EXCERPT:
Unsurprisingly, commentators who routinely denounce cancer analogies when they come from Iranian officials blatantly avoid addressing the use of the identical rhetoric by Israelis themselves when referring to the growing presence of non-Jewish communities within areas controlled by Israel. When IDF chief Moshe Ya'alon referred to Palestinian babies as "cancerous manifestations" and Likud Knesset member Miri Regev called African migrants and refugees "a cancer in our body," they were silent.
While calling the government and founding ideology of a state a "cancerous tumor" is certainly not a nice thing to say and supporters of that state's policies have every reason to take offense to such a description, it is quite obviously a political statement. Iranian rhetoric attacks a political entity, namely the "Zionist regime", which systematically discriminates against and oppresses people based solely on their ancestry and religious affiliation. In contrast, Ya'alon and Regev's statements employ the cancer analogy to defend the concept of ethnic-religious exclusivity and have everything to do with people, whether Palestinian or African, who somehow threaten the continued dominance of a deliberately demographically engineered and maintained state.
To be sure, regardless of its intended target, this kind of rhetoric is purposefully harsh and often gratuitous. Yet, like Ahmadinejad's "insult to humanity" line, the cancer analogy is neither new nor original. While Iranian officials have been employing it since 2000, it has long been wielded for the express purpose of condemning a political system or ideology one vehemently opposes.
In the 1820s, former president John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "slavery is a cancer to be isolated." On October 16, 1854, in an stridently abolitionist speech in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln likened the Constitution's vague references to slavery to a "cancer," hidden away, which an "afflicted man...dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time."
A New York Times article from September 8, 1863 quoted then-Tennessee Governor Andrew Johnson as telling a Nashville crowd in late August, "Slavery is a cancer on our society, and the scalpel of the statesman should be used not simply to pare away the exterior and leave the roots to propagate the disease anew, but to remove it altogether." Johnson endorsed the "total eradication" of slavery from Tennessee.
No comments:
Post a Comment