Why Russians and Palestinians are destroying human compassion in me

I believe, and want to believe, that everyone, unless they suffer from some psychological disorder, is not indifferent to human suffering. I would be very happy if we could perceive the suffering of animals in the same way, but that’s not exactly what’s been on my mind these past few weeks. Whenever I encountered a tragedy, whether personally or through the media, my first reaction was always pity, followed immediately by an attempt to help. I admit that recently, in certain cases, this pattern has mixed with a completely different one, namely, change your behavior and then I will feel compassion for you again. Yes, you guessed right, I have a problem with Russians and Palestinians. And yes, it pains me a lot.

I remember well how my grandmother, ironically born in Vienna, who spoke German as well as Czech, stubbornly wrote Germany with a lowercase „g“. She didn’t like Germans because of what they caused our family, Czechoslovakia, and in her view, humanity during World War II. Given that I could have begun to perceive this almost forty years after the war ended, it was peculiar. Similarly, she had a problem with the Soviet Army because the end of the war found her in Brno, where the Red Army, besides liberating from the Nazis, also „liberated“ many Czechoslovaks of bicycles, watches, and other items that caught their soldiers‘ interest. This all culminated with the full occupation of our country by Soviet communists in 1968. But why am I talking about my grandmother? Back then, I didn’t understand her; we often met boys from East Germany (for the younger ones, the zone of Germany occupied by the USSR post-war and economically ruined) at races, and we never had problems. World War II seemed as distant to me as the Punic Wars, just a chapter in history, plus the obligatory May celebrations, which under the communists degraded into a ticked-off obligation. I didn’t understand why not only my grandmother, but many people around her disliked Germans, when surely not all of them committed war crimes during the war.

About four weeks have passed since the terrorist attack in Krasnogorsk, Russia, and I see footage of desperate people trying to escape the shooting of cowardly and treacherous terrorists. In my head, I thought, poor people, but I was somewhat taken aback when immediately another thought appeared. How do you know that these people do not support the barbaric war Russia is waging against Ukraine? What if this lady in a fur coat, filming herself on her phone, gasping over what she saw and unable to catch her breath, had just the day before been unable to catch her breath as she applauded a speech by one of the Russian leaders, who, as is their custom, announced the need to exterminate Ukrainians as a nation and drop atomic bombs on us in the West? No, I certainly didn’t think „serves you right,“ but the automatic compassion was gone. Similarly, when I see a flood wave that passed through the Orenburg region, or the one devastating Kurgan and Tyumen regions on the news, I don’t first worry about the property or even the further fates of the people living there, but subconsciously, data about the Russian military industry in the area runs through my head, and I wonder how much its damage by the flood wave could limit the terror of the Russian army against Ukrainian civilians. Strangely enough, when I hear that the advancing flood also hit Kazakhstan, I start thinking again about whether we should help the people affected by the natural disaster. There is a big difference between a natural disaster (amplified by Russian sloppiness) and intent, when the Russian army deliberately blew up the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine to destroy and kill.

I have seen with my own eyes people affected by war conflicts, real refugees who were just trying to survive and save their women and children, and unfortunately in more countries of the world than I would like. And always, whether it was in Yemen, Iraq, Mali, or other unfortunate places in the world, what particularly struck me were the small children. So today, when I see authentic footage of frightened children in the Gaza Strip, my first thought is that this war must end immediately. The second thought, which is no longer so much about emotions but about the relentless reality, is that it can only end if the Palestinians themselves want it to. And the problem is that they don’t want to. After a brief ceasefire at the end of November, when the Palestinians released some kidnapped civilians in exchange for terrorists imprisoned by Israel, every subsequent attempt at a new ceasefire has been rejected by the Palestinian side. It’s hard to say whether it’s because their leaders, living in luxury in Qatar and now dollar billionaires thanks to Western humanitarian support, see the prolonged suffering of ordinary Palestinians as a welcome tool in their propaganda war, or because they are unable to locate even some of the 133 Israeli hostages they held and who would still be alive after half a year in their „care“.

It is really difficult to maintain compassion for people whose society is so permeated with hatred not only for their neighbors but generally for the West, which paradoxically has been increasingly feeding them since 1948. No other group of people in the world has its own specialized UN agency, no other group has such massive and especially such long-term support as the Palestinians do. Yet their hatred for Israel, but also for any difference, only grows over time. Palestinian homosexuals, for example, could tell a lot about it if they survived the popular pastime in the Gaza Strip of throwing them off the rooftops of multi-story buildings.

