We Are All Humans Now

Members of the Olympia Community gathered for a funeral procession through the streets of Olympia in honor of those individuals killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza. In attendance were Craig and Cindy Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer in Raffah refugee camp in Gaza in 2001. I remember meeting the Nasrallah family, who’s home Rachel had been protecting when she was killed, with the Corries at the KAOS radio station in 2005. We were there for consecutive interviews. I remember looking painfully into the eyes of Samah Nasrallah and reaching for words to convey my good intentions to her. The feeling that I could not effectively communicate how much I supported them and their family and their community. I was struck by how helpless I felt. How I was left feeling powerless and disconnected.

In the days leading up to the procession on Saturday January 17th 2009, Gaza had been the target of the most mercilessly violent assault I have ever personally witnessed. In the name of national security, Israel had unleashed her arsenal of high tech high power weapons with tremendously destructive effect. Innocent and defenseless women and children and non-combatants representing those most devastatingly impacted. Images of dismembered children, eyes burned shut, legs reduced to stumps wrapped in bandages, lips clenched with pain and confusion streamed onto the internet. Segments on Al Jazeera told of medics so brave that they rushed back out into the streets to retrieve wounded as soon as their own injuries had been tended. One recounting the words of his lost comrade saying, even if he lost one of his own legs he would hop back into the streets to save the innocents. Israel shamelessly targeted these brave and devoted Palestinian medics, shooting at them as they attempted to retrieve the wounded.

Nothing was safe from the weapons of the IDF. UN schools where children huddled with their mothers in fear were hit, dozens died. Whole families were rounded up and herded into buildings where they were prevented from leaving when the shelling began, they died as they had lived, together. In the end even relief supplies, medicine and food, were hit. Burned by phosphorous munitions that are banned by international law for use in such a criminal fashion. Miles of roads were destroyed with heavy machinery, making a return to normal life impossible. The people of Gaza were in desperate straits before this assault, the blockade having reduced them to captives in a refugee camp. Now that refugee camp has been destroyed, detonated and inflamed with white phosphorous. Fathers and mothers like the Nasrallahs have lost children. Children are without parents and brothers and sisters. Whatever semblance of civility and normalcy there had been in Gaza, is now reduced to rubble.

When the trade towers fell in 2001, the citizens of the United States of America felt a distinct camaraderie. The flag that had been burned and torn in its decent from the top of the tallest building in Manhattan was raised up. The rally around the flag began. I wondered then as I do now; why that flag? I mean, why not the flag of NYC or New York State? Down the street the flags of every nation fly, why not the flag of the United Nations? Certainly people of many nationalities died that day. The strike may have been intended to hit US targets, but in the days of globalization it is easily argued that it was a strike against the western world as much as it was a strike on American soil.

On September 12, the Paris paper Le Monde printed 'We're all Americans now'. With this they bridged the Atlantic and the many political divides between the left in France and the rapidly right moving 21st century America. This was how they showed their deep concern for the horrors perpetrated that day, they had taken on the mantle of our national identity. But in the end, innocents in Afghanistan payed the price for this alignment. They could not claim to be Americans, and seek the protections and opportunities it affords.

When Russia rolled a column of vehicles through a tunnel into a disputed Georgian province, then candidate McCain stated with artificial meaning the same line with the substituted Georgians in place of Americans; 'We are all Georgians now.' In addition to wishing to rekindle the fears of Americans that had worked so well to keep Republicans in the white house in the intervening years, he was also wanting us to take sides. Choose a flag, choose an identity. In the end the apartment blocks burned in South Ossetia, and innocents died in the rubble.

I can only speak for myself. I have not been given any greater authority to speak than that. But what I see in Gaza today has led me to a different conclusion than those I cited above. The burned and tattered flag in this case is not a national flag, but the flag of humanity. I am not a Palestinian today, I am a human. I choose the human identity, the one that leads me to defend humanity from inhumanity. The identity that leads me to seek peace and prosperity and a future for all of our children that they can rejoice in. It is in this way that I end my isolation and empower myself to strengthen my connection with the Nasrallah family and all of those good and noble who have lost so much in Gaza. It is not up to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Israel, it is up to all of us. After all; ‘We are all humans now’.

Thoughts on Gaza

Language prevents us from understanding these events well enough to stop them or prevent them. The details of the truce and the rocket fire and the settlement agreements would matter very much if all parties to the conflict agreed that justice should determine the outcome. Contrarily, the parties have allowed their ideologies to extinguish their idealism.

