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Jewish World Review Sept. 4, 2003 / 7 Elul , 5763 Militant Muslims' moral disease spread to envoy, troops because world did little when they were only targeting Jews By Jonathan Gurwitz
It's still not too late to stop the cancer.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com |
The almost daily attacks on American troops trying to restore order and civilized society in Iraq rarely generate anything approaching sympathy.
Among international and domestic opponents of U.S. policy who often regard Iraq's liberation as a criminal enterprise, the killing of soldiers who deposed one of history's most pathologically violent governments, the shooting here and bombing there of young men who traveled halfway around the world to unlock the gates of the savage prison that was Baathist Iraq, is gratifyingly if quietly seen as just desserts for the unnecessary use of military force.
Not so the attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. The deaths of U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and at least 22 of his compatriots in Iraq, as in other violent and God-forsaken parts of the globe, were mourned because they were civilians acting in the best, altruistic traditions of the international community.
"How did we degenerate to such a terrible extent?" a headline in Beirut Daily Star asked. "Killing the finest men and women from the Middle East and the world who serve in incredibly trying situations is an act so degenerate that it defies any rational explanation."
"How," the editorial inquired, "could the societies of the Middle East have deteriorated politically and morally to such a degree that this sort of attack has become routine? ... Where are the institutions, the forces, and the men and women of the Middle East who should stand in the face of such national deformity?"
I have an answer. The deformity begins with the first excuse for hijacking airplanes, blowing up buses, murdering diplomats and Olympic athletes. The only chance to stop it is at the first moral justification for the intentional murder of civilians and the religious sanction to kill those sent to free a long-suffering people.
It is a disease that starts by praising the destruction of "Zionists" or applauding a death sentence pronounced on a single author for blasphemy, but mutates and grows to encompass ever-growing groups — Americans, Europeans, Christians, Westerners and their friends, secularists and insufficiently fundamentalist Muslims.
It begins with the killing of one group — Americans in the World Trade Center, American soldiers in Iraq — but metastasizes to afflict the entire international body.
It is a pathology that, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has recently written, hails murderers as martyrs. It excused the slaughter of thousands in New York, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania. But having tolerated these, more attacks came in the same name: on a resort island in Indonesia, in Riyadh, in Casablanca, in Baghdad and Jerusalem, and most recently in Bombay.
The murder of the U.N. workers in Baghdad, tragic and deplorable, underscores a moral obfuscation: American soldiers in Iraq, no matter the humanitarian nature of their mission, are viewed as acceptable, perhaps deserving targets; but international bureaucrats are lamentable victims.
A world ungrateful for the liberation of Iraq, a world that silently accepts and at times openly lauds the murder of a liberating force, a world so willing to blur the lines between good and evil, freedom and oppression, cannot help but have its illusions shattered.
Illusions that terrorists will respect some lives but not others, that they would distinguish between soldiers and civilians, the United States and the United Nations, and respect the laws of war that render noncombatants and relief workers illegitimate targets. And shattered these illusions were, again, for the thousandth time, in the explosion in Baghdad.
Barham Saleh, a Kurdish leader in northern Iraq, told the New York Times, "Iraq is the nexus where many issues are coming together — Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture. If the Americans succeed here, this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for."
A blow not only against what the terrorists stand for, but also against the moral casuistry that has allowed the murder of innocent civilians, of good and decent people pursuing noble goals, and soldiers performing humanitarian tasks to become commonplace and acceptable.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Gurwitz, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, is a co-founder and twice served as Director General of the Future Leaders of
the Alliance program at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. In 1986 he
was placed on the Foreign Service Register of the U.S. State Department. Comment by clicking here.
© 2003, Jonathan Gurwitz
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