Evil over Good over Evil
Gruesome murders, how they are being reported and how we should respond
You cannot even begin to imagine the pain of the Dee family. And many indeed cannot, because they do not even know who the Dees are as the media treatment of their terrible loss was, as often happens when it comes to Jewish victims, highly selective. Let me clarify it a bit. The Dees were a family of seven living in Efrat in Israel and last Friday when on a family trip heading north in two separate cars, one of the cars was ambushed. It was the car with mother Lucy (48), and daughters Maia (20) and Rina (16) that was pushed to the shoulder of the road and once it had come to a standstill, a Palestinian terrorist proceeded to execute the three women with some twenty bullets from a Kalashnikov. Maia and Rina died on the spot, mother Lucy barely survived and passed away in the hospital in Jerusalem yesterday, Monday. Father Leo Dee, who is a rabbi, eulogized his daughters on Sunday, still hoping that his wife would recover from the wounds she incurred in the attack.
So there are the facts. Horrendous, no? In my mind they were and I could not get the story out of my head over the long Easter weekend. So what do you do? You share a photo on Twitter, you look up Efrat on Google Maps, you get up to speed on the Israeli family with British roots, watch some news reports and take in some analysis, and as a result a story begins to frame in your head. You visualize what happened on that road including the call that one of the daughters attempted to make to reach her dad during the final seconds of her life. At the same time a darker underside begins to paint itself, and I am not just referring to the terrorist whose decision to execute three defenceless young women is straight out of history’s darkest recesses.
No, there is more that is ugly here and these are the sentiments that surround the murder of the three. Or should I say the lens through which it is reported in a lot of western media? On the one hand the reports on this heinous act of terror are merged in with updates on Israeli troops killing Palestinian terror suspects during attempted arrests or clashes. To the uninformed reader that often leads to equating violence between armed groups to the random murder of innocent civilians. This is the journey of moral equivalence, a death on the battlefield apparently somehow justifies the cold blooded murder of innocent civilians, with no exemptions for kids. On the other hand news reports will also underline that Efrat is located in territory that most countries consider to be illegally occupied by Israel. In other words the Dee family, settlers in effect, was forewarned and the parents wilfully put their children in harm’s way. Those opinions stop short of saying that the Dee family was somehow deserving of a violent death based on where they had chosen to live and how their religion had informed their choices. But they do try to imply it and they do minimize the horror that took place last Friday. Maybe it is better to ignore these voices and just look at this photo.
The debate over the ‘conflict’ as some delicately put the status of the land on which the Dee family lives affect how these murders are reported. So yes, it is fair and balanced to report on the plight of a number of Palestinians living in some of the areas we know as Judea and Samaria and which are now occupied by Israel. It is likewise legitimate to question how a territorial dispute is being settled or be concerned with the fact that it appears to be not settled at all. That is not the point here.
You can put what happened in a certain political context, but you cannot wilfully ignore the essence of what Leo Dee saw when he came to realize what his unanswered phone calls last Friday meant. Too many opinionated reports, analyses and tweets take us away from that. The father translated this emotion into a press conference yesterday where he sought to bring the world back to that very simple distinction, that clear moral compass that basically asks: what did really happen here? Which forces were actually at work? And then: if you know that, whose side you think you should be on? The good or the bad one? And can we stand by if evil triumphs, or do we always try and ensure it is the good that will eventually overcome the forces of darkness? I hope it does, but it requires relentless effort and speaking out.
For a civil society to maintain its civility we must be clear on what human actions can be accepted as defensible or purely acts of evil.
This brutal assassination of a Jewish mother and her 2 teenage children slain by a cold-blooded terrorist is repulsive. Also is the killing this past weekend of 36 yr. old Alessandro Parini, an Italian tourist. Alessandro was taking an evening stroll with friends on a Tel Aviv beach promenade when an Israeli Arab decided to cross the median and ram his vehicle into a crowd of people killing Alessandro. Several of Alessandro’s friends were also seriously injured when the vehicle struck.
The deficiency of broad and unequivocal condemnations of such acts of evil are deeply disturbing. Calls by western governments for both sides to end the “deadly cycle of violence” speaks to a moral equivalency. Problem is when one side openly celebrates the murder of civilians by passing out sweets to children in the streets and calling the killers of innocent woman and children “heroic fighters” there is simply no morality.
If these facts on the ground continue to be mostly “unobserved” by the media and the western government benefactors who continue to generously fund the inciting and ruling Palestinian Authority sadly little will change.
Your article is a clarion call out in reference to the famous quote by Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”
Thank you, Pieter, for sharing your perspective.
You have made this tragedy feel personally relevant to me. Thank you for that. Though I am left deeply sad.