The first baby born at the Israeli Defense Forces field hospital in the Philippines was delivered safely on Friday. The mother named the boy Israel.
The IDF sent a 148 person delegation to the Philippines on Wednesday in order to provide search, rescue and medical services in response to super-typhoon Haiyan.
The Talmud describes Jews as rachmanim b’nei rachmanim: a compassionate people who are sensitive to human suffering. They are unable to sit by and ignore the terrible drama of human misery. Instead, they get up and do something about it.
As the world learned the news about Haiti one Tuesday in January, the Israeli Defense Forces were already planning their response. By Friday they had already pitched camp in Haiti.
My prediction: the story may be underplayed today — the above is the most recent clip I could find on YouTube (I’m still looking forward to the day when Facebook or “buddies” share their cell phone feeds with me directly) — and it will get large.
Shortly after his election, Egyptian President Morsi stepped off with a libel launched at Israel, professing to uphold Egypt’s treaty with Israel while accusing Israel of violating its terms many times (not true, I’m happy to report — the clip may be found embedded with this BackChannels piece: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2012/09/28/fb-a-note-on-gellers-poster/).
Remember: evil begins with a lie.
Sometimes it is a small lie, something not-quite-right slipped into a sentence (“Everybody knows that . . . . .”); sometimes, it is large lie and (everybody knows that) the Martian American Zionist European Kaffir Imperialists are the source of all evil (plus monsoons, floods, earthquakes, colds and flue) everywhere in the universe.
Oddly enough, for lack of intellectual armoring or rigor, for misplaced or misdirected loyalties, perhaps for money — business, loot, patronage — people buy the worst lies, believing, hoping, perhaps, that their lives will get better if only something other than themselves were changed in relation to themselves and their environment.
Such misguided faith never works but leads always to greater suffering (a favorite, most convenient, and rather clinical and neutral example: Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, a dictatorship that got its start with a just complaint but then kept going and going and going with a big mouth, patronage, and thugs) and, inevitably, a lot of people who want to leave or promote revolution, usually both.
Morsi has so far done what dictators may be expected to do, including replacing the generals he inherited, but who knows who’s loose in the junior officer’s corps — or elsewhere in the country.
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