In differentiating between those significant distinctions that comprise the tribes of men, there is little we can learn by considering solely the hue of one’s skin or geographic locale. In fathoming a civilization’s ruling essence, we are obligated to consider the hierarchy of values that cultures hold dear in their heart of hearts: those propositions a people embrace that inform their common Weltanschauung and set into motion the highest virtues that their moral imaginations can aspire to. While all civilizations might share some abstract moral values to one degree or another, it is a social order’s understanding and ordering of truth, freedom, law, order, courage, piety (and their relations to a communal knowledge of God and man), that grants the possibility for beauty, transcendence, and happiness to be enjoyed. If we look closely, we will find that the tensions between these conflicting values often result in disparate modes of viewing the world and the place of men within its confines. Taking this all into account, it is then prudent to conclude, if I may be so bold, that defective understandings of God and man produce sick and often deranged societies, while relatively benign philosophies or revelations are more conducive to a salutary existence. In truth, this axiom would seem to take on the character of a natural moral law.

Nowhere on earth is this stark dichotomy more evident than in the Middle East. If one ruminates over the insoluble animus between Arabs and Jews: peoples who share ancient genetic and geographic origins, who can quarrel with the realization that the values that drive their respective societies have resulted in beings bearing thoroughly distinct apprehensions of life -- as if they were both the inhabitants of Jupiter and Mars.

If we dare speak bluntly with the wisdom of generalizations (and it is impossible to be wise without doing so), the Arab spirit, though ephemerally possessing a culture brocaded with the relics of an ancient learned heritage, is weighed down by the anchor of a relentless fatalism. This same ponderous gravity that encases its moral imagination has, in turn, had a sclerotic effect on their public square that has both short-circuited intellectual autonomy and honest self-critical introspection. This predicament has effectively arrested the evolution of their civilization and rendered it incapable of moving on with its greatest refinements, while leaving its dregs behind. Moreover, the paralysis of the Islamic revelation fixates the Arab eye eternally into the glories of its Golden Age of Expansion, and this retrograde myopia kindles that overbearing pride that pronounces as holy the stagnant waters of obedience to an exhausted tyrannical spirit unworthy of the modern world and the human spirit. In condensing the pungent fruit of this mindset, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani has bitterly noted:

We are a thick skinned people with empty souls. We spend our days playing dice, chess, or sleeping -- and we say we are the best people that ever came to mankind?”

Indeed, while the Israeli has worked miracle upon miracle from their melding of mind and material with their singularly industrious and dynamic world view, the Arab cowers behind his Caravan Tales and grits his teeth at a future that they perceive has been ripped from their hands by force and fraud, much like Ishmael’s promise. The shame and loss of honor that accompanies the Arab’s Middle Eastern dilemma is a lump of iron that cannot be digested and passed through the Arab consciousness, and any fool who dares proclaim that what sticks in the Islamic throat is a simple squabble over real estate only proves the following indictment -- that they have utterly misunderstood or denied the deep metaphysics compelling the region. Such are forever the idiots of appeasement.

Two examples will serve to illustrate each group’s incommensurate moral values, and the first is related to the way that Israel has evolved the waging of its defensive war against an insurgency that brooks no limits. It is by now ancient knowledge that the Palestinians house their command structure and weapons caches in mosques, schools, hospitals – any place where women, children, and the aged are cunningly used as human shields. Against an immoral foe, such a stratagem would have a dire effect in the waging of total war. But since life in the Israeli calculus -- even the life of one’s enemy, is a “difference in kind” over that shared by Hamas, the IDF must use prudence, precision, and mercy in battling monsters who think nothing of utilizing its own innocents as hostage pawns. And so while Hamas fires its missiles deliberately into populated areas with the goal of stoking terror and innocent death, the Israeli Air Defense Force has utilized the “Roof Knock:” an initial projectile of non-lethal capacity that alerts the inhabitants that in the very immediate future their domicile will be reduced to one of smoking ruin. While this tactic is not always successful in salvaging  life, especially since the Hamas elite often order their children onto the rooftops to thwart the measure while callously videoing from a safe distance, it is a far cry from the intentional targeting of Israeli population centers -- where no military installation are centered.

