Protesting? What, Exactly? Why So Selectively?
Protests, everywhere protests. All around the world. Protests by angry Muslims against "Israeli aggression against Muslims", and that's predictable. Protests by sensitive and caring individuals concerned about the sad plight of Lebanon and its people. That too is happily predictable, understandable and supportable - to a degree. Protests even in Tel Aviv: Jewish humanitarians, (frightened for their well being and that of their country but unwilling to lend themselves to even self defense; burdened by the Jewish sense of guilt and responsibility to everyone else before themselves) - along with Israeli Palestinians and Christian groups. Why wouldn't anyone at all with even a shred of human compassion protest at the death of men, women and children, at the wholesale destruction of a country's civic infrastructure, imperilling its hopes for the future? Why indeed.Like everyone else I want to protest the loss of innocent human lives. The deaths of children, of women, of men wishing nothing more than to be able to go about their ordinary lives seeking fulfilment, love, security, economic advantage. Who on earth could argue with those very human aspirations? Who, other than sociopaths could overlook the irreparable harm being done to future generations? The children who have become traumatized by war, whose night-time slumbers will be interrupted time and again by violent nightmares, and who may remain forevermore emotionally unsettled by the frightening spectres of death around them, of munitions falling from the sky. I weep for them all.
I weep too for the innocent lives lost in Israel, for the displacement and dreadful fear instilled in its citizens, its children, hoping to see another day, and another day and another day. Their fear, their skittishness, their memories too will be forever tainted with fear of the imminence of death, of the possible obliteration of the country that they hold so dear. I protest, herewith, for the conditions in which they find themselves in perpetuity, on the balance between proud existence and fearful imperilment. No country and no country's inhabitants should be continually faced with the threat of invasion, war, annihilation, least of all that of a people who have already experienced the worst that human ingenuity and cruelty could conceivably visit upon them. There is an unhealable scar, a foul memory of blind hate visited upon this people and shared collectively by this indomitable, ever-hopeful people. My people.
Where were the worldwide protests when Arab countries surrounding the fledgling State of Israel assembled with the intention of invading it and driving the Jews into the sea, obliterating the new country and humbling its Jewish inhabitants who would survive the onslaught to become dwellers-without-official recognition in Arab-inherited, Muslim-dominated countries, as third-class hangers-on? Where have the protesters been in the past 60 years when Israel's neighbours one after another, and generally in tandem of far greater numbers than the country possesses, attempted invasion?
Where were all the protesters who were outraged at the advent of suicide bombers deliberately giving up their lives to Allah for the purpose of taking with them as many innocent civilian lives, (those of infants, young people, pregnant women, old men) as possible, by any and all means twisted minds could conceive of? Where was the outrage? Where was it expressed? I don't recall seeing great numbers of people massing in support of these embattled people, the Jews. But protests there were plenty when Israel finally decided to build a wall to prevent the infiltration of suicide bombers into their midst. This helped for a while to diminish the numbers of suicide bombers, but soon Jewish lives were again brought into peril by the lobbing of deadly rockets from Gaza over the walls. Again, Jewish lives threatened, lost. Their lives, it would seem, were seen as expendible. Why is that?
Silence is complicity. Inaction in the face of obvious wrong committed toward others is construed as agreement. Disinterest in the fate of a frangible peace, the lack of security of a civilian population merely because they are Jewish is monstrous. In this current conflict, forced upon Israel, and acting as a catalyst finally for the country to once and for all determine to rid itself of this implacable, murderous nemesis, a full one-quarter of the Israeli population has had to flee, to evacuate the northern sector of the country in fear of their lives. Like the Lebanese displaced and homeless, so are the Jews, and the Israeli Arabs, seeking shelter elsewhere.
Should Israel not take steps to protect its population? A population comprised of majority Jews, Druze, Christians, Muslims, and other minorities? A country of a scant six million, roughly equivalent, including non-Jews, of those who perished in the Holocaust? Is the world that willing to witness yet another Holocaust? Israel is not willing to submit to anything approximating that horror of history, of world inaction and disinterest. Hence the outcry of brutality being visited upon the blameless. Blameless? Hardly; rather those now being afflicted have been complicit, and their lack of interest, of compassion for their neighbours has in and of itself brought them to this pass.
Want to protest? Protest the fact that one hundred Iraqis each and every day is being sacrificed to sectarian Muslim violence. Sunni against Shia, gangs of thugs roam the night-time streets of Iraq's cities for the express purpose of "sacrificing" as many of their Muslim brothers as good fortune may assist them to in their deadly enterprise of murderous enmity in the name of Islam. Protest Darfur, where the Sudanese government is complicit in the murder, rape and pillage enacted upon black Sudanese Muslim farmers by the Janjaweed. Protest that the Somalia Muslim fundamentalist insurgents have breached the defences of the Muslim moderates, and now threaten to invade Ethiopia which has attempted to come to the aid of its neighbour and its rightful government.
Protest Pakistan-protected Muslim terrorists bombing Hindu sites in India at the cost of many lives. Protest that terrorist-craving and mayhem-and-murder loving Islamists are infiltrating civil societies everywhere, including Western countries, and carefully, studiously, forging a place for themselves where they can be respected within their own Muslim communities and where they have free reign to corrupt the values of young Muslim men, inducting them into the jihadist mentality and intent.
Protest man's inhumanity to mankind, but do so genuinely, pacifically, universally. Otherwise, just stay home and nurse your bitter grievances in ignorance and solitude
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, July 23, 2006
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