For those who have been living under a rock for the last ten years, the Death Eaters comes from the Harry Potter books. Death Eaters are wizards who have sworn allegiance to Voldemort. They despise their "inferiors", wizards of less than pure blood, abhor those things that bring joy to people, worship at the feet of a monster who himself attempts to defeat Death, and love nothing more than pure power.
The modern Death Eaters are the Islamists who "love death" and mock us for "loving life." Their cult is so powerful that it perverts the most basic of human desires. Precious Life is an Israeli documentary about an Arab infant from Gaza, born with a congenital immunodeficiency disorder incompatible with life, whose Mother fights fiercely to save his life and finds a cure in Israel through the efforts of hundreds of ordinary Israelis: [HT: Yaacov Lozowick]
He went to see her at twilight on a Friday, finding his way through the labyrinth that is the parking lot of Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. She was waiting for him upstairs - a woman in despair, holding an infant close to death in her arms. But Shlomi Eldar, the Gaza correspondent for Channel 10 News, did not hurry. He delayed his entry into the depressing neon-lit corridors. Already in the opening scene of his documentary, "Precious Life," he admits he did not want to come - that it all happened by chance, because of circumstances over which he had no control.
"I came here without any desire," he says, looking for a parking space in the large, empty lot. "It's not for me, but I had no choice."
In Sheba's pediatric hemato-oncology department was Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a four-and-a-half-month-old Palestinian infant. Protruding from his tiny body were pipes attached to big machines. His breathing was labored.
"His days may be numbered. He is suffering from a genetic defect that is causing the failure of his immune system," said the baby's mother, Raida, from the Gaza Strip, when she emerged from the isolation room. "I had two daughters in Gaza," she continued, her black eyes shimmering. "Both died because of immune deficiency. In Gaza I was told all the time that there is no treatment for this and that he is doomed to die. The problem now is how to pay for the [bone marrow] transplant. There is no funding."
When the story was aired on Israeli TV, donations pured in and the infant's life was saved. The punchline is horrific:
Nevertheless, this idyllic situation developed into a deep crisis that led to the severance of the relations and what appeared to be the end of the filming. From an innocent conversation about religious holidays, Raida Abu Mustafa launched into a painful monologue about the culture of the shahids - the martyrs - and admitted, during the complex transplant process, that she would like to see her son perpetrate a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem. [Emphasis mine-SW]
"Jerusalem is ours," she declared. "We are all for Jerusalem, the whole nation, not just a million, all of us. Do you understand what that means - all of us?"
She also explained to Eldar exactly what she had in mind. "For us, death is a natural thing. We are not frightened of death. From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You're free to be angry, so be angry."
And Eldar was angry. "Then why are you fighting to save your son's life, if you say that death is a usual thing for your people?" he lashes out in one of the most dramatic moments in the film.
"It is a regular thing," she smiles at him. "Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it's for Jerusalem, then there's no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing."
There is no way to normalize this. A culture that celebrates such a belief system is a deeply disturbed, sick culture that can never be expected to add to the well being of the human race. It is a culture that can not survive in conflict with the modern world. One or the other must perish or be walled off so that its baleful influence can be mitigated.
The Cult of the Death eaters will not be defeated until their acolytes in the West are routed, and this is a difficult job. Western Intellectuals have always had an attraction to dangerous and deadly "men of action", evil men who they admire for their ability to act, which shames men who only exist as passive observers of events.
Lee Smith offers powerful commentary on the modern day Hollow Men:
Why Israel’s enemies will always be the darlings of Western intellectuals
It’s nothing new for Western intellectuals to lavish attention and admiration on the resistance forces aligned against Israel, whether it’s Hamas or Hezbollah or even organizations like al-Qaida that are less interested in Israel than in killing and maiming Western civilians. Last week, when CNN’s former Middle East editor, Octavia Nasr, tweeted that she respected the late militant cleric Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the cards were out on the table for all to see. But usually the pro-resistance vibe is more subtle, as when Nasr’s defenders demanded a more nuanced understanding from knee-jerk Americans who were shocked by Nasr’s support for a suicide-bomb-sanctioning man of faith. After all, Fadlallah was a relatively pro-feminist radical Islamist cleric—and if his talk about Israel was genocidal, well, that’s just part of the package when dealing with a complex place like the Middle East.
...
Some journalists shed tears when Arafat died, others are smitten by the beauty of Islamist militants: The “green eyes” of Hezbollah’s deputy Naim Qassem “are framed by thick, dark lashes and he has long elegant hands.” Saddam Hussein, we are told, did much to advance the rights of women. In Cairo I knew a former CNN producer whose first affair with an Arab intelligence officer was in Saddam’s Baghdad—a great city, she explained, if you didn’t mind the constant surveillance and widespread torture.
But this attraction of the intellectuals to the flame of the resistance is not simply based on eros alone. There is also the aspect of thanatos, the death instinct. The sad reality is that all organisms—men and the nations they populate—carry within them the seeds of their own end. While the normal run of men unwittingly nurture their demise through the wrong that has become habit and custom, the suicide overruns all limits. In reality, it is not Israel that our intellectuals despise, for that hatred is simply the latest pattern in a long century that the West’s self-loathing has taken. It is ourselves that we cannot abide.
The struggle between Eros/Libido and Thanatos is a constant. We age and eventually die and envy those who are young and full of life. In those whose intellectual gifts have been directed at avoiding mortality and avoiding the knowledge of their own base nature, there is often little awareness of their envy and their admiration for the Death Eaters. They find wondrous rationalizations and intellectualizations to explain the (disguised) expressions of their hatreds and envies. They lack self awareness and are terrified of death; they despise their own weakness and passivity and idealize the vicious man of action who stands ready to destroy the Demos who have so disappointed them by failing to accord them the proper obeisance that is their due.
We are complex beings and contain within us many contradictions and conflicts. Intellectuals only know this intellectually; intellectual knowledge devoid of the emotional awareness that makes knowledge meaningful is empty.
It is in how we treat our children that offers the truest expression of our deepest beliefs. This morning Yaacov Lozowick encapsulated perfectly why "Peace in our time" will not be possible:
Queen Rania of Jordan has published a wildly successful children book about learning to live with people who are different. She is refusing to have it published in Hebrew. Jordan is at peace with Israel since 1994.
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