A Tale of Two Peoples
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Posted by HenryW on 07:49:47 2008/03/26
A Tale of Two Peoples
By Dennis Prager
The long-suffering Tibetans have been in the news. This happens
perhaps once or twice a decade. In a more moral world, however,
public opinion would be far more preoccupied with Tibetans than with
Palestinians, would be as harsh on China as it is on Israel, and
would be as fawning on Israel as it now is on China.
But, alas, the world is, as it has always been, a largely
mean-spirited and morally insensitive place, where might is far more
highly regarded than right.
Consider the facts: Tibet, at least 1,400 years old, is one of the
world's oldest nations, has its own language, its own religion and
even its own ethnicity. Over 1 million of its people have been killed
by the Chinese, its culture has been systematically obliterated,
6,000 of its 6,200 monasteries have been looted and destroyed, and
most of its monks have been tortured, murdered or exiled.
Palestinians have none of these characteristics. There has never been
a Palestinian country, never been a Palestinian language, never been
a Palestinian ethnicity, never been a Palestinian religion in any way
distinct from Islam elsewhere. Indeed, "Palestinian" had always meant
any individual living in the geographic area called Palestine. For
most of the first half of the 20th century, "Palestinian" and
"Palestine" almost always referred to the Jews of Palestine. The
United Jewish Appeal, the worldwide Jewish charity that provided the
nascent Jewish state with much of its money, was actually known as
the United Palestine Appeal. Compared to Tibetans, few Palestinians
have been killed, its culture has not been destroyed nor its mosques
looted or plundered, and Palestinians have received billions of
dollars from the international community. Unlike the dying Tibetan
nation, there are far more Palestinians today than when Israel was
created.
None of this means that a distinct Palestinian national identity does
not now exist. Since Israel's creation such an identity has arisen
and does indeed exist. Nor does any of this deny that many
Palestinians suffered as a result of the creation of the third Jewish
state in the area, known -- since the Romans renamed Judea -- as
"Palestine."
But it does mean that of all the causes the world could have adopted,
the Palestinians' deserved to be near the bottom and the Tibetans'
near the top. This is especially so since the Palestinians could have
had a state of their own from 1947 on, and they have caused great
suffering in the world, while the far more persecuted Tibetans have
been characterized by a morally rigorous doctrine of nonviolence.
So, the question is, why? Why have the Palestinians received such
undeserved attention and support, and the far more aggrieved and
persecuted and moral Tibetans given virtually no support or
attention?
The first reason is terror. Some time ago, the Palestinian leadership
decided, with the overwhelming support of the Palestinian people,
that murdering as many innocent people -- first Jews, and then anyone
else -- was the fastest way to garner world attention. They were
right. On the other hand, as The Economist notes in its March 28,
2008 issue, "Tibetan nationalists have hardly ever resorted to
terrorist tactics..." It is interesting to speculate how the world
would have reacted had Tibetans hijacked international flights,
slaughtered Chinese citizens in Chinese restaurants and temples, on
Chinese buses and trains, and massacred Chinese schoolchildren.
The second reason is oil and support from powerful fellow Arabs. The
Palestinians have rich friends who control the world's most needed
commodity, oil. The Palestinians have the unqualified support of all
Middle Eastern oil-producing nations and the support of the Muslim
world beyond the Middle East. The Tibetans are poor and have the
support of no nations, let alone oil-producing ones.
The third reason is Israel. To deny that pro-Palestinian activism in
the world is sometimes related to hostility toward Jews is to deny
the obvious. It is not possible that the unearned preoccupation with
the Palestinians is unrelated to the fact that their enemy is the one
Jewish state in the world. Israel's Jewishness is a major part of the
Muslim world's hatred of Israel. It is also part of Europe's
hostility toward Israel: Portraying Israel as oppressors assuages
some of Europe's guilt about the Holocaust -- "see, the Jews act no
better than we did." Hence the ubiquitous comparisons of Israel to
Nazis.
A fourth reason is China. If Tibet had been crushed by a white
European nation, the Tibetans would have elicited far more sympathy.
But, alas, their near-genocidal oppressor is not white. And the world
does not take mass murder committed by non-whites nearly as seriously
as it takes anything done by Westerners against non-Westerners.
Furthermore, China is far more powerful and frightening than Israel.
Israel has a great army and nuclear weapons, but it is pro-West, it
is a free and democratic society, and it has seven million people in
a piece of land as small as Belize. China has nuclear weapons, has a
trillion U.S. dollars, an increasingly mighty army and navy, is
neither free nor democratic, is anti-Western, and has 1.2 billion
people in a country that dominates the Asian continent.
A fifth reason is the world's Left. As a general rule, the Left
demonizes Israel and has loved China since it became Communist in
1948. And given the power of the Left in the world's media, in the
political life of so many nations, and in the universities and the
arts, it is no wonder vicious China has been idolized and humane
Israel demonized.
The sixth reason is the United Nations, where Israel has been
condemned in more General Assembly and Security Council resolutions
than any other country in the world. At the same time, the UN has
voted China onto its Security Council and has never condemned it.
China's sponsoring of Sudan and its genocidal acts against its
non-Arab black population, as in Darfur, goes largely unremarked on
at the UN, let alone condemned, just as is the case with its cultural
genocide, ethnic cleansing and military occupation of Tibet.
The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for
much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports
only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as
Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are
almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the
Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So
while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of
Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against
terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million
Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are
non-events as far as television news is concerned.
The world is unfair, unjust and morally twisted. And rarely more so
than in its support for the Palestinians -- no matter how many
innocents they target for murder and no matter how much Nazi-like
anti-Semitism permeates their media -- and its neglect of the cruelly
treated, humane Tibetans.
____________________________________________________________________________
Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in
Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness
is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is
www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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