Sunday, September 27, 2020

Coronavirus Suicide Bombers

 


I think I found a term for these people who in the middle of a near total lockdown protest in thousands in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  They are self-centered, self-righteous, ignorant, dumb, inadvertent suicide bombers. They expose themselves and everyone else to a deadly virus. The key of their behavior is absolute ignorance of the threat the virus represents.

Of course, you also have the haredi variation and the apolitical hedonistic variation.  On top of that add the greedy power hungry politicians and the result is a catastrophe. 

And yet the root cause of all this is ignorance of science and forgetting that preserving human lives takes precedence over everything else.      

Jerusalem protest disperses after estimated 16,000 rally against Netanyahu  

Letter in the Jerusalem Post on September 30

In Religious leadership in a time of plague” (September 29), Yitz Greenberg is spot on.

In 1848, Rabbi Israel Salanter instructed Jews not to fast on Yom Kippur because of the cholera epidemic. Today during the coronavirus pandemic all rabbis should have followed his example that pikuah nefesh is paramount.

What does 8,000 new infections per day in Israel mean? It means 80 infections per 100,000 population per day and that is 80 times, i.e. two orders of magnitude (!!) more than it is possible to control using a combination of testing, contact tracing, case isolation and extensive monitoring of positive tests. This is insanity!

But the religious are not the only ones. You have people who in the middle of a near total lockdown protest in thousands in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They expose themselves and everyone else to a deadly virus. The key of their behavior is either absolute ignorance of the threat the virus represents or the maxim that the end justifies the means.

Some on the Left view these demonstrators not as the problem but the cure, yet in a democracy, you topple elected leaders at the polls – or you end up with another French Revolution of 1789 and The Rein of Terror that followed it, or the October Revolution of 1917 and 100 million dead in Communist regimes since.

The root cause of all this is ignorance of science and forgetting that preserving human lives takes precedence over everything else.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba