Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table,
And we are introduced to Goodness every day.
Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;
he has a name like Billy and is almost perfect
But wears a stammer like a decoration:
And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;
It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover
And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,
And both are openly destroyed before our eyes….( Herman Melville by W.H. Auden)
…And now back to your regular programming, the prime-time slot of the century old conflict that show no sign of ebbing. A permanent crest that hits the shore and lies suspended ready to burst again on the pretext of an “incident.” A big part of the locus of evil seems located within the sphere of BDS hate-mongers of Israel; they say, ostensibly that its to end the netherworld of occupation and military presence, but its just window dressing, favorable words cloaked in the inventory of humanism and liberalism lie a Norman Rockwell tugging at the sentimental strings; No, they want to end Israel and see the country as a weak link in the chain of democratic societies, and want to act before these countries re-emancipate and re-invigorate the model. The BDS’ers do not exist because of anything Israel really does, as they exist because Israel exists and they don’t want it to.
—Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Office has demanded that a faculty member of Tel Aviv University cancel her participation in a meeting between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Netanayhu with academics in Berlin, because of her political views and criticism of government policy.
Professor Rivka Feldhay, the head of the university’s Minerva Center for Human Rights, was invited to the event by Israel’s embassy in Germany a few weeks ago. The event is meant to be the height of the summit being held by the two governments in Berlin on Thursday.
As part of the event, there will be a round-table discussion featuring both Merkel and Netanyahu alongside some ten academics and scientists from Germany and Israel. Following brief remarks by both leaders, each participant will say a few words about their area of research.—Haaretz—Image:http://www.shavei.org/
If the BDS lobby has success against Israel, they will use that as a template to mobilize against America. They are villains, and unfortunately many are cursed with an exceptionally high level of optimism which means that perhaps excessive confidence is a manifestation of insanity, or nihilism, or both. Its an insane optimism to actually believe they will never have to face the music for destruction from within.Basically, these are a variant on the age old con man and woman, the confidence swindlers, charlatans and snake oil peddlers, but using the levers of democratic freedom to bite the hand that protects them. The relation between the law and morality is usually tenuous and ambiguous, and much evil, and outright villainy is perfectly legal, which in the case of the radical anarchists, Marxists, extreme Lefties is an elitist and negative attitude which in sum, amount to a very positive and real evil even if the verbal packaging seems so “logical” and “reasonable” and axiomatically moral. The old expression, “a little education can be a dangerous thing,” is still valid.
“If the occupation ends, let’s say, would that end your call for BDS? No, it wouldn’t.” — BDS chief Omar Barghouti,…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Go back 40 years to the controversy that surrounded Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a study of the Adolf Eichmann trial, in which she coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil.” Arendt did not seem satisfied with the term and afterward wrote in a letter to a friend (the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem), “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.” …
The truth about evil that needs attention now is its shallow, deadly, fungus quality. Nice people – especially in a tiny, multicultural world in which different civilizations inhabit different centuries – are often moved to evil deeds, like blowing up the Other. Don’t bother demonizing people as being inherently evil (as Satan is evil). That’s not how it works. Opportunistic evil passes like an electric current through the world and through people, or wanders like an infection that takes up residence in individuals or cultures from time to time.
Distance once helped dampen the effects of human wickedness, and weapons once had limited range. But evil has burst into a new dimension. The globalization, democratization and miniaturization of the instruments of destruction (nuclear weapons or their diabolical chemical-biological stepbrothers) mean a quantum leap in the delivery systems of evil. This levels the playing field and the level field has fungus on it. Every tinhorn with a chemistry set becomes a potential world-historical force with more discretionary destructive power at hand than the great old monsters, from Caligula to Stalin, ever had. In the new dimension, microe
(the dark impulse to rape or murder, say) and macro-evil (the urge to genocide) achieve an ominous reunion in any bid for the apocalyptic gesture. That’s the real evil that is going around. [TIME, FEBRUARY 24, 2003] Read More:http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/projects/hesse/reprints/evil.html
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