The history of the region should bring moral clarity as well. Wars #1-3 were fought not over Palestine ? but for the elimination of the Jewish state itself. For two decades Arab countries hated Israel not because the West Bank peoples suffered under Jordanian control, but only because there were any Jews at all in the new state of Israel. Unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon did not bring praise from Hamas and Hezbollah, but contempt. Offers to turn back up to 97 percent of the West Bank were seen as foolish when an intifada could get 100 percent ? or more. Iraqi guided missiles raining down on Tel Aviv disappointed cheering Palestinians only because they were not laced with germs or nerve gas. All this the world ignores, as it seeks in vain to fabricate a holocaust in Jenin.
For these reasons and more, the current prejudices of the United Nations and the equivocation of the Europeans, who should know better, are nauseating ? and in the end simply shameful. In the latter case, the sanctimonious hedging indeed finally becomes too much and is abjectly reprehensible: Europe, after all, is the great, eternal cemetery of the Jewish people, where six million were incinerated through the evil of the Nazis and the complicity of millions of timid and opportunistic other Europeans. In almost every European city, there are no longer Jews, but the ghosts and shades of the dead who surely still flutter among the simulacra of their former houses, synagogues, and streets ? for the most part now expropriated or obliterated
Europe, then, because of its own culpability in the extermination, will always have a unique moral responsibility to ensure that once more we do not see Jewish women, children, and old men machine-gunned in sealed buses or blown apart on the street because they are Jewish. The very idea that Saddam Hussein once boasted that his Israeli-bound scuds were equipped with gas, that today's Palestinian murderers fortify their bombs with chemical poisons, that Mein Kampf sells well on the West Bank, and that Swastikas now routinely appear at pro-Palestinian rallies should send shivers up the collective spine of all mindful Europeans.
But instead, we get evasion at best from the Dutch and Scandinavians, and defiled Jewish cemeteries, random violence, and warnings for Jews not to be so ubiquitously Jewish in public in Austria, France, Germany, and Italy.
great minds.
Facebook
Twitter