Saturday, September 21, 2019 -
Print Edition

A world in turmoil

 . . . there is no adequate answer to the question of the frailty of culture. We can construe all kinds of post facto insight into the lack of correlation between literacy and politics, between the inheritance of Weimar and the reality of Buchenwald not many kilometers away. But diagnosis after the event is, at best, a shallow and partial comprehension. So as far as I can see, much of the harrowing puzzle remains.  George Steiner, In Bluebeards Castle

Palestinians, empty of mind, dead in heart, stab innocent people.

Pivot to Burundi. Genocide beckons.

Pivot to Syria, no longer a country, merely regions. In one, Assad drops barrel bombs on civilians. In another ISIS beheads people.

Pivot to Afghanistan. Taliban roam freely in much of the land. Business plummets. Incomes drop. People flee the country  or try to.

Pivot to the Mediterranean Sea. Desperate people  desperate for freedom  fleeing oppression, end up at the bottom of the sea.

Pivot to North Korea  sustaining the closest thing since Nazism to concentration camps.

Pivot to Egypt, whose Sinai desert receives the body parts of travelers on a plane likely blown up by a bomber.

Pivot to China, where, since its OKto kill a baby a week before its born, its OK to kill some 400,000 babies after theyre born  if theyre females.

Pivot to Nigeria. Boko Haram turns to ISIS tactics such as roadside bombs and suicide bombings in order to kill or maim the innocent.

Pivot to Jordan. A policeman opens fire on American and other police trainees, killing five people, and commentators wonder whether its terrorism.

Pivot to Bangladesh. Secular leaders are hacked to death with machetes or otherwise murdered, as three of four pillars of the countrys constitution  socialism, democracy and secularism  are endangered

           

A Jordanian Muslim preacher pronounces it mandatory to kill Jews but, alas, its not practical just yet.

Pivot to the Netherlands. Jews are advised not to live in certain neighborhoods  its too dangerous.

Pivot to Saudi Arabia, from which Jews are officially barred.

Pivot to Poland, where the chief priest in Jedwabne refused to attend a memorial to the Jewish civilians murdered there during the Holocaust because . . . it never happened, he said.

Pivot to Greece, tabulated as the country with the highest percentage of anti-Semites.

Pivot to France. Against a background of years of terrorist murders of Jews there, authorities are reduced to begging Jews to stay.

Pivot to Jerusalem, where moderate Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas stated: We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem.

           


The United Nations  supposedly the worlds collective instrument for peace, but in fact a pitiful anti-Israel debating society, where, in its latest perversity, Jewish holy sites such as the Tomb of Rachel are declared Muslim holy sites?

The United States  supposedly the worlds bulwark of freedom, but in fact committed neither to the war of ideas against the glorifiers of death in the name of religion, nor to the war of weapons against the elemental violations of Never Again?

           

Chancellor Merkel of Germany is unafraid of dramatic, precedent-breaking, courageous steps to move out of its comfort zone in order to address the problem of the immigrants lucky enough not to end up at the bottom of the sea.

Pivot to Israel, which treats refugees from the Syrian civil war without regard to religion, nationality or ethnicity.

Pivot to Myanmar. In a historic election it votes for democracy, ousting 50 years of military oppression.

Pivot to Brazil. It cut its promiscuous deforestation  its disproportionate contribution to global greenhouse gas warming  in just a decade.

           

Pivot to the Holy One. Humanity needs divine assistance in its struggles to humanize itself.

Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News


Leave a Reply