LESLIE J. SACKS: March 2009

Monday, March 30, 2009

Of Innocents and Savages

Google “Congo killings” and the search engine will find you 3.56 million references. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is 2.3 million square kilometers, and is home to 62.6 million people.

Enter “Gaza killings” and Google will locate 8.56 million references. The Gaza Strip is 360 square kilometers, and home to 1.5 million people. That is one-thousandth of the land mass, and two-hundredths of the population, of the DRC.

The media (both ‘new’ and ‘old’) bias is indisputable.

Less than 1,000 Gazans were reliably documented as killed in their last war with Israel, many of which were armed militants. In Congo, over four million unquestionably innocent civilians have now been killed—by weapon or disease—in the past twelve years. Horrific stories of rape, burnings, and mutilations abound. And yet, the media’s fixation on Israel’s ‘oppression’ of the Arabs continues. The question is evitable: why is there such a focus on deaths in Gaza—a war triggered by the firing of over 6,000 rockets at Israeli civilians—while the exterminations in the DRC are comparatively ignored? Is it because the Congolese are black and invisible people who cannot help but murder each other? Or is it because Hamas and the Gazans have been granted victim status amongst the worldwide left, giving the cognoscenti and ‘activists’ everywhere a perfect whipping boy in Israel? Either way, it doesn’t speak well for the evolution of mankind: blacks, apparently, are still savages, and Jews still deserve to be killed.

Posted on SlantRight
Posted on NewsBlaze
Posted on Bruce's MidEast Soundbites

Monday, March 23, 2009

The Value of Understanding

Now that appeasement is back in vogue, the post-9/11 notion that we must "understand" the terrorists - their unique motivations, their sad backgrounds - has re-emerged among the talking heads and diplomatic elites. The presumption is that such understanding will grant us insight and empathy, confirming our inherent similarities and bringing us reconciliation, compromise and resolution. The terrorists are merely aggrieved - not evil. Therefore, they are eminently capable of negotiation.

Is it not strange that the victims are pleading for reconciliation, thereby donating their victimization to the perpetrators? 1

Is not every citizen of the world - six billion plus people - in some way aggrieved, at some stage denied justice? What then separates these six billion aggrieved from the tens of thousands of active Jihadists, suicide bombers and terrorists? 2

Those who support negotiation won't consider this remarkable statistic - that of six billion citizens versus only tens of thousands terrorists. If they did they would have to conclude that an overwhelming proportion of the world's inhabitants choose non-violent methods of redress. I dare say that the victims of the Holocaust, those raped in Darfur, those with limbs chopped off in the Congo, those women stoned in Iran, those imprisoned in dictatorships, are all infinitely more deserving of aggressive redress, of violent redemption, than those who bridle at America's presence (or its Jewish proxy) in the Middle East.

Surely, then, the methods of redress chosen ultimately define the difference between human and inhuman, between, civilized and uncivilized, between fallibility and irrevocable evil.

Indeed, it is in those methods that the chasm between us and the terrorists is evinced - a chasm that cannot be spanned by negotiation. When one chooses very specifically to bomb a children's school, a hospital, a pizzeria, a wedding - despite plenty of military targets, governmental installations, and police stations - then methods reveal madness, and there is no similarity between them and us. It is then that those apologizing for terrorists, those advocating unremitting negotiations, are providing support for terrorism itself. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are undermining the defenses civilized societies must build to secure their survival. 3

For all their emphasis on the terrorists' motivations, by ignoring their methods the appeasers' self-proclaimed 'understanding' is in fact far from it.
After all,