Running Out of Other Hands

There's lots of blame to go around, that much is certain. What is also certain is there is not a single justification for what took place in Israel, across the border from Gaza on October 7, 2023.

None whatsoever. 

They call it Israel's 9/11 which is really saying something about a country whose entire existence has been defined by war and terror. In my opinion, in the scope of sheer depravity if not body count, 10/7 was worse. 

On that dreadful day, at this writing, three weeks ago, members of the terrorist organization Hamas, standing eye-to-eye with their victims, mostly ordinary Israeli citizens, tortured, raped, and butchered close to 1,500 people. Some were intentionally burned alive while hiding in their homes. Others were beheaded. Bodies of victims were desecrated. Many who were not killed were taken hostage. No one was spared, not the elderly, not the infirm, not children.

I'm not going to go into all the horrific details because information on that is everywhere. 

All I will say is that it takes a special kind of monster to kill parents in front of their children, not to mention all the other atrocities that took place that day.

Almost as disturbing were the scores of public acts around the world including the U.S., where people who support the Palestinian cause (a just cause in my opinion), openly celebrated the 10/7 attacks, claiming they were a legitimate response to Israeli policies.

If torture, rape and slaughter of innocent people, and cheering it all on aren't bad enough, for author/neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris, there is another atrocity that trumps them all, the use of human shields. In his words:

I’m talking about people who will strategically put their own noncombatants, their own women and children, into the line of fire so that they can inflict further violence upon their enemies, knowing that their enemies have a more civilized moral code that will render them reluctant to shoot back, for fear of killing or maiming innocent noncombatants.

This is taken from a transcript of Harris's recent podcast on the 10/7 attacks titled: The Sin of Moral Equivalence.  In the podcast, he notes that while ethics and morality take on different forms depending upon one's culture and religion, human civilization has advanced to the point where there are certain fundamental moral laws in our day an age, that nearly everyone accepts. It is generally agreed for example that it is wrong to kill (unless absolutely unavoidable), or to rape (in any circumstance), or to torture, or to take hostages, or to revel in such acts. And it is beyond wrong to use innocent people as shields to protect oneself from committing these crimes.

Therefore according to Harris, there is not any moral equivalence between the violent acts of Hamas, and the violent acts of Israel, who is merely attempting to defend itself. In his words: "Intentions count." 

I agree.

But he raises a few eyebrows with the following:

In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.

To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture­ in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible.

The problem is we could argue all day about whose culture is the morally superior, but in the end, we're still left with the question of what to do about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. 

I'm sure it makes little difference to the victims of the 10/7 attack, or the Israeli response to it, (over 5,000 people killed in Gaza at this writing), whether their or their loved one's killer was morally superior or inferior to the killers on the other side.

We can pick sides and argue until we're blue in the face as to who's cause is more valid, which side is responsible for more atrocities, and what group is more entitled to call the small patch of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, home.

Or we can go back and forth justifying the actions of both sides until we run out of other hands, as I certainly have after the 10/7 attack.

But in the end, there are only two realities that matter: 

Israel is here to stay and so are the Palestinians. We can either go on as we have for 75 years living with an unending cycle of violence and death, or somehow, someway come up with a solution for the Israelis and Palestinians to find a way to live together in relative peace.

Yes I know, that sounds very kumbaya of me but in all honesty, short of the mass eviction or genocide of one or both of the groups that call that land (whatever you want to call it) home, can you think of any other scenario?

No, I'm not presumptuous enough to claim to have an answer to this conflict. All I know is that it is not as some suggest a struggle between right and wrong, between good and evil. If it were, it would be an easy choice for those of us who haven't a personal stake in the issue to pick sides, like the other war we're dealing with in Ukraine. Nevertheless, many do pick sides without giving the other side the benefit of at least trying to walk in their shoes, even for a brief moment. 

To be sure there are very bad, perhaps evil actors involved in the current struggle in the Middle East, but the truth is that both sides have legitimate arguments that need to be listened to and respected, especially by each other.

In all his wisdom, Sam Harris makes no bones about which side he's on, which is certainly his prerogative. But in doing so, he illustrates much of the disconnect we have going on right now on both sides regarding this issue. 

While denying moral equivalence between the 10/7 attacks and Israel's response, Harris pays lip service to some of the issues Palestinians have, mentioning the:

the growth of (Israeli) settlements, (and) the daily humiliation of living under occupation.

 But then he adds:

Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.

This is a half-truth. While it's true that previous to the 10/7 attacks, Israeli forces were not occupying Gaza from the inside, Israel has blockaded the region, walled it off, controlling its air and maritime space, six of seven of its land borders, and as we've seen during this conflict, complete control of Gaza's utilities including water, electricity and telecommunications.

Harris's comments dismiss the dreadful conditions people have lived through in Gaza leading some to declare it, an "open air prison." And that was before Israel's current air bombardment and impending ground invasion, which have made it a living hell on earth. 

In all fairness it must be stated that a great deal of the suffering of the people of Gaza has been exacerbated by Hamas who has been the governing body there since 2007, and has been using the territory to launch missile strikes against Israel.

Sam Harris is not alone in his selective reading of history, In virtually all the assessments of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I've read on both sides of the issue, the authors use charged language consisting of half-truths, false equivalences, conflation and other rhetorical devices crafted for the purpose of minimizing the suffering of and dehumanizing the other side.  

