[Previous entry: "Pix of the little flag pledgers (if you want to understand the real origins and implications)"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Sunni weighs in against the "FairTax""]

03/11/2004 Archived Entry: "Explosions in Spain & how terrorists are like governments"

SOME DAYS LEAVE ME SPEECHLESS, and this was one. The bombings in Spain, blowing 200 people to bits and injuring well over a thousand more, are almost as heartbreaking as 9-11. The statisticians can say how much worse one attack was than the other. But you can't measure human pain and horror like that. How do you measure the blood and brains and guts of babies and innocent commuters rainging down on urban train stations?

What kind of person kills the innocent and calls it good in any cause?

An all-too-common kind of person, I think. A person who can't even recognize what he really is when he looks into a mirror. A person who doesn't realize how much he's like his worst enemies.

Aaron Zelman forwarded an article today by Benjamin Shapiro, in which a failed Palestinian suicide bomber was quoted as saying, "For me, all the Jews are soldiers, and I wanted to kill as many as I could ... As long as I am alive, I will never leave the Jews alone."

How convenient to define all of any group as "soldiers" to justify slaughtering them. How wrong-headed and how disgusting.

But while expressing righteous rage over the bomber's comment, Shapiro himself defines all anti-Semites as "Amakelites" -- the genocidal biblical enemy of the Jews. According to Samuel, God hated the Amakelites so much he ordered the Jews to slaughter each and every one of them, right down to their babies, and including their farm animals. And -- as Shapiro himself implies (though never directly states) -- all modern-day "Amakelites" should be killed. Not only those who actually aggress against the Jews, but all those who are "morally degraded" or who'd like to see the Jews gone.

By a conservative estimate, that's about 100,000,000 Islamic fundamentalists Benjamin Shapiro wishes to see dead.

Well, sorry, Benjamin. If you really mean it's right and righteous to slaughter people just because they hate Jews and not because they've actually aggressed against Jews, that makes you a moral cousin to the bomber babe who said your infant daughter and your ancient grandmother were "soldiers." Jews aren't all soldiers, deserving to be killed. And people who dislike Jews aren't all Amakelites, deserving to be killed. (And it's interesting that Shapiro justifies slaughter on the grounds that some target group is "morally degraded." Has he forgotten that "moral degradation" was one of the major charges Hitler used to excuse the ostracism and eventual slaughter of the Jews?)

And those commuters on those Spanish trains ... whoever killed them, those innocent people weren't all whatever cliche their murderers used to justify targeting and slaughtering them, either. Yes, you can be sure, even though we don't know who planted those bombs, that they did persuade themselves that all those innocents were "infidels" or "vermin" or "collateral" or "soldiers" or whatever other cool term of dismissal appealed to the murderers at the moment.

The one thing all these "death to my enemies" crusaders have in common -- and not coincidentally, the one thing they all also have in common with governments everywhere -- is a complete and total failure to value individuals. A total failure to recognize that everybody has a heart, a spirit, hopes, dreams, aspirations, and varying levels of innocence and guilt that neither the Pentagon nor the PLO nor the ETA nor Al-Quaida nor Hitler nor the Mossad is competent to pass capital judgment upon. It doesn't matter a damn whether it's flying planes into the Pentagon or dropping bombs from planes onto Afghani children. Doesn't matter a damn whether it's blowing up trains and office buildings or whacking the arms and legs off little Iraqi boys. It's all done by people who think something else in this world trumps the rights, and the value, of individuals. And who'll make convenient excuses to themselves to justify their neverending slaughter until they day they destroy the whole helpless world.

A pox on all their houses.

Posted by Claire @ 08:43 PM CST
Link