Interesting Policy, Selectively Applied, or, Hypocrisy in International Affairs

A friend writes: 

Here’s the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, rattling sabers at Israel and the US.

 “We have a saying in our language: ‘If someone throws a smaller stone, you should respond with a bigger stone.’ We will defend ourselves within our capabilities.”

I think that the world’s Jew-haters need to get their act together and read from the same script.  When Israel responds “with a bigger stone” to Palestinian violence, Eurochristians and liberals and Muslims of all nations scream: “Disproportionate response.”  (The US usually demurs, since that’s been our implicit policy for a long time.)  Yet the heir to the Khomeini revolution is declaring his readiness, nay, his cultural obligation, to disproportionate response.  

 Get with the program, Mahmoud.

The death of chivalry? You decide....

A friend suggests:

<dragnet_fanfare> 

<joe_friday>  

This is the city: Atlanta, Georgia. The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Late July, Saturday, 10 a.m. The shoulder of the Interstate, near downtown.

Two cars. One, last year's sport model with a flat tire; the other, a battered 10-year-old econobox.

Two twentysomething women wearing the hot-weather uniform of strappy top/tiny T and short shorts stand in the shade.

A disheveled and sweatsoaked thirtysomething man in jeans and a casual shirt with the tail out struggles to change the tire.

Is it chivalry, or yet another message to women that youth and beauty are the most important things they have to offer?

Is it Southern neighborliness, or reinforcement of sexist stereotypes about female weakness and mechanical ineptitude?

Is it ordinary decency or everything that's wrong with Western civilization in one roadside tableau? 

</joe_friday>

Israeli Knesset Considers the Armenian Genocide

A bit ago, a friend commented on the Israeli Knesset's somewhat belated moves toward recognition of the Armenian genocide, as recounted in the Jerusalem Post:

After years of apparently being unaware of this war crime, the Knesset is suddenly shocked, shocked that the Turks massacred hundreds of thousands of Armenians a few years ago. 

I've always been disappointed that Israel, of all nations, ducked the moral issue of condemning the first genocide of the twentieth century. Not that Israel is alone in its moral myopia about this event.  American Presidents again and again develop "the king's speech," stuttering when trying to say the words "genocide" and "Turkey" in the same sentence.  Obama is only the latest in a long list.  Turkey is too powerful, and Armenia is too irrelevant, for politics not to dominate. 

Nor is the Armenian genocide morally comparable to the Holocaust, in several significant ways.  Many Armenians were indeed rebelling against Turkish domination. They were armed opponents of the dying Ottoman regime, and its possible successors.  Furthermore, Armenians were sometimes both victims and perpetrators in gruesome attacks on civilians in that region and era.  In comparison, although some Jews in Poland and Ukraine and Germany after the Great War wanted cultural autonomy, they weren't advocating revolution as Jews, nor were Jews (as Jews) murdering their neighbors.

(Of course, Jews were disproportionately represented in certain periods and locales between the wars in the ranks of Communists.  But Jews who became Communists were not acting as Jews or in the name of Jews as a people: They were acting as Communists, and their Communist brutality was directed at least as much at Jews as at Christians. Later, Stalin made sure to remind the formerly Jewish Communists that they were always too Jewish and never Communist enough.

I grew to accept the pragmatics.  The Turks were Israel's only Muslim "allies," and beggars can't be choosers.  The two nations were strange bedfellows, but that's politics. 

I understand the desire to get back at the perfidious Turks now.  Poking them in the eye politically would feel good, after the past year or three of their nastiness. 

But what will it gain Israel?  I would think that Armenia is more interested in improving relations with Turkey than establishing better relations with Israel.  Besides, to paraphrase AH: "Who, after all, remembers or cares about the Armenians?"