over the bombing of an orphanage by Sri Lankans in pursuit of Tamils? Are you calling for the dissolution of Sri Lanka?
And last, but not least, are you aware that, when it comes to reporting about casualties in the Arab world, forty can be one?
For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.
Again we come face to face with your credulity and adoption of the Arab victim-Israeli demon narrative. Your account, like the Arab one, shows no empathy. These girls, who had been confined in shelters for days, who were encouraged by the press to write on the warheads, and who wrote messages Nasrallah, the man responsible for bombing them – civilians – at random, are not “strutting with glee at death and torment across the front.” Worse, your eagerness to see the Israelis in the worst light, comes hand in hand with your studious avoidance of any mention of the grotesque spectacles of children dressed up with suicide belts, and the rejoicing at the deliberate killing of children that one finds so commonly among Arab Muslims.
If this kind of behavior bothers you, why are you not mad with grief at the moral catastrophe that has befallen the Arab world and risks spreading to the Muslim world – taken over by an elite spreading a cult of death and murder? And why would you want to disarm the very people these people rejoice at killing?
The retribution of blood vengeance
We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
You may not realize it, but you’ve now stepped fully onto the stage of the classic Christian supersessionist reading of the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. “Old Testament”). Presumably your first sentence means we don’t grant moral authority or acceptability to Israel’s statements about why, in principle, it is at war. The second implies that the principle thus rejected is: “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.”
But as far as I can make out, you’ve made a classic double error. First, the carnal interpretation of an “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” (a real eye for a real eye…) has nothing to do with Jewish readings of this text. Jewish literature, from the biblical texts onwards makes it clear that this is not a call to mutilation — Jews abhor that — but to monetary compensation. On the contrary, the principle embodied in the expression “eye for an eye” is one of equity – any man’s tooth is worth another’s. And this egalitarianism is at variance with virtually every other law code until modern times, in which the eye of an aristocrat counted for far more than the eye of a freeman, a fortiori, of a serf).
In other words, Jews, for millennia now, have renounced blood vengeance, unlike every other people (especially in the Mediterranean), including most periods of Christian and Muslim history. Indeed one can correlate closely the period of Christian culture’s enduring commitment to blood vengeance and their period of supersessionist theology, and correspondingly the period of renouncing blood vengeance with a willingness to shed supersessionist hegemonic claims. The people who have the hardest time renouncing blood vengeance, who carry it out not only on their enemies, but on members of their own households, are the Arabs. They are the ones who teach their children to hate the Jews (and Christians) so much that it is a blessing to blow yourself to shreds killing as many of them as one can.
So I don’t understand what’s going on in your mind, Jostein. Here you are, aggressively accusing the Jews of blood vengeance and murderous drives which they renounced – at least in principle, and significantly in practice – millennia ago. At the same time, you pass over in virtual silence the disturbingly plentiful evidence that the much larger number of people who have declared the Jews their ultimate enemy – to be exterminated – openly espouse and cultivate precisely this blood vengeance and these murderous instincts in their children. Now these are traits that you abhor and on the basis of which you condemn Israel to annihilation as a state and Jews to statelessness as a people.
And the framework in which you put this denunciation of Israel is a religious discourse, again classic supersessionism. If only the Jews had listened to their rabbi (obviously you mean Jesus even though it could have been Hillel three generations earlier) who tried to get them to give up blood vengeance! But you know so little about the Jews now, or then.
So my question to you is: Are you a straight and narrow-minded Christian supersessionist, out to get the Jews regardless of what else is going on because your self-image depends on it? Or are you unaware that that’s what you’re doing… unaware of the immense weight of Christian supersessionism – a form of chosenness that we both agree is arrogant and unacceptable – in your thinking?
And the Arabs and Muslims in all this? Do you really believe that all this hatred and violence is really “merely” a response to Israeli crimes? Or do you really not know about this hatred and violence.
We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: “Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”
Part III and Conclusion Next…
David Bedein has some interesting remarks on Nasrallah’s recent expression of regrets over kidnapping the Israeli soldiers and bombing Israel: “Whodda thunk they’d get so violent?” The apology has had a large impact in Israel primarily boosting the government of Olmert and Peretz in their claim that Israel won the war. (By the way, there’s an amusing piece at Counterpunch about how the Israelis won the ceasefire.) In any case, some specualation has ensued about what Nasrallah was doing in making so exceptional a public apology. And this speculation calls for some application of the rules of honor-shame culture to the calculations in order to avoid cognitive egocentric explanations.
