The Long Wait - Is Revenge That Sweet?
The Palestinian-born Nabeel Ahmed Issa Jaourah who attacked foreign visitors to Amman, Jordan's famed Roman Amphitheatre on Monday nursed a grievance evidently so severe that he waited twenty-four years with the certain knowledge that when the time was "right" for him (in this case, when he was assured his children had become sufficiently grown and verging on independence) he would avenge the death of two brothers killed in an Israeli strike on Lebanon against Palestinian gunmen.Such bitter anger. Such undying enmity. In that twenty-four years of his life he was married, raised children, and lived a life. What kind of life could one possibly live with such a burning ember of deathly ambition eating a hole in one's soul? What other human emotions were displaced by the importance to this man, living his tribal, cultural inheritance of revenge? Did he smile occasionally when regarding his children? Did he find pleasure in a sunrise, a sunset, the colours of flowers, the gentle breeze rustling the hair of his infant children?
Did he find reciprocal love in his wife of so many years, and if so, why would that love not have acted as a balm to his sorely tried heart? If not the love of his wife, then that of his children, given so freely to the man who was their father, their protector, their guide through life. How, exactly, did he guide his children? Did he imbue them with his own savage values that a death is to be avenged at all costs, regardless of the time frame? Select your victims at random? Feel fulfilled, that you have answered to your god's imperative.
One assumes this man, Mr. Jaourah, was a religious man, a devout Muslim. As he attacked the western tourists in Amman, he shot them in the back, not even confronting them, to tell them of his intent, and why. He shouted the Muslim "Allahu akbar!". God is great. Is this the manner in which a human being indicates his homage to the Sacred, the Divine, the Ruler of All? Why would he assume unconditionally that his deed of murder would please his god?
Well, there are of course answers, and they reside in the primitive nature of tribal societies. Societies who see their duty to their religion as requiring their total agreement with all the sacred texts attesting to the religion's, and that god's purpose for mankind. There is, for example, an elderly man residing in Pakistan, Dr. Israr Ahmad, one of Pakistan's best known Islamic preachers. Through his weekly television address to his adherents, Dr. Ahmad exhorts Muslims to strive for the "global domination of Islam".
It would appear that Dr. Ahmad's view of his religion along with his opinions about Jews and the West are totally accepted and when he writes that it is the duty of all Muslims to strive for the "ascendancy of Islam over all other systems of life" through the stages of passive resistance, active resistance and armed conflict, this is a given.
Dr. Ahmad writes of the Jewish conspiracy theories which generally find favour among neo-Nazis, claiming that Jews have a "deeply ingrained tendency to conspire and to manoeuvre things surreptitiously for their own gain". Jews construct a "wicked web of control and exploitation" through ownership of banks, media, insurance companies and stock exchanges. The same old, same old tired litany of idiocy.
Dr. Ahmad compares Jews to parasites, refers to the Holocaust as "divine punishment" and foresees the "total extermination" of Jews at the hands of Muslims. Right up there with the al-Qaeda charter which states "there will be continuing enmity until everyone believes in Allah. We will not meet the enemy halfway. There will be no room for dialogue with them."
An al-Qaeda manual reveals chapters with titles such as "Guidelines for Beating and Killing Hostages". The manual further states that their vision of Islam "calls for...the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun". Can one understand such values? All in the name of Allah?
In 1948, just after the State of Israel became a reality, Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League spoke of "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre". And such was the intent indeed, when Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq descended with their armies upon the new State to completely obliterate it from the map of the Middle East.
This would not have brought peace to the region, had they been successful, since these states were always and ever at war with one another, each conspiring to take land from the other and in the process murdering one another with little interference from the outside world. Some things have changed, certainly. The most obvious being the fact that while some of the Arab states have been pacified seeking a more moderate way, a modern future for their countries, and reached a tentative peace with Israel, others have not.
Moreover, some of these Islamic, theistic-ruled states have set their sights elsewhere, while not ignoring Israel's irritating presence. Their mission has been extended; first the extinguishing of the Jewish State, then the conquering of the world at large, for Islam. This is not merely a silly Western apprehension; it is a stated intent of the Jihadist Islamists in the Muslim world.
The most frightening aspect of the current situation is the advent of an Iran which has transformed itself into the champion of Islam within the Muslim world, a world which respects its mad president who publicly declares his intention, that of the ruling Ayatollahs and mullahs everywhere to finally end the existence of the State of Israel. Their intention is not to stop at Israel's borders, but to pursue Jews wherever they can be found and murder them - in the name of Allah, who, they say, demands no less of them.
The International community expresses its polite alarm over these injudicious statements; surely they are merely more excitable rhetoric of the type normally associated with those coming out of Middle Eastern countries. But they are more. They are believable statements of intent, bolstered by a weapon whose use and potential destruction unleashed upon an always-unready world should give us more than pause for thought.
Not panic, surely. But to open our eyes, to understand that Muslims of this particular ideology will never forget the Crusades, never forget they once ruled Spain, that their slow but steady creep toward European domination was stilled centuries ago, but their memories are long, and their plans for the future reach beyond what western minds can even contemplate.
Israel is worried today about the potential for unleashing the most potent weapon known to mankind upon its cities and its people. Israel, today. And who will be next?
The wait, it appears, is never too long. Revenge, it would appear, is always sweet.
Nature handed out her human feelings and human failings unequally. She ran out of the former too soon, tried to make up for the lack with the latter, too generously. Never the twain shall meet.
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 07, 2006
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