The controversy over Nizar Banat... Combining the ethics of compassion and the ethics of justice

The killing of the Palestinian activist Nizar Banat sparked controversy inside and outside Palestine, for two reasons:

The first is

that he is an opponent of the Palestinian Authority and is very critical of it. He was killed by Palestinian security forces after being brutally beaten, which prompted European Union representatives to call for an independent investigation. The United Nations Middle East envoy, Tor Wencesland, also called for an investigation, saying: It is "the perpetrators must be brought to justice."

The second

: that he was known for his positions in support of the Assad regime and Iran’s militias in the region, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi group in Yemen. Rather, he considered the battle one from Gaza to Iraq, passing through Lebanon and Syria, and he made many comments in this regard that include profanity - repeated in many of his comments. In it he rudely aligns with the Assad regime against its rebels, and he has many other positions that I will mention later.

This incident opened the debate again about the relationship between the political and the moral, and whether the glory of death should silence any discussion of political positions that involve immoral behavior, and about the priority of the Palestinian over the non-Palestinian, and whether “Palestinianism” is an exception that can override what comes before or What is his On the one hand, Hamas, for example, called the "fighting martyr Nizar Banat", and on the other hand, many Syrians recalled the comments and positions of "girls" about the revolution, the torture, killing, chemical bombardment, and displacement that Syrians were subjected to at the hands of the Assad regime.

Palestinian, Nizar was considered a militant; He was killed in the face of brute authority and in a brutal manner, and this, not to mention his ugliness, threatens other opponents. Hence, the Palestinians saw that the priority here should be to confront the killer, who is the Palestinian Authority exclusively, and not to search for the positions of the killed person on other issues; Because such an inspection will distract political attention in their battle with Abbas’s authority first, and may lead to an implicit justification for killing him, and then soften the condemnation of the crime secondly. Indeed, for this political tendency, many were keen to give a character of heroism and struggle, and even one of the banners was raised at his funeral saying: to the Gardens of the Mole"; Further resentment over Abbas's authority, perhaps.

From a political perspective, the killing of an opponent by a local authority is justified as a self-contained event, and therefore does not need a broader context for its evaluation;

Especially if the central goal here is to achieve political gain and to pit people against the repressive authority that committed the crime, in addition to the moral gain as well, which is to deter the perpetrator and protect others from facing the same fate.

In Syria, the murdered person had anti-revolutionary positions and the revolutionaries and their rights, which makes the situation confusing for him.

On the one hand, he died because of the oppression and opposition of a local authority, and on the other hand, he supported the oppression of its people by an external authority.

He is internally opposed to the corrupt authority that oppresses him, and externally he is a supporter of the corrupt authority that oppresses others.

This confusion and controversy surrounding the incident is the subject of this article. We are faced with an example in which the person of the murdered person does not have any advantage or privacy for himself; Since its importance comes from outside it, as it has turned into a public event, and among the questions raised by this public event and its interactions, we are not in front of a discussion and evaluation of the behavior of the murdered that led to what was presented, but rather in front of a moral intellectual treatment of the controversy around it and the questions raised by the event itself, and from here we will use the term “The Murdered One” to bypass the diagnosis process by mentioning the name of the science first, and to emphasize the ugliness of the crime and that he was killed.

Among those questions that confront us here: Can the murdered person be awarded the degree of martyrdom and human rights struggle in light of this duality between his Palestinianness and her interviews?

Is it possible to separate here between his Palestinian position and his position on the non-Palestinian?

Although his support for the Assad regime is based on the centrality of the Palestinians and the marginalization of everything else;

Under the pretext of reluctance and resistance that would justify everything and anything?

Is the struggle determined on national or transnational principles?

Is opposing a local authority and supporting an external authority (from an internal political and ideological perspective) just a political disagreement?

From a political perspective, the killing of an opponent by a local authority is justified as a self-contained event, and therefore does not need a broader context for its evaluation;

Especially if the central goal here is to achieve political gain and to pit people against the repressive authority that committed the crime, in addition to the moral gain as well, which is to deter the perpetrator and protect others from facing the same fate.

But the moral perspective is different, so is it only possible to condemn the crime committed against the victim without paying attention to declaring repudiation of the positions and ideas of the victim himself that intersect with the practices of the authority that he himself became the victim of? Is it not necessary to highlight the distance between the positions of the murdered, and the denial of the authority that killed him? Not to confuse the two? And if we assume - for the sake of argument - that this distinction between the act of the victim and the act of authority implies a justification or an understanding of the crime, then can it be said that obliterating the positions of the (non-Palestinian) victim also implies a justification for them? Is it possible for any of the two positions (the position of the murdered towards the Palestinian Authority and his position towards the Assad regime, for example) to erase one another?

