Sometimes a thug is just a thug
Michael B. Oren, one of those questionably objective historians of the Middle East Conflict, asked why Jewish hit men should be any different from the cowboy six gun shooting hit men bread in places like American.
In comments made to the New York Times about Steven Spielberg’s new movie on the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the hit squads sent out by Israel to avenge their death (not to mention the more modern versions that hunts down people currently with far less justification) Oren said of the idea of a guilt ridden hit man: “It becomes as stereotype, the guilt ridden Mossad hit man. You never see guilt ridden men in any other ethnicity … I don’t see Dirty Harry feeling guilt ridden.”
Of course, he fails to mention that Dirty Harry (along with characters played by a host of propagandistic actors such as Chunk Norris) was a thug, a rogue cop who enforced the law by breaking it.
The question – in a society that celebrates the concept of “getting away with murder” as a metaphor for individuals not having to obey rules that other people are expected so follow – what makes murdering people for an allegedly good cause any less of a crime? And what is it about western society that makes James Bond’s license to kill so admirable when in reality it violates the basic tenants of modern democracy: the right for people to face their accusers in a fair trial?
Dirty Harry, of course, a fictional cop, had no conscience – becoming the ideal metaphor for a modern ultra conservative for whom justice is a quick kick in the ass.
Oren, blinded by a conflict that only God can sort out its roots, sees justice as murdering those first who would murder you and your kin – forgetting largely that those seeking to kill us and our kin feel they are doing the same.
The Times, of course, claims Spielberg risks offending Jews worldwide by questioning this new and morally-defended murder inc. and why a person of good conscience might feel guilty over slaughtering people.
Of course, Spielberg will be presenting a film to an already jaded audience, groomed on CIA-and-Right Wing-funded propaganda films from James Bond to Jim Clancy – films that have managed to bend our moral compass and make us think white is black and black is white and sinners are saints – when the killers on both sides might easily be seen as thugs – for whom it will be difficult for anyone with an undamaged sense of moral outrage to feel sympathy over.
When I first started as a reporter, the local police chief used a lot of such characters, wanna-be cops that could not cut the psychological mustard so became vigilantes that took the risks more sane cops wouldn’t.
“If they got a death wish, let them go at it,” was this police chief’s motto. “If thugs kill each other I don’t care as long as they leave decent people alone.”
This quote has haunted me for years, but never so much as when I began to read about the state-sanctioned vigilantes Israeli hired to avenge the deaths of those who died in Munich, but has since become a death squad targeting anyone they deem as evil – no trial, no jury, and very little accountability – just thugs killing thugs, doing their evil deeds for a good cause.
While this may be good stuff for modern movies where we have been bred to believe that we can take the law into our own hands or violate the law when it fails to meet our expectations, it also flies in the face of 5,000 years of civilized behavior.
A thug is a thug whether or not he has state approval or acts out of some misguided religious passion. Killing in the name of peace is a breakdown in society, that last solution to problems that reason can no longer deal with – an unreasonable response to an unreasonable situation – often called war. It is also become a disease of modern society, one which even the U.S. Government – supposedly the guardian and export of Democratic ideals – had contracted, where we dispense with basic principles of justice to become as vicious and immoral as those we condemn.
It is all right, under this concept, to sleep with people for information – although churches throughout our nation preach against prostitution. It is all right to lie and cheat and murder as long as there is a higher moral purpose. In other words, it is all right to be immoral as long as you are seeking to protect the concept of morality.
As Oren somewhat noted, we have all become that slimy cop who wants our enemies “to make our day” by doing things for which we can issue punishment and death. We do not want to live up to our own democratic principles, we just want to issue punishment making ourselves over into petty gods who can determine who is guilty and who is not without benefit of trial and jury.
After one of the most horrendous crimes in modern history – the murder of athletes at the 1972 Olympics – the state of Israel decided to suspend democratic principles by unleashing a pack of Dirty Harrys who administered justice Democracy was too weak to administer. Since then, of course, Israel had gone much further than even that moment in time, choosing a Dirty Harry policy that allows them to kill its enemies regardless of what country they may live in (and to spy on supposed allies as well) using sex, murder and whatever other immorality necessary to accomplish this goal.
While The New York Times claims Spielberg risks the good will he has earned with the Jewish community by raising questions about this practice of playing God, who will ask the question if Spielberg or someone with his loud voice does not?
The state of Israel (and most recently the United States in its imitation of that counter terrorism policy) did away with normal rules that govern us as a civilized society, trying to pretend that we still stand for something when we abandoned those principles that made us different from the thugs we are condemning to death.
But the rules are the point.
Dirty Harry, the Mossad, James Bond, even George W. Bush pretend to uphold the law by breaking it. But if those that are charged with upholding the law break the law then there is no law.
If those of us in a civilized society act like savages, then we are savages – or as my police chief friend put it, thugs.
Targeting killing by Mossad or hit squads hired by the United States are immoral, part of a bad system of continuing injustice that creates as much hatred as it professed to eradicate, turning good people on both sides into national terrorists who believe the other side is immoral.
The real challenge for Spielberg and his writer Tony Kushner is not how to make a thug sympathetic, but how to fix the moral compass such practices has destroyed since World War II.
When Israeli hit squads or terrorists from the Middle East pick and choose their targets free of any social restraint or accountability, they are acting like thugs.
The problem is: thugs don’t protect me. The law does. The law – respect for it and enforcement of it – is my protection. Dirty Harry, the Mossad and the hosts of terrorists they professed to kill are all thugs.
And though the ghost of my police chief friend asks me why I would care about thugs killing thugs, the answer is simple: every time they kill they murder a bit more of the Democratic society in which I believe.