In February 2019, Louise and David Turpin were sentenced to 25 years in prison for abusing their 13 children in California. Prosecutors stated that the children “were held captive in the family's house, starved and beaten for years.” The Turpins justified their abusive behavior to themselves and to their children as “protecting them from the corruption of an awful society.” Apparently one of the methods of justifying abuse to victims is by persuading them that there is a greater threat coming from outside.
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I have recently been reading Natan Sharansky’s excellent autobiography, “Never Alone,” where he recounts how Communist Russia used demonization of the United States as a technique to justify its abuse of the human rights of its citizens. Because of this experience, Sharansky has been the consistent voice of common sense in peace negotiations with Israel's Arab neighbors, urging that peace cannot be made with nations that abuse the human rights of their own citizens. His logic: the abusive regime will always need an external “enemy” in order to continue its subjugation of its own population – just like the Turpins. And in the case of the Arabs, that enemy is Israel.
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Demonstrators take part in a protest called by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) against the Iranian regime in front of the
(Photo: AFP)
There are few nations as abusive to their own citizens as the 12 Arab nations that surround us in the Middle East, including the Hamas regime in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority within our borders. According to Freedom House, the international standard for monitoring human rights, we are surrounded by some of the most abusive nations in the world.
Syria, on our northern border, has a human rights score of 1%, the lowest on this planet. And it is terrifying to consider that over half a million people have been massacred there by the government and civil war in the past 10 years.
Iran has a score of 13% with women and gays being persecuted daily while dissidents are rounded up and never seen again. And so, too, for the other Arab countries in the Middle East.
The Palestinian Authority has a score of 22% and Gaza 11% signaling societies where citizens are not free to protest about their leaders, nor vote in free elections. Israel, meanwhile, scores 77% for human rights. Not the 90% of the US or the 80%+ of the UK, but certainly free and democratic.
We are currently witnessing the ability of the Israeli populace to campaign publicly about the government and we should be proud of that. Out of the 100 million Muslims in our region, the only Muslims who are “free” are Israel’s 2 million Arab citizens.
As Sharansky points out in his book, human rights abuse is not just an internal issue for those unfortunate citizens, but a global threat to peace. The Cold War, that stretched from 1947 until the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, almost led the world to nuclear obliteration.
Today, the threat of a nuclear Iran, with its abusive human rights record, is real and imminent. In fact, if one were to consider the current threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of Russia, China and North Korea, one might reconsider allowing nations with no human rights from acquiring technology for “nuclear power."
We Jews have been too busy fighting among ourselves, while the Abuseniks, the true victims of unfree regimes, are dying of poverty, disease and warfare with no hope of a better future
And the lunacy continues as world governments, driven by the US, are shockingly supporting abusive leaders in the Arab world to acquire nuclear technology for “power plants” despite the fact that their unit cost of oil is equivalent to that of our tap water, so there can be only one real objective for their desire to purify uranium.
With the current terror campaign orchestrated by the Palestinian Authority against us, all this adds up to one conclusion: “We will not have peace in our region while good Arabs in our region are ruled by totalitarian, fascist, corrupt regimes that deny their citizens of human rights.”
And that leads us to the next conclusion: “In order to improve our security situation in Israel, with regard to the Palestinians, Gazans, Syrians and Iranians, we must campaign for their freedom!”
Sharansky recounts how his inimitable wife, Avital, lobbied world leaders, including the then-US President Ronald Reagan, and convinced them that releasing Soviet Jews would ultimately lead to the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. She was right. In late 1989, the Jews were given the green light to leave Russia and two short years later the USSR was no more, heralding the end of the Cold War.
Today, while religious and liberal Jews in Israel are taking to the street to argue about the rights and wrongs of the government and Supreme Court, there is a far greater risk to the existence of the Jewish Democratic State. That is the risk of increasing terror from the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah and Hamas, not to mention the threat of a nuclear missile from Iran.
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The Dee family, before a terror attack claimed the lives of Lucy Dee and two daughters
(Photo: Courtesy)
When my children made the decision on that fateful day in April to donate their mother’s organs after she was killed in a terror attack, I and the Jewish nation thought that this was just a kind, altruistic gesture. Little did I, or others, understand that the payback for this altruistic act would be a thousand-fold. When we had the honor of meeting the medical staff and organ recipients at Beilinson Hospital just a few weeks later, we received more comfort, knowing that Lucy had saved five lives, than from all the thousands of visitors that had embraced us so warmly in their hearts until that point.
Lucy’s favorite Torah insight was that the word “ונתנו” meaning “let them give” is the longest palindrome in the Torah, that is – it reads the same backwards and forwards. In other words, when we give, we receive in return. In the case of donating Lucy’s organs, we received a lot more in return. By campaigning for our Arab neighbors, who are slaves to abusive regimes, we gain the possibility of Shalom, Peace - and that’s a lot more than whatever we have to put in.
And we don’t only stand the chance of making Shalom with our Arab neighbors but also with our Jewish neighbors. The campaign to free Soviet Jews united Jews from all over the world, right and left, religious and non-religious. Some Jews were secretly smuggling Hebrew texts in suitcases to Moscow and Leningrad and others were publicly campaigning for human rights on the streets of New York and London. Everyone was united against the common enemy, Russia, and a campaign to free Arabs from their totalitarian regimes could unite us all, once again, today.
During Sharansky’s time in jail, one humble Jew from London, Michael Sherbourne, a Russian teacher, coined the term “Refusenik” to describe the plight of Natan Sharansky and his fellow Jews who were imprisoned within the borders of the USSR. Today, I would like to define the term “Abuseniks” as those who live in regimes that have no human rights and are abused by their leaders who are corrupt and violent. They suffer terror from their own military and they have no freedom of expression, religion or voting. What is worse is that no one in the world cares about them.
We Jews have been too busy fighting among ourselves, while the Abuseniks, the true victims of unfree regimes, are dying of poverty, disease and warfare with no hope of a better future.
What Israel needs today is a united front against terror states in our backyard, a grassroots campaign of all types of Israelis together to stand up against the common enemy, the modern fascist state. When Jews march, then the whole world marches - that we also learned from Avital and Natan Sharansky.
Let’s start marching for the Abuseniks and make “Never again” a truth and not just another slogan. Who will march with me?
Rabbi Leo Dee is the author of 'Transforming the World: The Jewish Impact on Modernity'. He tragically lost his wife Lucy and daughters Maia and Rina in a terrorist attack earlier this year.