I have a natural predisposition as an Irish Catholic to hold in high regard militant resistance, it is a romantic appeal that circumvents my rational mind. It is evident that many people of Jewish descent are quite satisfied to see a nuclear armed Israel pummeling its helpless neighbors with the most advanced weaponry on earth, immune to the worlds castigation. These emotions crush our humanity.

Through a carefully crafted campaign, we have all been deceived into believing that the two state solution is the just outcome, and the parties need only follow a roadmap to peace. This language is intended to beguile us, making real peace and justice impossible. In reality the two state solution is a cover for genocide, the roadmap to peace is a gilded veil for strategic warfare. Separate but equal is a conception of ruthless oppression. The strategists use language to conceal their treachery in the guise of law and order and self defense.

Without question there are individuals worthy of condemnation who claim to be acting on behalf of Palestinians. This in no way indicates a moral equivalency between the actions of the Palestinian people and the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces. As was the case when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, civilians are the target of Israeli fire. Any analysis of available statistics will support this conclusion; Israel intentionally kills civilians. They kill children because they will grow up to be militants, they kill women because they will bear more children to replace those killed. I say this without hesitation and with every confidence that it is a stated objective within the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. I do not defend the firing of primitive rockets into Israel, they are the consequence of failed Israeli policy, and serve the Israeli government far better than they threaten the Israeli people or further the cause of the Palestinians.

Israel has a national policy of genocide. Israel has a national policy of demonizing and dehumanizing its enemies. Israel undertakes psychological operations to manipulate political figures and the press in Europe and America to further its agenda. Any attempt to excuse Israeli actions in Lebanon or in Gaza is a dishonest effort born of an ideological loyalty to the state of Israel that will not be altered by empirical evidence. I conclude this as a result of careful analysis and not as a result of any ideological discrimination against Israel based on the race or religion of its citizens.

Palestinians are Semites. I reject any accusations of anti-semitism. I reject ideology that does not modify itself based upon empirical evidence that stands to contradict it. I oppose the willful murder of women and children and non-combatants to further any ideology, wether it be Zionism or America's own Manifest Destiny. I will never weaken my condemnation of the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces by equivocating their actions with the actions of the resistance in Palestine. I vehemently support and defend the right of individuals to participate peacefully in the conduct of global affairs, and I further support and defend the right of peoples to take arms in their own defense when their lives and liberty and culture and ancestral land is threatened by force, even when it is overwhelming force. I strongly and unequivocally support the people's resistance in Palestine.

I remember when Israel withdrew from gaza, and the analogy of the huge open air prison came into common parlance. The thought of families crowded into refugee camps become slum cities, dependent upon hostile and unsympathetic neighbors to provide them the necessities: fuel, water, electricity, medicine. The rumor at the time was that it was part of a larger plan, a model devised by Israeli strategists. They would be back with a vengeance when the opportunity presented itself.

The duplicitous goal of Israel has historically been to demonize the Palestinian natives while simultaneously ruthlessly destroying their way of life. There has been no hint of shame from Israel nor from her allies. These include, of course, the United States of America, after all she too demonized and destroyed her natives. What surely cannot be said is that Israel has any greater right to exist than the native peoples of Palestine, additionally it cannot be said that Israel is a democracy in any meaningful way. Israel is a state of entitlements based upon loyalty and blood.

At one time Judaism was a bastion of the disputative process. Today the skills developed over generations of devoted intellectualism are being bent and misshapen to sophisticatedly defend the indefensible. The sophists are equipped and willing to defend their cause regardless of its failure to adhere to the truth. Today Israel and her apologists are careful and calculated with their language, knowing that truth and morality and the demography of the future are not on their side.

The Israelis have been offering 'warnings' to civilians to abandon their homes in the north and the south of Gaza. Wether the effected families heed these warnings and run for their lives or not, Israeli military operations proceed, killing or wounding anyone who might have stayed behind. Should medics attempt a rescue of wounded civilians they too are fired upon. Once these military operations are complete, Israel is bulldozing the homes that have been emptied.

This is not an attempt to end the firing of Hamas rockets into Israel. This operation is an attempt to humiliate the Palestinian people, punish them for their election of the political party Hamas, and further the careers of Israeli politicians, effectively wiping their defeat in Lebanon out of the minds of the Israeli populous.

