Feeding Evil

Here are a couple of essays on a murder that got buried in the news recently.

The Other Tsunami

In much of the Arab Muslim and some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Think of any conflict in the world – Pakistan-India, China-Tibet, North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.

There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children – often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) – as it was to murder Jewish adults.

The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder, steal or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire of evils.

But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies, and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes toward children.

That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the Muslim world have done to the word "Jew." To them, the Jew is not just sub-human; the Jew – and his or her children – is sub-animal.

Five Dead Jews

The animals, the killers, were a team of Hamas murderers and, when word of the murders spread throughout Gaza, candy was given out to children there to celebrate.

The Palestinians and other Muslims of like mind have become what they believe Jews are. Their raging hatred of Jews has so corrupted and distorted their psyche over so many generations that they are what they have loved to hate.