Tragedies Are Tragedies, Not Political Causes

“Of course this doesn’t get reported, but if Israel did it, the media would be blowing up about it” or “you won’t see this being reported in the New York Times because Israel didn’t do it.”

Those are both statements that I’ve seen word for word on social media this past week concerning people being KILLED in Syria, Iraq and around the world.  KILLED.  MURDERED.

Something we seem to have forgotten throughout this conflict is that a life is a life, and a loss of just one is a tragedy.  To take these massive world issues, where hundreds and thousands of people are being murdered, and use them to express a feigned outrage at the ‘media’ for seemingly being against Israel is an abomination and something that we should be ashamed of.

As a Jewish people, and even just as world citizens, we should be seeing these issues not through a lens of how they affect us, but as atrocities in and of themselves.

We should be seeing these issues and asking, what can we, as a world community, do to fix this?  Not, how can I use this to benefit my own cause?

A cause is a cause regardless of how it affects Judaism or Israel.  Suffering of any kind shouldn’t be tolerated and should be fought against.  To scantly acknowledge it and then turn it into an issue used for political gain is the last thing that should be happening.  Politicizing an issue to a different cause strips it of the fact that it is a tragedy in its own right.