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Scared silly over Middle East

MCINTIRE School of Commerce professor Neil Snyder published a column entitled "Reading off the Scripture" in the March 21 issue of The Declaration, in which he argued frankly for America's unilateral support of Israel in the Middle East. He bases his argument on the simple premise that God has granted us prosperity in the United States so that we can use our power to defend Israel uncompromisingly. Snyder argues that if we fail in this divine duty, God will seek vengeance on our nation. He cites Hurricane Andrew, the Northridge earthquake and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as instances when God has punished America for attempting to orchestrate peace in the Middle East via compromise between Israelis and Palestinians.

It's the type of hare-brained, ignorant and dangerous philosophy that one would expect to find lurking in the deranged mind of a medieval theocrat, not in that of a contemporary professor here at the University. Yet here it is, staring up at us from the pages of The Declaration. It serves as a reminder not only of how unchecked superstition can threaten humanity, but also of the need to keep our minds clear and impartial as we continue to work toward a resolution to the horrible situation in the Middle East.

Related Links

  • UVA Middle East Studies Program/Resource List
  • It's amazing that Professor Snyder can sleep at night believing in the awful type of God that he does. A God to whom we should be thankful for including us in His plans. Thankful? For a deity who could with one gesture put an end to all the unmentionable acts of violence and terror in the world, but who instead chooses to bully us into doing His dirty work by murdering and maiming thousands of us with natural disasters and divinely inspired terrorist attacks? Thankful is not the word that comes to mind.

    The crux of Snyder's vengeful God claim rests on his unwillingness to accept what he sees as an amazing coincidence: That Hurricane Andrew, the Northridge earthquake and the Sept. 11 attacks all occurred on dates when the United States was either pressuring or deciding to pressure Israel into surrendering land to Palestinians as part of a peace compromise. But under closer examination, the coincidence is not so great. At least some facet of the U.S. government has been working to halt violence in Israel almost nonstop over the past few decades. It would be easy to pick hundreds of days over the past years when the United States either was formulating an Israeli-Palestinian compromise or announcing plans to work diplomatically toward a similar solution. Odds are good that a random distribution of disasters over the recent past would result in many of these disasters coinciding with U.S. diplomatic action in Israel, due solely to the frequency of such action. It's certainly a more sensible explanation than an angry God who enjoys making orphans.

    Snyder goes on to provide some more examples of his angry God's handiwork. He blames the decline of the Spanish Empire in the 16th century and the defeat of Nazi Germany on the two powers' persecution of Jews. Forget all the sociologists, political theorists, economists and strategists who have done decades of research and written thousands of volumes on practical reasons for the defeat of the two powers. Snyder has a simpler solution: God did it because he likes Jews, and He punishes people who persecute them. And He will do it to us if we don't do what Snyder (and, coincidentally, God) wants us to do.

    Snyder's next argument for our support of Israel comes from a different angle. He writes that our nation was built on Judeo-Christian values and that we, therefore, should support Israel's sovereignty absolutely against the Palestinians. While the beliefs and practices of our nation's founders were heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian principles, they also included racism, male chauvinism and slavery. We have evolved away from these ugly specters of our past and tempered them in an environment of free thought and free speech. Many of the values we now live by resemble those of our ancestors as little as they do those of the zealots who kill one another in God's name in Israel and Palestine. Admittedly we do not lack our own zealots. Professor Snyder is content to see countless more people die in the name of his ill-conceived belief. But such people thankfully are becoming increasingly more the exception than the rule in our society.

    Snyder's tone is the same as that of many others who want to scare people into thinking like they do. After Sept. 11, Jerry Falwell and some of his cronies tried to blame the carnage in New York and D.C. on gays, lesbians and the American Civil Liberties Union. When people are so self-righteous as to believe that their ideology has the backing of an all-powerful and vengeful God, it seems irresistible for them to use the threat of this God to garner support for their ideas. There are probably millions of Palestinians with beliefs equal in vigor but diametrically opposed in substance to those of Snyder. Because these beliefs are faith-based and by definition not falsifiable, there is no way for an impartial government to decide which of them is correct. We don't live in a theocracy. We can't decide our foreign policy on superstition, no matter how loudly fanatics like Snyder will scream about it.

    (Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)

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