I can understand that Palestinians believe that the existence of Israel is to blame for their miserable living conditions, and only after managing to exterminate all Jews and „from the river to the sea“ Palestine will be well, especially since this has been instilled in them from birth. I can understand that in Gaza, no one stands up to Hamas because its practices are brutal, and anyone who has tried it in the past has ended badly, often along with their entire family. I don’t understand, however, that for Palestinians living in comfort and hospitality in the West, whether in the USA or the European Union, who have access to plenty of information from various perspectives and face no punishment for expressing their views, are neither capable nor willing to find a bit of compassion for the victims of brutal terror by many Palestinian armed groups. That compassion, which they often rudely and through various manipulations demand from us.

It is really hard for me to have compassion for Palestinians, considering that according to data on average monthly wages in Asia in 2023, their income surpasses that of people in India, Vietnam, or Thailand. Countries whose products each of us uses in everyday life. I am trying in vain to figure out where this income comes from, apart from generous humanitarian aid, when the most famous Palestinian export item is terror.

There is another factor that significantly contributes to my (hopefully temporary) reduction of compassion for Russians and Palestinians. It’s their supporters here, among us. I am really touched by how they lie, how they are capable of uncritically adopting the propaganda of their favorites, and how they purposefully omit facts. I don’t understand the supporters of Russian aggression, especially as a member of a nation that experienced exactly the same arguments used by Nazi Germany, which Putin’s Russia uses today. That is, supposedly to protect minorities, first to detach the border areas and then to completely occupy the neighbor. The Nazis succeeded in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Russians have not yet succeeded in Ukraine. There are many reasons why it is different, history seldom repeats itself exactly the same way. Czechoslovakia was then sacrificed „in the interest of peace,“ in the belief that Hitler would not want more, as the French and British statesmen said, although he spoke openly about dominating Europe in front of his tribesmen. Ukraine has much greater territorial depth and is not surrounded by enemies on all sides, as was the case with Czechoslovakia (except for Romania). Nevertheless, anyone who is not blinded by Russian money or some personal complex should clearly see on what territory the fighting is taking place, who attacked and who is defending, and also who is threatening to wipe out our cities with atomic bombings, for those who do not follow Russian television, yes, Russia wants to destroy us and make us its colony again.

In the case of Palestinian supporters, it looks a bit different at first glance. They proceed with the well-known salami-slicing tactic. That is, in countries where their presence, or rather the presence of their fellow believers in the population, exceeds a certain level and their representatives sit on city councils or in legislative bodies, they demand the elimination of Israel as a state, but often also the elimination of Jews even in countries that recently provided these newcomers with a new life in the comfort and freedom of Jewish-Christian culture. One example is the current vile blockade of Jewish students‘ entry onto the campus of Columbia University in the USA. The similarity of the live chains that attack Jews who want to go to study, with those organized by the Nazis before the start of World War II, is not accidental. It is also no coincidence that while at demonstrations in support of Israel, Israeli flags are visible but always also those of the home countries, at pro-Palestinian ones only Palestinian or even some Islamist terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State, and flags of the home/host countries are at best burned. In the Czech Republic, we only see the use of Palestinian flags, albeit without the presence of our own, but fortunately, I have not yet seen it burning. Local Palestinian spokespeople talk only about their alleged concern for Palestinian children, while stubbornly refusing to talk about the massacred or kidnapped Jewish children. However, they talk about the need for a ceasefire, forgetting to mention that the last ceasefire was violated by the Palestinians, and any further ceasefires have so far been rejected by them. They also often and gladly talk about an alleged famine and Israeli blockade of Gaza, forgetting to add that in terms of food, the volume of humanitarian aid, measured by the number of trucks, has been for several weeks at the same or rather higher volume than before the Palestinian attack. Back then, it was about 500 trucks on average, but the vast majority of the cargo volume consisted of materials for building underground tunnels and manufacturing rockets, with food making up 70. Now it is just under 160. They also forget that the Gaza Strip is not only adjacent to Israel but also to Egypt, and that the distribution, or rather the trafficking of what the world sends to Gaza, is in the hands of terrorists from Hamas.

I don’t think compassion is a weakness, I am convinced that it is also thanks to it that our civilization circle has managed to break free from perpetual feuds. However, it is not possible to apply it indiscriminately, for example, to barbarians who have no compassion not only for us but also for their own citizens. I am sorry that I have to deal with something like this, something that did not even come to mind a few years ago. Yet it would take so little if both Russians and Palestinians stopped relentlessly in their efforts to destroy those who, according to them, have no right to exist. If they showed a little compassion for those whom their soldiers or militants inhumanely tortured and murdered and continue to do so. If they could also doubt themselves and their leaders, just as we doubt ours and ultimately even ourselves, we continually question ourselves.