September 15, 2006
we western europeans
Frederick Forsyth (London, Daily Express, 11/8):
“It must surely be
true that the level of lies and hypocrisy that a society can tolerate is in direct proportion to the degeneration of that culture.
Personally I am not particularly pro or anti Israel, pro or anti Arab or pro or anti Islam. But I do have a dislike of myth, hypocrisy and lies as opposed to reality, fairness and truth.
Watching the bombing of Lebanon it is impossible not to feel horror and pity for the innocent civilians killed, wounded or rendered homeless. But certain of our politicians, seeking easy populism and the cheapest round of applause in modern history, have called the Israeli response “disproportionate”. Among thee politicos are Jack Straw and that master of EU negotiations William Hague.
That accusation can only mean: “disproportionate to the aggression levelled against them”. Really? Why did the accusers not mention Serbia? What has Serbia got to do with it? Let’s refresh our memories.
In 1999 five Nato air forces – US, British, French, Italian and German – began to plaster Yugoslavia, effectively the tiny and defenceless province of Serbia. We were not at war with the Serbs, we had no reason to hate them, they had not attacked us and no Serbian rockets were falling on us.
But we practically bombed them back to the Stone Age. We took out every bridge we could see. We trashed their TV station, army barracks, airfields and motorways.
We were not fighting for our lives and no terrorists were skulking among the civilian population but we hit apartment blocks and factories anyway. There were civilian casualties. We did not do it for 25 days but for 73. We bombed this little country economically back 30 years by converting its infrastructure into rubble. Why?
We were trying to persuade one dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, to pull his troops out of Kosovo, which happened to be (and still is) a Yugoslav province. The dictator finally cracked ; shortly afterwards he was toppled but it was his fellow Serbs who did that, not Nato.
Before the destruction of Serbia, Kosovo was a nightmare of ethnic hatred. It still is. If we wanted to liberate the Kosovans why did we not just invade? Why blow Serbian civilians to bits?
Here is my point. In all those 73 days of bombing Serbia I never heard one British moralist use the word “disproportionate”.
The entire point of Hezbollah is not to resolve some border dispute with Israel; its aim is to wipe Israel off the map, as expressed by Hezbollah’s master, the crazed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. That aim includes the eradication of every Israeli Jew; i.e. genocide.
Serbia never once threatened to wipe the UK off the map or slaughter our citizens, yet Straw, in office in 1999, and Hague, leading the Conservative Party, never objected to Serbia being bombed.
As an ex-RAF officer, I am persuaded the Israelis fighter pilots are hitting civilian-free targets with 95% of their strikes. These are the hits no TV network bothers to cover. It is the 5% that causes the coverage and the horror: wrong target, unseen civilians in the cellar, misfire, unavoidable collateral casualties. Unavoidable?
Israel has said in effect, “If you seek to wipe us out we will defend ourselves to the death. You offer us no quarter, so we will offer none to you. But if you choose intentionally, inadvertently, or through the stupidity of your government to protect and shelter the killers among yourselves then, with deepest regret, we cannot guarantee your exemption.”
Yesterday, we Brits learned that certain elements in our society had tried to organise a mass slaughter of citizens flying out of our airports. We will have to take draconian measures against these enemies in our midst. Will Messrs Hague and Straw complain our methods are disproportionate? Not a chance. Now that, dear readers, is blatant hypocrisy.”
Oh, this is going to be so much fun to watch.
The koan for you is:
“There is about to be a conflict in an underdeveloped country where 100,000 civilians will inevitably be killed by their government. The EU could prevent this, but 100 of its soldiers will be killed in preventing it. Is the life of 1 EU-volunteered peacekeeper worth 1,000 foreign civilians? And is this even an appropriate question? What if the EU could spend money instead of its citizens’ lives to reduce its casualties, even if civilians are killed in the effort?”
You’d better bet I have no snap answer to this, and I intensely distrust anyone who does.
Great post. Coincidentally, my ten year old son came in to my office tonight and asked innocently “Dad, do you think we’ll ever cure terrorism?” (“Cure” was his word, as if terrorism is a disease.) My answer: Not a chance. Terrorism is murder, and murder has been around since Cain and Abel.
I don’t see where the current situation can end — but I can understand the Israeli point of view that it’s folly to placate people who are implacably opposed to it. Sad. Having lived abroad several times, I’m pretty sure that 99.999% of all Muslims and Arabs are good people.
Why can’t we all just get along?
The Bosnian Serbs, under Milosevic’s rule, committed genocide against thousands of people including 8000 in the Srebrenica Massacre alone. The largest mass murder since World War 2 and the first legally established case of genocide in Europe.
Should we have sat by while they did the same in Kosovo? Disproportionate? I think not.
here here!
Great cartoon, Hugh! Nailed it!