Folks taking the Palestinian side for example like to use provocative terms charging Israel with "imperialism" "settler colonialism", "racism", "occupation", "ethnic cleansing", "apartheid" and even "fascism". These are fighting words, terms designed to ring a bell by conflating Israel's treatment of the Palestinians with familiar grievous atrocities that have taken place throughout history such as the European conquest of the Americas, Apartheid South Africa, the brutal war in the Balkans in the nineties, and the quintessential symbol of evil, Nazi Germany.

Like Sam Hariis's occupation remark, while not entirely off the mark, these are half-truths that tell only part of the story. Israel is indeed guilty of committing grievous atrocities against the Palestinian people. What the folks who use these terms conveniently leave out, are the grievous atrocities carried out against Israelis by terrorist organizations acting, or so they claim, in the name of the Palestinian people.

Also conveniently not mentioned is the terrible history of racism and oppression against the Jewish people, culminating in the Holocaust which was the final straw that made the establishment of the State of Israel, a fait accompli.

On the other side, in a 1969 interview, then Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said this: "There was no such thing as Palestinians."  She went on:

When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist. (Emphasis mine)

What she says here with the exception of the last sentence, is not entirely without merit. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the territory of Palestine had been under the control of the colonial powers of Great Britain, the Ottoman Turks, several other Muslim groups broken up for a brief period by European Crusaders, the Byzantine Empire, the Romans, (with brief interludes of Jewish rule), the Greeks, the Babylonians and the Persians. That takes us back to about 600 B.C.E. when the Hebrews still ruled over much of the area when the Egyptians weren't calling the shots. In none of that time was there a Palestinian state governed by a people called the Palestinians.   

According to Meir's framework, the people who came to be known as Palestinians, were simply Arabs who happened to live in Palestine. As such they were subjects of the imperial powers mentioned above and were referred to as Palestinian Arabs. Golda Meir compares these people to the Jews like her, who lived in Palestine before 1948, and were referred to as Palestinian Jews. 

So she's right in that there was never a Palestinian state. Other commentators point out that even the word Palestine is a Greek, not an Arab word. 

Golda Meir spent years backpedaling her remark but the idea of a lack of a true Palestinian identity has been picked up by many hardline defenders of Israel and has been the foundation of their argument that the people who identify themselves as Palestinians have no legitimate case. In their view, they are simply Arabs who should live with other Arabs in places like Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. 

The germ of that argument may be factually true, but in its entirety the argument can be refuted in two words: so what? 

Before World War I, about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs lived in the region as had their ancestors before them for millennia. There was no mass migration of Arab people into Palestine, no one date when we can say the Arabs arrived in Palestine. Modern day Palestinians can legitimately trace at least part of their ancestry to the region back to the time of Abraham and before.

As can the Jews.

The Arabs of Palestine had their own towns, farms and way of life. They bonded as a community. They had developed their own culture and language, one of the many dialects of Arabic. And they lived in peace with members of the Jewish minority who had remained after the mass exodus during the first century C.E. after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. 

That all changed after World War I as the massive immigration of Jewish people into Palestine, made possible by Great Britain with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which declared British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the region, which completely changed the demographics of Palestine. 

Tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians were evicted from their homes and forced into exile, communities were destroyed, olive trees that provided Palestinian families their sustenance for centuries were uprooted, and entire towns were leveled. One incident was so horrific, The Deir Yessin Massacre, the obliteration of an Arab town near Jerusalem by radical Israeli terrorists, that it bears resemblance to what happened three weeks ago outside of Gaza, again if not in body count, in terms of sheer depravity. Remember as Sam Harris pointed out, intentions count. 

Today, Jewish people from every corner of the planet who have never set foot in the place are welcome to move to Israel upon which they automatically become citizens, yet Arab people who were born there and have since left for whatever reason, are denied that right.

I could go on forever describing sins of the past and present but what's the point?

The question of the day is where do we go from here?

Among the people making the rounds on the interview circuit in the past month is the Israeli author and historian Yuval Noah Harrari, who has friends and family members in Kibbutz Be-eri who were victims of the 10/7 massacre.

Harrari has been a strong critic of the current government in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Harrari is a populist, conspiracy theory driven strongman with aims to divide Israelis in order to shore up his own power. (sound familiar?). Harrari directly attributes the "success" of the Hamas 10/7 assault to the distraction caused by Israeli political infighting which led to a breakdown of security forces and Israeli intelligence resulting in letting their guard down, enabling the Hamas terrorists to cross the heavily defended border virtually unencumbered. 

 

Harrari also finds Israel's response to the attack unacceptable. While he agrees that Hamas must be dealt with severely, he doesn't agree with the hard liners' stance that the terrorist group must be annihilated. 

Beyond the obvious moral ramifications of killing thousands of innocent Palestinians in order to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, there are strong tactical points that should be considered using Harrari's logic. 

Hamas knew exactly what Israel's response would be to their 10/7 attack, and Israel is playing right into their hands. Hamas on its own has no chance to stand up militarily to the mighty Israeli armed forces. But they know that thousands of dead Palestinians at the hands of Israel will further harden the hearts of the remaining Palestinians to the thought of a negotiated peace, and turn much of the world against Israel. In this sense, every dead Palestinian at the hands of Israel is a victory for Hamas, whose stated goal is the replacement of Israel by an Islamic state. 

