Double Standards
Via
Norm, an
interesting article on recent events from the Israel-Palestine front. I hope that by quoting these two paragraphs I am more or less meeting the author's requirements.
The conclusion to be drawn from the episode, the big conclusion, is that the occupation has been able to corrupt us and to take us to places that years ago we would never have imagined that we’d arrive at. Obviously what happened is not the norm but woe betide us if we content ourselves with that, because there’s a climate, a breeding ground, which allowed the phenomenon to appear and which has penetrated much more deeply than we would like.
...
There is no question of a double standard. Quite simply, you know that we are morally superior and therefore demand from us what you don’t demand from others. I believe that this is how things are and that you are right. We are superior, so superior that the revelation of immoral conduct came from us, not from you, from an Israeli and Jewish NGO called and, and not by chance, B’Tselem, which means “in the image of” , a name taken from the Bible which says that all men were created in the image and likeness of God.
I’m glad that you make these demands on us, but don’t get carried away; none of you will be able to demand of us that which we demand of ourselves. Furthermore, you lack the most minimal moral authority to ask anything of us
Labels: Israel, palestine
Linda Grant on sorry recruitment
Over at Norm's Blog,
Linda Grant captures a perspective it took me a while when younger to grasp.
Kuntar fits no model of the impoverished refugee driven to despair by occupation. Nor can he be seen within the context of Iranian-backed Islamism. When he emerged from prison last week it was as a relic of a bygone age: of that era of self-appointed middle-class revolutionaries, like the Weather Underground and Baader-Meinhof Gang.
...
Drawn to political organizations of the far left and far right, they are people who have the passion and the excitement for violence, the glamour of violence. Those who are motivated by a desire for the alleviation of poverty or the redressing of injustice, lack the thirst for blood.
This remains the great problem in the Middle East - the prominence of the cult of death ("Viva la Muerte!") among the Palestinians (including Fatah) and in Lebanon. It is the Bonnie and Clyde approach to 'rebellion'.
There is no chance for civil society where Kuntar is lionized as a a hero.
And while the Weather Underground may be relics of a bygone era, you can expect some of those relics to play a visible role, and rightly, I think, in the upcoming US Presidential Campaign. (Well, at least until slick Barry tosses Dohrn and Ayers under the train too - I think he has tried but not in convincing enough ways yet.)
(Disclosure: I continue to be most likely to cast my foreigner's virtual meaningless vote to Obama, but the currency is sinking fast. Lucky for Obama the competition is not so great at the moment.)
Labels: death cult, Lebanon, murder, palestine
