Author: Dennis Prager
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: March 25, 2008
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A2DBDBAC-3D26-4348-9E70-37242532C88F
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.