Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The Rooster's Crow and Kenneth Roth's Evil

Highly disturbing statement from Kenneth Roth, of HRW:



Hamas tunnels may have also been intended against civilians but they've  "caused a huge number of military fatalities" 


It is an open and declarative attempt to reverse cause and effect in the service of whitewashing Hamas. IDF inserts its soldiers between Hamas and Hamas' civilian targets, which explains why there are fallen soldiers in this war but very few civilian victims. Kenneth Roth takes this fact and re-baptizes it as "reasonable doubt" ("Hamas tunnels may have also been intended against civilians") that Hamas actually targets military personnel and not necessarily civilian population. This is the product not of a confused mind but a malevolent cynical manipulator of facts who reverses the reasonable order of cause and effect. He is turning the effect, large  proportion of fallen IDF soldiers in Israel's war toll, into an explanation of the cause: they were the intended targets.

It has the same children story illogical literary device of placing two facts in a certain proximity, correlation and order and then deliberately drawing wrong conclusions to amuse kids and stimulate their thinking. For example, the rooster crows at dawn. We have two activities going on more or less simultaneously: sunrise and the rooster's crow. The creative author may suggest that one act triggers the other: if the rooster doesn't crow, dawn will not be break. It amuses kids to be regaled with this kind of illogic, but it does not serve as a scientific explanation of the phenomenon. That's exactly the kind of device Kenneth Roth tries to employ in his attempt to cleanse Hamas of its well-recorded and unimpeachable history of targeting civilians anywhere and everywhere in Israel. He turns the numbers of dead soldiers into an apriori intent, thus removing the verifiable, scientific element from his "analysis".


And it is done not to amuse, as in the case of the children's story, but to confuse and inflict further pain upon Israeli. 

Says Paul Ricoeur:

Evil is, in the literal sense of the word, perversion, that is, a reversal of the order that requires respect for law to be placed above inclination. It is a matter of a misuse of a free choice and not of the malfeasance of desire. The propensity for evil affects the use of freedom, the capacity to act out of duty – in short, the capacity for being autonomous.”

Ricoeur speaks of law and inclination. The inclination is Hamas intent to harm civilians. The law is the presence of IDF soldiers between Hamas and Israeli civilians. To turn that lawful force that acts out of profoundly justifiable duty into the intended target of Hamas is to lie about Hamas' fully declarative inclinations and intentions. It is, simply put, evil.

1 Comments:

At 5:52 PM EDT, Anonymous Brian Goldfarb said...

And, of course, while he's about it, Roth (like so many others) manages to ignore the two war crimes Hamas commits every time it fires a rockets - from among a civilian population and indiscriminately against civilians. But, hey, the one is only Palestinian "martyrs" and the others only Jews.

So that's all right then.

 

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