The pandemic hasn’t stopped Islamic terrorism
It may seem that the pandemic has overtaken everything, but there is an exception: Islamic terrorism. In Kabul, Afghanistan, 16 people, including two babies, were murdered when Islamic terrorists attacked, of all places, a hospital, including a specific ward in the hospital: the maternity ward.
It is wrong to allow the repetitive nature of the evil of Islamic terrorism to dull our ethical outrage. Each one of these victims is innocent. Mothers, babies — the intended target of Islamic terrorists.
The terrorists fought security forces for five hours to get into the hospital to do their killing. This was not a hit-and-run, not a bomb that explodes in an instant, not an attack from afar during which the killers do not see their targets. This was an attack up close, a sustained commitment to kill, to look the ill in their faces and kill them, babies not excluded.
At about the same time a suicide bombing occurred at a funeral in eastern Afghanistan. It killed 24 people.
The death of the two babies in the attack on the hospital represent immeasurably more than the human potential of two human beings lost.
After Cain killed Abel, G-d queried Cain as to Abel’s whereabouts. Cain famously answered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Whereupon G-d said, “The bloods of your brother cry out to Me from the ground!” (Genesis 4:8-10). Bloods, plural. How so?
Less famous than Cain’s answer but hardly less important is the rabbinic commentary on G-d’s response to Cain, recorded in Genesis: “The bloods of your brother cry out to me.” Bloods, plural. The rabbis comment: “When Abel was killed, so were all of his potential descendants.”
It was not only Abel’s blood that was shed. The death of these two babies represent the loss of countless human beings, unborn. Needless to say, so do the deaths of their mothers, most of whom presumably were of an age when they too could have given birth to more children — still more potential and incalculable loss.
Some say, “all people are basically the same.” Different religions, different races, different ethnicities, but basically the same. Everyone wants to make a living, have a safe environment and positive educational experience for their children, etc.
Sorry, not all people are basically the same. Not all people want the same thing. In fact, almost all people share absolutely nothing in common with these terrorists in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan, or any terrorists anywhere, other than basic biology. Terrorists want death. The more the better, from their perspective.
If the murderers of mothers and children are to be called people, basically just like me, please call me something else.
Every year at the Passover seder the Haggadah instructs us to take one drop out of our glass of wine as we recite the 10 plagues because, after all, the Egyptians who drowned in the Reed Sea were also G-d’s creatures. Really? If so, we would have to say: It is equally right to mourn the death of a Nazi murderer because, after all, he too was one of G-d’s creatures.
We are not capable of doing that and regard this interpretation of the Passover ritual as wrong. We do not mourn the death of any Nazi, nor discern any humanity in terrorists and murders, whether in 2020 in Kabul, Pakistan, in 1942 in Poland or in ancient Egypt. Historical distance is not an ethical determinant.
Perhaps what the Haggadah means is that we mourn the low level to which the Egyptians sunk, the extent to which they denuded themselves of the Divine image with which they were born. We remove a drop of wine from the cup not to acknowledge their humanity, but to mourn their descent into inhumanity. Same for the Nazis, for Islamic terrorists and for any other terrorist.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