Hezbollah Leader Has Surprised Many With Latest Comments
By: David Bedein , The Evening Bulletin
Jerusalem - Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has surprised almost every pundit in Israel by admitting that “he made a mistake by not estimating Israel’s forceful response to the kidnapping of two soldiers on the northern border”.
Note already that Nasrallah has adopted the general view that he “only” kidnapped two soldiers, not that he started bombing Israel with Katyushas as well.
Danny Rubenstein, an analyst with the newspaper HaAretz, said in a public speech that Nasrallah’s apology obligated him to reconsider his statement that Olmert had lost this word [sic? read: war]. Yet another pundit opined that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert should send a huge bouquet of flowers to the Dahiya quarter in Beirut, with a card attached reading: “Thanks, Hassan”.
So apparently, the remarks come to save face for Olmert, and help his claims that Israel, under his leadership, actually did win the war. The sarcasm of the bouquet remark suggests that some people are annoyed at this unanticipated boost to Olmert and Peretz.
The Hezbollah leader, who has his own political problems, helped the Israeli prime minister and his government more than any strategic adviser. From now on, until the next elections, Amir Peretz and Olmert can repeatedly state to the public what they learned about “who won the war” by means of Nasrallah’s resounding remorse.
Prof. Mordecai Kedar, an Arabic Affairs expert at Bar Ilan University, in Ramat Gan, Israel, provided another perspective on Nasrallah’s statements, saying that the Hezbollah leader was pretending as if he was a head of state, sharing remorse with any of the civilians who had suffered in Lebanon. Kedar warned Israeli leaders not to read into Nasrallah’s statements any hint of remorse or regret for his actions.
Kedar is an excellent student of not just the Arab political world, but specifically of the role of honor-shame culture in the media, so this comment surprises me somewhat. I am not aware that “sharing remorse with any of the civilians who had suffered…” as a result of their own recklessness is a characteristic of Arab heads of state. Western heads of state, perhaps, but for Nasrallah to model himself on this peculiarly Western tradition of public self-criticism seems absolutely extraordinary. Are there any precedents for this? Nasser’s resignation?
Meanwhile, Prof. Yehoshua Porat, Prof Emeritus of Middle East Studies at Hebrew University, gave an interview to Israel Government Radio News in which he said that Nasrallah wants to see Olmert remain in power, because he perceives Olmert as a weak character - which is why, according to Porat, that Nasrallah made the statement that he did.
This reasoning may be accurate, but let’s at least recognize that it’s partially based on conspiracist’s classic reasoning: “cui bono?” — who profits? Since Olmert is the (incidental) beneficiary of this, then it must have been said to benefit Olmert. It’s not a full conspiracy (Nasrallah’s comments were staged in order to benefit Olmert), and there’s the rub. In order to work, one must imagine that Nasrallah is a cagey schemer who made these remarks to weaken Israel by saving a weak leader.
But in order to do so, Nasrallah has to made a double calculation of dubious probability.
1) He would have to have been capable of public humiliation purely as a strategy ploy. This would put his psychological evolution very much ahead of the vast (overwhelming) majority of his compatriots, for whom such willing public humiliation is not just unthinkable, it’s the kiss of death. Perhaps he felt as widely loved as Nasser and therefore able to withstand the public avowal. Still, it’s a posture of weakness that calls for immense mastery of one’s own emotions. Maybe he’s capable of it. Who knows?
2) To admit publicly that he misjudged, and that had he known he would not have done it — and mean it — means accepting double damage. On the one hand, he encourages those in Israeli policy circles to react overwhelmingly the next time something like this happens, and on the other, he undermines the psychological game of “who won,” that his colleagues and fighters have been playing ever since the cease-fire.
Neither of these strike me as likely sacrifices for the possible benefit of bolstering Olmert’s reputation in Israel. (It’s not the same, but parallel to the 9-11 conspiracist claim that, to boost sagging polls and make more money for his buddies, Bush was willing to blow up the Pentagon and the Twin Towers.) Why he made the remarks, I don’t know. But these explanations strike me as unlikely.