Annihilating Hamas, if that is even remotely possible, would inevitably result in the deaths of several more tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and the displacement of millions. With Hamas gone at the cost of all those lives, something will inevitably arise to take its place. Something that is, that will probably be much worse. 

Demanding justice is a normal, fundamental human desire. But Yuval Harrari poses this question: what is more important, justice or peace? There will never be traditional eye-for-eye justice for the 10/7 attack, just as there will never be justice for 9/11, Deir Yessin, or the Holocaust. 

The only real justice for the victims of these atrocities is to do everything in our power to ensure they never happen again. 

Justice in the form of retribution only leads to more retribution, an unending cycle, just as we've had in the past 75 years. 

Harrari proposes a rekindling of the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia that were looking very promising up until 10/7, in fact he speculates their very existence was one of the prime motivations for the attacks. The last thing Hamas, a jihadist organization wants is peace with Israel.

Then in Harrari's words, with a 

coalition of the willing – ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority – should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.

With a rebuilt Gaza, and assurances from Israel to keep their hands off, maybe, just maybe there will be some hope for the future among Palestinians and the possibility that one day they will be able to live with dignity. And if that happens, maybe just maybe, Hamas and other similar groups will be seen for the truly needless destruction they cause and will be rendered irrelevant.

Yes it's farfetched but it's an infinitely better scenario then simply blasting Gaza to kingdom come, which is what we are experiencing now. 

But peace won't come unless attitudes on both sides change. 

Moshe Dayan was a formidable Israeli military leader and politician from the state's founding until his death in 1981. In 1956, he delivered the eulogy of a fallen comrade killed outside his kibbutz near Gaza by Palestinian fedayeen. Defining the reality and the terrible moral compromise forged with the establishment of the State of Israel, Dayan's words are resolute, yet filled with self-reflection and anguish:

Let us not condemn the murderers. What do we know of their fierce hatred for us? For eight years they have been living in the refugee camps of Gaza, while right before their eyes we have been turning the land and the villages, in which they and their forefathers lived, into our land.

Not from the Arabs of Gaza must we demand the blood of Roi, but from ourselves. How our eyes are closed to the reality of our fate, unwilling to see the destiny of our generation in its full cruelty. Have we forgotten that this small band of youths, settled in Nahal Oz, carries on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, beyond which hundreds of thousands of eyes and arms huddle together and pray for the onset of our weakness so that they may tear us to pieces — has this been forgotten? For we know that if the hope of our destruction is to perish, we must be, morning and evening, armed and ready.

Imagine that kind of honesty coming out of the mouth of ANY politician today, let alone one involved in the Israel/Palestine crisis.

Compare Dayan's words to these words addressed to the Palestinians, of Israel's current finance minister Bezalel Smotrich:

you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion (Israel’s first prime minister) didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out.

Clearly we not only need to disarm organizations like Hamas, but we also need to encourage the Israeli and the Palestinian people to stop choosing religious-zealot-extremists to lead them, as leadership on both sides has tragically failed its people.

As I said above, Israel and the Palestinian people are here to stay, despite the rantings of sociopathic lunatics.

We need to tone down the rhetoric and be willing to listen to different voices to try to understand our adversaries, instead of demonizing or dehumanizing them. 

Most of all, rather than declaring ourselves on the side of the Palestinians or the Israelis, all people of good will should declare ourselves to be on the side of peace.

I'm not at all optimistic peace will come, but what other choice do we have?

Some memories and a prayer for peace

This summer, my son and I visited the National September 11 Memorial, the magnificent tribute to the victims of the terror attacks built on the site of Ground Zero, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood in lower Manhattan. In case you missed it, here is my post about that visit.

Exactly ten years ago, New York Times Op Ed columnist Frank Rich wrote an article describing what in his opinion was America "letting go" of the events of September 11, 2001. To illustrate his point, he used a photograph made by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker of five young adults sitting on the banks of the East River, engaged in what appeared to be casual conversation while behind them, smoke billowed from the site where the World Trade Center stood just hours before. Rich's point was that not only had the country moved on from the tragedy after five years, but the folks in the photograph had already moved on that very day. Here's his assessment of the American character based upon that one photograph:

Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American.

Rich turned out to be dead wrong about the picture. Ten years after his article, one would be hard pressed to support his assumption that this country as a whole has gotten over 9/11. Yes there are exceptions, you can read about some of them in my post written five years ago on the tenth anniversary. 

Hard to believe, but today is the fifteenth anniversary of that terrible day. We continue to remember the victims, the places where they perished, Shanksville, PA., Washington D.C. and New York City, their loved ones, and the people who suffered and died in the wars that followed. In doing so we pray for peace in the world, an end to suffering and violence, and a time of understanding between nations and peoples. We most certainly will not see this come to pass in our lifetime, most likely not in our children's lifetimes, and possibly not ever, but it is our duty as citizens of the world to try.

How can we not?

In memory of that day, please indulge my quoting words that come from faith, but words I believe speak to all men and women of good will, regardless of their creed or lack of one, words that define what it means to be a human being.

The prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

Peace.

One man's lunatic...