These events are extremely painful to witness, and the natural instinct for those of us so removed from them is to deny them or manufacture simple exculpatory conclusions that do not abide by the facts. There is no question that war crimes are being committed, and that we and our government are complicit. What is most painful is to witness Israeli and US officials reading intentionally deceitful talking points that are designed to sophisticatedly mislead and mischaracterize. These are the most brazen crimes, even beyond those crimes of warfare, crimes of deep deceit. Those of us who vehemently condemn these acts are in good company, and as long as our resistance is unrelenting we will be remembered fondly. Our condemnations should be unequivocal, these crimes are inexcusable. The merciless killing of captive civilian refugees with the most advanced and destructive weapons ever devised by humanity is infinitely amplified by the brazen and heartless defense made by the well groomed masters of humanity in Washington DC and Tel Aviv. If we allow these crimes to be committed in our silent midst, we are in a meaningful way as culpable.

In Defense of the Liberal

What is the nature of the liberal?

The liberal is by nature an empiricist when acquiring knowledge, and a pragmatist when dispensing power. That is, their opinions and intentions develop as a consequence of their experience. The experience of the liberal precedes the opinion of the liberal. In action, the liberal is pragmatic. I mean that the good intended is weighed against the risk of bad consequence. The efforts of the liberal are calculated. In this way we separate the liberal from those who act on principle or from some ideological drive in other guise.

When the liberal is most native, she is completely free from the drives of ideology or the dictates of principle.

What is it that inspires the liberal?

The universal position occupied by the liberal mind, wherein all investment in particular outcome has been resigned in order to enable an unencumbered pursuit of truth, and all attachment to ideological certainty has been forgotten in favor of a willingness to modify one’s position as a consequence of empirical evidence.

The liberal is propelled by their own liberation from the oppression of ideology.

What can clearly be said of the liberal?

The liberal is always under attack, not from some diametrically lateral enemy, but from all sides. Every corner of the political universe must vent its unrequited resentment on the liberal. The liberal is most easily discerned amid the melee by the patient repose exhibited. The liberal listens most carefully to those who are attacking them most vigorously, and never hesitates to applaud the detractor who levels an especially sound criticism.

The liberal is most commonly observed in contemplation or observation, and is rarely observed in action.

What is the desire and expectation of the liberal?

The liberal desires a precise, transparent and honest interpretation of the world as it is. Her good action results from a good interpretation of good information. Regarding expectation, the liberal attempts freedom from it. Whereas desire exists purely in the present, expectation attaches the present to some inaccurately anticipated future.

It is the freedom from false expectation that enables the liberal to authentically desire the truth.

Does the liberal understand liberalism to be an ideal?

The liberal is an idealist, that is, she believes that ideals can be discerned and should guide decision making. The liberal does not believe liberalism itself to be an ideal, but liberalism is the attempt to act from idealism. This is how idealism is distinguished from ideology. Ideology is the rigid adherence to a single ideal at the expense of others.
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Liberalism is an attempt to act from idealism, idealism is dispelled by ideology, ideology is the enemy of liberalism.

What outcome does the liberal seek?

The liberal seeks resolution and in broader terms, progress. Whereas the ideologue seeks to convince others of his position, the liberal is burdened with the arduous task of remaining sincerely and willingly engaged with the other while simultaneously defending the position she has determined to be best. It is this effort, not to persuade with rhetoric or compel with force, but to transparently engage and modify based on sincere empirical analysis that is the signature of the liberal.

The liberal is as open to having their own mind changed, as they are to changing the mind of another.

What dangers threaten the liberal?

As a consequence of the transcendent strength afforded the liberal by the universal position she occupies, the liberal has little to fear. The most common affliction of the liberal is inaction, her contemplation must be effectively punctuated with action, or the liberal will cease to exist entirely. Always there will additionally appear the temptation to abandon the universal position in favor of one or another sweet scented ideological position. There is an almost irresistible urge in every human to abandon the pursuit of truth for the warm embrace of certainty; many a liberal has suffered this ignominious demise.

The liberal is most threatened by the perils of inaction and the temptation of ideological certainty.

What does the liberal reject?

The liberal rejects without hesitation all forms of cynicism. The sallow nihilist is a gray shadow of the liberal, unwilling and unengaged. At the heart of liberalism is the sanguineness spirit, called to invent hope out of despair, compelled in inexorable propulsion to experience the absolute joy of existence.

Though the liberal in the ever hopeful pursuit of truth may run the risk of inaction, or suffer the ignoble surrender to ideology, she is immune to cynicism by virtue of her spirit.