"We care more about the lives of their children than they do, and they weaponize that." A corollary is Golda Meir's famous statement, "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Still so true.
The line is from an interview with Sam Harris on Dan Senor's indispensible Call Me Back podcast, and it has stuck with me. I've commented about this paradox before, in a blog talking about dying as a political tool. I'm thinking about it now as more than just a despicable military tactic.
It sums up so much of the moral dilemma and paradox faced by Israel, and by extension the west. It sums up how fanatical and nihilistic the enemy's ideology is. How contrary to basic morality and humanity it is. How the stakes of this battle are actually so much greater than just territorial or political, it's civilizational. And it summarizes how the enemy uses our values against us, to destabilize our society and in some cases, like mine, family relationships, not in spite of, but because of our empathy, sympathy and decency. Our morality is the fuel for their iniquity and that's a problem.
I think of my daughter who asks, rightly so, why don't you care as much about the reported 41,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza as you do about the Israelis? I'm proud of her for asking that question. It's the right question for anyone with any basic sense of human decency and empathy to ask. I'd be worried if she didn't ask it.
My first response is obvious, we're Jewish. We need to care about our own. And as the global response to this war shows, we have plenty of enemies, people who want to do us harm, anti-Semitism is alive and well. But as justified as that answer is, that sort of tribalism also feels like part of the problem. It offends even my own sense of humanity, something I learned from being Jewish, which is also presumably why so many Jews are so sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. (Tellingly, we aren't seeing any Arab sympathy for the Israeli victims of Oct. 7th.)
What my daughter is implicitly saying with her question is; even if the enemy doesn't care about their own women and children, it's morally incumbent upon us to care about them. If they intentionally put them in harm's way, it does not negate our basic moral responsibilities to our fellow human beings. We can't sacrifice our decency and humanity in a fight against their indecency and inhumanity. If we are like them, or if we are worse, according to the scale of carnage and destruction that we are inflicting upon them, then they win.
Yes and no.
Our problem as a society is that we think of them in 'normal' terms. We have sympathy for them on that basis, which is only natural. We say, look at the squalor they live in, the oppression, Gaza is overcrowded, an 'open-air prison' (no mention of the border with Egypt.) Is it any wonder they are angry and will go to such extremes to fight for their 'freedom' and self-determination? This is 'normal' thinking. But if they were normal in their thinking, if their goals were the security of their families and a better way of life, would they have launched a suicidal attack against an obviously superior military? Would there be such pride in sacrificing their women and children for their cause? Would there have been such maniacal glee in their Go-Pro filmed brutality and bloodlust?
The only possible answer is that this is a type of madness. 'Normal' does not apply. Jihadism is a form of psychosis. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, "Psychosis refers to a collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality... a person's thoughts and perceptions are disrupted and they may have difficulty recognizing what is real and what is not." Jihadism is a mental illness like other types of pervasive delusional thinking, dangerously divorced from reality, and with homicidal/suicidal tendencies. That's the proper framework within which to view it. Can a society, or large swathes of a society, be psychotic? (the clinical term is 'Mass-psychosis') I think history has proven definitively that the answer is yes.
It's 'normal' to have sympathy for those suffering from mental illness. But only if they can and want to be helped. The delusional, psychotic, unrepentant, murderous Jihadist is a danger to his loved ones and society, and needs to be either put away or, if armed and rampaging, neutralized. No one can live with a murderous psychopath next door, or god-forbid in their own house. And what we know about dealing with psychopaths is that they will not stop until they destroy themselves, their loved ones, and everyone around them. And that's when sympathy becomes at best enabling and at worst self-destructive. That's what we're dealing with.
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