Howard Epstein – WHY FIFTY-FIVE LIVES HAVE NO GREATER VALUE THAN ONE
Still reeling from the murders of four Israeli lives at Sarona, a mere three days after I had passed through with my brother on a visit from the UK, and contemplating the thumbnail sketches provided by the media of those who died – two eminent members of Israeli society and two less recognizably so, I (along with every other sentient being) was assailed by the news that some fifty clubbers in Orlando, Florida had similarly been murdered. To cap off the week or so, my brain and being tried to absorb the news that a solitary woman had been cruelly murdered in a Yorkshire, England, suburban street for the crime (it seems) of being out and about whilst being a British Member of Parliament. She had been, a moment before, attractive, brilliant, selfless and a budding political leader, but to me her disgusting, cruel and wanton end was no more shocking for that. She could have been just a mother and housewife, like those who were murdered at Sarona alongside a professor. I shall grieve no more for him than for her. And here is why:
Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world. (Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a))
Every shiva, Irish wake or other form of mourning for a soul taken from us carries the same level of grief. It matters not whether the deceased was a professor, a humble mom and housewife, an MP, a gay, a heterosexual, thin, plump, tall, short, pulchritudinous or rather plain. It was a life and it is no more. It is as though the entire world has been destroyed – and, indeed, in the case of the departed it is so. His or her whole world has gone and that of many of the mourners has gone too, certainly in the form in which it had been immediately before the tragedy occurred.
Is the loss of a child – or a parent – more painful if occasioned by a bullet – in a flash – or it arose from cancer over years? Who cares, who dares, to measure the depth or the quality of the sorrow? And how could it be done?
The numbers taken or the apparent loss of value to society of a particular death are less important than the recognition that each life is an entire world unto itself and each is to be mourned to the same extent. There should, therefore be dignity in death, in every one of them and where we see people capitalizing on death, we should feel revulsion.
So now let us look at something almost as disgusting as all these murders themselves: the way that politicians will try to spin the news for their own purposes. I say “almost” because, of course, no amount of spin can ever be as bad as a murder. But to murder the truth, or to spin it for personal gain, is, as beholding a murder or the report of one (or fifty), in itself a nauseating spectacle. Who would stoop to such a thing before the bodies are cold? I shall give you three examples, and I shall take them in reverse order.
Stephen Kinnock MP
In the UK, the MP who was senselessly slaughtered was Ms Jo Cox, born and bred in the town that became her constituency and the scene of her slaughter. Undoubtedly, in twelve months she had made her mark on the Westminster Parliament and could have gone on to great things. It is being said that her death was the result of the frenetic atmosphere worked up by politicians on both sides of the so-called Brexit debate (read: should Britain leave Europe?) but if that were so, she would not have met her nemesis in the form of some-one who was quite mad (and apparently a closet Nazi), as was plain from the ugly death that he visited upon her, accompanied by the cry “Britain First!” There is another reason too. There are some 63 million people in the UK. There would be much more mayhem on the streets if the mood were as frenetic as the press are now spinning things than just one attack. Yet neither the fallacy of the spin nor the tragedy of the murder were enough to prevent one MP, Stephen Kinnock, who shared an office at Westminster with Jo Cox, from telling The Times of London:-
“What I know is what Jo stood for and believed in — her values of internationalism, partnership and solidarity and, of course, those are the values that are being debated now. And we have to look at what Jo stood for. It will be one of the thousands of things we should think about when we go to the ballot box next week.” [My emphasis.]
Or in other words: To honour poor Jo’s memory and political preference, Vote Remain! Or at greater length: This tragedy that struck down my friend has got to be worth a few thousand votes next week and I for one am not going to pass up the opportunity to plant the idea in some voters’ minds.
This is ugly politicking if ever it presented its hideous face. And before the body has been buried, too.
President Barak Hussein Obama
After the slaying of 50 innocents in a gay bar (no I am not, but I support their right to be – or to have been) in Orlando, the political correctness warriors were out in force. One UK TV interviewer enraged a UK gay interviewee sufficiently for the latter to storm out of the studio, on air, because the former would not concede that the attack might have been a homophobic one. Here is the exchange in brief, culled from the UK’s The Independent newspaper:-
Owen Jones: “it is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations and it has to be called out as such”.
Host Mark Longhurst interjected and said the crime had been carried out against “human beings” who were “trying to enjoy themselves, whatever their sexuality.” Owen takes his leave.
Well, maybe, Mark but it was a gay club, so the sexuality of the victims could have been honored – and a little rachmanut for your guest would not have gone amiss. (Where were the Sky TV researchers? The father of the gunman conceded that his son had recently been enraged at the sight of two men kissing in the street. Room for doubt, Sky? I think so.)
