Thursday, February 4, 2010

To Annihilate Evil

Ho-hum, another day, another Jew is accused of being blood-thirsty. No surprise either that another Jew is adding to the chorus. There is a gem of insight to be found here though so bear with me and slog through this hideous little example of faux journalism from Russia Today. Fellow Blogger Carl in Jerusalem, by the way, is the "blood-thirsty" exemplar here and he has blogged on the mess here.

I watch this video and the outrage I feel at the lies, anti-Semitic innuendo and the outright blood-libels is dwarfed with a kind of wonder at the utter absurdity of the Israeli woman, Inna Michaeli. Is there no limit to the venal careerism of people like this toad from "Women for Peace"? I wrote about Amira Hass as the Queen of the Toads three years ago and the same things I said about her back then apply double here to Inna Michaeli. She perverts and subverts liberal democratic ideals by implying that there is a moral equivalence between Israel's struggle to survive and protect her people and the annihilationist Arab Jihad against her, she obscures truth by inferring that Israel has not tried to achieve peace in ways other than warfare, and she betrays her own country a country which, judging by her accent, not so long ago redeemed her from the oppression of living in some part of the former Soviet Union. Now she is a professional in an organization that raises money and thrives on that betrayal, obfuscation and perversion. As with Hass, she has made her livelihood at betrayal and perversion and she takes her public acclaim and professional standing as her justification.

But who is blood-thirsty? Is it Carl who's only sin is in identifying evil and warning of its consequences or is it this fraud Inna Michaeli who pretends to want peace but who works to prevent Israel from asserting her power advantage (while she still has it) to secure her own people and survival. Who will be more responsible as the wars drag on and the land runs with blood for yet another generation?

The answer is made plain when she says “war is inevitable because ...wars and military action by our government simply goes unpunished..."?

If all military action is punished, who punishes the punishers? This is nothing less than a subconscious manifestation of the essential leftist yearning for world totalitarianism. This is the call for unending war.

Then too, Israpundit posted a brilliant speech by Spanish politician and Journalist Pilar Rahola at the Conference in the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism. This quote was debated in the comment stream, “The World is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it”. I was moved to write a comment which I have expanded upon below.

The only thing to disagree with here is that she comes so close but then misses the heart of the real problem. That is that ALL people are evil. The founders of the U.S. knew, as they learned it from Genesis, that man's heart inclines toward evil from his birth. The Patriarchs were evil Thomas Jefferson owned slaves NO ONE is perfect. The genius of America is that the founders were honest about evil. They constructed the first human constitution that accepted that honest appraisal and was specifically designed to make sure that no one person or party could dominate and hold the rest hostage. They constructed check and balances so that the next ruler would not have to kill his predecessor. By making it so that we were responsible for keeping each other "honest", They gave us a reason to work with and trust each other. On the whole, it has worked. Israel's government has very similar aims.

What is so insane about the left is the utter dishonesty about evil- the pretense that the government (any government) or the financial system or bourgeois morality or organized religion or The Jews or the Republicans are the cause of evil. In "resisting" these and other "institutions of evil" they are blindly and ironically undermining the very Institutions that have evolved to control and channel ever-present human evil. The left has declared a war of annihilation against evil, thinking that that is good. It is not an accident that the greatest slaughters of human history have been perpetrated by socialists and communists. They are ready to pursue and exterminate evil right down to the last human heart in which it resides.

And, like Inna Michaeli, they all pretend to virtue and compassion...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Please read:
'A Conflict of Visions' and
'The Vision of the Annointed' by
\Thomas Sowell\
You are describing the 'constrained' vision of the founding fathers who understood humanity for what it is.

Jewish Odysseus said...

Another great insight from the 1980's, via Michael Novak: "Socialism assumes people are saints, of which there are few, while capitalism assumes people are sinners, of which there are many."

And Thomas Sowell is as smart as all the rest of the world's intellectuals put together.

Yaacov Ben Moshe said...

Thanks both for bringing up Sowell. I am much less familiar with his work than I should be. While I can see there is a strong similarity between my conception and Sowell's, I feel that what I am saying about people's limitations is at once more limited and less conservative.

I am less concerned with the physical and intellectual limitations of the human being than with the moral and emotional concupiscence inherent in the human soul. The human intellect is so powerful that it can transcend almost anything but that human stain. It is the very almost "biblical" way in which the founding fathers understood and compensated for it that is not well accepted by the self-consciously secular progressive.

I love the Novak quote too- It dovetails so nicely with the Daniel Patrick Moynihan quote I have used before: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”