POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GORDON GIBSON IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Sorry, Mr. Gibson, there is no moral debate here.
I find it stunning that anyone living in a free country could even pose this question seriously.
The example of Israel is perfect. Israel has secretly, as well as in public, murdered those it calls enemies for decades.
And where has this taken Israel? Israel has no peace. Israel today has the worst reputation in the advanced world as a place of fairness and decency. And Israel gradually sinks lower and lower into a murky abyss of ghastly ethics and democratic values.
We have the witness of Israeli soldiers as to the horrible Nazi-like words with which they were prodded in advance of the Gaza invasion.
Indeed, it is a legitimate question whether Israel as we know it can long continue. The CIA only recently predicted that it would change in 20 years into something else, with many of American and European dual-nationals returning to the lands of their birth.
There is simply no question about these results. That's why Israel's defenders constantly today lash out at what they call anti-Semitism, calling the critics of human abuse haters.
You cannot have a society of laws and justice when you are unwilling to live by such laws yourself. The US has fallen into this same moral pit with its international torture gulags and its assassinations.
This kind of murder is absolutely no different to some rogue cops secretly executing the people they regard as criminals. It is no different to the ghastly work of death squads in Brazil going through poor areas of cities murdering children at night. And it is no different to the past several juntas in South America who made thousands “disappear” by kidnapping them and dumping them out of planes over the ocean.
God, the most precious thing we have achieved over countless centuries of ghastly murder and conflict is a society of laws and defined rights. How damnable that anyone would even toy with the idea of destroying that.
