Bill Moyers, Modernity, and Islam
by Michael Gillespie
mediamonitors.net
Excerpt:
Professor Michael Neumann of Canada's Trent University recently penned a remarkable essay titled "What's So Bad About Israel?" In it he offers a compelling explanation of the gravity of Israel's crimes, crimes against Palestinians, yes, but crimes against modernity and human values that transcend the differences between East and West, between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Neumann writes: "What Israel does is at the very center of the world stage, not only as a focus of media attention, but also as representative of Western morality and culture. . . . Its atrocities belong to its mainstream, its traditions, its founding ideology. They are performed by its heroes [and represent the] perhaps dominant version of its ideals. . . . What matters here is not Israel's arrogance, but its stature. Israel stands right in the spotlight and crushes an entire people. It defies international protests and resolutions as no one else can. Only Israel . . . dares proclaim: "Who are you to preach morality to us? We are morality incarnate!" . . . It says, "Look at us. We're taking these people's land, not because we need it, but because we feel like it. We're putting religious nuts all over it because they help cleanse the area of these Arab lice who dare to defy us. We know you don't like it and we don't care, because we don't conform to other people's standards. We set the standards for others."
And that, of course, is precisely the problem. Israel is legitimizing systematic military conquest, oppression, and exploitation based on doctrines of racial and religious superiority and exclusivity, while the U.S., the dog wagged by the Israeli tail, having been drawn into a world wide war without end against terrorism by its unqualified support of Israeli criminality, is inadvertently legitimizing the suppression of human rights by dictatorial regimes around the world that are now using terrorism as a pretext for the systematic denial and violation of human rights and the suppression of legitimate dissent.
Neumann continues, "Israel Shahak and others have documented the rise of fundamentalist Jewish sects that speak of the greater value of Jewish blood, the specialness of Jewish DNA, the duty to kill even innocent civilians who pose a potential danger to Jews, and the need to "redeem" lands lying far beyond the present frontiers of Israeli control. Much of this happens beneath the public surface of Israeli society, but these racial ideologies exert a strong influence on the mainstream. . . . The Israeli government can afford to let the fanatical race warriors go unchecked . . . As for the dissenters, don't they just show what a wonderfully democratic society Israel has produced? . . . It is this ability to command respect despite the most public outrages against humanity that makes Israel so exceptionally bad. . . . As the world slowly tries to emerge from barbarism --for instance, through the human rights movements for which Israel has such contempt-- Israel mockingly drags it back by sanctifying the very doctrines of racial vengeance that more civilized forces condemn. Israel brings no new evils into the world. It merely rehabilitates old ones, as an example for others to emulate and admire."
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