On the one hand, the Tragedy of Ricky and Doughboy perpetuates: Violence begets violence. This American parable of Los Angeles gangs avenging the killing of their members, in turn, echos in the chamber of every small arm and artillery discharged in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
On the other hand, the primal instinct to survive: An organization saying they want to wipe a people from this planet, strike to do just that, and are responded to by nature. Behavior observed throughout the history of anthropological violence.
In both hands, people held hostage by the theocratic zealotry and unconscionable civic dis-management of extremists.
The interplay of ideological fervor, geopolitical realities, and the influence of digital discourse reverberates societal perspectives across the globe. It reverberates from a grave and devastating lived experience in Israel-Palestine, in contrast with that of the protester crowds of the global West, that gets more stark the further west you go.
Hamas is a friend to no one. Their government is an enterprise of destruction, and of death. Of killing Jews, Catholics, atheists, and Muslims who aren’t Muslim enough to them. Instead of governing, Hamas hides in retrenchment, in bunkers and tunnels and buildings that they built with great assistance from stolen money and materials given as aid to those they are suppose to govern, encouraged by the Islamist covenant — build their caliphate on the ruins of non-believers. They must be eliminated for the good of humanity.
That imperative qualified by the atrocities perpetrated on October 7, and broader context touched on below, puts last week’s tragedy as it unfolds and escalates still, in a stratus of human conflict unrecognizable if not unbeknownst by many among the throngs of demonstrators in the United States — Americans impulsively shouting warped online moral convictions from the cocoon of comfort and liberty America affords them. The younger among them enraptured by an impulsive hate of anything traditional or borne from power acquired through classical virtues of work, strength, and competitiveness; the ideology of the petulant hashtag above all. They are at best in-experienced, at worst hateful fascists, but always entirely fortunate and free. How much so made evident by how glaring the difference in stakes is between the people of the continental far west and the people of the old world — Europe and the Near East.
In the hyper-assimilated USA — cushioned by oceans, irrigated by a great big river network and mountain ranges, fed by an abundance of productive soil — the highest level of collective existential fear includes only suicidal male maniacs with too easily accessible guns (sometimes radicalized by faith), acting alone, and the accelerating devaluation of the US Dollar. The next level of concerns is so far from existential — today likely including: How many other people will be dressed as Barbie on Halloween — that we should be firm in reminding ourselves how fortunate we are, geographically, and societally, when confronting terrible violence between ways of life far away from home.
In the hyper-assimilated USA, we make friends in school with someone from Poland, worship with someone from the Philippines, sell our business to someone from Pakistan, start another one with someone from Nigeria, eat at someones restaurant from Malaysia, invest in someone else’s from Singapore, buy our house from someone from Bulgaria, and get invited to someones wedding in India. Never rejecting in these engagements because of immutable or foreign attributes.
In the hyper-assimilated USA we pick up a venti latte from Starbucks before joining protest, and however juvenile or mature, misapplied or righteous our rage, it is our freedom to express it. In any time, every campus is teeming with this triggered, and oft maligned, energy, all the time.
Is this energy, afire on campuses and thereabouts today, a harbinger of political tectonic shifting, far away from the real tremors of this horrible war? Possible, but unlikely.
Present conflicts between embattled neighbors —violations of immigration, asymmetrical economics, land management, and population control becoming crimes against human rights — are paramount subjects for exposure, for diplomats to prioritize, and pervasive in multiple parts of world. Zionist extremism and the militarized subjugation of present day West Bank is real, and reported on, not invented, by the likes of Abby Martin and the many before and contemporary to her like Tomas Pueyo (Caption above). Some, like Talsa, from the land themselves. Voices often drowned out by western media in quieter times. But making equivalence of these to heinous and merciless acts of hot war, of dirt and steel and blood and death unannounced, in the infiltrated bedrooms of civilians, in the name of a genocidal covenant, is an errand in false morality. The men who attacked Israel on October 7 were not aggrieved Palestinians overtaking a military checkpoint in the West Bank to protest their interminable mistreatment at the hostile edges of Israel’s power sphere. They were, just as they assert themselves to be, murderers.
For far westerners, and its netizens, the civilizational backdrop of the bloody Middle East conflict could fill the internet’s biggest whiteboard and tapes, but its gravity weighted only in a media scale. That is to say, it’s argued about by exchange of information and opinion with keystrokes, between geographic lottery winners, not with rockets and rifles and bombs dropped from drones.
Europe’s modern societies are far more contextualized by its trodden historical lines to the Middle East and the Maghreb. Its civilizational backdrop not in the Metaverse, but in the human universe, and a part of it much less distant from the Levant than Michigan Avenue. Where one philosophy of liberty, discourse, exploration, and unity by diversity, clashes with a philosophy of adherence to rigid codes of uniform conduct and ethnic discrimination enforced through strict hierarchy and dominance of rulers over the ruled.
