Amiram Hayardeny’s BigMouth

For one reason or another I found myself busy thinking about hypocrisy lately.  Double standards, expecting others to do the “right thing” while allowing oneself to behave differently.  The problem is that once I started thinking about I suddenly started seeing it everywhere.  Where do I start?  Lets start at the personal level.

I doubt that any of you are following the news media in Israel.  Of course, you do follow the news media coming out of Israel, simply because it can’t be avoided.  A small country of seven million generates as much news as a superpower.  But I chose to start on the internal news first, because it leads to the topic I chose to deal with first: personal hypocrisy.

In recent weeks, there have been quite a few articles about incest, child abuse, wife beating, and even rape within religious families in different parts of the country.  The news media indeed seemed to have been making a feast out of this embarrassing and terrible stories.  Possibly because the families involved were religious.  In fact, not only religious, but ultra-religious.  Some of the talkbackists and bloggers in Israel were immediately discussing the importance of mentioning that the families are from ultra-orthodox background.  Some concluded that the fact isn’t newsworthy, but others, myself included thought that indeed, it’s very important to know the background.  Why, you ask?  Simple.  One word: expectations.

The religious create this aura of morality around them.  They, after all, answer to a higher authority.  They are (or portray themselves as) pious, peaceful, have a special and more direct relationship with God.  The expectation is that if someone preaches for a certain behavior which includes morality, modesty, honesty, fairness, will at least subject themselves to the same code.  Yet you find, more than occasionally, that this isn’t the case.  I actually hears about an ultra-orthodox Jewish prostitute who would eat only kosher food.  Not to mention various pedophile priests.

When a regular person trips, I can easily accept it as a mistake.  When a religious person trips, it upsets me twice more.  Because I expect.  When a policeman takes bribe, or doesn’t surrender the entire drug bust, and instead sells it on the street, it’s ten times as bad.  When Elliott Spitzer, a person who went after corruption as a blood hound, ends up using a “high-end prostitution ring” it’s a hundred times as bad.  When the president of Israel is accused of rape, not consensual sex between adults, you feel that hypocrisy has reached new heights.

Countries can be hypocritical as well.  Consider this: building a long wall between the US and Mexico, a peaceful country is OK.  Building a reasonably similar between Israel and its murderous neighbor isn’t.  Annihilation of the Jews in Europe in World War II is considered a Holocaust, a genocide.  Reasonably similar events for the Armenian in Turkey, Native Americans, or millions in Darfur aren’t recognized as such.  Everyone is screaming “free Tibet”, but nobody is screaming “free Iraq” or “free Afghanistan”.  Bad intelligence justifies taking over an entire country, a single even (granted, it was spectacular) justifies taking over another, and sixty year of constant abuse, terrorism, hostage situations, does not justify self defense?

Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune editorial from April 7, suggests that the Chinese government “face some greater truths”: “These include the facts that a half century of repression has not worked; that the Dalai Lama is the most moderate Tibetan interlocutor they will find; that he has called for autonomy but not independence; and that he is a revered global figure”.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?  Or am I losing my mind?  Yasser Arafat, a revered global figure, a Nobel laureate, for peace of all things, was presented to the world, by the media and the US as the “most moderate Palestinian spokesman the Israelis could ever hope to find.  He also asked for autonomy, not independence, which he indeed received.  In return he delivered nothing.  Not to the Israelis and most certainly not to the Palestinians.  He’s dead now, and his people are way behind where they were twenty years ago.

That’s not to suggest that the Dalai Lama is a terrorist.  But he does have an agenda, and the proximity of this eruption to the Olympic Games, in my mind isn’t a coincidence.

I think it takes a certain kind of nerve to preach for a government, any government,what to do and how to negotiate its future.  The reason is simple.  When it doesn’t work, Roger Cohen isn’t going to be there to take the rockets, the suicide bombers, the hatred.  He will not publish an editorial saying “I was wrong”.  He has no stake in Tibet, no stake in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Picking on the media again.  It somehow sounds that the Chinese media is only showing a one sided picture of what “really happening”, while the western, “free” and “open” media should be let in a report things “as they are”.  I beg to differ.  Indeed, the news coming out of China are well censored.  But the western media are guilty of reporting the “convenient” or “favorite” side of the stories as well.  In 2000, two Israeli reserves took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah, Palestinian Territory.  To make a long story short, a mob entered the room where they were locked, threw them, alive, out the window, to the waiting crowd, who lynched the two poor guys, in a bloody, murderous presentation of anger.  That IS NOT the point though.  Dozens of “western”, “free” reporters were there.  They shot the entire scene.  It was all on tape, from every angle you can imagine.  It never aired.  In fact, most of the film was destroyed.  The reporters were given a few choices: air the footage and lose their lives or access to the West Bank, or destroy the footage.  As I said.  Most was destroyed.  Integrity was lynched that day as well.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lynch_in_Ramallah)

Easy to criticize China.  The superpower, the non-democratic, the one-party country.  Easy to identify with the assumed victim.  I’m not suggesting right or wrong.  I suggest, read as much as you can, take the reports you get from the “free” media with a large grain of salt.  Don’t take anything for granted, don’t always assume who the victim is in a situation.  Employ your mind, your heart.  And preach when you have a stake.  When you don’t - hush!

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