Hugh,
It is good to see novelists raising their heads abovbe the parapets and entering into the debates about global moral relativism — a subject that has only recently come to the fore of our understanding of the world and must surely one of the most genuinely exciting byproducts of the internet age.
In terms of interesting and provocative writing about the current state of things by novelists stirring things up, I couldn’t recommend more highly the article,‘The Age of Horrorism’, written by Martin Amis in last Sunday’s Observer (UK). Agree with it or not, it is an outstanding piece of work that is 100% worth reading.
Link here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0„1868732,00.html
David
ps. anyone who enjoyed this should also check out the Amis story about Mohammed Atta in the previous week’s Observer as well as whatever he has to offer in his final installment tomorrow.
Thanks for putting that article up, I had never thought of Israel’s reaction in comparison to Serbia.
Furthermore the wave of anti-americanism which accuse the US of Islamaphobia always conveniently forgets the bombing of Serbia. Anti-semitism is still very much alive, and as Hugh points out in his cartoon (I think), arguably has been exported into the middle east (where Jews and Arabs had been peacefully co-existing) from Europe after the 2nd world war.
Israel must defend itself, but other than continued hostilites in the region, what is the real solution? Can you change the mind of the ant-semites? I doubt it. There are people alive today who were so effectively brainwashed by the Nazis they are still anti-semitic.
So do we need further military action in the region, is Israel’s reaction disproportioniate in that it is too small? After all, Hezbollah have claimed a victory. That’s an uncomfortable question, and to answer yes would almost certainly transgress international law.
Meanwhile the terrorists hide behind the hemskirts of civilians and wishy washy liberalism, happily murdering away, preparing the next generation, eroding our confidence in ourselves and our faith in humanity. Our press coverage becomes less clear sighted as the beginnings of the conflict diminish on the horizon and the death count rises…
Just a factual note on the last comment. Jews and Arabs had not been peacefully coexisting until after World War II. At the very latest, you could say that the current hostilities have their roots in the late 19th century. Before that, Jews were minority populations in Arab and other Muslim-controlled countries, a status which usually made the Jews’ lives peaceful as long as they submitted to their Muslim rulers. As to how much like second-class citizens they were treated, that varied greatly through history and location (as might be expected).
Thanks Scott, I should have said ‘peacefully co-existing by comparison with today’. I didn’t intend that the relationship sound so idyllic.
I was refferring to Berman’s point rasied in the Amis article about the rise in anti-semitism along with Totalitarianism in Arab countries post WW2. Berman mentions the wave of Nazi intellectuals who fled to Egypt and their influence there and on Qutb. Although they were treated as 2nd class citizens the Jews were not as villified in that area as they are now until that period, and I don’t think there was much talk of genocide.
At the base of any conflict is tribalism and one tribe’s inherent quest to hold dominion over another. It has always been so and will always remain so.
We humans do not learn to coexist. We learn to tolerate. For a while only.
Then we get bored, factuous, intolerant and belligerent again and bring out the bazookas and recruit innocents and send them to early and completely unecessary deaths as suicide bombers for what?
Nothing changes. The need for us humans to dominate another will never be resolved. War and regional conflict will remain inevitable for all time.
Why can’t Israel and Palestine simply accept each other as neighbours and get on with living eating, praying and procreating? They would and want to.
But that’d be too easy a resoltion. Someone wants to foster and maintain instability. Why?
Great post! Balanced and well thought out. The ‘international community’ is a failure when it comes to logic, fairness and truthful analysis. Keep up the good work.
Surf’s up,
Dennis
Oh … this one’s lovely. Right down my alley.
Just posted a three-pic piece on this down my blog (plug plug plug ethical question on using hatred as plug plug).
It’s hard talking about human nature, hypocrisy, moral relativism, etc. etc. … the debate gets so open and bloody. I think all responses are “disproportionate.”
Why? Because — when something goes right, we boast it’s all down to us. When something goes wrong, however, we always pin the blame on someone else. And that somebody (be it Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Serbs, Fluffy Bunnies, Easter Eggs or the Linux Penguin) gets it rammed down their throat as hard as possible. Why?
Because we’re HURT — we’re not only hurt physically, but morally, emotionally, etc. etc. — our outrage is out of proportion to the actual damage, but our response IS usually actual damage. So you get a vicious circle of violence.
Whoopee! Eh what?
The problem is, you have to do some cold blooded calculations, rather than get carried away in self-indulgent outrage at teh “evil terrists”
The truth is that Hezbollah firing unaimed rockets into Israel poses zero threat to the country. Sure, they’ll kill civilians, which is a nasty thing to do, but the amount of hurt they’ll inflict on the Israeli people is, frankly, tolerable. (Unlike the Serbian militias in Kosovo, which posed a plausible threat of genocide; even so Forsyth is right that the NATO bombardment of Serbian civilians was a wholly unjustified crime.)
