Epidemic is widespread

Editorial

In the 1980s, when the virus we now know as HIV first emerged in the gay communities of North America, the reaction by political leaders and some health officials was less than responsive. It took former U.S. president Ronald Reagan six years to publicly pronounce the term "AIDS" and, around the world, the association of the virus with the gay community played a significant role in ensuring that the issue remained unsatisfactorily addressed. During the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, a catastrophic assumption was made that, since the disease seemed inclined to affect only members of a stigmatized minority group, it was not worthy of the full force of international mobilization. There were even those, Christian leaders like Jerry Falwell among them, who declared that AIDS was a direct punishment from God for what he deemed immoral homosexual behavior.

The results of this attitude are now fully evident. As precious time was lost by a world community who did not take seriously the virus's threat and so did not mobilize health resources and research against it, we now, in 2004, have a situation in which 5,000 people die every day from the disease. Because most of these deaths are in Africa, new issues are raised about the seriousness with which the situation is being taken. Nevertheless, all decent people now recognize the disastrous consequences of having ignored the threat of AIDS 20 years ago.

Yet, that human capacity for delusion in the face of humanitarian disaster remains evident in other contexts today. In addition to the crisis in Sudan, the horrifying end to the recent hostage-taking at a Russian school proves our capability for self-destructive delusion remains as powerful as ever.

More than 300 hostages were killed in the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan. Many were children. The brute inhumanity of the event repulsed the world and has led to new rounds of condemnations against the use of terror for political ends.

The connections that some in the world community seemed intent on making – that the terrorists originated from Arab states – seems so far to have proved inaccurate. If the attackers had been Arab, it would have been a notable indication of the expansion of that particular export of expertise, but it would have clouded, in other ways, the underlying lesson of the attack.

Terrorism – the deliberate targeting of civilians for political ends – in all its forms, from all its sources must be condemned and fought with all our capabilities. The apparent desire to find an Arab connection to the Beslan attack may have represented a macabre hope, like that of the early AIDS crisis, to limit the scope of the virus of terrorism to a particular segment of the world's population.

What is also instructive from this tragedy, however, is the universal condemnation of its perpetrators. Unlike the 17,000 terror attacks on Israeli civilians in the past four years – which have claimed 800 lives, many of them children, and injured 5,000 – the world community is united in condemning the Beslan violence.

The lesson is an ugly one. The continuing attacks on Israel have been depicted by many in the world community as justifiable homicide for Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. It is an abomination no less ghastly than to suggest that the dead children of Beslan would not have died if Russia's policy in Chechnya were different. This equivocation with child-killers seems unthinkable in Beslan, yet has been the modus operandi for anti-Israel critics since 2000 or earlier. Could it be that, like AIDS, we are suddenly realizing that the world's smug sense of immunity has been shattered by the realization that the disease may not be limited to the victims we secretly believe deserve it?

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