By Dennis Prager
March 15, 2011
It is very difficult to hate babies.
It takes a special person.
As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to
have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not
evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being
deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a
degree of evil that few humans -- even among murderers -- can relate
to.
That is why what Palestinian terrorists did to a Jewish family on the
West Bank this past weekend deserves far more attention than it
received.
Normally, Palestinian atrocities get little attention -- certainly far
less attention than Israeli apartment-building on the West Bank
receives. But this particular atrocity got even less attention than
usual because the world was focused on the terrible tsunami that hit
Japan.
On Friday night, Palestinian terrorists slipped into a Jewish
settlement, entered a home and stabbed the father, the mother and
three of their children to death: an 11-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a
three-month-old baby.
In order to understand what those actions mean, a seemingly separate
incident needs to be recalled: the prolonged sexual attack by up to
200 Egyptian men on Lara Logan, chief foreign affairs correspondent
for CBS News, in Tahrir Square, Cairo a few weeks ago. It was reported
that after stripping her naked and then molesting and beating her, the
men kept shouting, "Jew, Jew!"
The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim and
some of the non-Arab Muslim world today (such as Iran), "Jew" is not a
person. "Jew" is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no
parallel on Earth to what "Jew" means to a hundred million, perhaps
hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Think of any conflict in the world -- Pakistan-India, China-Tibet,
North Korea-South Korea, Tamil-Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds
there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of
those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is
there something equivalent to what "Jew" means to millions of Muslims.
There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved
the word "Jew." The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the
word "Jew." Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to
murder Jewish babies and children -- often through as cruel a means as
possible (being burned alive, buried alive or thrown up in the air and
impaled on bayonets) -- as it was to murder Jewish adults.
The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come
pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder,
steal or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire
of evils.
But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies,
and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable
acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes
toward children.
That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the
Muslim world have done to the word "Jew." To them, the Jew is not just
sub-human; the Jew -- and his or her children -- is sub-animal.
Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the
left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies,
not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education,
television, radio and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique
hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis' part.
Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to
the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The
creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and
an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death
of perhaps 10 thousand Palestinian Arabs. And all of that came about
solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at
birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a
Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act
engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees and about a million dead
Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then
doesn't "Hindu" equal "Jew" in the Muslim lexicon of hate?
Here are some answers in brief:
First, many groups have been hated, but none have been hated as deeply
as the Jews.
Second, Jew-hatred is often exterminationist, which is why Jew-hatred
has little in common with ethnic bigotry, religious intolerance or
even racism. Rarely, if ever, do any of them seek the extermination of
the disliked or hated group.
Third, exterminationist Jew-haters are particularly dangerous people.
Non-Jews who do not recognize Jew-hatred as the moral cancer it is are
fools. Nazism was born in Jew-hatred and led to the death of more than
40 million non-Jews. Islamic terror started against Israeli Jews but
has spread around the world. More fellow Muslims have now been
murdered by Islamic terror than Jews have.
That is why the tsunami the world ignored this weekend -- the
Palestinian-Arab-Muslim flood of Jew-hatred -- is the one that will
prove far more dangerous to it than the Japanese one it understandably
focused on.
Dennis Prager is a radio show host, contributing columnist for
Townhall.com, and author of 4 books including Happiness Is a Serious
Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.
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