The political perspective forced many Palestinians to consider the slain a “martyr of opinion.” Paradoxically, some news websites described him as a “rights activist.” In this context, it was considered that the critical stance taken by Syrians towards the slain reflects a narrow perspective that sees the world only through his cause. But these descriptions and explanations are misleading. Because it jumps on the fact that the position of the murdered person is not based on political or country considerations, as some want to delude us; Rather, it is based on a moral foundation, especially since we are talking about a regime implicated in crimes against humanity in which it is difficult to separate the political from the moral. Rather, the politician here is the vehicle for committing these moral crimes to preserve the so-called resistance.

Apart from the profane language that the murdered person used, his stances are not purely political, and are not limited to Syria only. Some of them incite murder; In September 2018, he wrote that “with the luring and killing of any Arab artist who holds concerts in the Zionist entity and in the West Bank,” and in July 2018, he called on the residents of Jabal al-Arab to kill and mutilate the prisoners, saying: “When you capture an ISIS terrorist, do not execute him by traditional or ugly methods. .get a woman shoot him,” and in June 2020 he celebrated the Houthis’ rallies from Yemen to bomb Saudi territory, which he once described as a fictitious entity.

He also falls into treason and does not see any objection to accusing any politically different person of employment. The hostility has been against humanitarian relief organizations, such as the so-called “White Helmets” group, which he described in July 2018 as “the largest professional group of killers and social media workers that Israel expelled from Syria.” and exporting them to Jordan," he also accused Jordan of being "a partner in smuggling the thugs of the White Helmets." In October 2018, the world was preoccupied with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but was preoccupied that Khashoggi was not a "Saudi dissident", and that he "did not have any human rights or liberation ideology", and in February 2021 he underestimated the killing of Luqman Salim, the Lebanese opponent of Hezbollah, The one who accused the party of killing him, and said about him: “Luqman writes superficial trifles in a crude style,” denouncing the celebration of him as if he was a thinker. In 2020, he described the Gulf people as "Arabs", while praising the people of Bahrain, saying:"They are not like many of their neighbors, Arab tribes brought together by oil coincidence." In April 2018, it celebrated the "green buses and the heroic soldiers of Syria" who "grease their weapons while your howls reach the sky under the hashtag Idlib is burning."

Rather, he - the Palestinian - celebrated the displacement of Palestinian refugees in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus after the Assad regime stormed it in April 2018 and purged them of what he called "the forces of backwardness and labor." He also celebrated in July 2018 the Syrian pilot whose plane was shot down, describing him as "" martyr pilot"

Although his mission was to drop barrel bombs on Syrian cities and towns.

We are - then - in front of a complex and ambiguous situation, and therefore the critical position on the murdered cannot be reduced to a mere political dispute, and the previous data show that the murdered did not have any human rights ideology, which is the description by which he himself described the martyr Khashoggi!

Likewise, the issue cannot be reduced to expressing a Syrian perspective that sees the world only from its own perspective.

Although the Palestinian and Syrian issues do not reflect a special perspective from a moral and principled point of view!

On the other hand, it is not possible to turn a blind eye to all of this and only condemn the killer, who is an authority serving the Israeli occupation.

I have previously explained in a previous article that in ambiguous cases there is no deviation from the complex reading, far from the hegemony of the political and national perspective, whether Syrian or Palestinian.

The Palestinian, as well as the Syrian and others, are not fit to be a moral perspective or an explanatory view of the world, and they should not fall into the trap of a clash between two perspectives, each trying to appear as an exceptional case or a criterion for evaluation.

In the composite reading, we are faced with several aspects:

First

: The justification for killing in this case is an immoral position.

Because he reduces the complex and ambiguous issue in one of its aspects only, in addition to the fact that the killer here did not kill the victim for his non-Palestinian stances, but rather killed him outside the rule of law and justice, meaning that the person killed was killed for the sake of authoritarian interests equal to the interests of the authoritarian regimes for which the victim defended, and for which he was convicted The reason for his conviction could not be the reason for his murder!

The second

: that we are faced with such confusion, it is not possible to prevent people from thinking that some of them may fall victim to his ideas that he proclaims to his supposed political opponents (as you condemn, you condemn, and with the measure that you slander);

This does not absolve Abbas’s authority from its responsibility for the crime against him, and without this means condemning the murdered’s criticism of Abbas’s authority;

Criticizing it is a good deed.

But the Qadari here, we did not know it until after its occurrence, and it differs from the Legislative in that it is an event that cannot be repelled, but it contains a lesson and an exhortation to the living, and the Legislative imposes on us the accountability of those responsible for this crime in this case.

the third

A distinction must be made between judging an act - that is, killing outside the framework of the law - and judging a person, talking about his virtues, and obliterating his vices related to the general and the rights of others. Here, the very clear act of murder must be condemned, while judging a person can only come through the totality of his actions and attitudes that must be present in the evaluation process, which means that we are facing two separate levels. And if we suppose the immorality of the murdered, this does not justify any aspect of understanding for killing him; For the separation of the side between the two levels. Moreover, we are defending here a principled position that imposes consistency and generalization, and rejects resemblance to the slain in any of his condemned descriptions. Because any resemblance violates the moral principle that we defend and condemn the murdered for violating it.The principle here is the basis for the guarantor of the general right, and that this should not be repeated - whether the act of authority or the act of the murdered person - with any one of us, meaning that it is the guarantor of sound standards that can be generalized to all individuals; as human beings, regardless of whether they are in themselves moral or immoral.

