Steven Erlanger of the New York Times writes dispiritedly about the tragedy unfolding among the Palestinians:
The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, called today for an end to the internecine violence in Gaza, a day after members of his own Hamas militia surrounded the house of a Fatah commander, killed the man and his bodyguards and seriously wounded his wife and brother.
Before he died, the commander, Col. Muhammad Gharib, begged for help in a telephone call to Palestinian television that was broadcast live. He said in the call that he was being attacked by the Executive Force, a parallel security force under the command of the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, but Fatah leaders and fighters apparently did not respond to his plea.
“They are killers,” Colonel Gharib said of the gunmen. “They are targeting the house, children are dying, they are bleeding. For God’s sake, send an ambulance, we want an ambulance, somebody move!”
The article is titled “A Hamas Leader Tries to Halt Spiraling Violence,” and then Erlanger tries to explain why neither Abbas nor Haniyeh might not be able to stop the violence
As in Iraq, the division of power created by democratic elections, in the absence of a traditional powerful state or after the disappearance of one, has meant the continuation of party politics through armed militias that are affiliated with factions but not always obedient to them.
This is the only linkage that exists between Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “solving” the latter (impossible now, unless Israel makes a separate peace with Fatah) will not cause all the dominoes to fall our democratic way.
Israel is fighting two insurgencies—one against Hezbollah in the north and one against Hamas in the south. America is fighting an insurgency in Iraq. There will be more…who knows where. Wecome to the 21st century.
This is the long war or, as David Kilcullen has called it, the global counterinsurgency. And America and Israel—and, one hopes, its Western allies—will have to learn how to address it. (More on this another time.)
A reminder:
“Good things happen when you do good,” Mr. Autrey said after the mayor gave him the Bronze Medallion, the city’s highest award for exceptional citizenship and outstanding achievement. The award, for jumping onto the tracks at the 137th Street station of the No. 1 line on Tuesday to help Cameron Hollopeter, 20, a film student who had fallen off the platform after having a seizure, puts Mr. Autrey in the company of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and Willie Mays.
“I’m not looking at this like I’m the hero,” said Mr. Autrey, 50, who stood with his daughters, Shuqui, 6, and Syshe, 4. “The real heroes are the young women and men that are fighting in Iraq now. What I did was something that any and every New Yorker should do, you know what I’m saying? You see somebody in distress, do the right thing. You know? Help out.”
Autrey took the opportunity to drive home the point he wanted to make:
[O]f dozens of people on the platform, only he and two women went to Mr. Hollopeter’s aid.
“We got guys and girls overseas dying for us to have our freedoms,” he said. “We got to show each other some love.”
from Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial:
The trial, in the final analysis, raises the distinction between law and justice. No saint or statesman lost his life or his freedom at Nuremberg. All the men who went to prison or mounted the gallows were willing, knowing, and energetic accomplices in a vast and malignant enterprise. They were all there for valid moral, if not technically perfect legal, reasons; but then, the murderer who gets off on a technicality has experienced law, not justice. …
It can be argued that evil unpunished deprives us of a sense of moral symmetry in life, and that to punish evil has a healthy cathartic effect, confirming our belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Nuremberg may have been flawed law, but it was satisfying justice.
Joseph E. Persico wrote those words in 1994. Twelve years ago it was uncontroversial for an author—a biographer and historian—to note that punishing evil is a good thing, because it restores our sense of a moral order to life.
Just sayin’.
