While we we’ve been distracted by open borders and the election primaries, most of us have forgotten Gaza’s raid on Israel. Perhaps such is deemed no longer newsworthy since we are well aware that Muslims in the middle east think of terrorism as a tactic, warring against civilians. I sadly concede this is all real. I share with those believers who are brokenhearted the same broken heart. I write today with no interest whatever in lessening the sickening nature of what is going on over there. That said, I am less shocked and surprised than many. I’m less shocked than many because these kinds of horrors are not the behavior of sick and twisted monsters, bizarre and unusual human oddities. This is what we do, because this is what we are. This is not inhuman, but altogether human.
Which brings me to our selective outrage. We ought to be outraged any time anyone has been sexually assaulted by anyone. To sexually assault someone in the name of a religion is all the more disgusting. The problem, however, is when we soothe our own consciences by lying to ourselves that such things only happen “out there,” in the Muslim world where people are just crazy. If only, we seem to think, they were more westernized, more sophisticated, more urbane, we wouldn’t have these atrocities to deal with. So we mount our moral high horse and feed our penchant for moral superiority, grateful to be a different order of being, a civilized human.
Truth be told, though I abjure the reasoning, I can make more sense of a perspective that says, “This man must die because he holds to a false and blasphemous religion” than the perspective that says, “This child must die because he is inconvenient to me.” It is, however, the latter that we sophisticated westerners have embraced. Even if we have not sacrificed our own children to the brutal goddess Convenience, we stand guilty for not being aghast, appalled, daily sickened and broken hearted that our own neighbors have so sacrificed their own children. We don’t have daily social media posts highlighting what is happening in our own neighborhoods, nor the moral outrage that comes alongside such posts. We have instead business as usual.
Indeed there is no one calling for the United Nations to legislate a requirement for cleaner swords for the beheadings. No one is suggesting a legally required waiting period would be helpful. No one is saying, “It’s okay to rape Israeli women who were conceived by rape or incest, but not other Israeli women.” It takes people like us to reason that way, polite, Christian, “pro-life” people.
It is a good thing to be aghast and heartbroken over atrocities in the middle east. It is a good thing to be aghast and heartbroken over atrocities in middle America. What is a bad thing is when we grow aghast and heartbroken at what is out there so as to miss the horror of what is in here. Muslim people are awful not because they are Muslim, but because they are people. And so am I. Evil is what we are by nature. And because we are evil we ever and always push evil on to the other.
