The West’s denial of evil
Michael Berg may be a lunatic, but he represents mentality of millions of people
“These words are insane,” wrote former New York City mayor Ed Koch, and of course he’s right. But, however insane, Michael Berg’s words are also a fine distillation of a mentality found among many millions of people in Western countries, particularly the elites.
The mentality was well evident last week in reaction to Israel’s alleged accidental killing of a Palestinian family on a Gaza beach.
Who cares about Sderot?
For months, the deliberate firing of hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilians in towns such as Sderot and other Gaza-area communities has hardly elicited a yawn outside Israel. The fact that most Sderot residents are working-class, dark-skinned Sephardic Jews, many of them (or their immediate forebears) refugees from Arab countries that brutally expelled them some decades ago, did nothing to stir sympathy for them.
There is simply no cachet and no romance here, no “Save Sderot” marches on campus, not a whiff of censure of the Palestinian Authority. The people of Sderot might as well be George Bush.
Too good to pass up
Then came an image of a tragically decimated Palestinian family on a beach, and the West sprang into action. All of a sudden, the UK Foreign Office was “deeply concerned by reports of the deaths from Israeli shelling of civilians”; France’s Foreign Ministry thundered that it “deplores the Israeli bombing on a beach in the Gaza Strip.”
The US State Department was only slightly more circumspect, expressing “regret for the killing and wounding of innocent Palestinians in Gaza today as a result of artillery fire by the Israeli Defense Forces.” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on Israel to “respect human life and international law.”
Gone were the vaunted Western principles of a fair hearing and innocent until proven guilty; the condemnations poured in well before Israel had a chance to investigate the incident and found that an IDF shell could not possibly have been responsible (even then Annan, of course, did not accept the finding).
Something else was in the air, something too exciting—an Abu Ghraib, a Haditha, a chance to show, a la Michael Berg, that it is really the Western side who are the brutal abusers and killers. The hunger is so great that even a (supposed) accident, a misfired shell, will do.
Who's the terrorist?
If, after all, it is really America and Israel—the only countries (except Britain in Iraq) substantially fighting the jihad—who are the aggressors, then one gets off easy, one only needs to curb these two rogues to continue with one’s luxurious life. Michael Berg, running for office in Delaware, knows in his heart that George Bush is nothing to fear, that he can publicly call him a terrorist, try to wrest power from his political party, and remain perfectly safe.
He may be a touch crazy, but Berg, in addition to the widespread Western mindset he represents, is a coward who cannot look evil in the face. He would rather turn his son’s sadistic killing almost into an act of tenderness – with words like “felt my son’s breath on his hand . . . had to look in his eyes . . .” – than do that.
Almost five years after September 11, after Madrid, Bali, London, the terror war on Israel, and so on, the cowardice—the lunging to pin blame on one’s own side, the eager abandonment of logic and fairness while rushing to embrace moral inversion and idiocy—all this is still so strong as to suggest that the West’s survival is anything but certain.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem and a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com
