CHARLIE HEBDO, BARUCH GOLDSTEIN RELATED HYPOCRICY

CHARLIE HEBDO, WESTERN HYPOCRISY, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY AND BARUCH GOLDSTEIN

In the wake of the tragic and horrific Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris ( Jan 9, 2015) a lot of gobbledegook has spewed from the pens and lips of the chattering classes. Much of it is shameful, hypocritical and illogical. Too much fails to place these events in the historic context of the last decade. A period of the west's Crusader-like wars in the Middle East and the terrible devastation, death and destruction directed, almost exclusively, at the members of one religious group...Muslims.

Yesterday ( Jan 11, 2015) I read in the New Yorker, the opinion of George Packer,an American journalist. Packer was an early supporter of George Bush Jr's illegal and disastrous war in Iraq. Packer takes a position which focuses the blame squarely on Islam. He ticks off a list of the violence of the Islamists but conveniently ignores the terror wielded by the west's aerial bombardment, illegal wars, drone attacks, torture cells and black sites around the world. Actions which have killed and maimed Muslims in the many hundreds of thousands since 9-11. He ignores the scholarly studies which tally the dead of the Iraq war alone at nearly a half million, and the added killings of Mr Obama's more technically sophisticated but just as deadly and immoral "kill lists" and drone attacks.

Packer states: "They (the Charlie Hebdo killings) are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. ( !!) It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention."

If it WERE appropriate to tally up the the deaths on the two opposing sides (it is not), one might have brought Packer ( after all he is a "New Yorker" journalist) to task for failing to even mention the massive imbalance in the death tolls. That lapse suggests an uncharacteristic imbalance, for a reporter of Packer's stature. Packer was not alone in his virulent attack on Islam. The infamous billionaire, Rupert Murdock of News Corp, owner of Fox News, where ignorance and bigotry reign, got his two cents in as well. Regarding the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, Murdock tweeted " Maybe most Moslems peaceful. But until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer THEY MUST BE HELD RESPONSIBLE. So the 1.6 billion Moslems in the World, about one out of every four humans on this Earth, are, according the Murdock, all collectively responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacres!

Besides collective blame on Islam, some in France, and elsewhere tried to equate the Paris attacks with the 9-11 tragedy in New York. I understand their motivation, but I find little similarity there in the scale, method and intentions of the the perpetrators. But if one is looking for precedent, the Charlie Hebdo attacks were strikingly reminiscent of the well-recorded, but now seemingly forgotten (or ignored) massacre at the Cave of the Patriarch in Hebron in the West Bank. No one in the formal media seemed to make that connection. Thus I do so here.

On February 25, 1994, in the West Bank at the Hebron Ibrahimi Mosque, 29 male worshippers were shot dead by Israeli, fanatic, Baruch Goldstein, a member of the far right Israeli Kach movement. Goldstein entered the mosque armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and calmly and deliberately opened fire on unarmed, Muslims at prayer. He killed 29, wounding 125 others. The death toll far exceeded that of the recent Paris tragedy. Goldstein was finally overcome and beaten to death by the survivors when he ran out of ammunition. In the subsequent unrest in the West Bank, and Israel , there were no peace demonstrations. There was no handwringing and claims of us all being Palestinians ( No "Je suis Palestinien".) No prayer vigils for the dead outside of the Homes of the Muslim victims. No mass marches with world leaders arm and arm in unity against "terrorism" as in Paris. There were no widespread arrests or attacks on on Jews, or on Judaism as a a violent hateful religion. Instead, in the unrest and demonstrations in the following 48 hours an additional 19 Palestinians were shot dead in the streets by Israeli defense forces.

When we will see that violence breeds violence. There is no difference for the poor victims of terrorism...their death and mutilation is the same whether the means was delivered by a high flying drone or by a man carrying a gun or wearing an explosive vest. When we all understand that our government's mostly unnecessary and illegal actions generate reactions, our acts of state terror delivered by F16s or Reaper drones breed reactions, and there is no final peace or solution that can be arrived at through violence...then perhaps the seekers of peace will finally rise up en masse out of the squalor and wasteland that our lands will have become and call for a halt to this madness.