Monday, January 05, 2009

A Voice From the Other SIde

I actually find it quite interesting to get a comment from someone on the "Other Side," be it the Islamic expansionists or those on the peripheral right (James Baker) or left (list too long to fit in blog entry here)  who serve their interests.  If you read the comments section in my blog entry from last week, I actually received a comment, written in halting English, not from Gaza itself, which is now largely incommunicado, but from Egypt.  You can read it yourself here: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11016252&postID=5865621731299153738

I'm not so interested in a point by point rebuttal of various "facts" cited or arguments made, as they're so cliche as to bore the reader to tears, but more at analyzing his comments, as I think they are illustrative of the Arab mindset which makes peace with Arabs (or even between Arab states themselves) impossible.

First comment, "i refues whut hamas did by lunching rockets" (Translation: I reject Hamas' and Israel's actions launching rockets into one another's territory,) later comment, " ppl want live in peace in gaza they are withou weapon a" (The people of Gaza want to live in peace and are unarmed.)

Okay, so which is it?  Are they armed or unarmed?  If they are unarmed, how are they firing rockets?

In a deeper sense, this is a conflict of the ethics of civilization versus the ethics of barbarism.  When Israel's strikes against Hamas combatants and rocket launchers are morally equated to Hamas' strikes against Israeli civilian targets, and western society acquiesces to this sort of unreal "balance," it has the effect of dragging the west back into a primitive, tribal morality which the west outgrew centuries ago but which still seems to burn strongly in the Arab world.  In the Arab universe, the concept of "civilian" is incomprehensible.  If one of "my tribe" is killed, then I have the duty to kill from "your tribe," and it doesn't matter whether that's a man, woman or child.  If anything, children are considered more expendable.  I recall a Jerusalem post interview in Gaza during the Second Intifada, when the sort of "men on the street" of the Palestinian Authority were asked whether they felt worse about seeing a gunman or a child killed, and they uniformly responded "gunman."  After all, a child is incapable of inflicting suffering on "your tribe," and so is of less value to society.

The comment is replete with statements of this sort, reminiscent of the screaming, chanting masses you hear on television, one second shouting bloody murder and promising to inflict pain and suffering, the next minute weeping and crying over the unfairness of being defeated in the latest war they started.  I seem to recall a rally a month or so ago in which Hamas dragged out an actor in a cage pretending to be kidnapped soldier Gilat Shalit, crying for his mother, while the crowd of thousands of civilians took sadistic pleasure in the make-believe of inflicting suffering on infidel.  Now those same voices are weeping that Israel has deprived them of their Israeli-taxpayer-funded free electricity.

The final statement, "if u let them live in peace they will let you live in peace," is the kicker.  The ability to take the last eight years of rocket attacks on Israel, and just willfully blind one's self to the reality of eight years of inconvenient history, is not a propagandistic ploy as it would be for a western terrorism-advocate, but an actual belief, something which he has absorbed into his mind as factually true.  On some level of consciousness, he understands that eight years of rocket attacks would seem to justify an Israeli response.  And therefore, this inconvenient fact is excised from his reality.

The end of the email, "I'm a liberal," says it all.  If this is the Arab Peace Now, what does that say about the rest of that society?  I do admire that this guy had the guts to write on the blog of a Zionist Israeli, especially coming from the society he does, but I think we're still a few centuries away from being able to have a true heart-to-heart conversation.

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