Open Letter to Jostein Gaarder: Fisking Crypto-Supersessionism
Jostein Gaarder, the Norwegian science writer, novelist and children’s writer has written a thunderous prophetic denunciation of Israel that articulates well the moral posture of Europe when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s reach and vehemence prompted many complaints and accusations of anti-semitism. Gaarder apologized for perhaps having spoken in a moment of haste and outrage.
He admits he could have phrased himself with more precision, but that it would be too much work to do anything about it now. He also states that what he wrote, was motivated by “disgust for the war, and the wrongdoing of the Israeli army”.
The prophetic cry was published on August 5, 2006, in the immediate aftermath of the Qana bombing and the international outrage based on what we now know was systematically distorted numbers and staged photos, all designed to arouse precisely the kind of moral outrage so eloquently expressed by Gaarder. Thus his response represents a good gauge of the power of the media’s narrative on people’s thoughts and emotions.
The following is an open-letter fisking, asking Jostein Gaarder to take the time and effort to reconsider his hasty vehemence, explore the underlying assumptions and emotions that drove his prophetic language, and finally, examine the possibility that he might have been the dupe of demopaths… a phenomenon that Europe can ill afford these days.
God’s chosen people
Jostein Gaarder, Aftenposten 05.08.06
From the Norwegian by Sirocco
There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.
I am aware that you later argued that – in true prophetic style – this was meant as a warning, a call to the Israelis to repent, and not an end to Israel which, you believe, will happen if they continue along their (self-)destructive path. But surely you can understand that the formulation seems somewhat ineluctable… as if you had not the slightest hope or expectation that they might listen. This really is a form of “writing off” Israel.
In any case, I think there’s still a Serbian country and as far as I know you were not in favor of invading Iraq, so your two other cases — far worse and more deliberate than anything Israel did in Lebanon — have not led to disappearance nor, I presume, to calls for their disappearance from you. You need to ask yourself why you have a particular vehemence about Israel. On the scale of offenders out there in the world today (Sudan, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia), Israel is really low down, even if we accept every claim that came out of Lebanon.
We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.
This language may surprise some American audiences, unfamiliar with the humiliating and mocking dimension with which European anti-Judaism so commonly expresses itself — the honor-shame language of public mocking. But after a relative hiatus in public after the Holocaust, since 2000 this spirit is common in the lands. In any case, derision aside, this particular comment leads us to a discussion of the nature of chosenness that can be very difficult and touchy… a discussion that Jews normally do not challenge Christians and Muslims about because these later monotheistic religions do not come out well in the comparison. But since this matter of chosenness seems to lie at the core of your complaint, Mr. Gaarder, let us grab the nettles.
Let’s begin by agreeing in principle, if not in tone of contempt, that certain forms of “chosenness” can be extremely arrogant and offensive – and, from the perspective of a just and tolerant civil society, highly destructive. (That they are “stupid” as you claim, only really makes sense from a fairly elevated perspective (i.e., “might makes right is immature and counterproductive”). Unfortunately many actors in the Arab-Israeli conflict, like Yasser freedom-from-the-barrel-of-a-gun” Arafat and his Jihadi successors would find neither stupid nor morally objectionable. Rather than use a silly term like stupid for so weighty and frightful an impulse I would suggest arrogant and oppressive notions of chosenness.
In any case, the form of (specifically monotheist) chosenness that is here denounced as arrogant and stupid, and certainly objectionable, is the imperialist form: “We, the chosen people have the one true faith; God has chosen us to bring it to the world, and if others do not respond appropriately to our true message, we have the right to subject them to our rule and humiliate them as a tangible sign of our God’s glory.” This kind of monotheistic sense of election is best described by its political formula: “one God, one king/emperor/rule, one faith.”
This imperialist formula of political monotheism lies at the ideological heart of most of the most violent religious wars — Jihad, Crusades, Holy War — and some of the most powerful empires of the last 2000 years: Roman, medieval German, Umayyad, Abbasid, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British. Perhaps the single most violent and destructive of all chosenness episodes – the Nazis – although not monotheist, nonetheless expressed the most violent version of a racist, hate-filled notion of national (racial) election on record.
