While you're reading these lines, I don't know what the number of civilian deaths in Lebanon will read; as of today it's over five hundred.
A friend (who as a Social Democrat calls Hamas and Hezbollah terror organizations and curses anti-Semitism) watching the attack on Qana at the same time on the same TV news channel (it takes hours to get news of the fire raining on Lebanese children on thematic TV channels, including CNN) says a sentence on the telephone that makes my hair stand on end: "Hitler left his work half finished." A little earlier my hair also stood on end as I listened to the speech of the Israeli representative to the UN.
If one loses fear of God...
The representative says he's very sorry for the hundreds of children in Lebanon whose heads have been broken into pieces, whose arms and legs have been torn off, and whose eye sockets are full of coagulated muddy blood. In effect what he said is: "We're defending ourselves. Actually, we're the innocent ones. Our very existence is threatened not only by Hezbollah and those countries that finance, protect, encourage, and support it, but also by the whole Muslim world. Everyone is our enemy. The real murderers of the dead children in Lebanon are those who attack us because we defend ourselves. Hezbollah is the world's biggest and most dangerous monster.
Lebanon nurtured and raised this monster with its own hands. Syria and Iran supported it and continue to do so. The oppressed Israeli people are protecting themselves to repel the threats of the Hezbollah monster. We are very sad about the dead civilians, children, elderly and women. But I'm sure that parties are being held in Iran and Syria and Damascus to celebrate these deaths." The speech goes on like this. A still frame of death, killing and dying in the man's face. Regarding death one thinker says, "it is the end of expression," both the tongue's and the face. Here it's as if both speech and expression are lost. If after targeting children taking "refuge" in the basement of a (civilian) building and hitting them with finely tuned rockets of pin-point precision- can look at the torn bodies of the children and say "we're trying to protect ourselves from the world's biggest monster; we're innocent and victimized," then that person's facial expression must be dead. This must be where words lose their meaning. There's no difference-implicit or otherwise--between composing such a statement and saying, "Hitler left his work half finished." Mercilessly massacring two-hundred and fifty thousand civilians, tearing apart the bodies of hundreds waiting in a bread line, and raping tens of thousands of women, the Serbs also said at one time that they were innocent and victimized.
This victim psychology is substitute for religious/ethnic nationalism. Explaining something by killing someone is, at most, as Schuon said, "the work of a spoiled, decayed, and putrid state." In his work, Futuhat'in Seferler, Ibn Arabi says that a person in a place where there is no fear of God will not be able to save himself from degeneration. The way the world is going is a sign not of technological development, civilization, human rights culture, democracy, etc. in an altruistic, virtuous and perfect place, but rather it's a sign of bringing news of doomsday.
This colossal madness, this hysteria, this satanic wave, and this depravity and decay tell us that this is the end of time. Owing to one veto in the UN emergency session, not even a decision to condemn Israel was possible. In this attack the region's main highways, electric and water distribution networks, communication channels, hospitals and emergency institutions, total infra structure, have been destroyed. Civilian settlements have been indiscriminately bombarded and hundreds of children, women and civilians have been massacred. In view of this merciless attack, the US Secretary of State (who called Khomeini the "Great Satan") stated how very positive and appropriate the decision to support the attack was; Europe's civilized, democratic, developed countries remain spectators; and with the exception of a few countries making pathetic condemnations and cease-fire calls, almost all Muslim countries are silent.
Unlike the Serbs who, while wiping the Bosnians off the face of the earth, explained it with a victim psychology, Israel is a "sharia state" that appears not to have learned any lessons from centuries (particularly the first half of the 20th century) of being afflicted with great catastrophes and disasters. To the contrary, massacring children is perceived as a part of their political theology. The situation is even more pathetic in our own country , which has not produced an honorable writer like Sartre (except for a few brave hearts like Nuray Mert and Mehmet Bekaroğlu who are struggling like a one man/woman army of virtue), who directed strong opposition to his own country in relation to Algeria. Shortly after the UN meeting the Israeli Prime Minister states, in a world-threatening manner, that a cease-fire is out of the question under any circumstances. It's as if Israel is consciously attempting to strengthen anti-Semitism, which is increasingly deepening and spreading in the world. There is no level-headed front to stop or deter this side that has deluged the region with the smell of blood and gunpowder for decades.
As Humanity Dies...
The representative says, "We are on the side of peace and hope. We would want the children to be happy learning in their schools, not being killed..." But no one stands up and asks, "Then why are you showering rockets on top of poverty-stricken buildings housing children? Why have you been running over Palestinian children with tanks for years? Are you going to preserve peace and hope and protect the desire for mercy like this?"
This is no doubt a game -- a game, a part or dimension of a distraction. In a world where hundreds of millions of people have been mercilessly killed, understanding why the inconceivable are happening exceeds our mental threshold. It leaves great thinkers dumb-founded. It's impossible to understand why there are such powerful manifestations of Celal (Wrath of God).
"OK, if justice and mercy are fundamental," thinkers ask, "how can we explain all this?"
It appears to be impossible for us to understand the massacre of hundreds of thousands of children, the helpless and the weak; the rape of tens of thousands of women; where and why mothers and fathers holding the fragmented bodies of their babies are running, trying to escape from rockets, bullets and nuclear and chemical murderers.
They are all as inexplicable as the words "We are defending ourselves" or "Hitler left his work half done..."