The most hated man on earth (Bush replaces Sharon)

One day last week I awoke to discover that George W. Bush had replaced Ariel Sharon as the most hated man on earth. In Indonesia thousands marched with the banner: "Bush The World's Greatest Terrorist." European capitals declared him a "Baby Killer," and at the Academy Awards a filmmaker intoned: Shame on you, Mr. Bush. You fictitious president."

As I contemplated how the most powerful man on earth has become more vilified than the mass murderer he seeks to topple, it dawned on me that in life there are three levels of goodness: doing the right thing and being hailed as hero for it; doing the right thing and having nobody find out; and, the third and highest, doing the right thing and being hated for it.

Our political world, run as it is on focus groups and intensive polling, has lost a taste for pursuing virtuous ends that risk public excoriation. But greatness is found when uprightness and rectitude are upheld even at great personal sacrifice.

To be sure, everyone ascribes the most selfish motivation to the American war effort in Iraq. The most common refrain is that America wants Iraqi oil a particularly inane argument, as it overlooks the fact that even if the United States took all the profits from the sale of all Iraqi oil over the next decade, it would hardly recoup the estimated $300 billion that the war, reconstruction, and peacekeeping in Iraq will cost. Moreover, if the Americans wanted oil, they would presumably conquer a far weaker Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where they already have a formidable military presence. But why be logical, when hating America is so much more gratifying?

A hassidic story tells of the impoverished Reb Zusya, who having no money to marry off his daughter, approached his teacher, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, who ran a fund for poor brides. The Magid gave Zusya 500 rubles.

As Zusya made his way back home he came across a marketplace where a poor peddler had fainted. The peddler had been traveling the countryside for a whole year selling trinkets in order to earn enough money to feed his family. He had returned with the small fortune of 500 rubles, but stopped in the marketplace to buy some presents, he was robbed.

Deciding that his daughter would have to settle for a wedding comprising only the most modest necessities, Zusya took 50 rubles out of his own bag, put them in his pocket, held up the remaining sum and announced that he had found the peddler's money.

He was lionized as a hero that is, until he was searched and the rest of the money found. Then he was quickly accused of having stolen the bag of cash in the first place and thrown in jail. When, a few days later, the Magid came to secure his disciple's release and heard from Zusya what had really happened, he asked Zusya why he had not told the people the truth. Zusya responded: "For once in my life I wanted to do the right thing, even if I was pilloried for it."

HISTORY IS replete with stories of great men who were prepared to be hated for fighting for what was right. During the US Civil War, no man in the North or South was as loathed as Abraham Lincoln. His own commander, Gen. George McClellan, called him "The Gorilla" and "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon." Justice Benjamin R. Curtis reported general agreement on "the utter incompetence of the president."

Murat Halstead, editor of the influential Cincinnati Commercial, thought the president "an awful, woeful ass." As late as August 1864, leading Republicans like Horace Greeley concluded that "it was useless and inexpedient to attempt to run Mr. Lincoln" in that year's presidential race. Lincoln himself, understanding the depth of animosity toward him, wrote to a friend in that same month, "You think I don't know I am going to be beaten, but I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten."

But never did Lincoln waver from his commitment to what he knew in his heart to be justified: the preservation of the Union and, by 1862, the emancipation of the slaves.

"I'll hold McClellan's horse if he'll only bring us success," was typical of his preparedness to be brought low just so long as his cause triumphed. Winston Churchill has been described as the "last truly great man of the Western world." As Peter Graves notes, "His record of wartime heroism and peacetime leadership may never be equaled." Yet prior to becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill was almost universally loathed as a washed-up crank and a warmonger because of his unwavering opposition to Nazism.

Menachem Begin became one of the most reviled leaders on earth when, on June 7, 1981 he gave the order to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak. Even the pro-Israel Reagan administration joined the United Nations' chorus of condemnation. "Armed attack in such circumstances cannot be justified; it represents a grave breach of international law," scolded Britain's Margaret Thatcher.

"Israel's sneak attack... was an act of inexcusable and shortsighted aggression," snarled a New York Times editorial. How fitting that Begin lived long enough to witness his historic decision vindicated by the first Gulf War in 1991.

