Fear and Loathing, both With Hummus and Without It

"The root cause of terrorism lies not in grievances but in a disposition toward unbridled violence. This can be traced to a world view which asserts that certain ideological and religious goals justify, indeed demand, the shedding of all moral inhibitions.”—Benjamin Netanyahu, 1987  (article in Awake! magazine in 1987, entitled "Terrorism, How the West Can Win")

We have observed many, many times since the events of September 11, 2001, when a handful of Islamic extremists from a handful of countries with strong ties to the United States (most notably our putative ally Saudi Arabia) violently commandeered four commercial airline flights, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center, and murdered just under 3,000 innocent people for the sole purpose of spreading fear and panic in the non-Muslim world, that the terrorists have already won.
It’s the simple truth.

They had one goal – instill fear.  They accomplished it.  And our response was as predictable as it has been lamentable – we have debased ourselves to their level.

We began our musings with a quote from a state-sponsored terrorist with an officially sanctioned position (Benjamin Netanyahu, whose criminal policies in the West Bank and Gaza constitute morally uninhibited ideological, religious, and racist warfare on a daily basis) for an obvious and perhaps even overly sophist oratorical reason – we wish to demonstrate in as unequivocal a way as possible that there is very little difference between the barbaric criminality of those whom we marginalize with the label “terrorist” and those who promulgate government sanctioned policies whose innate character can only be described as violent, immoral and base.

The real irony, the sad kick-in-the-pants to any theory that human beings are self-aware or even remotely sentient, is that along with Netanyahu, the vast majority of supporters of Israel are incapable of reading that Bibi quote from 1987 and seeing the utter hypocrisy and racism which form the entire basis for his statement.  The very title of the article screams it – “…How the West Can Win” means “Terrorism” is of the East.

Newsflash, for Zionists/racists (and while we are only discussing Zionist racism here, rest assured, the same thing applies to Arab racists, who are no less guilty, and also applies to White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant racists, whose pro-Israel stance is biblical, and based on the idea that Jews are their “favorite heathens”) – terrorism is a state of mind, not a political affiliation.

The most active terrorists in the United States are white male militia members.  The most prominent terrorist ever taken on by the U.S. Justice Department was a Jewish racist named Meir Kahane.  Osama Bin Laden?  Bad guy.  But in the same category as WASP and Jewish bad guys.  Bin Laden’s race and religion and geographical point-of-origin had nothing to do with his being a “terrorist”.  His belief in his own theological superiority over others placing him above the law?  That is what made him a terrorist.  It is also exactly the same justification which Netanyahu uses to keep embargoes in place denying food and medical assistance to Palestinian residents of Gaza, which is every bit as sequestered as the ghettos of Johannesburg were during South African apartheid.  The slow starvation and strangulation of the Palestinian people in the Levant?  Why are we supposed to differentiate

Fanatical murderous terrorist.
Would you have known if we didn't tell you?

this from the crime of flying a plane into a building?

The counterarguments come fast and furious, of course, and backed by large money contracts to some of the finest PR firms in the history of advertising and spin-control.  “Israel has every right to defend itself,” etc.

And there is a limited degree of truth to that.

Rocket attacks (even with homemade rockets that exhibit the crudest of ineffectual home-grown engineering efforts) threaten Israeli civilians in an unjustifiable way.  The threat of random violence committed by Palestinian terrorists is a very real problem, and tasked with making its people as secure as possible is a job for which the Israeli government is ultimately and rightly held responsible.

That does not, however, mean that the Israeli people have the right to incur the kinds of depredations they have taken upon the Palestinian people.  Wholesale theft of land, embargo against free movement, denial of freedom to seek employment, jailing without writ of habeas corpus, taxation without representation, summary execution with no criminal court recourse against those responsible… these are all things that caused American colonists to rise up against British oppressors in the 1770s… so why on Earth do Americans have a problem with Palestinians rising up against Israeli oppressors?

We’ll give you three guesses, and any guesses not involving race and religion do not count.

There are simply no other viable explanations for the culturally ubiquitous opinions of the typical American citizen who has not spent time in multiple graduate-level seminars reviewing the various documentation surrounding respective Israeli-on-Palestinian and Palestinian-on-Israeli crimes over the 75 or so years since this conflict first began.

Note we are not claiming that Israel is 100% culpable – there are plenty of examples of Palestinians performing feats of cruelty and inhumanity which are simply unforgivable.  The Olympic hostage crisis alone demonstrates a degree of sociopathology which defies belief.  But on balance… it is the repeated election of racist, violent, criminal government officials on the part of the people of Israel, coupled with their superior economic and military power, that makes them more culpable.

C.S. Lewis (himself a racist, of course, but that’s a topic for another time) summarizes the dictum for who holds primary responsibility in a power struggle for making sure that all persons are respected:  “Never taunt your enemy unless he has the advantage of you.  Then, as you please.”

Of course, there are those who suggest even trying to hold out a measure of blame is inflammatory and unhelpful.  We are sympathetic to this point of view, even if we disagree with it.  The chief objective of those who say do not attempt to apportion blame is to ensure that a solution is sought, rather than to attempt for retribution or any sort of punitive justice, and to this we say ‘amen’.

Along those lines, the authors of “Jerusalem – A Cookbook” (Yotam Ottolenghi, Jewish chef who was raised in Jerusalem, and Sami Tamimi, Muslim chef who was raised in Jerusalem) argue that “…if anything will bring these people together, it will be hummus.”  While they themselves describe this belief as ‘probably naïve’ it is nevertheless the best we may be able to cling to, for the time being.
It is important in the interim, before culture can win the day, that we do not lose sight of speaking truth to power.  The unspoken assumption for most of America, for as long as we can remember, has been that the United States and Israel are “friends forever” and that Israel is right and the Muslim world is wrong.

That ridiculous way of looking at things needs to end, yesterday.  Israel has been wrong for a very, very long time now.  The longer we stand in the way of changing that, the worse it will be for everyone.

We’ll get back to gardening talk soon, we promise, but this has been sticking in our craw for a while now, and had to be said.

Happy farming!