Ultimately, whether it is the butchering of Jewish newborns in their cradles or in ringing insurgent mortar installations with a circle of grim children whose innocence has been torn from them, the Palestinian penchant for cynical warfare is exceeded only by their capacity for merciless brutality and moral cowardice in service to a stillborn faith that magnifies the unquestioned shedding of blood. As the world has intimately witnessed, hatred unto death equates to a civilizational anthem for the Crescent Moon and Star, and every sterile offering given over to its dark and distant lord is memorialized by a stream of tears, that if fully gathered up, would fully circumnavigate the globe.

While the one-year-old granddaughter of Hamas’ prime minister Ismail Haniyah finds succor from a grave malady in a hated Israeli hospital, and Jews who are quick to return blessings for curses spend a terrorized existence waiting for the next shoe to drop in their bomb shelters, it is the Children of Gaza who suffer the mightiest indignation by moral gargoyles who harbor no qualm in sacrificing one generation on behalf of another. It is one thing to perish at the business end of a bullet in this eternal conflict, but quite another to have one’s humanity and innocence ground away like pumice. To bring about this metamorphosis, every child in the Palestinian (and Arab) world is fed a gourmet indoctrination of hate where Jews are categorized as pigs and dogs. Today, Palestinian children are feted to a “Sesame Street” styled “wall of hate” that dehumanizes Israelis and lays the apologetic groundwork to justify the litany of atrocities committed to absolve every Arab dishonor incurred since the “unspeakable nakba”  As a case in point, Memri TV, that unsleeping chronicler of Arab media perfidy, has translated a children’s show where a Disneyesque bumblebee named Nahoul urges kindergarteners to pick up rocks and reduce the faces of Jews to that of tomatoes. From Al-Aqsa Television on May 2, 2014 the following exchange occurred:

“What do the police do?” Rawan asked.

“They catch thieves and troublemakers,” Nahoul the bee interjected.

“And they shoot Jews, right?” Rawan prompted.

“Right,” Tulin answered.

“You want to be like him? Allah willing, when you grow up,” Rawan asked.

“I will shoot the Jews,” Tulin answered.

Rawan’s follow-up question: “All of them?" 

To which Tulin obediently replied, “Yes.”

Contrary to what passes as august statecraft in the Western Halls of Delusion, no people capable of surrendering the cherished fruit of their loins for the fulfillment of a genocidal nightmare is likely to enter into a good-faith compact with an enemy engaged in the practice of making matzoh from the blood of Palestinian children. This lie has been told with such ardor and so persistently that the truth no longer holds any currency in the Palestinian world, nor are there any ears left to hear it. It is said that you cannot negotiate with a sick mind. For the Israeli, you can only stand vigilant and shoot straight when that final push comes to shove and bombs rain down like iron stars from the arid desert sky.

As for the Children of the Arab, the poet Qabbani is optimistic. And yet, knowing what we now know, we are unconvinced. His proud verse proceeds thus:

Arab children,
Corn ears of the future,
You will break our chains,
Kill the opium in our heads,
Kill the illusions.
Arab children,
Don't read about our suffocated generation,
We are a hopeless case.
We are as worthless as a water-melon rind.
Don’t read about us,
Don’t ape us,
Don’t accept us,
Don’t accept our ideas,
We are a nation of crooks and jugglers.
Arab children,
Spring rain,
Corn ears of the future,
You are the generation that will overcome defeat.

It is the height of madness to expect a snail to spring forth from an oak tree or a flowing spring to erupt from a cesspool. As long as fuzzy bumblebees urge rosy cheeked waifs to abandon human restraint and grow into seething beasts, the Israelis will play “knock knock” -- until prudence dictates otherwise, and a grisly Carthaginian judgment is all that remains as recompense for the bloody House of Ishmael to contemplate in its self-imposed purgatory.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland California, and welcomes your correspondence at arete5000@dslextreme.com. He can be followed at www.stubbornthings.org and on Twitter.