Acts of bravery and cowardice

As I write on Father’s Day Iranians are on the verge of rebellion. The odds are against the insurgents; they have neither the guns nor the organization, just Twitter and Facebook. They do have the moral authority, and sometimes that’s enough. I wish president Obama were more forthright in his support, just as I wished that president Reagan had been more forthright in his support of Filipinos when they took to the streets following their rigged elections in 1986, and I wish that president Bush (41) had come to the defense of the Tiananmen Square democracy advocates, but that didn’t happen either.

I envy the Iranian (and before them the Filipino and Chinese) protestors courageous enough to face the armed police without themselves resorting to violence. But it embarrasses me to see the brave of Teheran demanding an honest recount while in America we stood idly by as our presidential election was stolen in 2000. Yes, in Florida there were protests (Mary Matalin famously denigrated them as Jesse Jackson’s rent-a-riot) but the rest of us who were in the plurality did nothing. What a fiasco that election was. Buchanan won votes from myopic Jews of Palm Beach instead of to Al Gore their intended recipient; remember the hanging chads, and the confusion of the butterfly ballot, and the uncounted ballots, and the disenfranchisement at black polling places, and the fact that one candidate’s brother was in charge of the farce? Florida should have become the epicenter of a mass protest; instead one person (and four of his colleagues) gave the election to Bush, the fellow with the fewer votes, and what a swell job he did. And we did nothing as government became a shambles and the Afghanistan war was abandoned before victory was attained, and Osama bin Laden still taunts, and we still cower. Congress should have discussed scuttling the anachronistic 18th century Electoral College and substituting direct elections or some other way of approximating reality, but it too did nothing. In America, the self-styled land home of the brave we dared not oppose the coup. In Teheran, they are daring.

In shul last week we read about the ten spies Moses had sent into Canaan along with Joshua and his doggedly honorable friend Caleb. Yes the land was beautiful and flowed with milk and honey, but the people are giants, the ten wailed, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked like it to them, they groveled. And despite the contrary testimony of Joshua and Caleb the people refused to believe in themselves, refused to believe that they had the power to overcome the obstacles, refused to believe in God, if you will. The lesson of the Hebrew spies is that failure to do the right thing, the moral thing, failure to have confidence in oneself can be a recipe for disaster. I wish I had been braver in 1961 and again in 1967 when each time I had the opportunity of doing the right thing, but didn’t. In 1961 I didn’t join the Freedom riders as they boarded their integrated busses and headed southward. In 1967 I didn’t fly to Israel to work the fields or factories. I live with the shame and try to make up for it.

Then I read of Jihad Jaara who orchestrated the murder of an unarmed 71 year old American turned Israeli during the second Intifada, ironically a man who’d befriended Arabs. Jaara was part of the murderous crew trapped in the Church of the Nativity in the spring of 2002. After a five weeks’ siege U.S. officials of the Bush (43) administration arranged for the European Union to take the killers. Jaara was flown to Dublin where he cowers in fear of Mossad or CIA attack. When a reporter from the New York Times found him he was shocked and afraid. His physician told the reporter, “You must give up the name of the person who gave you this address. Jihad is terrified because his security has been so easily breached.” “You must help us," Jihad said, angry, moving toward [the reporter]. "They want to kill me.” Shakespeare put into Julius Caesar’s mouth the sentiment that cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Jihad Jaara, who conspired in the murder of innocents now fears inevitable retribution and dies his thousand deaths one by one, day by day. Poor Jihad.