Tragedy and Opportunity

Is the work you do through the foundation therapeutic?

Judea: We don’t do it for the sake of personal therapy, so no. Had I thought that I did all this work in the last five years for personal therapy, I would stop today. We do it because we think it’s effective, because we have a unique opportunity to do what others cannot. I see that history has given us both a tragedy and an opportunity, and if I let the opportunity go, I’m left with a tragedy.

Aren’t you angry?

Angry? I can’t afford to be angry, it’s diversionary. It’s something I learned in the Israeli Army: when a soldier gets angry, he can’t aim right. I’m a soldier, and I have to aim right.

A soldier of what?

Of decency, and I’m building an army, an empowered army to fight the war we all have in mind, Christians, Jews and Muslims. I don’t call it a war against terrorism because then it becomes political. I call it a coalition of the decent, understanding that there is good and evil. This is axiom No. 1: there is absolute good and evil, and the decent is on the good side. Moral relativism is dead. It died in Karachi with my son in 2002. The illusive notion that there’s always a justifiable motivation for one’s action, and that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is now dead. There comes a point where civilized society posts red lines that you do not cross. And he who boasts of killing an innocent journalist has crossed that line.