Police save Palestinian from snake

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=181209

snip - "A human being is a human being."

Border Police quickly brought in a medic who began providing the snake bite victim with first aid. Meanwhile, officers called in an Israeli ambulance and instructed the drivers to rush the victim to the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.

"We kept in touch with doctors to monitor his condition, and ensured that the snake, which had been killed after it attacked, arrived at the hospital ," Border Police Spokesman Moshe Pinchi told The Post.

"The doctors gave him a shot and saved him. We want to thank everyone - the Border Police and the hospital doctors," said Va'ada. "Well done to everyone."

"A human being is a human being, whether Jew or Arab. I recently called an ambulance tafter witnessing an car flip over on the road," he added.



When I read this, initially I thought to myself, so...a policeman saves a person - why is this on the front page of Jerusalem post? Is this some "feel good" story to make a person pat themselves on the back for not "seeing" this person as a palistinian, but just a human in need....and the more I thought about it, and considered the geo/political forces in the region....it is a big deal. Kudo's to the border police for doing what is right - and kudo's to Va'ada for saving his companion. We need far more stories like this, and far less of children singing about going to heaven by being a martyr....or how long a red light lasts in certain areas of East Jerusalem.

Because a human being is a human being.

Heartwarming, isn't it?

maybe it's just me

Violence is common as dirt. Everybody does it.

I guess it's too hot and humid or something

Congrats to you for living someplace where it isn't.

are lucky

'Many places in Europe' were certainly not so lucky 70 years ago. Or 95 years ago.

maybe Japanese kamikazes but that's hardly the same thing as strapping explosives to your body and blowing up buses or marketplaces

plain bombers?

The Londoners killed in the Blitz, for example, were just as dead, even if their attackers didn't blow themselves up at the same time.

And the bombers on all sides were, in fact, putting themselves at very high risk of ending up very dead themselves, even if not through 'suicide'; and they knew it.

There is an element of martyrdom, often glorified in the popular mind, in most wars. 'The love (of country) that asks no questions, the love that stands the test/ That lays before the altar the bravest and the best.' 'Theirs not to make reply/ Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do and die/ Noble six hundred!' 'The old Lie, 'Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori'.

ETA: many of the military operations of WW1 essentially meant suicide for most of the soldiers who engaged in them.

to people who strap on explosives to kill themselves and as many others as they possibly can?

I doubt too many of the fighter pilots knew that they'd be killed in their bombing raids

If fighter pilots bomb chiefly military targets, no. If they bomb civilian targets, yes. There've been examples of both.

What is the chief immoral aspect of the suicide bombers, as far as I'm concerned, is not that they kill themselves in the process (that could be described as a sort of twisted courage), but that they have a tendency to choose civilian targets.

But then, so did many people in many wars.

I think that war is evil. I think that war efforts that target civilians, or are indifferent to whether civilians or military targets get killed, are particularly evil. I think that terrorism is just war without an official army, and that anti-war people ought to be just as against all forms of terrorism.

I am no defender of Hamas or suicide bombers in general, or any bombers, especially those that target civilians or who are indiscriminate in their attacks.

But violence and war and even indiscriminate war are *human*. They are not limited to any particular group. We can only combat them effectively if we realize this fact.

And to get back to my original point, I don't think for example that the IRA bombings of crowded civilian targets were any better just because the bombers didn't blow themselves up in the process.

Canada is doing OK, a well-run country, relatively speaking, but that's the only one.

Until recently, there were plenty of people in the UK, mostly Northern Ireland, who were ready to bomb other people on political/religious grounds. They did not kill themselves in the process, except sometimes accidentally; but the basic principle was the same.

Just kidding.

It is easy to lump them all in one package and condemn all. The world is not just black and white, however. Small bright snippets of colour show through - such as the above article. Not all palistinians plot suicide bombings, and not all Israeli's cherish Baruch Goldstein.

Finding those little tidbits is, admittedly difficult - but, you can be assured that this sort of story is exactly what Hamas would despise. And that warms my heart...

It is what such as Hamas would despise, and it warms my heart.

Your side in that dispute has no moral superiority.

And your continued invocation of "terror, terror, terror" is bogus.

Palestinian militants have, at times, done horrible things(as has the IDF).

Those horrible things do NOT justify the Siege of Gaza(a siege we now know can NEVER have the effect of weakening Hamas)or of the Occupation and Settler Theft of the West Bank.

Please stop acting as if simply invoking the "t-word" automatically ends the discussion and proves your case.

You can't hold the weaker side in a conflict to higher standards than the stronger side.

None of us can say what we'd have done if we'd been put through what Palestinians have endured.

As much of world history can tell us.

If I were religious, I would consider this as the true original sin. As I am not, I consider it as involving some kinks in the human brain, which natural selection failed to straighten out in the early stages of our evolution.