Perspective: Is No One Willing to Help the Gazans?

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According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because at any one time there exists 10 righteous people who redeem mankind by their good works. This redemption now seems seriously challenged.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: Faith Street | On Faith
By Qasim Rashid and Nasim Rehmatullah
Posted: August 5, 2014

We need people with honesty and integrity to challenge the dehumanizing drift of our global society.

After slaughtering nearly two thousand Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rebuked the United States “not to ever second guess [him] again on Hamas.” Netanyahu is a poster child for the Quran sayings: “We appoint for him a satan who becomes his companion” (43:37) and “Then if he does evil deeds we degrade him as the lowest of the low” (95:6).

The important lesson of the Holocaust was not just that there is evil in the world. Instead, the Holocaust taught us that there are evil people in this world who could do unimaginable, cruel things while “decent” people watch and do nothing about it. In one broad comment, President Obama dismissed the slaughter of the Palestinians by saying that “no country would agree to live with that kind of threat (rockets) repeatedly hanging over it.”

In his opening remarks at the Nuremberg Trials in November 1945, Justice Robert H. Jackson said, “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated . . . .”

It is crucial to put this current war in perspective. The strip of land called Gaza, home to 1.8 million Palestinians, is surrounded by the Israel Defense Forces. Israel has a chokehold on everything. Yet the rhetoric by Israel is that there is no occupation of Gaza Strip. We haven’t been there for some eight years. This warped view of reality is not politics or morality or justice. This is arrogance and cruelty of power. It is evil.

One noted leader of Jews in the U.S., Rabbi Henry Seigman, correctly points out:

On the face of it Israel has a right to defend itself against those wayward rockets. What undermines this principle is that no country and no people should live the way the Gazans have been made to live. The moral equation which puts Israel on top as a victim must also point out that the Gazans are a people who have a right to live a decent, normal life, and they too must think, “What can we do to put an end to this?” Imagine if the situation was reversed and the Jews were made to live there in these conditions. Nobody would agree to that. They would say it is absurd.

The Palestinians are in a struggle to end their distress and oppression in any way they can. No one else seems willing to help them. Muslim-majority nations are shamelessly non-responsive. Hamas is no more a terrorist organization than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish state. If Hamas grew out of the generation of the first intifada, when the young people who threw stones were met with bullets, imagine what will grow out of the generation that experienced the repeated massacres of the last seven years?

Until and unless we recognize that all human life is equal and rule with justice, dignity, equity, and respect for all, peace will remain impossible.

According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because at any one time there exists 10 righteous people who redeem mankind by their good works. This redemption now seems seriously challenged.

We need people with honesty and integrity and high morals to challenge the self-destructive and dehumanizing drift of our global society. Such individuals must speak out loudly, creating awareness and emphasizing that we be mindful of the consequences of our political immorality.

The worldwide head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, The Khalifa of Islam, has repeatedly drawn our attention to the fact that if there exists any hope for civilization — any chance for an ennobling human community to emerge from the current cacophony of strife, debasement, nihilism, and fanaticism — we must all revert back to God. We must all band together and fight all these forces which are working to destroy the image of God in man.

Good people should not sit idly by as Gaza’s innocent civilians face atrocity after atrocity. We can only hope and pray that good people have the courage to stand up and say No more. As Justice Jackson said, humanity cannot survive such atrocities being repeated.


The opinions expressed in this piece belong to the authors.


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