IN OCTOBER of that year I played host to then Israeli housing minister Ariel Sharon, who lectured at the Oxford Union. At the very moment Sharon was speaking, prime minister Yitzhak Shamir announced that he would travel to the Madrid Peace Conference, where he would sit with Palestinian representatives for the very first time in talks that would indirectly result in the Oslo Accords. Sharon assailed Madrid: "It is not a peace conference, but a war conference."

I walked alongside him as he was jeered by hundreds of Oxford students, who called him a murderer. He strutted past them confidently, holding the hand of his beloved wife, Lily. It would take the death of hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians to prove the truth of his prescient prediction.

Now, in a long tradition of great men who have suffered for resisting evil, it is the turn of President Bush to be hated by the world for standing up to tyranny. Today's shallow generation sees goodness as indulging people's whims, always showing them acceptance, tolerance, and love rather than resisting their excesses.

We know how to love the stranger, but never how to stop the evildoer. Goodness entails getting along, but never offering a rebuke. To be popular one may offer praise, but never pass judgment.

In 1994, as head of the UN's peacekeeping forces, Kofi Annan was approached by Maj.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, who urgently pleaded for permission to disarm the Hutus so as to prevent the genocide of the Tutsis. Annan refused to act, or even inform his superiors of the request. Such armed confrontation was not part of his world view. The result was the slaughter of 800,000 men, women, and children. Seven years later Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Abraham, the first Jew, was known as Avraham Ha'Ivri, he who dwelled across the river. But there is a second interpretation of the word ivri: He who drew a line in the sand and declared: "No further."

Abraham was the first to proclaim to the world that morality involves restraint, and that decent men have to know how to oppose wicked ones.

The Kofi Annans of this world may get the prizes and the popularity. But the George Bushes get to see the warm smiles of innocent children whose lives they have saved.

The writer, a rabbi and best-selling author, hosts a daily radio show syndicated across the United States on the Talk America radio network.

We have forgotten not how to love but how to hate. How to hate evil that is. I think Shmuel Boteach wrote an article about it somewhere. What I find telling is President Bush is hated for hating evil as well as for doing good. Ergo, this President will never receive the Nobel Peace Prize but he will be reckoned with among the righteous, to his eternal and everlasting reward.

By Rabbi Shmuel Boteach
formerly the Chabad Rabbi at Oxford University
http://www.arutzsheva.org
9-22-1
For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace (Eccl. 3).

One of the most frequent themes of my writings is how we - a generation with a fifty percent divorce rate and a professional singles scene - have forgotten how to love. Today I will surprise you by complaining about how we have forgotten how to hate.

The proper response to the cowardly brutes who perpetrated the horrific attacks against America is to hate them with every fiber of our being and purge ourselves of any morsel of sympathy which might seek to understand their motives.

Forgetting how to hate can be just as damaging as forgetting how to love. I realize that, immersed as we are in a Christian culture that exhorts us to "turn the other cheek," this can sound quite absurd. Little do we remember, it seems, the aphorism that those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.

Indeed, exhortations to hate all manner of evil abound in the Bible and God Himself hates every form of immorality because of its harm to mankind. Thus the book of Proverbs declares, "The fear of the Lord is to hate evil." Likewise, King David declares regarding the cruel: "I have hated them with a deep loathing. They are as enemies to me." Hatred is a valid emotion - an appropriate response - when directed at the truly evil: those who have gone beyond the pale of human decency by committing acts which unweave the basic fabric of civilized living. Contrary to Christianity, which advocates turning the other cheek to belligerence and loving the wicked, Judaism obligates us to despise and resist the wicked at all costs.

About two years ago, I was on the BBC discussing the tragic bombing of a gay pub that left three dead. I referred to the bomber as an abomination, to which Pastor Tony Campalo, President Clinton's spiritual advisor, replied that we had to love the bomber in the spirit of compassion and forgiveness. Similarly, in my years in Britain I was used to hearing victims of IRA terrorist attacks, after having lost fathers or brothers or sons, immediately announce on air their forgiveness and love for the murderers, in the spirit of Christian love. I disagree vehemently. The individual who, motivated by irrational hatred, chooses to murder innocent victims is irretrievably wicked. He or she has cast off the image of G-d that entitles them to love and has forfeited their place in the human community.

