Op-Ed: Not to Act Against Evil is to Act

Evil triumphs when good people do not stand against it. And we may be on the way to seeing a repeat of the good Europeans who disagree with Hitler - in their living rooms.

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Published: Thursday, June 18, 2015 10:26 PM

Prof. Phyllis Chesler

The writer, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum and recipient...

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Christians, Kurds, and Yazidis are being ethnically cleansed—massacred, exterminated--in Iraq and Syria and neither President Obama nor any stable, allegedly moderate Muslim regime (is there one?) has done anything to stop it.
ISIS and Boko Haram have been kidnapping, torturing, and turning Muslim, Christian, Kurdish, and Yazidi girls into sexual slaves and, despite his professed pro-Arab, pro-African, and pro-Muslim biases, the American President has not stopped this nor has he come up with a viable strategy to do so.

The Jihadists know they can keep going for a very long while. No one has stopped them.
At least five, if not ten, million refugees have fled the war-ravaged region of the Middle East’s “Arab Spring.” Many are trying to enter southern Europe and are dying in the process. Nevertheless, global leaders, the media, and the United Nations continue to focus on an artificially inflated number of Palestinian refugees--and are failing to confront or resolve the greatest and most complex refugee story of our times.
President Obama and his European allies are about to unleash the Iranian bomb, a fact which they are presenting to us, Orwell-style, as the only way to stop the Iranian bomb. As we know, Iran and the Iranian bomb are a direct and existential threat to Israel as well as to the entire civilized world.
Those who dare to say so are demonized as “racists” and “conservatives.” And, we are not allowed to speak the truth in universities, human rights organizations, or in the left mainstream media, at least not without police protection and a capacity to endure hostility, interruptions, and lies.
One pays a price for speaking out, yes. In Muslim countries, dissidents are forced into exile, or jailed, tortured and executed. In the West, one’s career as an academic or public intellectual is ruined. One is defamed, shunned, sued, censored, death-threatened, and may require round-the-clock police protection.
But, what is the cost of remaining silent? I asked this question in a previous column and now wish to expand upon it.
Evil always triumphs when good people do not oppose it. The failure to resist and overthrow barbarism always, always means more suffering, more deaths, more despair. Surviving victims are always more haunted by what the “good” people failed to do than by what the “bad” people did do. They cried out—no one rescued or believed them, few helped them bring their torturers to justice.
When good people do nothing to stop radical evil—a soul-eating despair enters the world as well as an enormous cynicism.
The Jihadists know they can keep going for a very long while. No one has stopped them. The Arab and Central Asian Christians being slaughtered in their beds and churches know that the Western Church will not save them. The three million or more Syrian refugees know that America does not have their back. The girls and women raped and impregnated by ISIS and Boko Haram know they are on their own.
Unlike Israel, and despite 9/11, 3/11, 7/7, I fear that the West has not yet paid the price for failing to stop far-off genocides. Today, we watch the Jihadist propaganda and, in viewing their death pornography, we become passive collaborators, complicit.  
Our President refuses to name or understand this evil that is coming our way--an evil  that is already here. Only incredible vigilance has stopped hundreds if not thousands of Jihad attacks.
Evil triumphs when good people do not stand against it. Like Europeans and Americans in the Nazi era—privately disagreeing with Hitler’s policies did not save eleven million people. One must resist—or the Devil wins. Covering up Stalin’s crimes—40 to 50 million died—is not resisting the Devil.
According to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “SILENCE in the face of evil is itself evil, God will not hold us guiltless, NOT to speak is to speak, NOT to act is to act.”