Jerusalem Post editor Carolyn Glick aptly compares Israel's situation to a Salvador Dali painting:
"There is something surreal in the spectacle of thousands of Israelis and our supporters marching through the streets of a Dutch city holding pictures of our terror victims as Israel is libeled in a show trial produced and directed by our murderers.
"There is something surreal about the picture of gowned judges marching into a courtroom to hear arguments about how a law is broken when Israel attempts to prevent more of its citizens from being murdered by terrorist armies."
Then there is the State Department. In its new human rights report, it puts Israel on trial. Writes Glick:
"Of course, it duly notes that the PA security services have themselves conducted terror attacks against Israeli civilians. Yet aside from condemning every action Israel has taken to combat terrorism and thereby equating actions aimed at protecting Israeli citizens with terrorism, the report does something even more offensive.
"The report very sensitively gives the names of a dozen or so Palestinian children who died during Israeli assaults against Palestinian terrorists who used these children for cover.
"Yet, grotesquely, while the names of Palestinian children are listed, the report provides not one name of any Israeli victim of Palestinian terrorism.
"By naming Palestinian victims while not giving names of Israeli victims, the State Department report follows in the path of the general climate that has gripped us for the past 40 months. This general climate is characterized by the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews by the international community."
Alas, most surreal of all is Israel's own complicity. "Our government," Glick writes, "is the main financier of the terrorists. Israel transfers some NIS 130 million to the PA in tax revenues every month.... Yet we know that PA budgetary funds finance terror."
And then there is Shimon Peres, who told a public gathering in Washington that Israel has no moral right to Judea and Samaria.
Surreal indeed.
In the Arab world, Umm Nidal Farhat is much celebrated. She was filmed helping her son Muhammad leave home to carry out a suicide attack in March 2002 and a year later donated her second son Nidal. An interview with this "mother" was recently published in the London daily Al Quds al-Arabi. An excerpt:
Question: As the mother of two Shahids [martrys], what has changed in Umm Nidal's life?
Umm Nidal: Nothing has changed. The strength and honor have only increased. It doesn't matter to me whether I have two or three Shahids. Let all my sons be Shahids. What matters is doing what Allah wills and waging Jihad for the sake of this homeland.
From historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's "A Passion Out of Proportion," Washingtonpost.com:
"Mel Gibson has said that his film is simply a graphic rendition of the historical truth as conveyed in the Gospels. I leave this issue to others. Nor will I dwell on the question of whether a graphic visual representation of a written text -- a text, moreover, that does not contain some of the more memorable and horrific details depicted in the film -- can be said to be truthful to the text. Instead, I will propose a 'thought-experiment' or two that may put this film in perspective.
"How would we (Gibson and all the rest of us) feel if a Hollywood producer (a Hollywood so notoriously populated by Jews) made a film, in the same 'over the edge' spirit vaunted by Gibson, dramatizing another historical event -- the auto-da-fe in Spain in February 1481, for example, in which six men and six women conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) were tortured and burned alive at the stake, while richly robed prelates triumphally presided over the scene? Such a film, taking its cue from Gibson, might utilize all the devices of violence, sadism and malignity that he has deployed so skillfully, here as in his other films....The effect would be to make of the auto-da-fe a defining experience in the relations of Jews and Christians....
"It is not so much anti-Semitism that worries me -- not in America, at least, although the film might well have that effect abroad....What I find so disquieting is the coarsening of the religious sensibility evident in the response to this new Passion play, as if the message of Jesus is validated only by that degree of suffering, torture and violence, as if a lesser degree would make him less a savior and redeemer. By the same token, the culture as a whole is coarsened, abandoning any notion of limits and restraints, requiring more and more doses of sadism, continually going 'over the edge,' as if seeking redemption in the abyss."
Outpost - 2 - April 2004