The Toleration of Evil

[The following article is an abbreviation of a report I wrote for the Freedom Research Foundation, issued on March 25, 2002.  Its relevance today is underscored by the Israeli Government voting to expel Yasser Arafat from Israel and Israeli Vice-Premier Ehud Olmert calling for Arafat’s outright assassination.]

It is impossible for the ordinary human mind to fully grasp the evil of Joseph Stalin.  He purposefully engineered the starving to death of over ten million people in Ukraine.  In terms of mass murder, Stalin’s Ukrainian Holocaust was an even greater crime than Hitler’s Jewish Holocaust. 

Millions more were hauled off to be enslaved and die in the Gulag, or tortured and shot for the slightest suspicion of anything Stalin was suspicious of.  Many of his closest deputies were ordered to put their parents, wives, or children to death to prove their loyalty. 

Yet this tyranny, this monstrous evil, is not a mystery.  Evil exists, deeply embedded in certain human souls.  That isn’t mysterious;  it is a basic fact of  human society.  The true mystery is why and how such is evil is tolerated.  Stalin tyrannized the Soviet Union for thirty years.  In all those years, there is not one single known attempt on his life.  Not one. 

Which then, is the greater depravity:  Stalin killing people, or no one killing him?  The former, of course.  Evil itself is the greater evil — but toleration of it is the greater mystery.

It has been blindingly obvious for years now that Robert Mugabe is a pathologically evil man.  He has systematically been destroying the rights, freedom, and livelihood of people in Zimbabwe.  He will commit any crime he considers necessary to maintain his power.  Anyone who had the slightest hope that he would allow an election with the barest semblance of fairness and honesty exhibits naïveté of Olympian magnitude. 

Zimbabwe is dying as a country.  Its people face dying of actual starvation.  Its white population doesn’t stand a chance of keeping their property and indeed their very lives as long as Mugabe lives.  Yet Mugabe’s existence is no mystery.  The history of Africa is riddled with such loathsome leaders.  The mystery is why no one in all these years hasn’t realized there was no hope for Zimbabwe as long as Mugabe lived, and put an end to his life.

It is only the toleration of evil that enables evil to continue to exist.  It is not immoral to extinguish such evil as Joseph Stalin or Robert Mugabe.  It is immoral not to.  Mass murderers, tyrants and terrorists, have forfeited by their crimes their claim to life.  If Osama bin Laden should be hunted down and shot on sight, so then should Robert Mugabe.  So then should Saddam Hussein.  So then should Yasser Arafat.

No people on earth have had evil directed at them more than Jews.  No people should be more intolerant of this evil than Israelis.  Yet they keep tolerating it.  They keep acting and hoping and wishfully thinking towards Yasser Arafat as Zimbabwe’s white farmers do towards Robert Mugabe.

The toleration of the evil of Palestinian Nazism is the cause of Israel’s travails.  Arafat is an Arab Nazi.  He inherited the leadership of the PLO from his mentor and uncle, Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who formed an alliance with Adolph Hitler.  (At a meeting with Hitler in Berlin on November 21, 1941, al-Husseini convinced Hitler a better “solution” for the Jews would be to kill them in death camps rather than expel them from Europe).  You don’t negotiate with Nazis, because you can’t.  Their entire purpose in life is to kill those they hate.  The Reverse Golden Rule must apply:  Do unto them before they do unto you.

The United States is not trying to find Osama bin Laden to negotiate a peace settlement with him.  It is trying to find him in order to kill him.  There is no more chance of peace between Yasser Arafat, the Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, et al, and Israel, than there is between Al Qaeda and America.  Both are duels to the death. 

Al Qaeda’s September 11 attack enabled America to acquire the resolve for this duel.  What will it take for Israel to acquire a similar resolve?  How many more slaughters of babies, of children, of mothers, of innocents is necessary?  It’s not like Palestinian Terrorism started recently with their so-called “intifada.”  It has been going on for decades.  When will Israel stop its toleration of evil?

We will know the day it does — for that will be the day an Israeli sniper draws a bead on Arafat and puts a bullet in his brain.

Israel must no longer be concerned with “world opinion,” i.e., the opinions of those who tolerate evil.  It should only be concerned with this unalterable fact:  If evil is tolerated, evil thrives. 

It is time the world recognizes Palestinian Terrorism as a form, indeed the heir, of Nazism.  It is time Israel demanded that the toleration of such evil no longer be acceptable by civilized societies.  It is time for human garbage such as Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, and Yasser Arafat be disposed of along with Osama bin Laden.   Peace, prosperity, and civilization itself, can be achieved only by the refusal to tolerate the evil such men embody.