Colin Friedersdorf wrote this article with the provocative title "Why the Reaction Is Different When the Terrorist Is White" which appeared in the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago. It was inspired by news media's response, or lack of one, after the tragedy that occurred in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. It was there a white supremacist entered a Sikh house of worship, murdered six people, and injured several more before he took his own life. Since he's dead we'll never know exactly why he committed the atrocious crime; did he have a bone to pick with Sikhs, did he confuse Sikh people with Muslims, or was he simply an equal opportunity hater of everyone who was not like him?

Friedersdorf begins his article by comparing the crime to one that happened just weeks earlier in Aurora, Colorado, where a man shot and killed twelve people and injured nearly one hundred more in a theater showing the new Batman movie. The author claims the Colorado tragedy received far more coverage than the Wisconsin one, and speculates with the help of another Atlantic journalist, that the reason is more Americans can relate to the victims in the movie theater than those in the Sikh temple.

Here is another article from the New Yorker, written by Professor Naunihal Singh, himself a member of the Sikh community, who also feels the Oak Creek tragedy got the short shrift.

I'm not much of a follower of TV news. I get most of my news from other people, from the radio, newspapers and select internet sources. Consequently I'm spared the 24 hour cycle of TV news babble with their constant "breaking news" headlines and hyperventilating, live, on the scene reporters. Since I don't have cable, unlike many of my peers I get zero news from the late night comedy/news shows. So I can't honestly say which story got more press. My own experience of those two events was of the airwaves being filled with incessant information, much of it unnecessary, about both tragedies. Many times during the past month I found myself turning off the radio or TV to spare my children the grizzly details. Personally, the Oak Creek tragedy affected me more as A) It took place closer to where I live, B) the victims were targeted for their ethnicity and religion and C) you'd be way more likely to find me attending a Sikh religious ceremony than a midnight screening of Batman.

I recall another article from right after the Colorado shooting, but not the source, that asked the question: why in the media, when a Muslim commits a crime he is labelled terrorist, when a black man commits a crime he's labelled a thug, and when a white man commits a crime he's labelled sick.

Granted I'm not a psychologist, but the Colorado killer who is white, armed with an arsenal of assault weapons, shot dozens of random strangers in a dark theater while dressed up as the Joker, is clearly a lunatic. Of that I have no doubt. A terrorist by contrast is not insane; a terrorist, whatever the color of his skin, does harm to innocent people in the name of a cause. As has been said countless times before, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, it all depends which side you're on. While he may or not have been insane or acted on his own, given his background of racial and ethnic hatred, the Oak Creek murderer targeted a specific community and consequently was a terrorist. And he was white. So much for that theory. As screwed up as the news media is, to the best of my knowledge, no reasonable journalist has attempted to portray him in a sympathetic light or tried to find excuses for his actions based on his mental health.

Timothy McVeigh who destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and with it the lives of 168 people and their families was a white terrorist, as was his accomplice,Terry Nichols. At the time, that bombing was the worst act of terrorism in the United States and the Feds went after extremist groups such as Nichols's and McVeigh's with a vengeance. The indelible image of a dying child in the arms of a rescuer galvanized the public's opinion of those two men and their despicable act. For their part, McVeigh was executed and Nichols got life behind bars without a hint of regret or sorrow from the press or the general public.

Appalling as the loss of life in Oklahoma City was, it paled in comparison to the horrific events of September 11, 2001. Beyond that, the methods, organization, determination, self sacrifice, and resourcefulness of the al-Queda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, made McVeigh and Nichols in comparison look like a pair of ten year old delinquents. The loss of life during the September 11 attacks was comparable to the number of American deaths resulting from the Japanese attacks on December 7th, 1941. Like those attacks, the al-Queda attacks plunged the United States into multi-front wars, one of which continues to this day with no end in sight. It must be remembered that unlike the Japanese attacks which concentrated on strategic military targets, al-Queda targeted innocent civilians. And while the September 11 attacks were by far their most audacious and deadly, al-Queda carried out many other sucessful attacks all over the world for the past twenty years.

Draconian tactics were employed by this country and others in an attempt to stem the tide of international terrorism. Innocent people suffered. That was a shame. Unfortunately during times of war there are always innocent victims. Americans of Japanese descent know this all too well. Fortunately the atrocities committed by the US government against Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, were not repeated after 9/11.

That's not to trivialize the suffering of Muslim people after 9/11 one bit. Civil liberties were suspended in some cases. There are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp who have yet to receive due process. What's more, in this country and for that matter much of the world, a whole shroud of suspicion over Islam has arisen. Muslims, and others confused for Muslims, have been victims of hate crimes and unjust persecution. That is a tragedy.

After 9/11 many Muslims, men especially, were singled out or "profiled" as suspicious individuals, simply because of their appearance, especially when they were trying to board airliners. The response by civil libertarians in this country was swift and effective. I used to fly a lot more back then and I distinctly remember the folks I saw singled out for extra security screening were more often than not old, female, and often in wheelchairs. In other words precisely the opposite of what any known terrorist looked like. One could argue this case of reverse profiling was just as immoral and illegal as the profiling it was intended to counteract.

Here is Professor Singh from his New Yorker piece:

... it is hard to escape the conclusion that Oak Creek would have similarly dominated the news cycle (as the Colorado shooting did) if the shooter had been Muslim and the victims had been white churchgoers.

Singh is correct about the theoretical reaction to such an attack, but he is doing a disservice to his readers by singling out "white churchgoers." The September 11th attacks were not an attack on white America. The victims of that day faithfully represented this country and its diversity. They came from all colors and creeds, including many devoted followers of Islam.

