Making sense of a fractured world

The role of race and racism in the narrative surrounding conflicts and a transcendental approach to terrorism.

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.”

VIKTOR E. FRANKL, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

We live in a broken, fractured world — lurching from one crisis to another, one senseless war to the next, hatred and divisiveness poisoning our hearts and minds. Just over the last few years, we’ve lurched from the world’s longest-running protest over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in India, to a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in the US, the farmer’s protests in India, the struggle for women’s rights in Iran, the Russia-Ukraine war, and now the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza.

And these are just, to borrow some social media terminology, the highlight reels. There have been daily micro-aggressions and manufactured outrage on that wasteland that is now called X. The news has been a continuous shit show of rampant hate. All of which has resulted in my need to distance myself from all the noise — I’m off X and I spend a few moments quickly checking the headlines every couple of days.

A very brief history of the Israel-Palestine conflict

But after the recent events in Gaza, I’ve found myself checking the news every day, watching on in horror as the news rolls in, each headline more devastating than the last. I sit with a heavy heart, holding space for the both/and — condemning both Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel and the scale of Israel’s retaliation {the UN has accused it of war crimes}. Acknowledging the generational trauma of Palestinians who have been made refugees in their own country; the millions of innocent people in Gaza without food, water, or electricity, or even a safe place to evacuate to in the face of a relentless Israeli onslaught; and the heartbreak, fear, and anxiety of the relatives whose loved ones have been killed or kidnapped by Hamas.

There will be no winners in this war. And there will be no lasting peace in the region unless leaders from both sides can sit down and come to an understanding and resolution of the tensions between the two nations. A process that started with a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994, but then broke down amid Israeli aggression and continued tensions between both parties that were never peacefully resolved.

While this is a long-standing conflict and the Palestinian people have been refugees in their own nation since nigh on 70 years, how do we respond to these acts of terror wrought by Hamas and Israel? How do we parse through social media posts, which polarize events, paint one party right and the other wrong? With 15-year-old kids who think this conflict started a week ago and are shouting into their megaphones without knowledge of any of the facts?

Thinking transcendentally about terrorism

The bigger question, though, is how do we think about and therefore respond to acts of terror? Both those wrought by groups that are designated as terrorists and by state-sponsored terrorism?

I believe we need to look at all acts of terrorism though a historical lens with a much more transcendental and nuanced approach than the one taken by politicians and the media — and Howard Zinn, a historian and political science professor at Boston University, tells us how, in this piece that he wrote in the aftermath of September 11.

The trick in acting transcendentally is to think. What questions are the voices of authority not asking? I am saying all this at a time when it is unpopular to speak against the bombing of Afghanistan or Iraq. The undeniable truth is that some fanatical group killed 3,000 people in New York City and Washington. The government has leapt from that to “Therefore, we must bomb.” We’ve always met violence with violence. But if you knew some history when this happened, you would ask, “What was the result?”

It would help to redefine the word “terrorism.” What happened on September 11 was an act of terrorism. But to isolate it from the history of terrorism will dangerously mislead you. This act of terrorism exploded in our faces because it was right next door. But acts of terrorism have been going on throughout the world for a long time.

I bring that up not to minimize or diminish the terror of what happened in New York and Washington but to enlarge our compassion beyond that. Otherwise, we will never understand what happened and what we must do about it. When we enlarge the question and define terrorism as the killing of innocent people for some presumed political purpose, then you find that all sorts of nations, as well as individuals and groups, have engaged in terrorism. Along with individual and group terrorism, there is state terrorism. When states commit terrorism, they have far greater means at their disposal for killing people than individuals or organizations.

The United States has been responsible for acts of terrorism. When I say that, people might say, “You are trying to minimize what was done.” No, I’m not trying to do that at all. I’m trying to enlarge our understanding.

The United States and Britain have been responsible for the deaths of large numbers of innocent people in the world. It doesn’t take too much knowledge of history to see that. Think of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Millions died because the United States was interested in “the rubber, tin and other commodities” of the region. Think of Central America. Think of the 200,000 dead in Guatemala as a result of a government that the United States armed and supported. … So far, the
United States has killed as many or more people in Afghanistan as lost their lives on September 11…

HOWARD ZINN, ARTISTS IN TIMES OF WAR

This state-sponsored terrorism is something we are seeing playing out in Palestine. Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel has been met with a brutal show of force from Israel, whose indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and further tightening of the unlawful blockade on the Gaza strip amounts to genocide.

