Imagine you're in business and you receive communication
from an officer of a well known and well respected large business overseas. You
never saw the man before but he says he'll be in an upscale restaurant in your
town, and he wants to meet you there to discuss a business deal that may
interest you.
You go to the restaurant on the specified day at the
specified time, and the usher escorts you to the man's table. He looks and
sounds impressive to you as he is dressed impeccably, and behaves with
gentlemanly manners. You have small talk with him for a few minutes, and he
doesn't disappoint you. So you ask him to tell you about the business deal he
has in mind.
Oh yes, he says, there is that too. And he starts talking.
He says something like this: “Yesterday the plane was in the hangar; I went to
the seaport where I saw the submarine in the river. Kids were riding their
bicycles when the eagle landed an egg on the moon. And then came the rhinos as
they rode on the backs of monkeys but the doorkeeper at the hotel would not let
them in.”
He laughs; you laugh with him and then say: Nice story but
would you please tell me about the business deal. And he responds: That's it;
that's the business deal. If you don't like it, I have another one. You say:
please wait here, I need to go relieve myself, and I'll be back. You go to a
table where the manager of the eatery sits, and you ask him: Is that guy
sitting over there for real? And he says: as real as the rhinos that swam
across the river together with the submarines at sea. Do you know how real that
is?
You say thank you, and you start walking toward the exit
door when someone walks up to you and says: Smile you're on Candid Camera.
That's when you laugh at yourself for not guessing early on that this was an
elaborate prank. You go back to your office and think about what just happened.
You cogitate over the idea that the people who staged that prank had only one
thing in mind; to get a laugh out of their audiences.
But you see a deeper meaning in that whole situation. It is
that you tolerated the absurdity of that man for a period of time before
deciding to walk away from the weight of his incoherence. You wonder how long
someone else might have tolerated a similar absurdity before walking away. You
then think about society as a whole and wonder how long it will take it before
revolting against the absurdities which are thrown at it every day.
And that's the crux of the matter. The airwaves and the
print media now carry so much moral absurdities; we grew a very thick skin
that's acting like armor to protect us from the most absurd of moral bullets
fired at us. An example of this is the editorial which came under the title:
“Islamic State Gets Mustard Gas” and the subtitle: “Assad's stockpiles weren't
destroyed, and the jihadis have them.” It was published on August 13, 2015 in
the Wall Street Journal.
That piece was still on the website edition of the Journal
on Friday, August 14, 2015 when the news came out to the effect that the
mustard gas used by the Islamic State had not come from the Syrian or Iraqi
stockpiles, but was, in all likelihood, produced by operators working for the
Islamic State. Despite all this, the editorial continued to display an expanded
version of the following:
“US
officials said Thursday Islamic State militants used mustard gas … the sources
told the Journal the gas was obtained in Syria . Obama claimed his deal with
Putin removed those weapons from Syria . The US intelligence
said the government hid some caches … Mr. Obama refused to act. He promised to
destroy ISIS . But the jihadists have expanded
in Iraq … Chaos spreads in
the Middle East . The last who used chemicals
was Saddam ... The US established a no-fly zone. Mr. Obama should do the same
in Iraq and Syria … Don't expect arms control to stop the
spread of WMD in Syria or Iran . The only
effective arms control is killing or deposing those who would use the arms.”
Given that the knowledge for making the chemicals used by
Saddam were handed to his people by agents of the American government, and
given that the two most recent terrorist entities to use chemical weapons on
civilians were the Jewish State and the Islamic state, it sounds like the
editors of the Wall Street Journal are calling for the killing of the Israeli
leaders and those of ISIS.
This may sound like a funny prank to the editors of the
Journal and to others, but there is a risk in an operation like this because
you never know who will replace the dead leaders. Or maybe the editors meant it
to be a consideration that should be taken seriously by the American
government. You never know with those guys.