In response to my post yesterday, Do We Now Return to the Garden of the Finzi-Continis?, I received an e-mail from a reader which, to her mind, "says it all." I will reproduce her note in its entirety and then point out a few issues I have with her triumphant sense that she has sealed the argument.
"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956)...." - Ariel Sharon, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956
[The writer signed her name and gave her address, which takes either some courage or masochism; the omission of her name was my decision.]
Addendum: Much appreciation to commenter 11A5S, who pointed out the quote is a hoax. This does not detract from the point of my post. Further information can be found here.
I especially enjoy receiving comments and e-mail from those who disagree with things I write (though I find that much of the opposition takes an unhelpfully irrational tone; I suspect the bloggers on the left complain of the same thing with many of their commenters who disagree with their positions.). I prefer the missives to be polite and reasoned. I received an excellent comment to my Wednesday post on Liberalism's Alter Nation from Gary Farber that I hope can lead to a useful discussion of the differences between the liberal and conservative approach to politics and current affairs; I am especially interested in finding common ground with the political opposition since I think we have an absolute need for a responsible opposition. That is a post (or two) for another day.
Back to the e-mail...
What does the writer hope to convey by a quote attributed to Ariel Sharon from 1956, when he was 27 years old and had already been involved in two wars for the survival of the young Jewish state, within the first 8 years of its existences and within the first 11 years after the Holocaust, a genocidal war of extinction? Perhaps the writer believes that the hateful comments of Sharon toward the Arabs which he made 50 years ago are somehow exculpatory of the Arab's ongoing rhetoric and action of genocide toward the Jews? If she believes that angry words convey the essence of a person or a people, this would bode extremely poorly for the Arab world which cannot seem to refrain from threatening Israel with death and destruction; since there are many Arabs who use the Koran as justification for calls for the death of the Jews, does she then condemn the entire Muslim world for genocide? I doubt it.
On the other hand, if she is suggesting that angry words are the same as murderous actions, she needs to read my post on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West: Part I which included this famous aphorism:
The first human being who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization. - Sigmund Freud
Sadly, there are those who do consider thought and action as equivalents. They are always ready to excuse the barbarity of our enemies as long as their rhetoric is couched in the proper terms of liberation, fighting oppression, equality, or some other catch phrase of the anti-colonial period of the last century.
I am beginning to see more clearly that a major distinction between the left and the right (terms which are sorely lacking in specificity) involves the relationship to language versus action. I would just offer one example of this from the pens of the two esteemed Senators from New York, who wrote an illuminating op-ed piece in the New York Post today. While the topic is gun control, their approach is consistent with their party's positions in the international arena as well.
Senators Charles Schumer & Hillary Rodham Clinton are deeply troubled by the use of illegal handguns in crimes on our streets. Their prescription for fixing the problem?
From 1988 to 2003, 92 percent of the illegal handguns recovered in New York City came from out of state. Stopping the flow of illegal guns into the Empire State is essential to ending the gun violence on our streets. We are therefore pressing our colleagues in both the Senate and the House to repeal the senseless law that handcuffs law enforcement and the public from having full access to the ATF gun-tracing database.
Likewise, we ask that our colleagues join us in demanding the mandatory reporting of stolen guns and guns used in crime to the ATF database for tracing.
On its face, this does not seem outlandish, though they do not seem to bring the worry about monitoring al Qaeda communications, which the liberal media and the Democrats have been so exercised about, to the issue of privacy rights for gun owners, but that is not unexpected. The more important point is that their first reaction when faced with a problem is to write a new law. The arguments against such a law are myriad and worth while exploring (for instance, those who support gun rights would be right to worry about this as a first step toward a national gun registry with all the dangers for their rights that would be implied. Darfur is another excellent argument against gun control. Ask the people of Darfur if they would be better off armed or not?) The most salient point is that such a law has almost no chance of being passed when all three branches are in the hands of the Republicans. Even if you agree with gun control in theory, in practice it is not going to happen any time soon and all moves in such a direction are fanciful. My New York Senators are posturing for the benefit of their constituency, using words as a substitute for action. If they supported taking action against gun crimes in New York, and wanted to deal with reality rather than their wishes, they would support a program of targeted profiling or the use of new technology to spot hidden weapons on the street. We all know that could never happen because the cries of racism and fascism would drown our all reasoned discussion of the merits and demerits of such plans.
My Senators have thus given me an excellent example of the triumph among the liberals of words over actions which is the first thing I have to thank them for in quite some time.
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