Is this Chanukah or Purim? After many years of Hamas petitioning the EU to remove the terror appellation from Hamas, the EU has voted to honor the request and has reversed Hamas’ status as terror organization. Officially and legally, according to the EU, Hamas is no longer a terrorist organization.
On the very same day, however, at the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, the irrational obsession with Israel continues unabated, this time in investigation for war crimes.
You can’t make this stuff up. Like I queried above, Chanukah or Purim?
In a week that painfully witnessed terrorism across the world, from Australian civilians taken hostage in Sydney, to the brutal slaughter by the Taliban of over 100 innocent school children in Pakistan, the world has not only not reacted, but, a step further, has accommodated, appeased and capitulated to terror, to Hamas.
For those who still compartmentalize terror and feel that Hamas, Taliban and other radicalized Islamic terror groups are unrelated: Wake up. When there is danger of cancer spreading and infecting the body, you don’t excise only one source of the cancer, hoping for the best regarding other affected organs. Cancer is cancer, and it is out to attack and destroy the good cells.
To be sure, and it is crucial to verbalize in such a discussion, there are good cells, good Muslims. In fact, probably most are good. The challenge is to cope with the minority of the faith, the numerically significant (millions) of radicalized Islamists, who pose a danger to hijacking a free and tolerant way of life for us all.
In 1987, when Hamas arose, it said it was not a terror group. That’s equivalent to ISIL today saying it is not a terror group. It sounds absurd, because it is absurd, but that is what the gradual approach of appeasement accomplishes. It numbs the sensitivity to reality and lowers the bar of definitions until it reaches the dangerously absurd. That is where we have arrived today.
Looking back on history, will today become our generation’s Neville Chamberlain Munich Agreement moment? It’s one thing to be soft on Hamas or other terrorists in the media. Quite another to legitimate them by legally formalizing their status. Of course, the two are interwoven. Today’s capitulation did not arrive in a vacuum.
In a week when a land famous for its playful salutation “G’day, mate” is transformed into terror, when school children who began their day dressed in school uniforms ready to learn are cut down to corpses in a coffin the same day, and in a week where cherished photos, a pair of shoes, and tefilin — vestiges and relics of human lives, of a most painful chapter in Jewish history — are randomly discovered in an attic in Terezin — such a week gives heightened context to the EU’s most disturbing decision.
To be sure, we have our problems at home. We in the US are not free of our flaws. In these past couple of weeks the pain of racism has been laid bare for all to see. Ferguson was one thing, but the horror of Eric Garner’s chokehold, whimpering pleading “I can’t breathe” is quite another.
Aside from racism, somewhere inside of ourselves many of us painfully sense, or fear, that terrorism is not done with the shores of this country, either. Israel, Australia, Pakistan, Paris, Spain, England, Mumbai, and who knows where else?
It is up to us. All of us a part of the community of mankind who want to see a world where schoolchildren who wake up in the morning to go to school to learn can return home to play in peace.
So, to be honest, I feel scared. It’s one thing when there is evil in the world, quite another when the enlightened, liberal, good people are weak or confused. Now that is scary.
Purim or Chanukah? Today, both, I suppose.
Ultimately, Chanukah though. Indeed, let the collective bright light of the kindled menorah pierce this blanket of heavy darkness.
Copyright © 2014 by the Intermountain Jewish News