Permit me, if you will, Mr. Gaarder, a few quick comments about the history of this idea. It begins in Christianity, and finds its full measure with Eusebius’ remarks about Constantine: God’s image on earth, the ruler of the world as God rules in the heavens. It so pervades most Christian thought until the Protestants, that books have been written assuming that this is the only form of political monotheism (Peterson, Fowden). And it particularly characterizes a form of Christian self-awareness known as supersessionism: “We have replaced the Jews as the chosen people; we understand the true message of the Bible; we “sit on top of” (literal translation of the verb supersedeo) the Jews.”
This form of chosenness is everything that a liberal and progressive opposes. It is hard zero-sum: “We are right because you are wrong; we are good because you are bad; we have the true message because you Jews, in your stiffnecked literalism misunderstand your texts; God chose us because he rejected you.”
Such a hegemonic reading meant that for most of Christian history, the faithful had to read the Jews not as they were – a living and evolving religion and people with exceptionally interesting things to say – but as props on the Christian stage, as relics of a period before the torch had passed. German scholars thus refer to the Judaism of Jesus’ time as “Spätjudentums” — late Judaism — when it was really fairly early in Judaism’s lifespan (about 1500 years into what is now a 3500 year existence).
The reason I go into some detail here is that as you will see below, I think you are caught in precisely this kind of supersessionism, and one of the clearest signs of it is your profound lack of knowledge about Judaism, a natural consequence of needing the Jews to play a specific and negative role in your self-perception. A friend of mine called this “invidious identity formation”: “My self-esteem comes from your worthlessness,” a characteristic emotion of the kind of honor-shame calculus in which my honor comes from your shame. Given the commitment to very high moral standards that I detect in your prophetic cry, I assume you would consider such invidious and small-minded emotions profoundly unworthy. We don’t make ourselves look bigger by making others look smaller.
Now one more point before we get back to the Jews. There’s an even more noxious form of chosenness that sometimes appears for relatively brief moments that represents a danger to everyone including the believers themselves. In this form of “apocalyptic chosenness,” members passionately believe that they have been chosen by God to bring about a world-wide conquest that demands vast destruction and even genocide in order to bring about the messianic kingdom of imperial dominion that their “God” has promised them.
For example, there is an apocalyptic hadith in Islam which has become extremely popular these days:
The Day of Judgment will not come about until the Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them), until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh Muslim! Oh Abdullah! there is a Jew behind me, come on and kill him.
Messiahs and their followers who believe that they are their God’s agents in this destruction and conquest, that they must “destroy the world in order to save it,” you get mass murderers who, uncontrolled, can leave dozens of millions dead in their wake, men like Hong Xiuquan, the Mahdi of Khartoum, Hitler, Mao, etc. This is precisely the kind of religious passion that every religion that wants to claim participation in a world culture of religious tolerance has to renounce. Especially in an age of nuclear weapons, we cannot afford such base and violent notions of chosenness.
So let’s return to the historical record which may surprise you. As far as noxious forms of chosenness (arrogant, imperialist, racist), the Jews actually have the best historical record (i.e., fewest examples) and the Christians and Muslims the worst (with the Muslims way out in front at this turn of the 3rd millennium). For every case of Jewish religious zealotry resorting to violence to impose its notion of chosenness (initial conquest, Jewish war of Independence to which you make reference below, Bar Kochba rebellion), we have literally myriads of examples among Christians and Muslims. Both religions, for most if not all of their almost 2000 and more than 1400 years of their respective existences, predominantly interpreted their notion of chosenness in consistently, one might even say dogmatically, aggressive, arrogant, domineering fashion over those who did not share their view of chosenness. In Christianity it’s called “the humiliated remant” (the Jews humiliated as proof of their crime of deicide), and in Islam it’s called the Dhimma (Jews and Christians humiliated to illustrate the superiority of Islam).
So we may agree completely that there are noxious notions of chosenness, just as there are noxious forms of monotheism. But to confuse all monotheism and all chosenness with this kind of attitude is to make a serious, one might even say, potentially fatal category error because it means one cannot distinguish constructive from destructive forms of both chosenness and, more broadly, monotheism. And in order to understand why the simplistic approach to “chosenness” can be problematic, we need to be aware of a very different definition of chosenness, one that is positive-sum and beneficial to both the “chosen people” and to their neighbors.