If Israel had magnanimously ignored the rocket attacks, Hezbollah would have gained little sympathy in Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world, and would have gradually lost popular support.
Instead, Israel made a botched attempt at a war to destroy Hezbollah; killed something like ten times as many innocent Lebanese civilians as Hezbollah had killed innocent Israeli civilians — which seriously hurt its reputation as the good guy ; *failed* disasterously to damage Hezbollah’s capability — which seriously hurt its reputation as a fearsome, competent military force ; and has now retreated, amid a surge of pro-Hezbollah feeling in Lebanon and the rest of the middle-east, requiring that thousands of European and UN troops are dragged into the south of Lebanon to keep the peace.
Israel did not even go to war because of rocket attacks. (If you’ve forgotten, go check the sequence of events.) Israel went to war so that its scoundrel of a prime-minister could make some patriotic capital by rescuing two Israeli soldiers. It was a war, very much of choice, driven by political posturing.
By contrast, Britain actually showed the world how to beat terrorism this year. By smart police work, and good co-operation with both the muslim community at home, and internationally with the police of Pakistan. Ultimately, this, not chest-thumping and telegenic random invasions of other countries is what’s going to make the world safer. It saves lives, nails the guilty and does little collateral damage to either civilians or our reputation.
Ok, I’m Muslim and one of my best friends is Jew, I realized that both religions ISLAM AND JUDAISM are so close , except that muslims believe in Jesus the christ, in the other hand Jews consider Jesus the Christ as a false prophet.
But. My other friend Believes that BEER IS GOD. (I Like this )
Nice work Hugh! I am always inspired by the way you write and draw toons! Keep inspiring me..
- Saurabh
Hmm. Re-reading my posting above, the word “tolerable” sounds a bit dodgy. I meant, of course, that it was not any kind of “existential” threat to Israel, not that it was somehow morally OK.
I just loved this one.. Brilliant!
Nice one. However I do not agree with the comparison. It just needs a little bit more of reading through history books than that. The bloodshed in the Balkans is just the consequence of the bad foreign politics of GB and the rest of Europe in the past. But if I think of it, it’s not just the Balkans. All the wars anywhere in the world can be tracked back in time to some wrongdoing of an European state. Israel and Palestine, civil wars in Africa, Asia, Latin America…all of them are products MADE IN EUROPE. Maybe U.S.A is just following the tradition.
I’m a Serb and have muslim and Western friends. We all get along quite ok.
But there’s one thing that disturbs me about them, you people and actually most people around the (Western) world:
Everybody keeps repeating that the Serbs massmurdered people.
Somehow every dead albanian, muslim or croat is photographed a million times, while serbian deaths seem to be completely unimportant.
there are sources that say that 120000 muslims and 90000 serbs died in Bosnia. Why have the Western media never shown anything about that?
Did those 90000 serbs collectively commit suicide or were they killed by the other parties?
It really seems as if a Serbian life is worth less than any other…
If you think the Kosovo war was for humanitarian reasons then explain why dozens of other countries aren’t bombed. Sudan Rwanda etc…with much, much more casualties.
I learned 1 thing: no american war is fought for humanitarian reasons. That’s just propaganda. And if there are no genocides or weapons of mass destruction, they will make them up, but in the end they will always have it their way.
So actually Saddam and milosevic should have killed themselves as soon as they found out the us wanted to get rid of them.
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosovo_crisis/html/0614_jwr.html
http://www.iacenter.org
I’m a Serb and have muslim and Western friends. We all get along quite ok.
But there’s one thing that disturbs me about them, you people and actually most people around the (Western) world:
Everybody keeps repeating that the Serbs massmurdered people.
Somehow every dead albanian, muslim or croat is photographed a million times, while serbian deaths seem to be completely unimportant.
there are sources that say that 120000 muslims and 90000 serbs died in Bosnia. Why have the Western media never shown anything about that?
Did those 90000 serbs collectively commit suicide or were they killed by the other parties?
It really seems as if a Serbian life is worth less than any other…
If you think the Kosovo war was for humanitarian reasons then explain why dozens of other countries aren’t bombed. Sudan Rwanda etc…with much, much more casualties.
I learned 1 thing: no american war is fought for humanitarian reasons. That’s just propaganda. And if there are no genocides or weapons of mass destruction, they will make them up, but in the end they will always have it their way.
So actually Saddam and milosevic should have killed themselves as soon as they found out the us wanted to get rid of them.
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/kosovo_crisis/html/0614_jwr.html
http://www.iacenter.org
The Kosovan war / genocide was not the largest since the 2nd World War — Biafra suffered 3.5 million deaths of Igbo’s by forced starvation of which the Financial Minister of Nigeria satated’starvation is a legitimate tool of war’.
The Nigerians also killed by force 300,000 Biafran soldiers and civilians.