http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-23085736 — “”He is much better today than he was when I saw him last night,” Mr Zuma said after speaking to the 94-year-old’s medical team.” — We must put a stop to guessing and rumors when dealing with observable phenomenon!
In the BBC article, Nelson Mandela’s daughter Makaziwe castigates the international press for wanting to get to Heaven’s Gate and the great obituaries ahead of time.
If a family’s “death watch” may be has hard and uncertain as it is natural and beautiful in its human way, that involving an elderly international political celebrity may be that much harder. Mandel’as journey has been Big News for Big Media since the 1950s, at least, and any moment approaching the end becomes a part of that epic.
Still, we should be careful.
The rumor of Mandela’s death came to me by way of a Pakistani friend and perhaps on his side from a part of the mouth-to-ear quarter of it. A fast look-up on the web tells the truth: web-based media, large or small, has no incentive for painting a false picture.
May patience — and fact checking — abet integrity in the news online.
LONDON — An opposition monitoring group that has tracked Syria’s widening civil war said on Wednesday that more than 100,000 people had died in the 27-month-old conflict, with pro-government forces taking far more casualties than rebels seeking the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad, while civilians accounted for more than one-third of the overall fatalities, the biggest single category.
Perhaps the old days were better after all: assemble the armies on an open plain, send the warriors into it, and leave the noncombatants of both sides for the spoils of the winner.
Just kidding.
*****
“As always, numbers like these gloss over the many people who have been so grievously wounded, physically or psychologically, that they will never again live productive lives. What the latter figure amounts to in Syria is anyone’s guess. What’s certain is that it’s even larger than the death toll.”
Rajan Menon’s report on the suffering goes on to note 1.7 million refugees on top of 4 million Internally Displaced Persons, or 5.7 million displaced souls altogether, about 25 percent of Syria’s total population before the onset of serious hostilities (but I’m not sure I’m getting consistent numbers from any source published within the past two years).
*****
“In one trailer we meet 13-year-old Najwa. She curls back in the corner next to her husband, 19-year-old Khaled, and her mother, hardly saying a word.
Najwa is the youngest of three, her two older sisters in their late teens are also recently married.”
Evidently, grim statistics don’t tell a whole story, or not much of whatever is to be told at all.
*****
“The head of the International Terrorism Observatory think tank, Roland Jacquard, told Reuters Television the group appeared to be sending fighters abroad, likely to Syria.”
“Special informed sources from London revealed to the Palestinian al-Manar newspaper that the British security forces arrested early June a group of 11 terrorists in London who had come back from Syria where they were involved in the fighting there.”
While Israel’s cardinal military defense rule seems to remain, “Do not intervene; do not interfere” (DM Yaalon), Israel’s first virtue would seem to remain compassion to the extent that it may provide that.
“The two boys, 9 and 15 years old, were transferred to Ziv Hospital in Safed for treatment. The 9-year-old suffered moderate injuries from shrapnel wounds across his body and lost his right eye, according to a report by Maariv. The 15-year-old was listed in serious condition, according to the report.”
Every wounded Syrian is guarded by either an IDF soldier or by a civilian security guard in an attempt to isolate them from speaking with anyone unauthorized to do so who might photograph them or pass on their information to Syria, potentially harming them or their families upon their eventual return to Syria.
As stated, more than a 100 wounded Syrians have crossed the border in recent months. Some 70 of them have been taken to Israeli hospitals, and two have passed away as a result of their injuries.
After 2,000 years or so, Hillel’s negatively stated dictum seems to hold. “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another” — and certainly, the choice between enabling or denying access to hospital services related well to that.
*****
“The request came in a letter handed to Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Harel Locker at a meeting with Druze leaders on the Golan Heights Thursday. The letter included an unprecedented request for Israel to take in Druze students who had left the Golan and settled in Syria, Maariv reported.”
Druze along the Golan have served both in the IDF and in Syria’s defense forces according to their decisions about citizenship and location, and with the fighting as I’ve described — “Two mad wasps in a bell jar” — Israeli Druze are seeking sanctuary for their relatives.
God knows God would seem to give Jews the toughest ethical and survival challenges.
Both.
At the same time.
Providing infirmary to wounded to be turned back into the field — and who want to be returned to their land — is one thing.
Affording sanctuary to those endangered by this war that only loosely respects boundaries and seems absent of compassion and conscience both in relation to innocents, noncombatants, neutral parties, and so on makes for a more difficult decision.
One alternative hypothesis: NATO has been trying to goad Putin into taking ownership of what is a long-neglected Russian client, i.e., update the relationship in the post-Soviet era. That didn’t happen. Instead, with the gates to an unbridled capitalism open, the family picked up all the chips it could get and Russian business and military plus oligarchs got something out of the new deal too — just the people got screwed.
Cultural attitudes and beliefs have independent political effects. Whether with the Baloch or Syria, altruistic intervention and sacrifice demand a goodness within and an outcome in goodness achieved as perceived by those who would help. For both Russian and NATO interests, outcomes leading to continuing dictatorship or religious fascism, the prospect of either, keep the superpowers both at bay and apart. Where are the people other people would want to put into power?
That’s where the hesitation is.
The world would rather put $1 billion in the pot for UNHCR than produce a unified response in Syria. However, the conflict is so awful and wrong in so many ways, it’s sucking energy into it — first the wave of democratic revolutionaries, then the sectarian fighters and extremists, then the more powerful states of the world who can’t figure out how to approach it or organize it or help it organize itself in a way that has more positive effects for Israel, frankly, and the region in its totality.
In its most dismal aspect, Syria is reflective of a war in the head, essentially, and of its integration in regional and international states of affairs. A disaster, a dark star, a sucking black hole that holds and pulls in killers while displacing its population (82,000 casualties to date; 3.4 million IDPs and refugees to date).
I don’t know if any of this expressing make any difference at all.
Six million dead in the Holocaust (please, don’t deny it).
Three-point-four million homeless today in relation to Syria’s civil war.
Those are big numbers around which to wrap our heads.
I can barely imagine what it must feel like to wake up as, say, UNHCR staff responsible for drawing up plans and a budget for some portion of the millions of souls for whom Syria has failed to provide basic security.
The Jews know every life has its legend and know this no less so for Syrians, but heroic altruism necessarily stalls at the wall of hate and cannot do much beyond attending to the closest injured.
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