The opposite of this arrogant, zero-sum notion of chosenness as warrant for conquest and rule, for privilege, is a positive-sum notion of chosenness as responsibility. Here one is “chosen” to observe certain ethical standards, regardless of whether one’s neighbors respond favorably or not. This form of chosenness constitutes an obligation to meet certain moral standards; chosenness as responsibility rather than privilege.
Being chosen in this sense is considerably less attractive for many people since it’s far more demanding with far fewer advantages. Here political success is rare, hence control of one’s environment minimal, dependence on others for whom dominion is a sign of superiority, and humiliation at the hands of others a common phenomenon. And the Jews have learned to live creatively with this oppressed status for millennia without developing the kind of enraged fury that one finds so commonly among certain subaltern people now raging against every perceived conspiracy to humiliate and destroy them.
Whereas in the noxious form of chosenness, one’s political success (at any cost in life and destruction on all sides of the conflict) assures the chosen of dominion (or heaven for “martyrs”), in this form, success with “others” can only come voluntarily, only in the success of others: “through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Here God’s honor is manifested not by the military victory and political dominion of his “faithful” but by the manifestation of God’s ethical demands in the behavior of believers, regardless of their reward.
This notion of chosenness is positive-sum: the “other” benefits from one’s own ethical behavior; and the chosen benefit from that ethical interchange. This form of chosenness is actually highly beneficial and welcome from everyone who believes he or she is chosen, whether Christian, Muslim or Jew. In this sense, more than one people can be “God’s chosen” because more than one people “take on” God’s heavenly yoke of self-control and moral restraint, of concern for other human beings.
The political formula for this kind of monotheism is “No king but God”: God is radically different from man, and just as he cannot be “imaged” by earthly images, so his rule over man cannot be represented in the rule of man over man. So instead of a political order imposed from above by intimidation, societies in which people develop God’s kingship can become increasingly free because responsible. The voluntary acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven makes people responsible as self-regulating autonomous moral agents, and therefore they can grant each other the freedoms that an earthly monarchy cannot. Indeed, I’d argue that modern democracies (and, more generally, civil society) is based on this attitude.
And while this form of monotheism is not unique to Judaism – there are powerful Islamic and Christian variants – it is a key notion in Judaism. Indeed even as Eusebius formulated iconic imperial monotheism for Christians in the early 3rd century, the rabbis were embedding the phrase “no king but God” into their daily and yearly liturgy, meant for recitation by all Jews. Thus even as Christians were pursuing just the kind of chosenness you reject, Jews were pursuing something very different. And because of Christian supersessionism, they could not see the Jews as they were.
Limits to tolerance
There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.
Again, let us agree in principle. There should indeed by limits to tolerance, especially for a notion of chosenness which is a license to kill, which is a justification for occupation and apartheid policies, which is a throwback to the Middle Ages. My only quibble on that point is that, as a historian of the Middle Ages, I would recommend caution in assuming how much we “moderns” have left those ages and their passions behind. Part of our problem is that we assume we’ve completely overcome the medieval legacy and can act accordingly, when it may be that a) we Westerners (especially you Europeans) have not really left the Middle Ages behind, b) by pretending you have you do not even recognize when medieval attitudes drive your emotions, and c) by so acting as if all that medieval stuff were gone (except of course among those stiff-necked Jews) we actually increase the power of some of the worst medieval passions.
What I find most disturbing about the above statement, though, is the targeting of the Jews as the culprits – the obvious referent of “funny stone tablets.” (They certainly inspired the French revolutionaries who promulgated the “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the foundation – I presume – of your own moral commitments to human rights and dignity.)
But why the Jews? I understand from your text that you think they have done terrible things, some of which may be the product of mistaken reports, a point we can return to. But even if we grant that all you think the Jews have done, is not the worrisome actor here from the perspective of noxious forms of chosenness and violent contempt for the rights of others… the Muslims?
It is Islam which, today claims that the God of flora, fauna and galaxies has selected Muslims as His exclusive favorite, and given it a license to conquer, to massacre unto genocide, and to install apartheid laws that discriminate against non-Muslims. Any brief moments attending to what Jihadis like Hizbullah and Hamas do and say in their native tongues, reveals a terrifying world of open, raw, ferocious genocidal hatreds. Nothing in current Christian or Jewish circles – except the worst of Christian Aryanism – can compare for morally base notions of chosenness.