For the Western European countries, the triumph of integration has enumerable examples, but the secular contract of “together from anywhere” is not entirely binding. The diaspora of peoples assimilated(ing) is not fully exhaustive, or as granular, or in the same melt down the socio-economic ladder as America. In Sweden, starkly non-assimilated sectors are called “Parallel Societies.” And the breaking of this contract concerns civil leadership:
Protesting crowds in European Union nations, Starbucks cups fuming among them or not, are more charged than ours in America, if not always bigger, posing a more tangible threat of violence. Partly because extremist gunfire has cracked and killed at their doorsteps as it did on October 7 (See November 2015 Paris attacks) — Embodying the clash between Judeo-Christian civilization and its possible predecessor. The one predicted as imminent by Michelle Houellebecq in Soumission (Submission), an present day novel where the Muslim Brotherhood has extended its empire to Europe, and life is organized by Sharia Law. Where there is no flirting with ideas in public, let alone proclaiming them in shouts.
In our Western land, open deliberation, discussion, and argument about all things, including justice and the merit of the Muslim Brotherhood’s mandate, is an inextinguishable privilege, unlike the lives of the people of Israel; a truth history should keep even more prevalently for us perhaps. A privilege exercised in defiance, rather than in amity, with Muslim extremism, that would rid society of it by earliest decree.
There is no going to Starbucks first for the people fighting this war right now, in their home, where there are fewer guns per capita than we anguish over in the US, but where a far greater share of the population knows how to use them, because they’ve had to to defend their way of life, and remain willing when so close to those who come to kill them they can see the whites of their eyes.
Here’s hoping Hamas receives no backup from their bosses — mullahs and clerics and ministers and their counterparts in peripheral ancestral lands, who either run suffocating theocracies or operate nearly undisturbed in more progressive, if not model, governments, from Qatar to Cairo.
Their call for jihad has gone largely unanswered so far, though not without victims, in the West Bank (Ricky and Doughboy) and in the communities of our western allies where the war Israel is fighting is more palpable, and threatens to erupt for real.
In the western Internet, there were predictable jingoistic calls to “bring it” like we live in a Mountain Dew advert, and overall sardonic sentiment best encapsulated by this iconic comedy moment of east-west confrontation from Spielberg and Ford:
But, the Palestine flag still waves prominently in the grand boulevards of some US cities and some football stadiums of Europe; and the malls and libraries of its campuses are tagged fresh with slogans of its most radical factions. Interpreted by some for what they are, hate, but maybe now, further in, better interpreted as lopsided pleas for mercy. After all, is someone chanting “intifada from the river to the sea” really interested in traveling to the real world to join this conflict? Are they prepared to disavow, and fight to eradicate a nation of people from earth from tunnels dug beneath it? Understandably not. A kinder interpretation would be that these chants from the better angels of our nature, for Hamas itself to be merciful — stop suffocating the people of Gaza, allow peaceable motives to gain the upper hand, and harness your strategic and material energies for productivity.
In the first twenty days of war, the call to arms puttered, needing no plea for serenity from the privileged western demonstrators, congressional leadership in our representative government that chose their hashtags, or from the devoted allies of their target, Israel itself — that the sibling branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, and their financial and material backers, not assemble, knuckle down, and light more fire. The gravest of possible escalations to avoid.
As the Israeli operation intensifies in the air and on the ground, the politickers’ rhetoric remains rhetoric, but is taking on absolute tones. These should be heard and heeded — as they are by our commanders assessing “force posture requirements”:
But heard concurrently with prescient calls from our most experienced and thoughtful agents, like Massachusett’s Congressman Seth Moulton, summarizing an imperative of equal import to the one first declared in this piece, as Israel engages Hamas in a ground war:
[The] First Marine Division motto in Iraq, under General Mattis, was “no better friend, no worse enemy.”
Likewise, French President Macron’s plea for the protection of humanitarian passageways: If you kill [Palestinian] non-combatant brothers and sisters in the name of eliminating Hamas, you are driving more people to adhere to their cause.
US President Joe Biden renounced “violence and vitriol” with equanimity in addressing the conflict, reminding us that America is “committed to dignity and self-determination” for everyone. A message linear to that of his predecessor, who on his first foreign visit, to the Arab world’s mightiest nation Saudi Arabia, noted in announcing the Global Center for Combating Violent Extremism, that its members are the ones to have “borne the brunt…of fanatical violence.”
Blinded by the dust of indiscriminate bombardments engulfing their green bandana-ed adversaries, those that are fighting, and have the attention of the Israeli people are in a position to influence relations and need to lift their war goggles and extend their hand to those the true side of history will say they are liberating.
Their dreams are our dreams, and as the most considerate interpretation of pro-Palestine demonstrations can offer, allowing everyone of all faiths to pursue their dreams is what we demand, just as we demand from ourselves every day, to do good and prosper in all our chosen endeavors.
Peace and safety to everyone who wants to live and make and exchange in harmony, as in outrage we all risk taking these for granted, and the most affected risk losing belief in humans completely.
