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Dark Starless Nights in Bethlehem

Copyright © 2002, Aldo Vidali.

NOTICE: Permission to reprint this article in its entirety, including this notice, is granted by the author.

This writing was first intended as a letter on collective madness to a good but unfortunately impassioned Jewish writer, deeply-rooted in that irreducible denial in which most members of ethnic or political tribes seek refuge when faced with facts demonstrating injustice on their part. She expressed her unmitigated support of Israel's actions against the Palestinian people based on arguments which the U.S. and Israeli press have often repeated and which need no repetition here.

The real theme of this paper is the next-to-impossible task of distilling objective understanding and factual observations, just settlements and mutually beneficial solutions in irrational conflicts between nations, religions, and political ideologies.

Suicide Terrorism Before Christ
When writing about suicide bombers, it is odd that no journalist has yet associated contemporary “suicidal terrorism” with the Old Testament's first report of a suicide terrorist:

The temple was crowded with men and women.   All the leading Philistines were there.   There were something like three thousand people on the roof,  watching Samson.   Samson called out to Yahweh:  "Lord Yahweh,  remember me.   Give me strength this last time,  and let me be avenged at one blow for my two eyes."   He put his arms around the two central pillars supporting the building,  his right arm around one and his left around the other.   He cried out,  "Let me die with the Philistines!"   And then he leaned forward with all his strength,  and the temple fell on the chiefs and on all the people who were in it.   He killed more people at his death than he had killed in his life.” Judges 16: 27-30

Samson, after being blinded by Delilah and made a slave, was chained to a millstone for many years and ultimately chose a suicidal act of terror to destroy his oppressors.

When I was as a child my teachers didn't refer to Samson as an evil terrorist for destroying his oppressors and sacrificing his own life in the process. Quite the contrary, Samson was regarded as a hero. In fact, "Samson and Delilah" is one among the “Heroes of the Bible" series. In an early blockbuster movie with Victor Mature as Samson, Samson's suicidal terrorist act is glorified.

To Christians and Jews Samson has been portrayed as a great hero; nowhere in all these centuries is there a reproach from God for his deadly act. How very interesting, therefore, that today Jewish, Christian, and Moslem writers have ignored this biblical story, especially since the number of innocent Philistines who were crushed by the collapsing temple was around 3000 - strangely, almost the same number of people who perished on September 11 in the temple of modern international business and money exchange. The World Trade Center was brought down by suicidal terrorists invoking the same Semitic God Samson invoked in the distant past when seeking revenge.

Fosse Ardeatine
In order to forestall the all-too-predictable accusations of anti-Semitism for speaking out clearly against injustice, the following is a true episode from my own life, the event which spawned my lifelong opposition to injustice and tyranny.

In 1943 during World War II my family sheltered several Jewish neighbors in our apartment at 104 via Agostino De Pretis, where the German army had established an officers' club on the third floor. I was barely 13 years old, and a good part of my day, when air raids permitted, was taken up carrying buckets of water to our apartment. I walked down seven flights of stairs and then about a mile from home to a public water fountain, stood in a long line, filled and carried back two big heavy buckets of wonderful Roman spring water, then climbed the stairs, trying to dodge questions from the “portiere” as to why the Vidali Family seemed to use so much more water than any other tenant.

On March 23, 1944, an Italian resistance fighter camouflaged as a street sweeper set up a bomb in a cleaning cart and exploded it when Company XI of Battalion III of the German SS Polizei Regiment Bozen marched in Via Rasella only a few blocks from my home. 33 German SS were killed. Gunfire and explosions between the Italian resistance and SS followed.

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