But somehow, you do not think that worthy of mention. Can you explain why? (I ask, because one of the problems here is how highly sensitive Christians get to Jewish moral trespass, and how they fall silent in the face of ghastly behavior from others, especially their Muslim neighbors.)
So let me ask you to try a thought experiment. I presume from your tone that this will be difficult, but let me appeal to the scientific and philosophic spirit in the man who wrote Sophie’s World: try understanding what’s going on in the Middle East with a different working hypothesis. Certainly there are enough anomalies here to warrant such a mental exercise, and certainly the stakes are high enough to make all possibilities worthy of consideration.
What if the Israelis’ behavior – from the “occupation” in 1967 to the wall of the first decade of 2000 – does not derive from imperialist Jewish notions of their chosenness, but defensive measures against a highly aggressive and imperialist Arab-Muslim sense of chosenness? I know this sounds unlikely and apologetic, but I would argue as much about the information you unquestionably accept from your Arab and Muslim sources. So, if you can, humor me, please.
If your analysis is right – the Jews’ notion of chosenness is the problem — then your anti-Zionist solution might make some sense. But if you are wrong – that is, that it’s the Muslims’ notion of chosenness that has made this problem insoluble – then your solution promises to be a disaster. Having misread the source of the violence and shutting down the Israelis, you will give wings to the very forces of hatred and arrogance that you find intolerable (at least when they show up among Jews). This will bring down terrible crimes not just on the heads of those poor Jewish refugees of a dismantled Jewish state for whom you beg mercy, but all those Muslims now in the grip of’ vicious men who think that Islam is a religion of war, and hatred, and death.
And not far behind the unfortunate victims of your misjudgment, lies the fate of your own moral value system. How long do you think the values of mercy, respect, moral courage, freedom and justice that your prophecy invokes will survive the victory of the Jihadis who harass Israel on every side and even now set their sites on Europe, the West as well. Indeed, horribile dictu, around the world, Islamic societies have bloody borders with all its neighbors.
Do you really think Europe is immune to these aggressive currents? If we look at the notion of chosenness embedded in Global Jihad, Europe constitutes at least as much the target of their chosen mission – the whole world under Shariah – as the Israelis. And now that we live in an age of astonishing telecommunications, these sentiments resonate the world over. Muslims demands for a Sharia state in the midst of nation states of Europe shares this same sense of chosenness even as it cheers and sometimes copies the violence of apocalyptic groups like Hizbullah and Hamas.
You can listen to the voices that dismiss this argument as a Zionist plot, ignore these powerful and publicly dominant Islamic strains of chosenness and the immediate and instrumental violence they engender. Instead you can focus almost exclusively on Israeli violence, which you see not as a response to this external aggression, but intentionally driven by a noxious Jewish sense of chosenness. But you do so at your own peril. Misreading this situation is not cost free, as pleasing as it may be for you to morally excoriate the Israelis. Indeed, in so doing, you may be missing important elements of the larger picture, a picture that includes the fate of Europe as well as the Middle East. Believe me, I don’t think you’d like to live in a Sharia-ruled Europe.
Now the (over-)attention to the Jews may have its reasons. It makes a certain unhappy sense to want to dump on the Jews morally. There is a certain moral Schadenfreude in being able to say, “You Jews, 2000 years you were oppressed, and no sooner do you get power than you do it to someone else.” The extreme logic of this thinking, heavily promoted by the Palestinians, is that they are the new Jews, and the Israelis the new Nazis. One can well imagine the appeal of such a ferocious irony to many people who find the Jews a particularly frustrating people, and even more to those who might feel bad about their role, however passive, in the Holocaust.
But at some point those who can’t distinguish invidious comparisons (”Aha! We knew it all along. We Europeans are more moral than the Jews!”), and therapeutic rhetoric (”Let’s not criticize the Muslims, they need encouragement.”) from reality assessment (”What are the real sources of hatred and violence?”), will go down in history as a fools. Such foolish elites populated Western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries, men who spoke and wrote precious words as their civil society fell apart around them, and a brutal culture of honor and shame and blood vengeance took over.