As Howard Zinn writes in Artists in Times of War:

“You can’t respond to one terrorist act with war, because then you are engaging in the same kind of actions that terrorists engage in. That thinking goes like this: “Yes, innocent people died, too bad. It was done for an important purpose. It was ‘collateral damage.’ You must accept ‘collateral damage’ when you are doing something important.” That’s how terrorists justify what they do. And that’s how nations justify what they do.”

For a more nuanced understanding of this — or any war, conflict, or act of terror — it is important to read up on the history and origin of the conflict; to listen to sane voices of the people and communities that are impacted; and not form immediate opinions based on the loudest and shrillest voices, and to curb the need to perform your opinion publicly.

Understanding the role of racism in the war on terror

It’s also worth understanding how labels like “terrorist” and “terror organizations” are dictated by race and racism, which is made abundantly clear from the contrast between the Russia-Ukraine war and Israel’s colonization of Palestine, and the rampant Islamophobia perpetrated by the global war on terror.

In a world marred by two decades of a global War on Terror, racial reckoning, and cold wars of the past thawing to restore bygone geopolitical rivalries…Terrorism has taken on a pointed racial and religious form. Muslims, transnationally, have been “raced” as terrorists as a consequence of this American-led crusade^. Their faith is conflated with extremism and their portrayal in American media is constructed based on that conflation. More than legitimizing this indictment, global War on Terror law and propaganda have spearheaded its construction. In turn, they unravel the humanity of Muslims in favor of a political visage that enables policing and prosecution in America and military persecution and mass punishment abroad.

ON TERRORISTS AND FREEDOM FIGHTERS, HARVARD LAW REVIEW

Muslims are “presumptive terrorists,^“ a charge levied on account of race, religion, and realpolitik, even when acting as freedom fighters. A distant, yet kindred campaign for self-determination reinforced the power of this indictment, with a racial design as its marrow. It took form in Europe, beginning on February 24, 2022, when Russian missiles “rained down on the Ukraine,” foreshadowing the thunderous military storm seeking to restore reign over the former Soviet colony. The formidable Russian army rushing in from the east was rightfully and universally branded “imperialist,” while Ukrainians, from the highest rungs of political office to the deepest roots of lay society, were globally celebrated as “freedom fighters.” Ukrainians embodied the indigenous fight of Algerians then, or Yemenis and Kashmiris today, against a global military power intent on crushing their hearts, homes, and everything they love beyond and in between.

Unlike the accusations leveled at Ukrainians’ Muslim counterparts striving for self-determination, the Russian indictments of “terror” lacked the dehumanizing hand of race and racism. Rather, the indictments were countered and quelled by their targets’ lurid whiteness, and Ukrainians were celebrated as freedom fighters on the basis of their whiteness coupled with Western opposition to the Russian invasion. It took little for Ukrainians, whose faces monopolized the news headlines and timeline feeds, to become universal darlings and irrefutable victims.

ON TERRORISTS AND FREEDOM FIGHTERS, HARVARD LAW REVIEW

This stark contrast was very evident in the world’s response to the Ukraine war. Social media was flooded with outrage on behalf of Ukrainians, people bandied together to raise funds for Ukrainian refugees, and politicians went on television asking people to open their homes to refugees who “look like us”, immediately othering the many Syrian, Palestinian, Rohingya and other refugees who do not “look like them”.

The response to the Israel-Palestine war is, comparatively, muted. I haven’t seen artists raising money for Palestine. There’s no outpouring of outrage for the thousands of civilians in Gaza who have lost their lives. The US actually vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called for humanitarian pauses in the conflict between Israel and Palestinian Hamas militants to allow humanitarian aid access to civilians in the Gaza Strip.

And both these peoples — Ukraine and Palestine — are fighting for self-determination, for their own freedoms. And yet, the response is so starkly, heart-breakingly different.

Where do we go from here?

What can we on an individual level do in the face of these events that feel so much bigger than us? Events where we definitely do not know all that there is to know. Issues that are so complex that there are points and counter-points; books and academic scholarship devoted to untangling and understanding them?

We can never be experts on any of these conflicts — that’s just a simple fact. But it is a privilege to “not know or understand” what is going on. We can keep an open heart and mind. We can step outside our echo chambers and read diverse voices.

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

NELSON MANDELA

And most importantly, we can keep our humanity intact. We can stand against violence and oppression no matter who perpetrates it. We can operate from a place of love and compassion for all the people who are suffering, regardless of their race, religion, or color.

And finally, we can remember this: