Silence of good people

Editorial

The mind struggles to conjure a crime more sinister than blowing up a group of people as they meet to worship. But the explosions outside two synagogues in Istanbul as Shabbat services occurred Saturday did not cause the world to sit up and notice, anymore than a bombing at a discothèque or pizzeria. The bar of human disbelief has been progressively lowered over three years of human carnage by Islamist extremists who bring the tallest buildings to the ground and explicitly target civilians.

Some people may have checked their e-mail messages over the weekend, expecting an announcement of a vigil or a rally of some sort, where Lower Mainlanders could join together in at least a sense of common pain and abhorrence. But Vancouver's Jews, like other Jews worldwide, have faced this sort of impotence many times in the past three (or 55) years, as Israel is used as an excuse to kill Jews worldwide. We can't, practically, organize vigils every time a Jew is killed in the name of Allah. We would have no time for other activities.

Yet the Istanbul attacks should have been met with a recognition that something is different; that a new low has been attained. The act of coming together in grief is not just a religious imperative, but a human one. But why is it always the Jews who are the ones to mourn when Jews are killed? Where is the outrage and grief of good gentiles?

Last month, when anti-Zionist Vancouverites rallied against Israel's construction of a self-defensive wall to keep murderers out of the country, one lone woman – a Jew, almost needless to say – stood in solitary vigil nearby holding an Israeli flag. Without this brave, solitary act, there would not have been a single voice to even suggest that Israel has a right to defend itself against decades of continuing murder.

At a time when racial supremacists in the southern United States were exploding and burning churches with African-Americans inside, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Diverse groups of Vancouverites are capable of coming together to protest and rally over international trade agreements, alleged "humiliations" perpetrated upon innocent Arabs by Israeli "occupiers" and George W. Bush's foreign policy. Where are they now? Where is their sense of justice? Why are the good people silent?

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