[Peace-discuss] Uri Avnery on the killing of Osama bin Laden: Rejoice not...

[Stuart Levy]

(via the ufpj-activist list)

I like this piece.

  "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth... "

  "A new Caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest
   creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to
   the Zeitgeist, were it not for its opponents ­ the Americans. They
   needed this dream - or nightmare - more than the Muslims themselves."

-------- Message original --------
Sujet: Avnery on bin Laden
Date : Fri, 06 May 2011 22:52:50 +0300
De : Uri Avnery <avnery at actcom.co.il>
Répondre à : avnery at actcom.co.il>
Pour : uri-avnery at list.avnery-news.co.il

Hi,
Hope this may interest you.
Shalom, Salamaat,
uri

Uri Avnery
May 7, 2011

"Rejoice Not"

"REJOICE NOT when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad
when he stumbleth, / Lest the Lord see [it], and it displease him, and
he turn away his wrath from him."

This is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (Proverbs
24:17-18), and indeed in the Hebrew language. It is beautiful in other
languages, too, though no translation comes close to the beauty of the
original.

Of course, it is natural to be glad when one¹s enemy is defeated, and
the thirst for revenge is a human trait. But gloating ­ schadenfreude -
is something different altogether. An ugly thing.

Ancient Hebrew legend has it that God got very angry when the Children
of Israel rejoiced as their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the Red Sea.
"My creatures are drowning in the sea," God admonished them, "And you
are singing?"

These thoughts crossed my mind when I saw the TV shots of jubilant
crowds of young Americans shouting and dancing in the street. Natural,
but unseemly. The contorted faces and the aggressive body language were
no different from those of crowds in Sudan or Somalia. The ugly sides of
human nature seem to be the same everywhere.

THE REJOICING may be premature. Most probably, al-Qaeda did not die with
Osama bin-Laden. The effect may be entirely different.

In 1942 the British killed Abraham Stern, whom they called a terrorist.
Stern, whose nom de guerre was Ya¹ir, was hiding in a cupboard in an
apartment in Tel Aviv. In his case too, it was the movements of his
courier that gave him away. After making sure that he was the right man,
the British police officer in command shot him dead.

That was not the end of his group ­ rather, a new beginning. It became
the bane of British rule in Palestine. Known as the ³Stern Gang² (its
real name was ³Fighters for the Freedom of Israel²), it carried out the
most daring attacks on British installations and played a significant
role in persuading the colonial power to leave the country.

Hamas did not die when the Israeli air force killed Sheikh Ahmad Yassin,
the paralyzed founder, ideologue and symbol of Hamas. As a martyr he was
far more effective than as a living leader. His martyrdom attracted many
new fighters to the cause. Killing a person does not kill an idea. The
Christians even took the cross as their symbol.

WHAT WAS the idea that turned Osama bin Laden into a world figure?

He preached the restoration of the Caliphate of the early Muslim
centuries, which was not only a huge empire, but also a center of the
sciences and the arts, poetry and literature, when Europe was still a
barbaric, medieval continent. Every Arab child learns about these
glories, and cannot but contrast them with the sorry Muslim present.

(In a way, these longings parallel the Zionist romantics' dreams of a
resurrected kingdom of David and Solomon.)

A new Caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest
creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to
the Zeitgeist, were it not for its opponents ­ the Americans. They
needed this dream ­ or nightmare - more than the Muslims themselves.

The American Empire always needs an antagonist to keep it together and
to focus its energies. This has to be a worldwide enemy, a sinister
advocate of an evil philosophy.

Such were the Nazis and Imperial Japan, but they did not last long.
Fortunately, there was then the Communist Empire, which filled the role
admirably.

There were Communists everywhere. All of them were plotting the downfall
of freedom, democracy and the United States of America. They were even
lurking inside the US, as J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy so
convincingly demonstrated.

For decades, the US flourished in the fight against the Red Menace; its
forces spread all over the world, its spaceships reached the moon, its
best minds engaged in a titanic battle of ideas, the Sons of Light
against the Sons of Darkness.

