RUTHFULLY YOURS

  The ferocious display of death within the animal kingdom is primarily undertaken to fulfill the need to find food in order to survive. In humans however there are hatred and xenophobic instincts that require horrific slaughter, not for food but for supremacy of one clan, tribe or nation over another; be it for territory or for the supremacy of one faith or ideology over another.

History is replete with ghastly and gruesome examples of massacre, war and genocide and each century over the last 2,000 years has been more bloody and horrendous than the previous one.

So we are transfixed in horror at the latest atrocity, this time in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty innocent children were murdered along with six adults.

The writer and owner of the famous blog, Ruthfully Yours, points out the irony that, “… in Newtown was the home of Fairfield State Hospital, which was a psychiatric hospital … which operated from 1931 until 1995. At its peak the hospital housed over 4,000 patients. It was set on beautiful and rolling hills, and the patients were housed in lovely and well maintained old brick buildings which rivaled any of the famous Ivy League campuses.”

But following the de-institutionalization movement, which left so many of America’s mentally ill homeless and in the streets of America, we now reap what the so-called experts in government and mental health sowed.

It would be appropriate to point to a remarkable and prescient book written by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat in August 2000 titled:

Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill

We must also consider the role of the media for it covers at inordinate length each and every shooting incident so that those who genuinely are psychotic and are not recognized as such by the mental health authorities feel an uncontrollable urge to repeat in even greater horror another act of barbarism; one which will make them perverted media stars and celebrities.

It has been justifiably said that the only way to stop a person with a gun is with a gun. That is why we have police to protect us within the nation and troops to protect the nation from enemies without. But equally, perhaps as importantly, every law abiding citizen should know how to protect him or herself and that is why we have the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

So yes, evil stalks the world and we as a nation should urgently rethink our policy towards the mentally ill and find better ways to identify those whose minds are deeply troubled, who hear voices telling them to commit dastardly acts, or who are the results of destabilized families.

But the evil that mankind commits is not only from mental illness. It is, as I wrote earlier, from the endemic poison that permeates so many societies whose people have been indoctrinated with vile ideologies and religious fanaticism.

When we consider the slaughter of the children in Newtown, we should also remember that one and a half million Jewish children were systematically exterminated by European men and women following the Nazi ideology; men and women who themselves were often parents yet who believed in the evil strictures of Nazism.

The first camp commander of the German Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, was Rudolf Höss who it was said looked like a normal person, rather like a grocery clerk, as a BBC report mentioned. Yet he is probably the worst mass-murderer the world has ever seen having overseen the systematic murder of one million Jewish victims.

He lived with his wife and four young children in a house, just yards from the crematorium in the main camp at Auschwitz where hellish experiments on little children using the poisonous insecticide, Zyklon B, were carried out.

Höss, once he came home from his evil daily work in the death camp, lived the life of a solid, middle-class German husband and father. It is this apparent ‘normality’ that ultimately makes Höss much more terrifying for us to try and comprehend.

According to one particular story, Hoss, his wife and children stood around the Christmas tree singing carols in honor of the Jewish baby Jesus while Jewish children nearby were being murdered at the very same time, their tiny broken bodies thrown into the fiery crematorium while smoke from the chimneys rose darkly up to heaven.

And then there are the child killers of the so-called Palestinian Liberation Organization. Again we see the evil that men do in the deliberate infanticide perpetrated by the Muslim followers of the late arch terrorist Yasser Arafat and the later xenophobia of the Palestinian Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ideology wrapped in a religion that has spewed out from Gaza and is on the verge of overwhelming Egypt.

In 1974 the evil Arafat sent the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), an offshoot of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), into northern Israel. They broke into an elementary school in the town of Maalot, and in cold blood savagery mowed down twenty one children along with five adults.

In April of that year, Palestinian terrorists attacked Kiryat Shmona, another northern Israeli village, deliberately murdering eight children. Palestinian gunmen ambushed an Israeli school bus from the village of Avivim, slaughtering nine pupils and three teachers, as it traveled along a road not far from the Lebanese border.

In March 1978, Palestinian Fatah terrorists took over another bus on the Coastal Haifa-Tel-Aviv highway, killing 21 Israelis. Children were then, as now, particularly targeted by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

Thus we are victimized not merely by deranged and mentally sick individuals as in so many places including Newtown, Connecticut or at Virginia Tech or at a shopping mall in Clackamas, Oregon, but evil enters sane individuals who act out their inhumanity in the name of secular ideologies or religious fanaticism; be it Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau or Maalot, Kiryat Shmona and Avivim.