In the last 24 hours, much has been written about the shameful scenes of celebration which greeted child murderer and terrorist Samir Kuntar upon his return to Lebanon. Among the most insightful: the dignity of Israel’s position as explained by Simply Jews (”One thing, however, should not be forgotten - it is not about politics, not about national pride and even not about the grieving families. It is about the soldiers.”); Norman Geras’s invitation “…to resist the complaisant marking of a moral victory for Hizbollah; to give back its meaning to that word by giving its due to a country that would honour its dead, rather than to those whose joy is for the murderer of a defenceless child”; and Neil D and David T solemnly reminding all of us that we should take the time to remember little Einat Haran (ז״ל) , the four year old who, after seeing her father shot dead in cold blood, was herself murdered by the monster Kuntar as he slammed a rife butt against her skull. Her younger sister Yael died too, accidentally smothered to death by her mother as they hid from the terrorists.

All of this led me back to the pages of Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya’s book Cruelty and Silence, a masterly exploration of the failure of Arab intellectuals to confront the bestial cruelties which inflict their region (and by no means an apologia for Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, as some of Makiya’s more deceitful detractors have tried to make out.)

Towards the end of the book, Makiya asks a question which many people would have been asking themselves yesterday; is there “an Arab uniqueness, or a ‘national’ Arab pathology where violence and cruelty are concerned?” Doubtless there are those who will answer in the affirmative for all the wrong - essentially racist - reasons.

Makiya offers us a compelling alternative to the crude slander that Arab cruelty is somehow genetic. “In the Middle East,” he writes, “violence has tended to be ideologized and to fill public space.” Ideas are important and those who formulate and carry them - the intelligentsia - have a special responsibility as a consequence. Makiya’s essential point, first made in 1993 but resonant today, is that Arab intellectuals are guilty of a “glaring collective failure…to evolve a language of rights and democracy to supplement the language of nationalism…Words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy,’ ‘justice,’ ‘human dignity,’ and ‘human rights’ have lost all meaning in the hands of the same intellectuals who go on and on about Western hypocrisy.”

What is needed, Makiya continues, is a “new self-critical discourse…one that is rooted in a thoroughgoing insistence upon the inviolable sanctity of human life and the subordination of everything else to this criterion.” Without this, Arabs will continue to impose cruelty and intolerance “…against their fellow Arabs, or against Kurds and other national minorities of the Middle East.” What we have witnessed in Iraq over the last several years, and what we witnessed in Lebanon yesterday, bears witness to this remark, just as it underlines the bankruptcy of an explanation which blames Israel and the west - Makiya argues persuasively that anti-Zionism is an integral component of the silence which surrounds cruelty in the Arab world - for everything.

What needs to be said, too, is that there are many in the west - writers, journalists, politicians, activists - who are complicit with this cruelty. We are all able to think of some person or persons who fit this particular bill. We all recall the banners declaring “We Are All Hezbollah.” And that, perhaps, is why there is a need for a “self-critical discourse”, as Makiya would say, in our own culture too. Because those who ignore, excuse or celebrate someone who would deliberately bludgeon a four-year old child, or set off a car bomb in Beirut, or blow himself up in a crowded Baghdad market, challenge us to reclaim the meaning of words like “freedom” and “justice” - and, I might also add, “resistance” and “liberation.”