Does it Depend on Whose Ox is Being Gored?
To gain respect, one must be prepared to give it to others. To expect consideration from others one must be prepared to extend consideration toward others. To anticipate acceptance from those around one, one must be able to accept others for what they are, who they are, what they value. This is fair.News around the world is dominated now by the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of devout Muslims reacting in anger throughout the Middle East and Europe as a result of a deliberate insult to their sacred belief in a historical Prophet who delivered to them the precepts of a religion whose spread dominated a good portion of the world and still does. Flippant treatment of anyone's most sacred belief is fairly intolerable. Islam is a religion, a way of life which has developed a unique culture for Muslims around the world, and as such deserves respect and not only from its adherents.
Now comes the other half of the story. Religions are held to be sacred concepts. The belief in an Almighty, a Supreme Being responsible for the presence on earth of mortal beings is an act of supreme faith not amenable to the reason of provability. Anything that mocks this belief is certain to cause outrage among the faithful and that can readily be understood. Good reason to avoid causing people pain and anger.
The 20th century brought the world an event of quite staggering proportions in the scope of its intent, and the breadth of its success. In memory of the six million Jews, along with political dissenters, Gypsies, and the handicapped, all earmarked for deliberate murder, we recognize the Holocaust as a seminal event symbolizing man's inhumanity to man. We venerate the memory of all those men, women and children who were brutalized, de-humanized, annihilated.
The question now is, can others, with impunity deny the historical record? Whose ox is now being gored? Mine. Six million Jews wiped off the face of the earth. This is provable. There are witnesses, there are carefully kept and maintained records, there is the proof of the concentration camps, the crematoria, the sad remains, the remnants of human misery. There are the survivors, there are their stories. All on the historical record.
So a newspaper in Denmark pulls a juvenile stunt and publishes a miserably stupid set of cartoons. This is not reality in the sense that murdering people is. This is an insult to peoples' sensibilities; their vision of their immortal Prophet, and by extension, Allah. Bad, very bad behaviour. Insulting, yes. Intentionally so, very likely. That's goring the ox of over a billion people. Not advised. Not polite, not considerate, not neighbourly, not nice at all.
But is it murder? Many religions have a saying that goes something like this: if you kill one person it is as though you kill a multitude. And, in fact, if you kill a young person and that young person did not have the opportunity to parent children, then into the future there is a decided lack of offspring of that one unfortunate person. Hitler's Germany murdered six million people. The mind boggles at the numbers. And each one of those murdered; men, women, children, was a soul whose life was brutally taken. Can the two events even be compared?
Yet, we have countries like Turkey and Egypt who bring doubt to these events, and their populations accept and approve of this. Why, I would personally like to know, do Muslims approve of the practise of caricaturing Jews? In so doing they denigrate not a single Jew, but a nation. Is a nation that much different than a spiritual concept? Egypt and Turkey can give official sanction to the production of films and television series showing Jews as thieves, base animals, society's corruptors and that's all right? A government like Iran can convene a Muslim conference for the express purpose of uncovering the "truth" that the Holocaust never occurred and there are no repercussions.
Jews are appalled, but not dreadfully surprised. Heads of state in European countries, in North America, and even the United Nations protest this invidious insult to the memory of millions of innocents. I don't recall seeing thousands of protesters gathering to demand death be visited upon those responsible. Yet this is a sacrilege to the memory of millions of people brought to their death by a deadly ideology, a religion of conquest and superiority.
Where is the balance here? If you gore my ox, I'll be unperturbed, to say the least, when yours is gored. At the same time, I will understand, and I won't be happy at your umbrage. We are all, after all, human beings. Remember that.
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, February 05, 2006
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