Kidnapping the truth

When I was in my second year at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I became friendly with a Druze student who was a year ahead of me in the International Relations program.

Those unfamiliar with the Druze faith/culture shouldn’t feel bad. They prefer it that way. There are less than a million practitioners of this secretive religion worldwide, and even those who are familiar with the tenets of the Druze faith have trouble placing them within the more accessible framework of the larger world religions.

The Druze nominally consider themselves a type of Muslim, but do not accept the Koran. They believe in reincarnation, but do not share the eastern concept of constant rebirth leading to a joining with a higher power. They are pure monotheists, but believe that there have been as many as 72 human incarnations of a higher power/order. They believe in man having complete free will, but they also believe in a passionless deity that doesn’t care about man’s actions. They believe that there is no longer a chance for further human incarnations of the deity, but that at some point there will be some sort of divine intervention in world events.

And most of all, he told me that their first and most important ‘commandment’ is to love truth.

Obviously, what I don’t know about the Druze religion and culture can (and does), fill volumes. But what I learned from this one Druze student helped me understand why his coreligionists were so difficult to classify… even in terms of religious and national allegiances.

Druze villages in the mountains of Lebanon and Syria are often staunchly anti-Israeli… and the Druze communities living a few miles away in the upper Galilee region of Israel are so ardently patriotic that many of them serve in elite combat units of the Israel Defense Forces/Border Patrol. The irony is that these disparate Druze communities are mostly related by blood or marriage to one another, and would gladly reunite with one another without regard to their divergence of loyalties.

When I asked him about this strange (to me) situation, he pointed out that when a perfect truth is not available (when is it ever?), one has no choice but to accept the best available truth. These communities in Israel, Lebanon and Syria are first and foremost Druze (a term he used interchangeably with truthful) … and then things like allegiance to governments and policies come into play.

When we met, I had assumed he was either a Christian or Muslim Arab (there were plenty of both on campus), but noticed that his circle of friends was exclusively Jewish. He had done his national service in the Border Patrol, and had chosen to study International Relations because he thought it offered the best opportunity to discover the truth about why countries (especially in the Middle East) acted the way they did.

I would like to say I kept in touch with this friend over the years and that we had a joyful reunion when I moved back to Israel. But the fact is I have always been a lousy correspondent (even for a guy), and we really hadn’t been that close. Truth be told, the reason I haven’t mentioned his name is that I can’t remember it!

What got me thinking about this long-ago friendship was the recent Palestinian kidnapping of Riyad Ali (who would have been a few years behind me at Hebrew U), a CNN producer who was born and raised in a Druze village in the Galilee.

That a Druze would pursue a career in journalism is not particularly surprising, given their affinity for truth. But why would the Palestinians grab a Druze hostage rather than one of the more abundant Jews? They had targeted a non-combatant (even by their own malleable definition of that term) in an otherwise target-rich environment. It made no sense!

Then it hit me: Few people in the world even know what a Druze is! Someone not intimately familiar with the Middle East would assume that this was some internal Muslim-on-Muslim violence and look elsewhere to dole out their daily ration of western empathy.

But Riyad Ali was perhaps the perfect target for the Palestinians. His kidnapping would outrage both the Druze and Jewish Israeli communities, but would ruffle few feathers outside of the region. It give the Palestinian’s the perfect opportunity to engage in the sort of barbarism that the ‘Religion of Peace’ has been perpetrating over in Iraq, without incurring the inevitable international outcry and condemnation.

The awful irony in all this is that the Palestinians, by targeting a Druze… a ‘lover of truth’… have found the perfect way to conceal the truth about their own viciousness and barbarism from the rest of the world.

If you love truth (regardless of your religion or lack-thereof), don’t view this kidnapping as ‘just another act of violence in an already violent region’. See it for what it is… an attack on the truth.