Op-Ed

I call it “naked insanity,” as in: the emperor has no clothes.

He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom — not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons . . . and the threat to use them! Hence: climate change, a.k.a., ecocide.

I stroke the unknown,

the dark silence, the

soul of a mother. I

pray, if that’s what

prayer is: to stir the certainties of

pride and flag and brittle

God, to stir

the hollow lost.

I pray open

the big craters

and trenches of

obedience and manhood.

This is the beginning of a poem I wrote a few years ago. I called it “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side,” by which I meant “Mom! The world’s all messed up. Can you fix it?”

Now is the time

to cherish the apple,

to touch the wound and love even

the turned cheeks and bullet tips,

to swaddle anew

the helpless future

and know

and not know

what happens next.

Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free.

“Snort! No one wants this! It’s not possible — it’s not true!”

My reply to the cynics is this: We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security — we will not evolve — if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty. Our god is better than your god!

I acknowledge from the start: This is not a simple process, any more than America’s reluctant embrace of the civil rights movement was, or is, simple. But armed dehumanization — which is to say war, hatred, ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure, endless slaughter, the murder of children, genocide — is neither “simple” nor the least bit effective in creating a world that is safe for anyone. War and hatred perpetuate nothing but themselves. You know that, right?

Israel fooled everyone and Dublin fooled me. First, Israel claimed with zero evidence that Hamas has beheaded 40 babies and raped hundreds of women on October 7 and even got President Biden to claim he saw it! When the world heard the news, American, European, and Latin American mercenaries were recruited and rushed to Israel to fight its dirty war. That was precisely the reason why Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire. Because of the feeling of shame and guilt of knowing that his fellow soldiers were secretly on the ground in Gaza participating in the genocide. 

Then comes the city of Dublin's publicity stunt. It began on this month on March 8 when I received this email from  Brother Imran Malik, local Muslim leader that says in part, "The city of Dublin will light the Dublin Link as Green and White to welcome the holy month of Ramadan for the Muslim community of Central Ohio on Sunday March 10th, 2024, at Sunset. Please join us at the Dublin Link Bridge around 7 pm for a celebrating this communal joy together."

Oh Lord, kumbaya . . .

As I absorb the daily news of war and global devastation, I sing these words to myself — quietly, yes, secretly, lest I ignite instant flash-bang sarcasm from the surrounding world. What next? A flower in a rifle barrel?

Sarcasm spits in the face of idealism — a.k.a., “feelgood-ism” — and life goes on. Any questions? Sure, war is hell and all that, especially when the bad guys wage it, but sitting around the campfire and lamenting musically for global niceness is a sin against our military budget. Don’t be silly. We need to protect ourselves.

In a conversation in 2020 with Princeton Professor Emeritus, Richard Falk, he told me that historically, colonized nations that have won the legitimacy war have always won their freedom. 

 Palestine is unlikely to be the exception. The Gaza war, however, is confronting the world with an unprecedented challenge, specifically to governments’ relationship with international law, their obligations to international institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and others. 

The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West. 

 As soon as the Israeli war began, following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its western allies supposedly held dear was suddenly dropped. Western leaders rushed to Israel, one after the other, offering military, political and intelligence support - along with a blank check to rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals to torment the Palestinians.  

 The likes of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, went as far as joining Israel’s first war council meeting, so that he could take part in the discussion which directly resulted in the Gaza genocide. 

The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible.

I’m thinking about the recent protest death of Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire — doused himself in flammable liquid, lit a match and ignited himself — in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. this past Sunday, Feb. 24. The last words he shouted were “Free Palestine!”

No, this is not the first such death. Over the centuries — and particularly in recent decades, since the Vietnam war — a number of people, spiritually distraught over war or other social conditions, have killed themselves in protest by self-immolation . . . that is, in the most painful way imaginable. You might say they entered hell of their own accord. Why? The question tears at the soul.

Excuse me as I ponder eternity — briefly.

Like it or not, this is the essence of . . . uh, aging. As I wrote a year ago: “. . . once you actually hit it — that three letter word, ‘old’ — watch out: ‘An aged man (as Wiiliam Butler Yeats pointed out, as he sailed poetically to Byzantium) is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick . . .’”

Nonetheless, hooray for my good fortune! I’ve been dancing around at age 77 for a while now, and before I start complaining about the aches and pains that come with it, I have to acknowledge — indeed, revere — the mere fact of making it this far. So many people don’t, due to the random will of fate, but also due to the hell of war, which remains humanity’s cancerous addiction. How can I complain when the bombs I help pay for are killing children?

"If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long," famed linguist and cultural critic Noam Chomsky wrote in an essay published in Z Magazine in October 1997. 

 The essay, entitled, 'What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", appeared before social media took off to the point it became essential to the formation of our modern culture. 

 Facebook arrived in 2004. A year later, YouTube was launched, followed by Twitter, now X. 

 With time, what may have started as creative or even juvenile digital phenomena became defining elements in our perception of ourselves, each other and the world at large. 

 Before the exponential growth of social media, the internet had numerous, but understandable, challenges pertaining to access, rules and regulations, financial viability, copyrights, social inequality and the like. 

“Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital . . .”

No, this is not the official “you are now entering Dearborn, Michigan” sign, at the corner of Michigan and Wyoming avenues, or whatever. This prosperous Detroit suburb — not only the hometown of Henry Ford but my hometown as well, the place where I grew up —which has one of the largest Arab-American populations in North America, was recently the target of a snarky, racist op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. The above words were its title.