Equal right to die…. Hannah Arendt termed it an “overpowering reality” that seems to be inherent in totalitarian systems in which the problem of evil could be analyzed but would remain elusive, a fugitive that escaped the most ardent manhunt that could be mounted. Arendt was correct in not avoiding the special animus that seems the Jew’s sort, but rather an evil of totalitarianism that differs only in the choice of victim while the nature of the crime remains a constant. Whether the evil act remains a learned second nature or more despairingly, something innate to our primary nature is not touched upon, but it may come down to the issue of conscientious choice, and how the will seems to be diminished when the outlets to choice are negated, the examples of Milgram and Zimbardo’s Stanford experiments seem to point in this sense. In Arendt’s studies of the death camps, the prisoners had their ability to distinguish between good and evil robbed from them and instead presented with a choice between evil and evil, thereby implicating themselves in the crime although not a willing complicity. What we are witnessing in the Middle East today is Arendt’s vision of totalitarian terror, with its nihilistic underside of total destruction, as a form of radical evil that implicates its religion within the root of evil, hence dissolving conscience, principal, honor, and ironically, even fear which an individual manifests if they are free to do so….
( see link at end) Meotti: …Hamas MP Fathi Hamed, addressing Israel, said, “We desire death more than you desire life”.
That SS Death Heads’ cry is the root of the conflict in Gaza and in the Middle East.
“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the same vein.
Osama bin Laden declared: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”
“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah.
—August Macke (German, Expressionism, The Blue Rider, 1887–1914): Garden Restaurant, 1912. Oil on canvas, 81 x 105 cm. Kunsstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland.—
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared: “It is the zenith of honor for a man to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”
Hamas’s armed wing reported that it has prepared its forces in Gaza to engage the Israeli army by deploying “suicide units”, read women. In Arabic it’s the “istishhadiyah”, the female version of martyrdom.
When a journalist asked her if she was ready to kill Jewish children too, the [Arab]woman replied: “Yes, all, infants and children”.
My fellow journalists prefer not seeing the dormitories, the schools, the streets, the sports arenas and the events named for these messengers of death by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
There are 88 cases of Palest
n women who have so far chosen to die in order to bring death to the Israelis, civilian and military. The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, found that 33 percent of them were college graduates. They are called “the purest of bees”. Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin issued a fatwa justifying the suicide operations for women.
Kahira Saadi, a mother of four, never expressed regret for the role she played in the attack that killed four Israelis, including Zipi Shemesh, a Jewish mother pregnant with twins, and her husband Gad.
—Overnight, some 20 white tents were pitched in the middle of Cairo’s totemic Tahrir Square, the scene of the unrest which ousted long-time President Hosni Mubarak last year.
…
Protest organisers said more than 20 different groups had joined a week-long sit-in against Mr Mursi’s reforms, saying the new president is becoming as much of a dictator as Mubarak.
“We are involved in a sit-in because the goals of the revolution have yet to be achieved,” said Mira Daniel, whose brother, Coptic activist Mina Daniel, was killed in the 2011 uprising.
“We are here because they took a decision to make us die in the square, so we are here to die in the Square. What’s happening now is death.”—Read More:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20474124
Wafa Biss wanted to become a martyr from childhood: “I believe in death, I wanted to kill fifty Jews”. Wafa tried to blow herself up in a hospital with nine kilos of explosives between her legs. When a journalist asked her if she was ready to kill Jewish children too, the woman replied: “Yes, all, infants and children”.
Ayat al Akhras was eighteen years old when she blew herself up in a supermarket in Jerusalem.
Female suicide bombers provided Hamas with an element of surprise and an easier way to pass through Israeli checkpoints. In a video recorded in December 2008, Hamas operative Umm Suheib proclaims: “I swear by Allah that I will turn my body parts into a fire that will burn the occupation soldiers”.
A 57 years Palestinian grandmother blew herself up in Jabaliya, among a group of Israeli soldiers.
—The solution, according to Yousef, is to educate Gazans about their real friends and foes. ”We need to expose the lies and educate the Palestinian public that Israel is not the enemy. Israel actualy helps the people of Gaza more than anybody else,” he said. “We need the average Palestinian to see this clearly.”
In a particularly poignant part of the interview, Yousef chose to use the camera to speak directly to his father, the man who publicly disowned him two years ago.
“I am sure that Hamas people, people like my father are listening to this interview. It is not courageous of them to hide behind children and launch missiles. Israel was out [of Gaza, having removed all its civilians and its military in the disengagement of 2005]. The battlefield was out of the populated areas. If they [Hamas members] had courage they could have come out of the Gaza Strip instead of hiding like rats,” he charged.—Read More:http://www.timesofisrael.com/son-of-hamas-mosab-hassan-yousef-calls-out-gaza-barbarians/
Gaza is like Chechnya, where women took part in suicide missions against the Russians. On the passenger list of planes blown up in 2004 there were the names of two Chechen women. They are known as “black widows”. Another two detonated themselves a few meters from the Kremlin. In the siege of the Dubrovka theater in Moscow, half of the terrorists were women. In Chechnya, women led 43 percent of the suicide attacks since 2000. Female terrorists took part in the Beslan’s Apocalypse.
