The Other tsunami

The Other Tsunami
By Dennis Prager
March 15, 2011


It is very difficult to hate babies.

It takes a special person.

> As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to
> have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not
> evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being
> deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a
> degree of evil that few humans -- even among murderers -- can relate
> to.
>
> That is why what Palestinian terrorists did to a Jewish family on the
> West Bank this past weekend deserves far more attention than it
> received.
>
> Normally, Palestinian atrocities get little attention -- certainly far
> less attention than Israeli apartment-building on the West Bank
> receives. But this particular atrocity got even less attention than
> usual because the world was focused on the terrible tsunami that hit
> Japan.
>
> On Friday night, Palestinian terrorists slipped into a Jewish
> settlement, entered a home and stabbed the father, the mother and
> three of their children to death: an 11-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a
> three-month-old baby.
>
> In order to understand what those actions mean, a seemingly separate
> incident needs to be recalled: the prolonged sexual attack by up to
> 200 Egyptian men on Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent
> for CBS News, in Tahrir Square, Cairo a few weeks ago. It was reported
> that after stripping her naked and then molesting and beating her, the
> men kept shouting, "Jew, Jew!"
>
> The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and
> some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a
> person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no
> parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps
> hundreds of millions of Muslims.
>
> Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India, China-Tibet,
> North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds
> there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of
> those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is
> there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.
>
> There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved
> the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the
> word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to
> murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as
> possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and
> impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.
>
> The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come
> pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder,
> steal or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire
> of evils.
>
> But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies,
> and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable
> acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes
> toward children.
>
> That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the
> Muslim world have done to the word "Jew." To them, the Jew is not just
> sub-human; the Jew -- and his or her children -- is sub-animal.
>
> Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the
> left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies,
> not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education,
> television, radio and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique
> hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis' part.
>
> Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to
> the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The
> creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and
> an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death
> of perhaps 10 thousand Palestinian Arabs. And all of that came about
> solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at
> birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a
> Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act
> engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees and about a million dead
> Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then
> doesn't "Hindu" equal "Jew" in the Muslim lexicon of hate?
>
> Here are some answers in brief:
>
> First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply
> as the Jews.
>
> Second, Jew-hatred is often exterminationist, which is why Jew-hatred
> has little in common with ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance or
> even racism. Rarely, if ever, do any of them seek the extermination of
> the disliked or hated group.
>
> Third, exterminationist Jew-haters are particularly dangerous people.
> Non-Jews who do not recognize Jew-hatred as the moral cancer it is are
> fools. Nazism was born in Jew-hatred and led to the death of more than
> 40 million non-Jews. Islamic terror started against Israeli Jews but
> has spread around the world. More fellow Muslims have now been
> murdered by Islamic terror than Jews have.
>
> That is why the tsunami the world ignored this weekend -- the
> Palestinian-Arab-Muslim flood of Jew-hatred -- is the one that will
> prove far more dangerous to it than the Japanese one it understandably
> focused on.
>