And then ­ suddenly - the whole thing collapsed. Soviet power vanished
as if it had never existed. The American spy agencies, with their
tremendous capabilities, were flabbergasted. Apparently, they had no
idea how ramshackle the Soviet structure actually was. How could they
see, blinded as they were by their own ideological preconceptions?

The disappearance of the Communist Threat left a gaping void in the
American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama Bin Laden kindly
offered his services.

It needed, of course, a world-shaking event to lend credibility to such
a hare-brained utopia. The 9/11 outrage was just such an event. It
produced many changes in the American way of life. And a new global enemy.

Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted-off for display.
Islam the terrible, the murderous, the fanatical. Islam the
anti-democratic, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values. Suicide bombers,
72 virgins, jihad.

The US springs to life again. Soldiers, spies and special forces fan out
across the globe to fight terrorism. Bin Laden is everywhere. The War
Against Terrorism is an apocalyptic struggle with Satan.

American freedoms have to be restricted, the US military machine grows
by leaps and bounds. Power-hungry Intellectuals babble about the Clash
of Civilizations and sell their souls for instant celebrity.

To produce the lurid paint for such a twisted picture of reality,
religious Islamic groups are all thrown into the same pot ­ the Taliban
in Afghanistan, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in
Palestine, Indonesian separatists, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
elsewhere, whoever. All become al-Qaeda, despite the fact that each has
a totally different agenda, focused on its own country, while bin Laden
aims to abolish all Muslim states and create one Holy Islamic Empire.
Details, details.

The Holy War against the Jihad finds warriors everywhere. Ambitious
demagogues, for whom this promises an easy way to inflame the masses,
spring up in many countries, from France to Finland, from Holland to
Italy. The hysteria of Islamophobia displaces good old anti-Semitism,
using almost the same language. Tyrannical regimes present themselves as
bulwarks against al-Qaeda, as they had once presented themselves as
bulwarks against Communism. And, of course, our own Binyamin Netanyahu
milks the situation for all it is worth, traveling from capital to
capital peddling his wares of anti-Islamism.

Bin Laden had good reason to be proud, and probably was.

WHEN I saw his picture for the first time, I joked that he was not a
real person, but an actor straight from Hollywood¹s Central Casting. He
looked too good to be true - exactly as he would appear in a Hollywood
movie ­ a handsome man, with a long black beard, posing with a
Kalashnikov. His appearances on TV were carefully staged.

Actually, he was a very incompetent terrorist, a real amateur. No
genuine terrorist would have lived in a conspicuous villa, which stood
out in the landscape like a sore thumb. Stern was hiding in a small roof
apartment in a squalid quarter of Tel Aviv. Menachem Begin lived with
his wife and son in a very modest ground floor apartment, playing the
role of a reclusive rabbi.

Bin Laden¹s villa was bound to attract the attention of neighbors and
other people. They would have been curious about this mysterious
stranger in their midst. Actually, he should have been discovered long
ago. He was unarmed and did not put up a fight. The decision to kill him
on the spot and dump his body into [or ³in²] the sea was evidently taken
long before.

So there is no grave, no holy tomb. But for millions of Muslims, and
especially Arabs, he was and remains a source of pride, an Arab hero,
the ²[]³lion of lions² as a preacher in Jerusalem called him. Almost no
one dared to come out and say so openly, for fear of the Americans, but
even those who thought his ideas impractical and his actions harmful
respected him in their heart.

Does that mean that al-Qaeda has a future? I don¹t think so. It belongs
to the past ­ not because bin Laden has been killed, but because his
central idea is obsolete.

The Arab Spring embodies a new set of ideals, a new enthusiasm, one that
does not glorify and hanker after a distant past but looks boldly to the
future. The young men and women of Tahrir Square, with their longing for
freedom, have consigned bin Laden to history, months before his physical
death. His philosophy has a future only if the Arab Awakening fails
completely and leaves behind a profound sense of disappointment and
despair.

In the Western world, few will mourn him, but God forbid that anyone
should gloat.
__._,_.___