How war in the Holy Land imperils our Judaeo-Christian civilisation
By Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald.
I had wanted to write only theology and spirituality. Raw politics always presents added complexities. It is too often the practice of power in the setting of prejudice. But in the West all politics takes place within a framework of ethics. We are not yet suffering totalitarianism, though through self-indulgence and laziness, we may yet soon be.
The events in Gaza and Israel have, however, made it impossible to write about only theory and history. The risk of appearing partisan has to be faced. In the present circumstances public discourse takes the form of appearing to be fixated on the question of which nations’ dead babies one is more outraged by.
One would always hope to be able to write “and we are all against babies being murdered” but after the Hamas escapade which involved either burning or beheading Israeli babies, even that moral refuge is denied.
This commentary is not about which nation’s dead babies we prefer, nor even, though it might reasonably be, which religion we prefer. It is about power and mercy, or forgiveness. We might try to be a bit more subtle and suggest that it is about power and justice and mercy. In each case justice, not being an absolute, is viewed through the lens of either power or mercy and forgiveness.
However we do our history, we can agree that Jews and Arabs both claim Palestine as their home. It doesn’t help for either side to deny that. The problem is though that each side draws on different moral sources to justify it. So from the very beginning there is no common scale of values one can use to act as a referee.
The two state solution is an obvious compromise, but there are many within Islam who won’t have it. They are demanding all or nothing. This is not spoken about much in the public media but it is a fact. Hamas is using its people as a human shield because it is placing power before the interests of its people; justice (as it sees it) before mercy.
Our decadent society is characterised by an unwillingness to look at any aspect of reality it does not find congenial. TS Eliot nailed it when he wrote that humankind “cannot bear much reality”. We do worse than that, we deliberately sidestep it when reality challenges our egos or our self-interest.
Part of the difficulty in pursuing an ethical debate is that it appears that our decadent secular society cannot and will not face the reality of the implication of Islamic values.
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