You bet a Muslim attack on a house of worship filled with Americans of any race or creed would cause a stir.

The incontrovertible fact is that al-Queda is an organization made up of Muslim men. So too is the Taliban who were in control of Afghanistan in 2001, provided a safe haven for al-Queda to do their evil work, AND to this day are waiting in the wings to take over control of Afghanistan if given half the chance. All of the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, as were the four men who blew themselves up along with fifty two innocent people riding London's public transportation system on July 7, 2005 As were the people who carried out well over thirty al-Queda operations throughout the world over the past twenty years.

What's more, al-Queda and the Taliban used their faith to justify their crimes against humanity. If the bigots of the world ever needed fodder to justify their hatred of the Muslim people, al-Queda served it up to them on a silver platter. No one group of people suffered more at the hands of al-Queda than the Muslim people. Not only did they see their faith perverted by a band of murderous zealots, not only have they been the targets of suspicion, hatred, and worse, but not counting the September 11 attacks, most of the VICTIMS of al-Queda attacks were Muslim.

As an international terrorist organization, there is no comparison between the threat al-Queda presents to the civilized world, and the threat white extremists present, no matter how appalling the latter's ideology, motives or tactics may be. That doesn't of course provide an ounce of comfort to the people who lost loved ones to those yahoos.

Whether it be in a movie theater outside of Denver, a house of worship in a Milwaukee suburb, or in the streets of Chicago, every life lost to senseless, unprovoked violence is an unspeakable tragedy. Each victim was some poor mother's child, someone's sister or brother, perhaps a husband or wife, father, mother or dear friend. Unrestrained news coverage brought to us by the blathering talking heads at FOX, MSNBC or even Comedy Central cannot bring their loved ones back. Nor can it prevent the killing, in fact quite the opposite seems to be the case.

The one thing we keep learning in our culture of hatred, violence, and ready access to weapons of death is this: given the will, it's extremely easy to kill another human being. We don't need to be bombarded over and over again with that message, it's pretty obvious. I simply don't believe it makes much sense to take the pulse of the country by counting the number of words devoted to one tragedy versus another.

As for the survivors (that includes all of us), the sensible ones try to carry on living the best lives they can, try to be fair minded, understanding that an entire group of people cannot be held responsible for the actions of a few, and try their best to keep themselves and their families reasonably healthy and alive.

That seems to be getting more and more difficult on all counts.

On controversy, icons and photography

There's a photograph that's been making the rounds for six years that continues to create a stir. Five young adults, a woman and four men, are engaged in what appears to be casual conversation on the banks of the East River in the neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The photograph could be an ad for high priced vodka, or an illustration for a lifestyle piece on artists living in Williamsburg, were it not for the background which dates the photograph almost to the minute. The picture was taken on September 11, 2001 and in the background is the Manhattan skyline with a huge plume of smoke emanating from the spot where the World Trade Center stood, only minutes before.

Of the hundreds of thousands of photographs made that day, this particular one sat in a box for years as its author, Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker, felt it was too enigmatic to publish given the raw emotions of the time. The photo was finally published four years later, and was picked up by the New York Times critic Frank Rich on the fifth anniversary of the attack. It has since been dubbed "The most controversial photograph of 9/11."

Rich uses the subjects in the photograph and their alleged indifference to what's going on behind them to illustrate how quickly Americans would put the sorry event behind them. He wrote:

Seen from the perspective of 9/11’s fifth anniversary, Mr. Hoepker’s photo is prescient as well as important — a snapshot of history soon to come... This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American. 

The article then goes on to blast the Bush administration and in typical Rich style, everything he finds objectionable about Americans.

Did Americans really just keep on going, throwing off 9/11 like a bad penny? I hardly think so. Today, five years since the Times article and more than ten years since the tragedy, 9/11 is still a festering sore.  Yes there is some indifference. I wrote about that subject in this space last year. However in most cases, the very words "nine eleven" evoke horror, grief and sorrow, just as they did ten years ago. That date will live in infamy long after the last generation who was around to witness it has passed on. Most importantly, our soldiers are still sacrificing their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, direct results of the attacks of 9/11. They don't have the luxury of tossing away that day, nor has any American who cares about them or the memory of their fallen comrades, or needless to say, the direct victims of 9/11.

We move on, yes, but only because life demands that of us. What else can we do?

Not only do I discount Rich's assessment of the American psyche since the attacks, but I find his remarks about the photograph, which have since been expanded upon by others, to be not only dead wrong, but also lazy and harmful.

In my opinion, Rich's (and others') assumptions about Hoepker's photograph tell us absolutely nothing about 9/11. They do say a great deal however about the medium of photography and its ability to manipulate, misinform and distort reality.

On a quick glance, the five subjects do appear to be oblivious to the tragedy that is taking place just a few miles away. There are no tears, no grimaces, no beating of the breasts. No one is gazing off to the south to look at the scene of the terrible carnage. The ease of their posture suggests they could be chatting about their artwork, or the new night club down the block.

Frank Rich assumes they have already moved on, just minutes after the towers fell.

But how does he know that? What's to say these folks weren't in lower Manhattan when the planes hit, evacuated the borough via the Brooklyn Bridge, made their way up to Williamsburg and just before the photographer snapped their picture, caught up with their friends, relieved that they too were safely out of harm's way?

