Libanon (5)
Robert Weissman, in de Huffington Post, begint met een vriend een actie:
"If you are a Jewish American, you take a first step by adding your name to a sign-on letter that Robert Naiman of the new organization Just Foreign Policy and I have initiated. Just click here.
Here's the text of the letter:
Dear President Bush:
As American Jews, we are horrified by your apparent support for the bombing and destruction of Lebanon, and your opposition to international demands for an immediate ceasefire.
We condemn the violence by all sides, especially against civilians. But we cannot accept your attempt to justify and abet the collective punishment of the people of Lebanon -- including thousands of Americans trapped there -- as part of "Israel's right to defend herself."
The vast majority of Lebanese now suffering the destruction of their country, along with hundreds of civilian deaths from the Israeli bombing campaign, had nothing to do with Hizbollah's attacks on Israeli soldiers, nor subsequent rocket attacks on Israeli cities.
The same is true in Gaza, where the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit on June 25 -- the original alleged pretext for Israel's incursions and detention of the territory's elected leaders -- was preceded just the day before by the abduction of two Palestinian civilians from their home by Israeli forces, as reported by Gideon Levy in the Israeli daily Haaretz. Here, too, it is wrong to portray this ever-widening conflict as a "war against terrorism." According to the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem, more than 100 Palestinians who were not engaged in hostile actions were killed by Israeli forces since Israel withdrew from Gaza, and before the recent escalation of violence.
The idea that the cycle of violence will come to an end by means of more violence, and especially attacks on civilian areas, is wrong and immoral.
We ask you to support an immediate cease-fire and a negotiated solution to the conflict.
Sincerely, "
posted by willem @ 12:26 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Oh Help! Daar hebben we weer de cliché term "cycle of violence" weer. Filosoof Lee Harris daarover:
"Here we come to the first, and perhaps the most common, form that our modern cant about terrorism assumes -- a phrase that slips so easily off the tongues of anchorpersons that no one ever stops to inspect its meaning.
You walk into my house and shoot my wife dead. I chase you out of the house and gun you down in the street. The next day your son kills me; and two days following my son kills your son.
Now here is a cycle of violence, and yet can there be any doubt who started this cycle? You did. True, I may have done things that, in your opinion, justified your violence; but provided I did not use physical violence against you or yours, then you were the first one to escalate to the deliberate use of violence.
So how could I have stopped the cycle of violence? Well, by not doing anything to you or your kin when you killed my wife.
But would this have stopped the cycle of violence? What if you came the next day and shot my son, and I still didn't use violence to avenge myself. In this case, is my refusal to stoop to the use of violence a factor promoting the end of violence, or an incentive to more violence on the part of the person who first decided to use it?
The "cycle of violence" is a cant phrase, like so many other cant phrases circulating today, in that it permits us to feel as if we have said something profound when in fact we are talking utter nonsense. Yes, violence, once begun, often breeds violence -- but, as history amply demonstrates, violence breeds violence no matter how the other party responds to it. Fighting violence breeds it, but so too does appeasing violence. Furthermore, massive and overwhelming violence, far from continuing the cycle of violence, often stops it in its tracks, like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So what is the phrase "cycle of violence" good for? Well, for deceiving ourselves into thinking that we can be even-handed and fair-minded in our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since it is all just a cycle of violence, we do not need to take sides, or decide whose violence is justifiable. All violence is equally wrong, on this view; hence the role of the honest broker is to deplore both Israeli violence and Palestinian violence as if there were no difference between them.
This policy is similar to the policy on violence that is fashionable in American public schools today. If two boys are found fighting, both are punished equally, and no attention is paid to the question, "Who started it?" All violence is equivalent. The violence of the bully, and the violence of the boy who is determined to put the bully in his place, are one and the same. The heroic kid, who is prepared to stand up to the bully, is not honored, but sent to detention or expelled.
In the context of a public school, such a policy can be justified by the obvious problem of how do you go about determining who really started the fight when both boys, along with their buddies, are screaming that it was the other side who threw the first punch. Yet matters of expediency must not be elevated to maxims of morality. It is fine to break up two boys with the statement, "One of you may well be totally in the right and the other totally in the wrong -- but, unfortunately, the school system lacks the facilities to pass a judgment on this question. Therefore, we are forced to punish both the guilty and the innocent." But it is not fine to tell them that all violence is equally wrong, and to condemn both equally for resorting to it, since this, rather from being a straightforward statement of school policy, is transparent cant.
Yet this is the position that so much of the world inevitably takes when it is a question of eruptions of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis. "There they go again," is apt to be the response of many fair-minded Westerners; and each new terrorist act, and each retaliation against it, are weighed against one another as if they were morally equivalent.
Psychologically, it is understandable why so many Westerners feel this way. Those, for example, who have gone back to the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inevitably discover that their sincere efforts to solve the question, "Who started it?" are baffled by the bloody and violent historical track record of both Israelis and Palestinians. But, in fact, it is not necessary for us to try to determine the question of who started it. This is because, even when we cannot be clear about who started it, we can be reasonably certain about who is not trying to stop it -- and this is certainly true in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis retaliate against terror, and they try to prevent it; but they do not use acts of terror to deliberately disrupt attempts at a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Palestinian terrorist organizations do. They have for decades, and they continue to engage in such terror, despite Palestinian national elections and concessions made by the Israelis. Nor is there any reason to suppose that this terror will end, so long as there are Palestinian organizations whose very existence depends on maintaining a condition of anarchy and disorder. Any stable and peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would, in and of itself, rob the terrorist leaders and their followers of their power and importance. Thus, they have a vested interest in keeping uproar and violence alive.
Despite this painfully obvious fact, the apologists of Palestinian terror argue that, unlike the Israelis who have tanks and airplanes, the Palestinian militants lack the means to express their political aspiration, except through acts of terrorism. But couldn't Timothy McVeigh have said the same thing? "Yes," he might have said, "I would have declared war on the Federal government if I had been equipped with my own military force, but, lacking that, I did the best I could: I blew up lots of perfectly innocent people."
The argument does not work in McVeigh's case because we do not accept the legitimacy of his aspirations: we do not see the point of his act of terror, nor do we see any link between the point he was trying to make and the means he elected to make it with.
This, however, is not the way that most of the world views Palestinians acts of terror. These atrocities are looked upon as the expression -- however immature or misguided -- of what is called "the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people."
Lees de rest in "The Peculiar Institution: Understanding Why Palestinian Terror Is Different". Klik op mijn naam voor de link.
Waarom wilt Willem de Zwijger zo graag dat ze daar gaan onderhandelen met de Mohammed B's en slaat hij Geert Mak taal uit?
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