We have not finished with Orlando yet. There were others staking claims to motive and context before even all those who may yet die were out of ICU. According to reports:-
- the mass murderer Omar Mateen became a“person of interest” to the FBI in May 2013 and July 2014. The 2013 investigation was opened after he made “inflammatory” comments to co-workers about having family connections to al-Qaeda and being a member of Hezbollah whilst the 2014 investigation was opened after he was linked to Moner Mohammad Abu Salha, an American radical who traveled to Syria and committed a suicide bombing Mateen was interviewed three times in connection with the investigations, which were both closed after producing nothing that warranted further investigation.
It might have been an idea for the FBI to have kept an eye on him. Just saying.
- S. officials saidISIL may have inspired Mateen without training, instructing, or having a direct connection with him. Investigators have said no evidence linking Mateen to the group has emerged, and have cautioned that the attack may have been ISIL-inspired without being ISIL-directed, as was the case in the December 2, 2015 attack in San Bernardino.
Does this look like it could be Islamic terrorism to you as well as to me? Ask: how many angels do you see on the tip of that needle? for despite all that analysis, here is the take today of President Obama:-
“Our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist or even just a disturbed individual to buy extraordinarily powerful weapons, and they can do so legally,” Obama said after meeting with families who lost loved ones in the Orlando nightclub shooting that took place Sunday.
“I held and hugged grieving family members and parents and they asked, ‘Why does this keep happening?’ And they pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage,” Obama said. “They don’t care about the politics…. Things need to change [on gun control].
In other words, according to the President, this is just another rampage killing that arises from the American obsession with guns and from lax gun control laws. No words from the President on Islamic hatred, on Da’esh, on the threat to America from the Islamist barbarians (Note: there is a difference between Muslims and Islamists) but not at, but now within, the gates – and all this just months after San Bernardino. But given that Obama has not conceded that the Fort Hood massacre (please Google it for yourself) was an example of Islamic terrorism, what else can we expect?
Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv
All that is bad enough but it is trumped (if decent people, among whom I still aspire to be counted, can still innocently use that word without implying some form of double entendre) by the words of Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv, the city where Sarona is located, after the anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli murders there. If you have not seen or heard the words of the Jewish-Israeli mayor of Israel’s biggest and most liberal city (not least towards gays) then I suggest you prepare yourself for them:-
“We might be the only country in the world where another nation is under occupation without civil rights (….) You can’t hold people in a situation of occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion everything is alright.”
Or in other words, the Tel Aviv mayor says, you can understand the terrorists shooting dead one Israeli, then another one, and another, and another, because they live under Israeli occupation or “The Occupation”.
Well, I am sorry Mr Mayor but I do not. I do not understand, and I do not subscribe to that nauseating load of hog-, eye- and white-wash of yours. Keep your left-wing liberal, worldly, culturally-equivalent and equivocating, Europe-pleasing nonsense to yourself and find it within you to respond to the tragedy in fitting terms – or just keep quiet.
Here is why the terrorists committed their outrage – and it has nothing to do with the “Occupation” forced on us by the naivety of King Hussein in June 1967 (see my earlier blogs):-
- their leaders and warlords promote a single-purpose project: to drive the Jews out of Arabia;
- they see us as a dagger in the heart of their nihilistic, self-brutalising project in which they will take all or nothing;
- our success in the meantime shames them;
- they are incapable of compromise;
- they teach their babies and kids that we are descended from pigs and apes; and
- they have chugim to brainwash the still-innocent children of the would be Palestinian nation, the better to ensure that they do not grow up to share decent values but to know only hatred, which is easier to convey than a competency in empathy and cooperation.
Do I think we never make mistakes or that we could not improve our act. Of course I do not. But let us see a glimmer of decency, of compassion, of humanity in the darkness and we shall know how to repay it. How will we recognise it? that’s a tricky one but here is a parable to assist:-
Auschwitz, 1945: A little old Jew was awaiting his turn to enter the gas chamber. A two meter tall SS officer looked down at the Jew with disgust and decided to play with him.
“Jew!”, he spat. “I shall, give you a chance to save your life. One of my eyes is a glass eye. It was made by the finest German doctors, scientists and engineers, so that it is indistinguishable from my other, natural eye. If you can tell me which is my glass eye. I shall spare your life.”
“Oh, that’s easy” said the Jew. “The glass eye is your left eye.”
“How did you know that, pig-Jew?” snarled the shocked SS officer.
“Ah, said the Jew. I shall tell you. It’s because in that eye … I saw a glimmer of humanity.”
Shavuah tov
© 2016 Howard Epstein