Amid my deep and abiding respect for the Christian faith, I state unequivocally that to love the terrorist who flies a civilian plane into a civilian building or a white supremacist who drags a black man three miles while tied to the back of a car is not just insane, it is deeply sinful. To love evil is itself evil and constitutes a passive form of complicity.

Contrary to those religious figures who deny Solomon's proverb and preach that religion is about unconditional love and forgiveness for all, I believe there is a point of no return for the mass-murderers of this world. The Talmud certainly teaches that the true object of proper hatred is the sin, not the sinner, whose life must be respected and whose repentance effected. The Talmud also teaches that it is forbidden to rejoice at the downfall of even those sinners whom it is proper to hate: "Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth." However, this attitude does not apply to impenitent and hardened monsters who pay no heed to correction. For us to extend forgiveness and compassion to them in the name of religion is not just insidious, it is an act of mocking G-d, who has mercy for all, yet demands justice for the innocent.

I have an a typical Christian artist friend who showed me a picture he painted of Jesus embracing Hitler. I felt the picture to be obscene, "How can you have Jesus holding Hitler?" I objected.

"That's the whole point. That's how far Jesus' love extends."

"But that's not love," I corrected him, "it's disgust. It's like saying that Jesus loves cancerous cells. If you love Hitler, than you are showing contempt for the good and decent people whom he turned into ash and lampshades. The only response to Hitler is utter contempt and violent hatred. The only way to react to incorrigible evil is to wage an incessant war against it until it is utterly eradicated from the earth."

I maintain that any culture that does not hate Hitler and his ilk is a non-compassionate society. Indeed, to show kindness to the murderer is to violate the victim yet again. Thus, in the interest of justice, the appropriate response to the evil person is to hate him with every fiber of our being and to hope they find no rest, neither in this world nor in the next.

The pacifist will respond that fighting hatred with hatred accomplishes nothing, that, as in the old Bob Dylan song, "if we take an eye for an eye we all just end up blind." This is poppycock because the purpose of our hatred is not revenge, but preservation of justice. To this end I wholeheartedly embrace the example of Simon Wiesenthal, one of the most inspirational men of the twentieth century, who has devoted his life to the pursuit of justice by not allowing Nazi murderers go to their graves in peace. We do not hunt Nazis in order to take revenge. We Jews have better things to do with our time than chase a bunch of pathetic, murderous thugs. Besides, our Torah prevents us from taking retribution. Rather, we track them down because G-d at Sinai entrusted us with the promotion of justice, turning the jungle into a civilized society. We seek them out on behalf of all humanity so that all of the world may know that for genocide there is no apology. In the words of Aristotle, "All virtue is summed up in dealing justly."

Justice is not a cultural construct. Neither is it a human invention imposed upon the members of society in order that they treat each other with decency and respect. Justice was not created for some utilitarian end. Rather, justice is intrinsic to human nature. We do not teach our children to refrain from stealing because they might get caught. Rather, we teach them that theft is intrinsically wrong, even if they could get away with it.

In the Hebrew language there are three words for forgiveness: selicha, mechila and kapparah. The essence of the forgiveness is that an individual is so valuable that we allow them the opportunity to start afresh after error. But since repentance is based on recognizing the infinite value of human life, its premise cannot be simultaneously undermined by offering it to those who have irretrievably debased human life. For a murderer to cry in public and achieve instant absolution is an affront to everything forgiveness stands for and that's why we should feel no guilt for our feelings of revulsion and hatred toward these terrorists.

The bottom line is that there are some offenses for which there is no forgiveness, some borders whose transgression society cannot tolerate under any circumstances, and mass murder is foremost among them.

Only if we hate the truly evil passionately will we summon the determination to fight them fervently. Odd and uncomfortable as it may seem, hatred has its place. Although they referred to a different era in history, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., still ring true today: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Let us make sure, therefore, that we never make the mistake of forgiving those whose sin is so inextricably woven with their rotten character that the two can never be separate. Let us love the righteous and fight the wicked. ___

Rabbi Boteach, formerly the Chabad Rabbi at Oxford University, is a well-known author and lecturer on Judaism. http://www.arutzsheva.org/

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