One might object that the late, Christian Roman empire was hardly an egalitarian civil society, but even so, it was far more sophisticated and civic than the tribal warrior culture that took over. For these Germanic warriors, the Sermon on the mount recited as, “blessed is he who takes vengeance for he shall have peace,” and Jesus “would not have been crucified” if they had been there to protect him. In such a brutal culture, thoughtful and literate men fled to monasteries to escape these brutes. I don’t think that this is a fate Europe should wish on itself for the coming centuries.
We call child murderers ‘child murderers’ and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!
Again, we agree. Murder is bad, the murder of innocent children, despicable, morally revolting. And anyone claiming divine or historic mandate for such murderous deeds deserves condemnation. But again, despite tossing in Hamas and Hizbullah at the end of the paragraph, your target seems to be Israel.
And yet of the three “culprits,” the Israelis least fit your profile. It is the Jihadi Muslims who openly embrace a rhetoric of divine sanction for the most odious child-murder, not only in justification of the random murder of innocent Israeli, American and European children, but in the spiritual and physical murder of their own children as suicide killers, child sacrifices on an altar of hatred. These folks not only openly espouse their chosenness as a “warrant for genocide”, they celebrate the murder of children publicly, and encourage their public to relish the very moment of revolting violence.
On the Israeli side, attitudes differ dramatically. You cannot find a trace of the open embrace of killing children intentionally, of celebrating the death of innocents, or teaching hatred and a cult of child sacrifice. Do Israeli soldiers sometimes kill innocents? Yes, what army has not? Do they go to extraordinary lengths to avoid it? Yes. Do they apologize even when it’s not clear they’re responsible? Yes. Although it may anger you to hear it, no army in the military history has so risked its own soldiers’ lives to spare the lives of civilians among the enemy as the Israeli. These are measurable and verifiable assertions, not wild claims.
But let us pause a moment on this issue of murder, that is the intentional killing of people. Not all killing of innocents is murder; and only two approaches do not consider the distinction valid. At one extreme, the most primitive cultures of blood vengeance do not distinguish between intentional murder and accidental manslaughter: if you kill my relative, for whatever reason – even if he attacked first – I kill you or one of your relatives. At the other extreme, Christians have a tendency to ignore this distinction from an extremely high and pacifist morality that views all violence with overwhelming horror.
This moral attitude, which reflects the extraordinary moral demands of Christianity’s founder (e.g., Sermon on the Mount), appears in their mistranslation of those funny tablets’ command on the matter: What in Hebrew reads, “Thou shalt not murder,” in Latin and the thousand vernaculars that Christians have translated the Hebrew Bible into, it reads, “Thou shalt not kill.” (There are “heretics” in the Middle Ages who are burned for refusing to kill a chicken based on their reading of the mistranslation.) Given what you say in your prophetic cry, you clearly side with high pacifism and not blood vengeance.
But when you look at the situation in the Middle East, you seem to forget that few people share your high moral standards. Here we have people who, by your moral standards, represent the basest moral position imaginable, people who openly embrace murder of civilians – children! – and who look for every reason to stir up hatred. And as anyone knows, hatred comes far more easily when one imagines that the “other” has done damage “on purpose,” in the case of killing, murdered. As a little girl said when her aunt burned her arm cooking, “That’s okay auntie, you didn’t mean it.” When it’s by accident, it’s a lot easier to forgive; when it’s on purpose it calls out for vengeance if only to deter further violence.
If a five-year old can understand the difference, why do adults like you deliberately exclude the distinction and accuse Israel of murdering children. No documented case of Israelis deliberately murdering children exists (it is the heart of the unfounded libel around al Durah). Given the violent hatreds that teem among terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hizbullah, and how ready they are to accuse Israel of deliberately murdering their people even as they sacrifice their own, do you not think you should pause before jumping to conclusions that can only incite more hatreds?
After all, virtually every attack on Israeli civilians is intentional, the target of Muslim violence. And these attacks derive specifically from what you despise: the Muslim sense of chosenness, that they were chosen by Allah to kill every last Jew at the end of time. If you were wrong about Israel, falsely accusing them of murder in front of murderous enemies, would that not consist of incitement to murder, again, precisely what you deplore?
However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy…
Part II to follow