When bad men combine the good must associate

I visited an amazing place today. Shalva Center for Children with Special Needs. I was touched and inspired. Here, in the middle of all the turmoil and unrest, in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood, while rockets are being fired at Israel (yet another broken cease fire) from Gaza, is an island of Good, children with special needs are cared for and loved and cherished regardless of their ethnicity, religion, color or creed. More on this later.

Not since WWII has there been a clearer case of moral clarity. A wave of inconceivable evil is sweeping through the Middle East. I watched a video that was labeled “Muslims force Christian to convert to Islam then brutally behead him”. There are many brutal videos floating around, some posted by ISIS themselves. I’m not going to post the link, you can find it yourself if you wish. It’s a very difficult segment to watch. There are mass murders happening as I write these words in Iraq and Syria. Young men killed in large pits by the hundreds. Women raped and sold into slavery. 40,000 people, men, women and children, trapped on a mountain need to decide if they should die of starvation and thirst or be slaughtered by ISIS. Children beheaded. Read that last one again.

The recent Gaza war cannot be view only through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas is not fighting for the Palestinians. It is fighting for its own radical genocidal version of Islam. Hamas seek death as we seek life; they choose the “martyrdom” of their children in paving the road to Jerusalem in Israeli AND Palestinian blood. This should come as no surprise, the Hamas Charter states clearly their mission to obliterate Israel, annihilate the Jews and institute an Islamic Caliphate. Believe them. Israel is the proverbial ‘canary in the mine’. With all its faults and shortcoming, when pitted against Hamas Israel needs to elicit support from every decent, peace and freedom loving individual who values life and liberty. It’s really not that complicated.

The West’s reaction to the Gaza war, its condemnation and abandonment of Israel, its lack of reaction to the massive atrocities committed in Syria and Iraq, Nigeria and Sudan (and many other places) by sociopathic Jihadi murderers, the main stream medias’ complicity in carrying out a terror PR campaign, the hypocrisy at the UN and the masses violently demonstrating around the world against Israel and no one else, the rise of anti-Semitism and its minimization by the media, the complete moral bankruptcy and betrayal of liberal “intellectuals”, the self-defeating political correctness and racism of lower expectations propagated in university campuses, the dramatic rise in radical Islamic anti-democratic populations in Europe and the decline of European culture… all lead me to the sad conclusion that Western Civilization is coming to an end. Maybe not in a year, or ten, or twenty, but certainly within our life time. It’s not going to be a smooth transition.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe now people in London, New York, Toronto  and Los Angeles, Mumbai, Beijing and Sidney, Moscow, Cape town, Rio de Janeiro  and Buenos Aires will wake up to the harsh reality. Because, to quote Edmund Burke, “When Bad men combine, the Good must associate, else we will fall one by one, a pitiful sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”.

And if you want to see Good, go visit Shalva to learn kindness and love and altruism. A ray of hope in a bleak cruel landscape.