Awards in perverse moral equivalence: Guardian Letters Edition

The murder of Israeli actor Juliano Mer Khamis by masked gunmen in Jenin, likely by Palestinian terrorists who saw Khami’s secularism, social liberalism, and peace activism as a threat, was a horrible blow to those brave but marginal forces in Palestinian society who are truly working towards co-existence.  Indeed, Khami’s background – his mother was Jewish while his father was a Christian Palestinian – rendered him uniquely suitable to bridge such enormous political divides.

This murder also represents a dilemma for those with a cognitive predisposition to believe that terrorist movements in the Middle East may at least marginally be defined as representing authentic “resistance” to oppression, as evidence by the following letter printed in the Guardian, one of only two published by the Guardian regarding Khamis’s murder:

The murder of Juliano Mer Khamis, actor, director, founder of the Jenin Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, is an assault on art and artists, peacekeepers and the creative lives of young people who live under the constant threat of violence. As American theatre-makers whose work is dedicated to understanding of the other and the self, we condemn this unspeakable act and the policy of targeted assassination which is widely practised by militant non-state actors and by governments. [emphasis mine]

Karen Malpede, George Bartenieff Theatre Three Collaborative, New York James Nicola, Linda Chapman New York Theatre Workshop

One of the defining features of the Guardian Left – an ideology which transcends the political context in the UK which the Guardian operates – is a mind numbing inability to draw moral distinctions between the defensive actions of liberal democracies and the wanton violence employed by terrorist groups to achieve explicitly reactionary ends.

To equate Israeli military actions meant to take out hardened terrorists operating on their borders – in order to prevent such groups from targeting their civilians – with the cold-blooded murder of a peace activist who ran afoul of Islamist ideology represents a dangerous political pathology – an ideology nurtured daily in the pages of the Guardian.