— the son of one of Hamas’s founders, Mosab Hassan Yousef told Israel’s Channel 2 News on Friday that taking down his father’s terror organization “is a necessity, not just for Israel, but for humanity.”
Speaking from a safe house in a secret US location 48 hours after a fragile ceasefire ended eight days of Israeli-Hamas conflict, the former terror operative turned Israeli informant said, “Let’s not forget that our enemy is a barbarian enemy and they are using women and children as a shield.”
“Hamas was born to destroy. Hamas does not know how to build,” he said. “I doubt they will be able to build a modern Palestinian state and hope their lies will be exposed to the Palestinian public.”—Read More:http://www.timesofisrael.com/son-of-hamas-mosab-hassan-yousef-calls-out-gaza-barbarians/
…In Palestinian society, the most famous disabled person was Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin. In Iraq, terrorists used disabled women for suicide attacks. In Israel, in contrast, Down syndrome youth can be inducted into the army so that they feel part of society.
This is the story of the Middle East conflict: Islamists’ death cult vs. Israel’s right to life, epitomized by Professor Reuven Feuerstein, the Israeli pioneer who has dedicated his life to advancing Down’s Syndrome people beyond their supposed limits. He has said that “chromosomes will never have the last word”.
On the other side you have those who savor “the vivid and delightfully perverse feeling of the spilled blood”, as wrote Varlam Salamov, who spent twenty years in the Gulag.
…Five major wars and terror attacks since Israel’s founding in 1948 have resulted in thousands of disabled veterans and civilian survivors of suicide attacks. Each morning, these people wake up to the worst nightmares epitomizing Israel’s joy de vivre. They are a microcosm of the unfailing spirit so many of us in the West associate with being Israeli.
I remember a security guard at the Kiryat Hayovel supermarket who lost his legs; an Australian-born policeman who lost a leg in Neveh Ya’acov; a girl with shrapnel lodged in her brain from the double bombing at the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall; a boy who lost his eyesight at Haifa’s Maxim restaurant, or the pregnant policewoman, Shoshi Attiya, who chased down the terrorist in Netanya.
I think of them when I read the Western press saying that Israel is the stronger side in the conflict, with the military, the technology, the money, the knowledge base, the capacity to use force, the alliance with the United States— and that before it stands a pitifully weak people, claiming its “rights” and ready for martyrdom in order to obtain them. This is the greatest lie ever sold to public opinion.
Israel is fighting the same evil which in Kigali slaughtered those who wear glasses, which in Algeris cut the throats of monks and intellectuals and which in Tokyo used the Nervin gas in the subway.
The line of Israeli mothers and children running for a shelter under the “tzeva adom” alarm remind me of that boy with a hat too big for him, the yellow star on his chest and his hands up in the Warsaw ghetto – and the little human dots who jumped from the Twin Towers. We must not try to escape these pictures.
Richard Wagner offered us the terrorists’ final scenario: the twilight of the gods and the burning of the planet. It’s our responsibility that those who, from Gaza to Beslan, hang bombs like garlands above their children, who threaten them with death if they cry, who reduce them to drinking their own secretions , will fail in their attempts to accomplish their apocalypse.Read More:http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12473#.ULBZ64Zf27o
ADDENDUM:
…Arendt quotes the Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski on his experience in Auschwitz: “Never before was hope stronger than man, and never before did hope result in so much evil. . . . We were taught not to give up hope. That is why we die in the gas oven.” Agreeing that hope “stronger than man” is “destructive”of humanity, she added that the victims’ innocence, “even from the viewpoint of their persecutors,” further dehumanizes them: that their “apathy” toward their own death is “the almost physical, automatic response to the challenge of absolute meaninglessness” (see “Why Did the World Remain Silent?” reprinted in The Jewish World 2 [September 1964]).
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Thirdly, and this was by far the most important difference, the phrase banality of evil “stands in contrast to . . . ‘radical evil.’” This last distinction is developed in more detail in a letter to Gershom Scholem (see letter to Scholem, July 24, 1963). There she wrote: “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme.” “Thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated.” That there is nothing in evil for thought to latch onto is what Arendt meant by the banality of evil. Not the murderous deeds but the evildoer she faced in Jerusalem and the massiveness of the evil he inflicted on the world are banal in that sense.4 The realization that the most extreme evil has no meaning that the human mind can reveal, that it is not only senseless in its own terms but meaningless in any terms, was momentous; to say the least it afforded Arendt relief from a burden she had borne for many years. Read More:http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayc6.html
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