Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes
Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Foreword. Vegetarianism: A Way of Life, by Dudley Giehl, Harper & Row, 1979.
The Lebanese Prime Minister had been assassinated with most Lebanese thinking that the Syrians were behind the murder. All the political parties in Lebanon called for a UN Tribunal to investigate the assassination. As the Tribunal was ending its investigation, word leaked out that the report would name Lebanese Hezbollah operatives as being involved in the assassination. If that happened, the Lebanese government and army would have the obligation to arrest the murders for trial and Lebanon would be split against Hezbollah which was the most powerful and militant political group as well as being a terrorist group. Hezbollah declared that they would not allow any arrests of their people, and that they wanted the Government, led by the murdered politicians son to repudiate the UN Tribunal even before the report was issued. When that failed, Hezbollah withdrew from the government coalition and reconstituted a government without the son of the murdered Prime Minister who was then thrown out of office. Jumblatt’s Druze party held the balance of power and surprisingly sided with Hezbollah. Usually he was a strong advocate for justice. However, if he refused to go along with Hezbollah, they would use their terror troops against the Lebanese army and civil war would result. Hence Jumblat’s answer—a classic statement of a political dilemma.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).
