1 Boring Old Man

Hamas killing was not murder, says Israeli minister
^{The killing of a senior Hamas official in Dubai should not be considered as murder, an Israeli minister said today.}
telegraph.go.uk
22 Feb 2010

Public diplomacy minister Yuli Edelstein insisted that he did not know who carried out the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, which has been widely blamed on the Israeli secret service, Mossad. But speaking to a meeting of the Henry Jackson Society think tank at the House of Commons, he said that it would be wrong to become ”overly emotional” about his death.

”Even if it will turn out that the worst secret service of the worst country in the world had managed to get to that guy, I will still not call it murder,” he said. ”We are talking about the worst murderer in one of the worst terrorist organisations, so let’s not get overly emotional about his death and let’s not start mourning his death.”

The killing of Mr al-Mabhouh in his hotel room in Dubai last month threatened to spark a major diplomatic row after it was disclosed that the hit squad responsible used forged European passports – six of them British. Gordon Brown last week ordered an investigation into the use of the fake UK documents headed by the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

It would seem that this kind of they-did-it-so-that-justifies-our-doing-it thinking goes back to before the beginning of history [maybe if Abraham had had an only child, we’d be a lot better off]. In December, we were in Jordan at the Dead Sea looking across at Israel. In the distance, we could see Jerusalem, Hebron, Jericho. The West Bank immediately on the other side of the Dead Sea looked a like a desert. I was there to float on my back in the brine of the Dead Sea and read the newspaper for the required photo-op, but I couldn’t help but think about how small it all is. I kept wondering how it compared in size to my home State, so I looked it up.

I know I’m hardly the first person to question how such a little place could cause so much strife, even given its history. On that trip to the Dead Sea, we stopped at a place called Mudaba, Jordan that has a 5th-6th century church with a mosaic map floor. It wasn’t much different back then [except Mohamed hadn’t quite come along yet].

But the Israeli/Palestinian back and forth had already been going on for a long time before that. Joshua [as in "fought the battle of Jericho"] is dated to 1500 BCE.

So if history is "his story" [the story of human-kind], the back and forth between the Jews and the Arabs in that region is one of the longest running shows on the planet. I’d bet the self-justifying comments and mutual assassinations go back beyond measured time. One wonders where the original sin even happened, who hit who first? And when "… minister Yuli Edelstein insisted that he did not know who carried out the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh," I feel like yawning. If it weren’t so lethal and so detrimental to the world’s future, it would be funny – like watching siblings argue in the back seat about who in encroaching on the line drawn down the middle. The problem is similar. The back seat just isn’t big enough…