[lit-ideas] Re: Why is the UN & EU silent?
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 13:25:41 +0900
On 2004/05/04, at 12:30, Stan Spiegel wrote:
> Here's a note I got from an acquaintance in Israel. Why do you think
> the UN and EU are silent? - Stan
>
> When Israel builds a fence to keep out terrorists, the UN and EU are
> up in arms because it makes it difficult for terrorists to kill more
> Jews. When terrorists kill an 8 month pregnant Jewish woman and her 4
> little girls, there is absolute silence from your organizations. If
> you think your indifference goes unnoticed, count the number of
> messages you will receive world-wide in the next 48 hours on this
> subject.
>
> Jack de Lowe
> Raanana, Israel
Two reasons I can think of:
The first has to do with the human condition in the world of 24-hour
news. When our TV screens are filled with horrors from all over the
place--communal massacres in Ambon, ethnic cleansing in the Sudan, 108
dead in battles in Southern Thailand--numbness sets in.
The second has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. The
news that one side has killed some more of the other is now perceived
as an almost daily occurrence--the usual numbness is reinforced by an
appalled but unsurprised, "There they go again."
A third factor is that, whatever the justice of Israeli responses to
the intifada, they have been a public relations disaster. Tales of
heroic Israeli resistance to the Arab Legion's tanks are an indelible
part of an education that made me, for example, a solid supporter of
Israel for most of my conscious life and, also, truth be told left me
with a highly demonized image of Arabs that I still have to struggle
with. But now the tanks are Israel's tanks, and it's Israel that
deploys them, along with bulldozers and helicopter gunships. Israel's
leaders and Israel's spokesmen say things that often make sense, but
too often they look like apparatchiks mouthing official anger and
saying, like a certain American president, that "You are either with us
or against us." The result is appalling but predictable: Sympathy dies.
John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email mccreery@xxxxxxx
"Making Symbols is Our Business"
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