Wednesday, March 7, 2007
German Christians should, of all people, pick their words carefully. These men are not deep thinkers: German bishops compare Israel to the Nazis
It never ceases to amaze how obtuse some people can be. A little history lesson from the story about some of the reaction: Israeli ambassador blasts German bishop for Warsaw ghetto remark:
...In 1940, months after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis forced some 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto, surrounding it with a high wall.
About 100,000 died inside from hunger and disease, and over 300,000 were sent to death camps...
People who compare Israelis trying to stay alive against the death cult to their own history as victims of mass murder are either ignorant or evil.
I'd have to vote for "evil."
Can I vote for "malicous willful ignorance"
Pot, Kettle, black.
Such morally vapid and stupidly facile commentary, from western Catholic bishops no less (who are highly educated with only the rarest of exceptions), reflects a type of monstrously culpable conscience. That is an apt, and not at all an exaggerated or hyperbolic, description.
Too, it is precisely this type of more obviously inept commentary (to use a too kind term) which receives impetus as a result of more subtly plied commentary, such as is reflected in Carter's recent book. Carter's distortions, elisions, occlusions, redactions, manipulations, etc. reflect an insider's more knowledgeable and deft handling of the material, for example his treatment of UNSCR 242 and other U.N. Security Council resolutions (though that is but one example only).
In that sense Carter is the more mendacious actor, or is at least the more subtly mendacious actor, while the German Catholic bishops here are intellectual and moral brutes.
A critique of the Arab refugee aka "Palestinian" situation can certainly include some criticisms of Israeli policies. But the type of wholesale criticisms forwarded by Carter, and in a qualitatively different sense the German Catholic bishops, reflects such a studied set of omissions, occlusions and one-sided and distorted "analyses" that the result is a corrupted analysis and policy prescriptions at an absolutely foundational level. I.e., these analyses are corrupt throughout, the cancer is both pervasive and terminal.
Shocking? Yes. Unexpected? No.
How can we come complaining about these German bishops when fellow Jews are giving the New Anti-Semitism (i.e. Jew-hatred under the mantle of anti-Zionism) all the legitimacy it needs? If influential Jews as far back as Yeshayahu Leibowitz (long may he burn in hell) did not care to watch their words, and gave free rein to the "Palestinians are the new Jews, the Jews the new Nazis" libel, why should we turn our anger at Jimmy Carter, Ken Livingstone and these bishops? The enemy, as Melanie Phillips says, is within.
Don't worry about Holocaust Denial; it's Holocaust Inversion you should be worried about.
HaShem guard us. Shabbat Shalom.
It's less an either/or than it is the ability to apply a proportionate weighting. Since it is, ultimately, a moral/ethical valuation which needs to be conceived and placed in the balance and achieved, proportionate judgements will almost always be key.
In the end, in terms of the broadest strategic conceptions and goals, it isn't race, religion, ethnicity, geography, etc. that will eventually bring us into a 21st century marked by comity and prosperity, it's better and more fruitful ideas.
Those ideas, regardless of the specific form they might take in any one country, will include supplanting authoritarian and tyrannical forms of governance with more representative forms, forms more responsive to the human needs of the peoples, the polities, being represented. It will additionally include market driven economies supplanting critical aspects of top-down, more centrally planned economies.
Peace and comity are not utopian conceptions. Rather, they are practical/pragmatic conceptions wherein human centered, responsive forms of governance are reined in by checks and balances, by separation of powers, by well considered constitutions drawn up as foundational documents, also by responsibly restrained judicial systems and well considered conceptions of liberty and property rights.
Too, while overly zealous tribal and nationalistic identities need to be guarded against, a sense of sovereignty, applied both to the individual and to the nation and nation/state, is absolutely requisite. The self, whether conceived in a personal/individual sense or whether conceived in the sense of the nation and nation/state, needs to be a chief cornerstone of any comity and peace achievement hoped for, and worked toward, in the 21st century.
Hence, Iraq, supplanting Saddam & Sons, is a chief front within that broadly conceived, strategic conception. Perfection, whether utopian perfections or strategic/tactical perfections, are not achievable.
eos - end of sermon