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We Refuse to Be Targets
December 2, 2007
“We know of it, but we haven’t experienced it. But yet we can’t avoid it.” Jules Bukiet, a 2G and author of “Stories of an Imaginary Childhood”
And yet….. Rising anti-Semitism is an indication that the world still has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism and racism and hatred are growing around the world. Anti-Semitism is escalating and has been on the rise in Europe and elsewhere since the outbreak of the Palestinian armed conflict against Israel. What is at stake today is nothing less than the survival of our civilization, The first and most crucial thing to understand is that there could be no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states, Terrorists do not just happen. They train, arm and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens on territory provided by terrorist states. Often these regimes provide the terrorists with intelligence, money, and operational assistance, dispatching them to serve as deadly proxies to wage a hidden war against more powerful enemies.
Today the terrorists have the will to destroy us. However, there is no doubt that we have the power to crush them. Now we must also show that we have the will. Once any part of the terror network acquires nuclear weapons, this equation will fundamentally change and with it the course of human affairs. This is the historical imperative that now confronts all of us all.
What do we do about it? First, as our president has said, we must make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that support them. It is not enough to root out the terrorists who committed a horrific act of war. We must dismantle the entire terrorist network. If any part of it remains intact, it will rebuild itself, and the specter of terrorism will reemerge and strike again. Bin Laden, for example, has shuttled over the last decade from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to the Sudan and back again. So we must not leave any base intact.
To achieve this goal we must first have moral clarity. We must fight terror wherever and whenever it appears and we must make all states play by the same rules. We must declare terrorism a crime against humanity, and we must all consider the terrorists enemies of mankind, to be given no quarter and no consideration for their purported grievances. If we begin to distinguish between acts of terror, justifying some and repudiating others based on sympathy with this or that cause, we will lose the moral clarity that is so essential for victory. This clarity is what enabled America and Britain to root out piracy in the 19th century. This is how the Allies rooted out Nazism in the 20th century.
They did not look for the "root cause" of piracy or the "root cause" of Nazism - because they knew that some acts are evil in and of themselves, and do not deserve any consideration or "understanding." They did not ask if Hitler was right about the alleged wrong done to Germany at Versailles. That they left to the historians. The leaders of the Western Alliance said something else: Nothing justifies Nazism. Nothing! We must be equally clear cut today: Nothing justifies terrorism. Nothing! Terrorism is the deliberate attack on innocent civilians. It needs be distinguished from legitimate acts of war that target combatants and may unintentionally harm civilians.
When the British bombed the Copenhagen Gestapo headquarters in 1944 and one of their bombs unintentionally struck a children's hospital, that was a tragedy, but it was not terrorism. When Israel fired a missile that killed two Hamas arch-terrorists, and two Palestinian children who were playing nearby were tragically struck down, that is not terrorism.
Terrorists do not unintentionally harm civilians. They deliberately murder, maim, and menace civilians - as many as possible.
No cause, no grievance, no apology can ever justify terrorism. Terrorism against Americans, Israelis, Spaniards, Britons, Russians, or anyone else is all part of the same evil and must be treated as such. It is time to establish a fixed principle for the international community: Any cause that uses terrorism to advance its aims will not be rewarded. On the contrary, it will be punished and placed beyond the pale.
Greta Brewer
Vice President of Education,
NEXT GENERATIONS
NEXT GENERATIONS is under the auspices of LEAH, League for Educational Awareness of the Holocaust.
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