The truth as we'll see in a minute, not surprisingly exists somewhere between these two highly unlikely scenarios.

The question is, does the truth behind this picture really matter? A "work of art", as this photograph is portrayed in Jonathan Jones's recent article in the Guardian, represents a greater reality, one that goes beyond the picture frame. Jones suggests that the Hoepker photograph illustrates the very human condition of life going on in the face of tragedy, which is a recurrent theme in art throughout history. Yet paintings and literature represent symbolic figures. Portrayed within the frame of Hoepker's photo are recognizable individuals who have stories that may or may not jibe with Thomas Hoepker's, Frank Rich's, Jonathan Jones's or anyone else's assumptions. Given that I'd say yes, the truth does matter a great deal. And if we don't know the story behind those people in the photograph, then it's best to leave them, and the picture alone.

This is nothing new. The history of photography is filled with iconic images that aren't exactly what they seem. There is a famous photograph by Margaret Bourke White that portrays a Depression era bread line made up of African American people. The people are standing in front of a billboard that pictures a happy white family driving in their car, the copy of the sign reading: "World's Highest Standard of Living; There's no way like the American Way." The irony of this scene is pretty hard to miss and for years the photograph has been used to illustrate the inequality between the races in this country. Now there's absolutely nothing made up about the photograph, but what some folks who use it to illustrate racial inequality in America fail to mention is that the people in the bread line were flood victims. They were temporarily dispossessed naturally, but we simply don't know what their everyday lives were like and where they fit in the overall economic spectrum. Like the 9/11 photograph, the subjects of the Bourke White photograph were recognizable and may or may not have appreciated being used as symbols of a cause.

One of Diane Arbus's most enduring images is of a young boy in a park, holding a toy hand grenade. He holds his body in an unnaturally stiff position, his free hand in a claw grip, and there is a bone chilling grimace on his face. It is a haunting, ominous image. That is until you see the proof sheet that shows the rest of the pictures the famous photographer shot of the same boy. In the other pictures, the boy looks like a normal little kid hamming it up for the camera. The picture Arbus chose to use was the last shot on the roll where the child, possibly out of frustration, or boredom of being photographed, mugging it up to the extreme, strikes the curious pose. Arbus was known for her portraits of freakish looking people and this picture used in the context of her other work, made a statement about the human condition, one that the artist conjured up in her mind.

The subjects of the 9/11 photograph were not asked permission to be photographed. That's not at all unusual in photojournalism. The photographer writes that in his journey down through Brooklyn to get closer to Ground Zero, he came across this scene of relative tranquility in the midst of the chaos. He snapped three pictures and moved on. There was no contact between him and the subjects so he couldn't have possibly known their stories. I'm guessing, being a photographer myself, after shooting only three frames in the midst of a day like that, he probably put those folks entirely out of his mind until he saw the images.

Shortly after Rich's article came out in the Times, David Plotz of Slate Magazine published an article whose title expressed his feelings in no uncertain terms: "Frank Rich is Wrong About That 9/11 Photograph." The article is so spot on that instead of quoting sections from it here, I suggest you just read it yourself. Plotz not only made some assumptions of his own about the subjects of the photograph, but asked them to contact Slate to tell their story. Two of them did. You should read their replies for yourself as well, here.

It turns out that two of the people, a couple at the time, watched the Twin Towers collapse from their rooftop in Williamsburg. Shocked like everyone else, they made their way down to the waterfront where they saw thousands of folks covered in dust walking across the Williamsburg Bridge, helping each other in any way they could. Before the famous brief encounter with Hoepker and their date with destiny, the couple encountered the other three men in the picture, all total strangers. The man in the photograph noted that the event brought people together in ways only a catastrophe can. He writes:

Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened. He instead chose to publish the photograph that allowed him to draw the conclusions he wished to draw... A more honest conclusion might start by acknowledging just how easily a photograph can be manipulated, especially in the advancement of one's own biases or in the service of one's own career.


The woman in the photograph wrote later confirming the man's words and added that she too is a professional photographer who didn't touch her camera that day, in part because:

This somewhat cynical expression of an assumed reality printed in the New York Times proves a good reason... I also have a strict policy of never taking a photograph of a person without their permission or knowledge of my intent.


She went on:

I am a third-generation native New Yorker, who knows and loves every square inch of this city, as did her ancestors before her. My mother and father are both architects and artists who have contributed much to the landscape of this city and my knowledge of the buildings that are my hometown and my childhood friends.


The woman added that her mother once worked for Minoru Yanasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center and concludes:


...it was genetically impossible for me to be unaffected by this event. 


So it turns out that Frank Rich was right on one point; the photograph is indeed an important, perhaps iconic image that illustrates the American experience on 9/11.

It just illustrated the opposite of what he assumed.

Peace

Ten years ago

Between now and this Sunday we will be deluged by accounts of people telling us where they were on the morning of the terrorist attacks on the United States. That is entirely as it should be. December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001, are three days that changed America forever. They are days whose events are etched into the minds of all Americans who were alive at the time and old enough to understand them. As someone who has an almost pathological memory of my whereabouts during momentous news events, I can remember almost every detail of September 11, 2001. And since my story is virtually identical to the story of every other American not in the direct line of fire that day, it is perfectly irrelevant.

