The danger in the absurd

I have written less and less about Jews and Muslims because dislike to fuel the hatred; it's such a charged subject and I have several friends that are already over incensed about it. But I can't resist writing my 2 bits about the news of the recent UNESCO resolution draft about the Temple Mount, that strikes me as particularly absurd and as a sign of what is saddening and frightening in our Western civilisation. The absurd starts with its very existence - why on earth would it be necessary to define a historical place in this way, as if it's not sufficiently known to all the parties interested. But there it is nevertheless. I can understand that some Muslim countries advance such proposition, as a political maneuver part of their usual strategy of playing victim and reinforcing the anti-semitic propaganda they use to demonize Jews as a scapegoat for their own failures, as xenophobia and minority groups discrimination has been used for centuries by many kinds of governments everywhere. I can also understand that immoral and corrupt governments like Russia's or China's support it, as a means to appease their own sizeable Muslim minorities while in a way undermining Western-styled democracies and thinking, so killing two rabbits with the same stone. But that Western democratic countries can support it or abstain to vote (as so many did, mostly abstaining), supporting in that way such a ridiculous and despicable rewriting of History for political reasons, is infuriating. It is the kind f misguided "political correctness" stemming from a ridiculous sense of colonial gilt allied to a coward ad counter-productive policy of appeasement that, by denying our Western values of honesty and democracy is corroding the very base of our civilisation. That is the real problem, not the refugees or the minorities. The Western problem is not standing for and upholding the values on which our civilisation - the most successful until now even if not perfect - allowing in that way intolerance and obscurantism to get a foothold and set in. That's how great civilisations fail, from within, and not because of the barbarians, who just take advantage of their weaknesses and tiredness and, in the end, become a kind of solution, as the famous poem by Cavafy so rightly expresses. This UNESCO pitiful vote is a sad sign of decadence, as is the Trump phenomenon in the US, the Brexit vote or the tolerance by the EU f its members' Hungary and Poland policies. In this case, it's mostly symbolic, but symbols are meaningful.