By Shalom Freedman
January 29, 2004
The enlightened liberal world can take great satisfaction with the latest development in the Islamic woman's quest for equality. The twenty-one year old mother of two from Gaza who, on January 14, 2004, murdered five Israelis at the Erez Crossing, and injured ten others, has been proclaimed by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Hamas, as the ' latest weapon ' in their arsenal. From now on, we are told, there will be hundreds of Palestinian women blowing themselves up in order to murder Israelis.
Women of the Islamic world must be thrilled to know that they can now, in just a matter of weeks, leave husband and children behind, and make not only an express journey to Paradise, but also a statement about equal opportunity employment in fundamentalist Islam. In fact, if Sheikh Yassin can be believed, it may well be that women will be given preference, and that we will now see such a great wave of women suicide bombers that it will redefine forever who wears the pants, or who is the real shahid in the Jihad family.
That so many within the Palestinian, Arab and Islamic worlds cheer this development is - given what we have seen Sept. 11, 2001, and even for some time before - not at all surprising. What is surprising, however, is the great silence of the Durban egalitarians, of the most enlightened liberal feminists, of the political and, yes, even judicial elites of the Western world. Aside from a few cranky conservatives, and of course a few self-interested Jews, who are not happy when they see their fellow 'occupiers' blown up, there is a great silence.
After all, all these liberals know that democratic Palestinian society, which places such great value on human dignity and freedom, is engaged now in an any-and-every-method-will-do struggle against the same people who let them into their country to work, who tried to make peace with them for eighty years, and who offered them a state just three years ago. It would seem that the enlightened ethic here is that the more generous and more compromising one's enemy is, the worse it is necessary to treat them. For the Palestinians, the peace-loving and power-holding Jews are inhuman beasts whose death and suffering is a means to liberate all of the Holy Land; in order to establish there yet another Arab state, one dedicated to military rule, totalitarian suppression of the opposition, and terror at all and any times against its opponents.
All this is, of course, wholeheartedly understood by these liberal elites, who seem to have developed temporary amnesia in regard to such values as 'the sanctity of human life' and 'the prohibition against murder'.
The hypocrisy of this silence, the hidden and now not-so-hidden anti-Semitism that fuels it, makes one wonder if there is any sense of decency remaining among the Left in the West.
But then, of course, this particular piece is written by a man, a Jew, an Israeli - i.e., not really a human being - though one taught years ago, both in his own family and in the American society he grew up in, that each and every individual human being is of infinite value; that it is, therefore, forbidden as much to take one's own life as it is to take the life of another.
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