I will however share for a moment my memories of the day exactly one year later, September 11, 2002. I was in Los Angeles working at one of the city's major art museums. In LA like everywhere else in the country, full scale public events were planned to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11. Having been involved in the art world for a very long time, I've become accustomed to the political leanings of the vast majority of people in that world which as you can imagine are shall we say, to the left of center. My own politics are not entirely out of sync with theirs, just perhaps slightly more nuanced, I do try to listen to all sides and when necessary, break from the party line on occasion. For example, unlike many of the people I come in contact with on a daily basis, I don't have an overwhelming distrust of our country and its institutions. Not that I'm a jingoistic, flag waiving, my country right or wrong type of individual, but I do love my country despite its shortcomings.

Having said that, I was still unprepared for the conversation that took place during lunch with some of my colleagues from that LA institution, the gist of which was: "so what's with all this fuss about 9/11?" Frankly it was the first time I heard anyone address 9/11 without the gravitas it deserves, out of a deep respect for the victims and their families. Not these folks. "People die all the time...", someone said, "why should we place so much energy on this one event?" Another added: "...besides Americans are hated all over the world and we probably had it coming anyway."

Of course there is some truth to those words. No, we don't go out of our way to remember victims on the anniversary every single tragedy, and yes, our government's occasional forays both before and since 9/11 have created great resentment toward our country around the world. Like it or not, some folks do indeed hate us.

Still I find it amazing that there are people in this world whose hearts are so hardened by living in their own smug little cocoon of cynicism, that they cannot break free, not even for the most gut-wrenching experience they or any of us will likely ever experience, even if it was only from a distance.

I was reminded of those remarks the other day after hearing a snide remark about our museum's exhibiting some pictures of the World Trade Center (taken in happier times), in honor of the tenth anniversary of that terrible day. Granted, I haven't heard those sentiments expressed very often in the past ten years. Most folks I know who may at times feel a bit overwhelmed by all the attention to the event, out of respect for the dead, keep those opinions to themselves.

There will certainly be lots of coverage of 9/11 this Sunday, and I'll probably miss most of it.

This Sunday, the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, I plan to go to church and pray for the victims of 9/11 and for the loved ones they left behind. I'll especially remember the first responders who without any regard to their own safety, went into those buildings to do their job, saving the lives of others. I'll think of all those folks who went to Washington, DC and New York, also at great personal risk and without compensation to themselves, to help out in any way they could. Of course I will also remember our servicemen and women who put their lives on the line every day in the service of our country. And however futile this may sound to some of you, I will be praying for peace in the world.

This Sunday by happenstance will be an unusually busy day for us. We are going to two first birthday celebrations AND the baptism of a new born. Most importantly, I will be spending the day with my family. I can't think of a more fitting way to spend September 11, 2011.

After all, life goes on.

Post Script...

My day went mostly as planned. Either by pure coincidence or by divine providence, the gospel reading for Sunday, September 11, 2011 was the parable of the unforgiving servant who after having his own enormous debt forgiven out of compassion by his master, refused to forgive a trivial debt owed to him by another servant. An amazingly apt and challenging lesson for us about forgiveness, on the anniversary of one of the most painful days in our history.

I did manage to catch most of the coverage of the memorials in New York, Washington and Shanksville, and a part of the film shot by the two French film maker brothers who were in the process of shooting a documentary on a firehouse in Lower Manhattan when the attacks on the World Trade Center took place. Never during the day yesterday were my thoughts far from the events of ten years ago, but the most compelling moment was during the recessional hymn in church when we sang America the Beautiful. I completely lost it during the fourth verse:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!

Lest we forget...

With all the talk about Osama bin Laden and the advice on how we should or should not react to his death, I think it's a good time to reflect upon his legacy.


These photographs come courtesy of Daniel Ryan who in 2001 was a firefighter with the Niles, Il. Fire Department. Along with several of his colleagues from all over the country, Dan traveled to Ground Zero in New York City at his own expense, to assist with the unimaginable task of recovering the remains of the people who died there on September 11, 2001.


On September 11, 2001, 2,742 innocent lives were taken at the World Trade Center, 184 were lost at the Pentagon, and 41 were lost on the plane that was taken over by the passengers and crashed in Shanksville, PA.


This of course does not include all the innocent lives that were lost in al-Qaeda attacks at the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the USS Cole, the bombings of the transportation systems of Moscow, Madrid and London, attacks against Christians in the Philippines and against Muslims in Iran and Indonesia. The list goes on and on.

With all the attention in the last few weeks devoted to bin Laden, I think it's high time we forget about him and remember the people he murdered.

Thank you Dan for your photographs and for your service.

Was it vengeance or justice?

This has been one of the many questions going through my head since my wife awoke me last Sunday from a sound sleep to tell me that we got Osama bin Laden. While his death may have been the biggest rallying point for Americans since that terrible day almost ten years ago, many questions surrounding his killing left me feeling a little ambivalent.

Take the spontaneous rally in front of the White House that was shown ad nauseum Sunday night during the coverage of the event. There, hundreds of fist pumping, chest thumping yahoos, mostly in their teens or barely older, were chanting "U.S.A. U.S.A." and singing "na na na na hey hey hey goodbye".

