Tuesday, June 25, 2013

How evil is done again and again when ordinary people tolerate it or - worse

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
25 June '13..

There's a wry expression that says "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". It was the caption to a cartoon by Peter Steiner published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. We think it stands for the way ideas can be freely exchanged via the Internet; its anonymity and ease of access let people air the widest range of viewpoints with little fear of repurcussions: the outlandish, the offensive and everything in between and beyond.

This post is not actually about cartoons or dogs, at least not in the conventional sense, but how evil is done again and again when ordinary people tolerate it or - worse - give it their active support.

Two individuals, more than anyone else we know, inflicted brutality, pathological hatred and lethal violence on our family, leaving us devastated and in constant, enduring pain.

One is Abdullah Barghouti, a Kuwaiti holding a Jordanian passport who built and delivered a cleverly-engineered bomb disguised as a guitar case and intended to kill civilians and - by means of a thick layer of nails - to maim and disfigure the greatest possible number of people in range.

The other, Ahlam Tamimi, a Jordanian student of journalism and 21 years old, scouted suitable sites during several undercover visits and eventually picked a site - a pizza restaurant in the center of the city where we live, popular with teens - for delivering the bomb right up to its doors. She then walked the bomb there before fleeing for her own safety back to Ramallah where she was working as a television news-reader.

The explosion and killings they engineered - in short, their barbarism - are detailed in a piece we wrote, "The massacre at the Sbarro restaurant". In addition to those killed, more than 130 others suffered serious injuries.

(Continue)

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