It is obvious that the West concerns itself with its live citizens; we concern ourselves in glorifying our industry of death.
It seems we regard our dead differently from the way the dead are regarded in the West. Here, no respect is paid to the shaheed [martyr]; he is expendable. He serves only as an excuse to hate, riot and glorify the "resistance" and the "jihad" -- terrorist attacks.
Why, during the long years of our conflict in the Middle East, have we Palestinians never interested ourselves in the bodies of Palestinian terrorists killed in terrorist attacks? No one has ever shown the slightest interest in their fate. Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East often point fingers at one another, yet in reality, we respect neither the living nor the dead. No one buries the thousands of bodies of Islamists killing each other. We abandon our brothers to rot in foreign soil. There are untold number of civilians killed in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, their bodies unmourned, eaten by scavengers.
We simply use the bodies of terrorists -- to call for more blood and more terrorism against civilians, and to keep the terrorism industry going. No one here really cares about the dead: they quickly become just an excuse for more violence and more terror attacks.
 A picture of a baby wearing a mock suicide-bomb vest, found inside a wanted terrorist's home in Hebron. (Image source: IDF) |
When one looks at Westerners, one can only envy the hyper-morality of their self-criticism. They are forever accusing themselves of moral lapses. Sometimes they seem to have some kind of autoimmune disease whose function is to cleanse their societies.
One honestly has to wonder at the West, surrounded as it is by murderers, rapists and terrorists responsible for the flight of millions of refugees from the Middle East, yet struggling to be hyper-moral, dealing obsessively with self-criticism about people who offend terrorists, or how to be nicer to individuals who often can be seen not accepting hospitality but trying to see how much advantage of it they can take. There do not seem to be many refugees risking their lives to get to the oil-rich countries of the Gulf -- Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait. Nor do there seem many invitations from them to go there.
The so-called "human rights" groups -- usually just political hit-squads -- the lazy, biased media; the sweet but misguided do-gooders of Europe; the sanctimonious church groups who cannot tell their friends from their enemies; the United Nations, which empowers all the corrupt dictatorships -- they really do not give a rap about us, our jobs, or well-being or our rancid governance. To us, it looks as if all they really care about are hating Jews and stroking corrupt dictatorships.
Perhaps the time has come to learn from our "enemy" and first take a cold hard look at ourselves.
Bassam Tawil is a scholar based in the Middle East.
Commander Johnson