Rachel Neuwirth posted this provocative essay yesterday at The American Thinker: The Stockholm Conference: A Political Obscenity.
It's a must read, especially if you're unfamiliar with the details of the Conference in question: the commitment of close to a billion dollars in aid for the rebuilding of Lebanon in the aftermath of an unprovoked aggression launched from its soil, coupled with uncontested condemnation of Israel, the victim of that aggression. Oh, and some additional gratuitous aid for Fatah and Hamas thrown in, just for kicks. It truly boggles the mind.
But as if that weren't enough, Neuwirth outlines the parallel attempt at Stockholm (by the European-based Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt) to require reparations(!) from both Israel (the victim) and the United States (the ally of the victim) to be paid into the coffers of Lebanon (where, God forbid, they would certainly flow directly into the pockets of Hizbollah).
Finally, Neuwirth deftly turns this funhouse mirror back on itself by proposing that there are adequate grounds in international law for both Lebanon and Israel to demand, together (and for the international community to enforce), reparations from Syria and Iran, the true forces behind the aggression that devastated both countries. I say: Go for it!
That said, I'd like to draw attention to one paragraph in Neuwirth's essay that deserves a post all its own. She quotes the Swedish Prime Minister's firm statement of solidarity with the Lebanese people, to which she replies:
These are noble sentiments; no one should be indifferent to the human suffering of civilian populations. But there is a shocking omission in this kind of statement: the quest for responsibility. Whereas the European Left has always been eager to find exculpatory “root causes†in all matters related to Islamic terrorism after 9/11, and found them in such implausible factors as poverty, inequality, oppression, joblessness and alienation, there was no mention in Stockholm of the root causes of the Lebanese ordeal. This omission is nothing short of obscene.
This aversion to "the quest for responsibility" (it's more than an "omission"), this compulsive but selective search for exculpatory "root causes" and this insistence upon ignoring forseeable effects, characterizes not only the European Left but the universal Left, and not only in matters related to Islamic terrorism after 9/11, but in all matters, from its distorted perception of the Israeli-Arab conflict to race relations in America. It's one of the fundamental flaws that has torn the left away from any claim it had to the moral high ground and set it adrift on a sea of its own rudderless self-righteousness.
More on this anon, I expect.
