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Uwe, Montag, 26. Mai 2003, 12:34 (vor 7852 Tagen) @ Realo

According to him, "Certain intellectuals in Europe
have great difficulty believing Israelis can be
victims. They are locked into the role of the
wealthy, the powerful - and as an implication of
this as oppressors of the Palestinian people. The
idea that the oppressed can sometimes be
murderers, the idea that the strong can sometimes
be victims - these are two ideas that the
progressive French intelligentsia has a hard time
accepting."

Why?

"Because it makes an automatic connection between
the strong and the hangman, because it makes an
automatic connection between the ruled and the
pure victim. Because it bases itself on the
classical leftist thesis that the victim is always
right, no matter what is said and done. This is an
old thesis that continues to hold that the fact
that you are a victim gives you direct and
preferential access to the truth. It used to be
the proletariat, or the Algerian rebels, or the
Vietnamese. The French intellectuals found it hard
to believe that they could become the founders of
a Mafioso and terrorist state (like the
independent Algeria).

In his opinion, this is also the reason the
Americans, even though they were the victims of
September 11, did not get the sympathy of the
French intellectuals. "In France, there is a great
difficulty in admitting that the Americans are
true victims. That is, that the disasters that
occurred are really disasters and that the
Americans did not deserve them. That is what they
often say - that the Americans are even
responsible for the blows that have befallen them.


"The fact that they are victims is undermined if
they succeed in showing that these dead are the
result of American arrogance, that this is the
price they paid for the victims of American policy
around the world, that American power is the
source of September 11. To think that more than
2,000 Americans, just because they are Americans,
are pure victims is something that undermined
Western understanding. Books continue to appear
and so-called investigations continue to be
published that aspire to prove that the Americans
of September 11 are not the victims that they
appear to be.

"This logic, which insists that the strong cannot
be victims, and that if they are victims they
deserve it and are therefore unworthy of pity -
this is one of the reasons for the indifference
toward the Israeli dead. It is true the
Palestinian dead arouse great media, political and
emotional concern in Europe - and this is good, I
am very glad about this. But I do not find this
concern, and this I regret, when the dead are
Israelis."

In his new book, Levy describes his journey in the
footsteps of American journalist Daniel Pearl, who
was murdered in Pakistan. He describes the
character of Pearl´s murderer, Omar Sheikh, a
Muslim who had been educated in the West and
became a murderous fanatic. According to him,
people like Sheikh have also come to Israel. "The
two suicide terrorists at Mike´s Place are
Anglo-Pakistanis and they are `derived from´ and
shaped in this model. They are not poor, they come
from the West, they came in contact with
enlightenment and democratic culture. We have a
tendency to see the suicide terrorists as
desperate people who have nothing more to lose,
who come from the most unfortunate levels of
society. This is not always so. There are cases -
like the Twin Towers terrorists - when they are
the sons of wealthy families, from the most
educated classes of society, not from the slums."

Levy, who has come to the conclusion that the
jihad is also an economic enterprise, finds that
the Israeli press does not deal sufficiently with
the suicide terrorist industry. "A suicide
terrorist is not something spontaneous," he says.
"One doesn´t become a suicide terrorist on the
spur of the moment. It isn´t a decision like that
- I wake up and I´m a suicide terrorist. It takes
a lot of time, a lot of strength and a lot of
resources to produce a suicide terrorist. There is
a need for military training, political training,
psychological training - really to go all the way,
not to be deterred at the last minute. Very great
discipline is needed and very long training."