I know I usually reserve this blog for comment on Columbia-related issues, but it was really difficult to follow the news coming out of the Middle East this week without wanting to write something about it.
A recap for those of you who haven’t been following it: as part of a possibly misguided live-terrorists-for-dead-bodies swap, Israel freed quadruple murderer Samir Kuntar, a stain on the human race whose only detectable accomplishment involved killing a family of Israelis and savaging a four year old girl with a rock. Naturally he was given a hero’s welcome upon his return to Lebanon, where murdering a child with your bare hands is fine, so long as that child is Jewish. In Lebanon, the children you kill needn’t even be Israeli if you’re looking to elevate yourself to superstar status—just look who turned out for the funeral of Imad Mugniyah the monster (or rather Hezbollah military commander) responsible for the JCC bombing in Buenos Aires in the mid-90s. Apparently, any Jew will do.
But this isn’t merely a case of terrorist pathology seeping it’s way into a country psychologically battered by 25 years of more or less continuous bloodshed. Indeed, Kuntar was feted by the government of Lebanon itself—greeted by its president, dressed in military garb, walked down a red carpet. One can only imagine what the country’s officials and cabinet ministers must have said to him as they shook his hand and patted him on the back: “nice wrist action when you bashed that defenseless girl’s head in, Samir! You really showed her!”
This reveals more than just the moral equivocation—and worse, moral depravity—that accompanies an increasingly nihilistic modern-day anti-Zionism. It goes beyond that to mock moral relativism itself, to shatter the idea that nothing is wrong so long as it can be justified in context. I hate to sound like Bernard Lewis or Norman Podheretz, but to me the following statement couldn’t possibly be more obvious: there are societies that pin medals on racist child murders, and who see such people as symbols of national redemption and hope. And then there are the people and societies who will defend liberalism even—and especially—when they are being made a travesty of. Lebanon’s (and, while I’m at it, the Arab world’s) celebration of anti-Jewish barbarism is another reminder of the crossroads at which the Saidists now find themselves, even if they’re too self-absorbed to realize that such a crossroads even exists. In a very real sense, it’s a reminder of where all kinds of lines are drawn–and that those lines are there in the first place.