"What do they know? They were only kids during 9/11" was my sentiment shared with others who were appalled by the celebration. After I thought about it though, on September 11, 2001, most of the kids at the White House were the age that my son is today. If my boy is any example, ten is one of the most impressionable ages in life, old enough to know what's going on but still too young to fully digest it. I can't imagine what the effect of witnessing the events of that day unfolding right before his eyes would have been had on him if my son had been ten at the time. It certainly would have been a terrifying, life altering experience, as it no doubt was for those kids who were in front of the White House the other day.

Osama bin Laden was THE personification of evil for a generation, a real life, flesh and blood bogeyman, his face looming large in the nightmares of the children who were forced to come of age in the days, weeks and months following the attacks. Of course, teenagers need little excuse for getting a little crazy, but I suspect that his demise was a huge release for many of them.

After the wave of euphoria and praise for President Obama, I'm starting to hear rumblings about the timing of the attack in Abbottabad. Could the fact that it happened at a time when the president's popularity was at an all time low not be a coincidence? Cynical thoughts to be sure but it wouldn't be the first time that we have initiated military strikes abroad during tough times for presidents. My guess is that if President Obama wanted to take full political advantage of capturing bin Laden, he would have waited for a more advantageous time, say during the Republican National Convention.

However I did think the timing was brilliant, if not intentional, as it made for delicious poetic justice, after all the "birthing" nonsense of the past few weeks. The announcement of the news interrupted Donald Trump's silly reality TV show as if the president was saying; "excuse me for interrupting while you're cavorting with the likes of Gary Busey and Meatloaf, but I just wanted to tell the world that we got Osama bin Laden. Back to you Donald."

Speaking of poetic justice, the image of the world's most famous fugitive hiding not in the caves of remote Pakistan as was commonly thought, but inside a mansion in a wealthy suburb of that nation's capital, lent credence to George W. Bush's assertion that the people behind the 9/11 attacks were cowards. So does the report of bin Laden firing at Navy SEALS from behind the protection of one of his many wives. Unfortunately, the facts don't back this up. It turns out that while one of the men in the compound did use a woman as a shield as he fired at SEALS, bin Laden did not hide behind anyone, he was in fact, unarmed. If a mansion in Islamabad's equivalent of Winnetka evokes images of living "la dolce vita", bin Laden's life there had to be in reality, a self-imposed imprisonment.

Not that anybody should particularly care, I am of the opinion that bin Laden is exactly where he belongs, at the bottom of the sea. Yet this guy whom we hated for so long is himself not a black and white character at all. He was OK with us while he supported the Mujahideen in their efforts to defeat the Soviets while they were occupying Afghanistan. You may recall that we didn't mind the Taliban so much back then either. We give credit to Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II for their roles in bringing down the Soviet Union, but I think the role of Osama bin Laden is overlooked. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, a struggle to which bin Laden contributed significantly, may very well have been the beginning of the end of the "evil empire".

Yet bin Laden's motivation for jihad against the Soviets was exactly the same as his motivation for jihad against us, the removal of foreign influence from the Islamic world. He was not a mad man, far from it. In interviews, bin Laden very rationally articulated his plans to undermine the U.S. He had a great understanding of capitalism and of how we tick. In the end, he understood us far more than we understood him. Calling him brilliant may be a bit of an understatement. Bin Laden may be gone, but his cause is far from dead. Claiming victory in the war on the terror network that he led is premature to say the least.

Well was he evil? Now there's a question that only God can answer. He certainly did evil things in the name of God. In doing so he not only undermined and profaned Islam, but all religion. I don't think he was motivated by love for Allah, but hate for man. Just as some Jews, Christians, Hindus and members of all faiths did before him, bin Laden was able to convey that hatred to those who followed him by using loopholes in Scripture to justify his evil work.

Which brings me to the question at the title of this post. I've heard many comments chastising people for celebrating bin Laden's death. They say that not only does the public display of joy following this human being's murder not only provoke those who may do us harm, but it is simply wrong.

In other words, justice may well have been served, but vengeance is only the domain of the Lord.

On September 11, 2001, I wasn't in Shanksville, PA, Washington D.C. or New York City, but safe in Chicago. I wasn't evacuated from work and forced to walk home across the East River or the Potomac in full view of the devastation as my friends who live in Brooklyn and Arlington were. I didn't witness people jumping 1000 feet to their death rather than perish in suffocating smoke, as a friend in Soho did. I didn't need to offer my condolences for the losses of several firefighters at my local firehouse, or travel to Ground Zero in the aftermath to search for the remains of victims as some local firemen I know.

Most importantly, I didn't lose a friend, parent, spouse or child that day. And I never had to confront the smug grin of the murderer of my loved one, taped inside his hiding place in Pakistan.

Since my city wasn't attacked that day, I can't be the judge of people directly impacted by the attacks. As crass and over the top as they were, the words of Monday's provocative headlines in the New York tabloids speak for many of us. As far as I'm concerned, everyone from New York, Washington or Shanksville, every person who lost a loved one in an al-Qaeda attack, has reason to say; "Hooray, the bastard's dead, may he rot in hell."

Of all the comments I've heard this week, the most memorable, poignant and true words came from a young man who was a relative of one of the 9/11 victims. Without any patriotic bluster he simply said this:

Osama bin Laden was the symbol of so much suffering. And now he's gone.

Is that alone reason to celebrate?
I believe that it is.

Remember...

New York, Washington, Shanksville, PA, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the innocent lives that have been lost as a result of a barbaric act committed eight years ago today.