Fourth

: Surrendering to a purely Qatari perspective, whether Palestinian or Syrian, would make the moral one subservient to it, and this would mean a retreat of the moral principle to certain national, geographic and political borders, and then it would disrupt the moral principles that underpin the causes we defend, whether they are Palestinian, Syrian, or others. Our condemnation of the Assad regime and the authority of Abbas is based on one moral principle, in which resistance to the occupier and the tyrant meet together from a human rights perspective.

On this basis, the duplicity of the victim - from whom numerous human rights and legal violations were committed - is due to the transformation of political ideology into a source for determining what is moral; Rights are only required of those who meet his ideological criteria. In November 2018, Nizar Banat wrote that the battle is one that “the men of God are fighting in Yemen and the men of God in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.” Hence, morality - for a segment of the people - depends exclusively on the issue of Palestine and hostility to Israel. In May 2019, several Palestinian figures (including girls) signed a statement saying: "Palestine is not a mental game that we play in our spare time. It is our moral test by which the value and role of each person who puts freedom as a crown on his head is determined."This statement identifies the source of the problem, in my opinion; Because Palestine is not a moral criterion in itself, but rather acquires its morality from the founding principles of the issues of liberation from occupation and tyranny, and rights and freedoms.

This is one of the distortions that afflicted the Palestinian cause and a segment of the Arab and international left who still support the Assad regime in the face of what they call imperialism, at the expense of the blood of the Syrian people, men, women and children, and the blood of the Palestinians themselves before that!

Considering that Palestine is itself the moral criterion is the most prominent formula for the exceptionality of the Palestinian cause, an idea that I have previously criticized;

It leads to the conclusion that all other issues are secondary or can be sacrificed for the sake of the exceptional, without realizing that such positions stem from a narrow concept that transcends colonialism;

Because we are facing a broader concept today, which is the internal colonialism represented by the authoritarian military regimes, and the Palestinian Authority serving the occupation.

Fifth: Several pretexts were put forward to silence any criticism or investigation into the opinions of the victim; Although he is the hero of the event, it is natural to search for him and try to understand the various dimensions of the event and its characters without selectivity or direction. Including: the claim that the one who revealed the views of the murdered is the criminal authority to divert attention from its action, or that he has a family that must stop everything that harms them, or that delving into his previous positions implies - implicitly - justifying his killing. These are excuses that ignore that we are facing an event that has become public and central in the news bulletins, that the murdered person is an activist, that his positions are already public, and that the true expression of the person today is his pages on social media and the Internet, which is available to everyone. It is not possible for an event that has become public to be selectively controlled according to narrow political criteria and calculations, especially since the murdered person was active in issues of public concern that affect several countries and peoples.Such pretexts may be based on personal biases (friendship) or a country that believes in the exceptional case, or a politician who wants to invest the event in achieving specific political gains and putting aside what disturbs it, and this may be to push any attempt to justify the killing process, and the latter is a legitimate purpose, but we are only We argue the validity of these pretexts to achieve.

The moral reading does not stop at the limits of grasping the various aspects of the event, the intertwined levels, and the transcendence of the country, the ideological, and the local political agenda. Rather, it expands to include the complexities of human action and bias towards human humanity that condemns the crime of the Palestinian Authority that attacked human sanctity.

Just because he has a different opinion, and condemns the inhumane attitudes of the murdered who incited the killing of others just because they have a different political perspective, but at the same time it does not get involved in celebrating the suffering of the slain;

Just because he was celebrating the suffering of the dead and other displaced.

Thus, this reading attempts to combine two types of ethics:

The first: the ethics of compassion, which rejects any form of human suffering, and revolts against it on humanitarian grounds;

Because its justification not only violates the principles related to the ethics of justice, but also violates the humanity of man, and refuses to imitate and imitate the murdered who celebrated the suffering of others for ideological reasons.

The second: the ethics of justice, which preserves the correct ethical standards for actions, to maintain moral clarity, and to fulfill the requirements of a comprehensive and complex moral judgment, and not to obliterate one side in favor of another, or not to give the character of struggle to non-principled actions; Just because she fell for an image that seemed moral from a private and divisive perspective; Criticism of Abbas’s authority and support for the Assad regime are subject to the same principle among the detractors, which is that Palestine is the moral criterion that determines their choices for them, not the moral principles founding the cause and others.