Terrorism, Violence, and Conventional Wisdom

Nicholas Kristof, in his Thursday op-ed piece for the New York Times, “Satire, Terrorism and Islam,” uttered a statement that seems to summarize what most of the Western world is thinking today:   “The great divide is not between faiths.  Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who ‘otherize.’”  Kristof then went on to plead, “Let’s stand with Charlie Hebdo, for the global outpouring of support has been inspiring. Let’s denounce terrorism, oppression and misogyny in the Islamic world – and everywhere else.  But let’s be careful not to respond to terrorists’ intolerance with our own.”

Wrap that up in a bow, my friends, for therein lies conventional wisdom.  Kristof is making several points.  The characteristic virtue of our era is tolerance. The characteristic vice is intolerance-fueled violence. Charlie Hebdo speaks with satire (not violence) so we “stand with it.” And we stand with Islam as well as all other races, colors or creeds, because, unlike the “terrorists,” we are “tolerant.”    

Obviously, I cannot disagree entirely with Kristof’s comments.   Like Kristof, I deeply mourn the deaths of the employees of Charlie Hebdo and all of the others who died in France this week at the hands of religious extremists.   Like Kristof, I believe in free speech, including the right of Charlie Hebdo to disseminate its brand of satire.  But like most conventional wisdom, Kristof’s point was far too simplistic.  For one thing, Charlie Hebdo doesn’t stand for tolerance.  Tolerant people don’t depict all Orthodox religious practitioners, let alone the prophets of their faiths, as ugly, sub-human perverts.  Tolerant people don’t foment polarization and hatred.   Conventional wisdom may say “I am Charlie Hebdo,” but true wisdom says “Thank God I have better things to read than the smut that Charlie Hebdo publishes.”

I also disagree with the idea that the characteristic vice of our times is intolerance-fueled violence.   Violence certainly belongs on our short list of vices, but it would be folly to focus exclusively on that violence which is fueled by intolerance.  Our problem is violence, period, however it is fueled.   And believe me, the violence problem has reached epidemic proportions here in the “tolerant” West, not just in the “intolerant” Middle East.   

Conventional wisdom indicates that here in America, we are “tolerant,” we are “moderate,” and we are peaceful.  Well, we may be tolerant, but we are certainly not peaceful.   In fact, it is precisely our tolerance that fuels our lust for death … or our willingness to look the other way when other people kill, as long as it’s not in the name of “terrorism.”

To begin, we are addicted to eating meat, notwithstanding the effects of that addiction on our environment and our own health.   We ourselves don’t kill for our meat, we have others who kill for us, but our demand is what fuels the number of animal killings.  What’s more, we are hardly discriminating in the way we take our meat.   It’s no secret that factory farms don’t merely kill animals for our eating pleasure; they place their animals in conditions that can only be described as torture.   We are aghast when we read these reports.  But we eat the flesh that these farms peddle.   In other words, we facilitate and look the other way at the unnecessary killing and torture of animals, and as long as we’re not doing the deed (which we define as the killing, not the eating), we can happily view ourselves as non-violent.

We are also addicted to unprotected sex, despite the carnage that flows from such sex.   Each year, roughly one million human fetuses are aborted in America.  My guess is that most of these abortions come from unprotected, consensual sex.   Do we lust for such abortions?  Of course not – and that is one reason why we can look at these acts as fundamentally “non-violent.”   Another reason is that we are obsessed with the debate about whether abortion should be legal.  As a result, as long as we believe, as most of us do (myself included), that abortion should be legal, we can absolve ourselves of moral responsibility for having the unprotected sex that so frequently leads to aborting human life forms.  Once again, we are burying our heads in the sand about our violence problem.

When we recreate, we go to the movies, watch TV, or play with video games.  And what do we enjoy watching?   Mass quantities of gratuitous killings.   Even the directors and actors we admire the most peddle murder and torture.  It’s become almost de rigeur.   Who doesn’t love the Godfather?  Who doesn’t like Die Hard?   Even a movie like Django Unchanged, which to me is just a stupid orgy of violence with no artistic merit, received an 88% rating by critics on Rotten Tomatoes and was nominated for five Academy Awards.  The other day I heard on cable news that the members  of Al-Qaeda have derived a lot of enjoyment and inspiration from watching violent Hollywood movies.  These movies are shown worldwide, and they de-condition all of us to tolerate the abrupt and involuntary termination of human life.  There’s that word again: tolerance.  Thanks to our entertainment industry and its award-winning stars, we’re plenty tolerant when it comes to watching human beings blow each other away with guns and knives.  But are we violent?   Nah, because the stuff on the screen isn’t “real” violence, we tell ourselves, it’s only “virtual” violence.

When we elect representatives to serve in Congress, they quickly learn one lesson above all others – don’t mess with guns.  Here in America, people are gunned down on the city streets every day, and nobody cares (other than the immediate family members of the deceased).  It’s just something we have come to expect.   We also frequently have school shootings, and that does kind of tug at our heartstrings a bit – after all, the Hollywood types who have conditioned our “tolerance” haven’t decided to depict kids getting shot in every movie, but only adults.   As a result, these school shootings inevitably lead to at least some calls for gun control.  Yet even when the gun-control debate forced Congress to debate the issue of whether background checks should be mandatory for gun sales, and even when it became clear that more than nine in ten Americans supported requiring background checks, Congress still voted down that idea.    No doubt, our representatives didn’t see themselves as having a “violence” problem – they were only standing up for “liberty” and trying to get re-elected.  

The truth is that our whole world has become inured to violence.   What scares us here in the West isn’t all forms of gratuitous violence, but only the type known as “terrorism,” by which I mean the taking of innocent life by individuals as a political or religious statement by those who see themselves as fighters for an oppressed people or ideology.   

Do I find terrorism disgusting?   Absolutely.  Do I share Kristof’s views that there is a battle afoot between “terrorists” and “moderates” and that we are responsible for embracing moderate Muslims rather than lumping them in with their terrorist co-religionists?  Sure, I subscribe to that statement as well.   But where Kristof and I part ways is in taking that difference to be the “great divide” on which we should be focusing most of our attention.  To me, the great divide is between those who are working for peace in all its forms and those who are perpetrating, or looking the other way at, violence.  When you eat tofu instead of chicken, have sex only when protection is available, watch a comedy instead of an “action” movie, vote for Congressmen with bad NRA ratings, and (if I may add another point) work for climate change before it consumes the lives of millions of Africans and others … then you can talk about being on the right side of the “great divide.”  Until then, we’re all just fueling the same fire.  

Happy Holidays from the Empathic Rationalist

Now that virtually all of my free time is being spent at my mother's rehab facility, I'm going to have to beg your forgiveness as I take the week off from blogging.  I do, however, want to thank all of my readers for your support.  Hopefully, this blog has given you some food for thought ... and even some cause for empathy.   That, at least, is my goal.

Have a great week and a happy New Year.  I'll see you in 2015.

Dan

The Firing of Ari Roth and the Closing of the American Jewish Mind

Denial.  Anger.  Bargaining. Depression.  Acceptance.

There you have the five so-called “stages of grief.”  I’m still dealing with the second stage.  And my hope with this blogpost is to place each of you somewhere on this same continuum.

My anger relates to the firing this week of my friend, Ari Roth, as Artistic Director of Theater J, the Washington, D.C., Jewish theater.   The story has received a lot of attention – and not just locally.  Here are a few of the stories that have been written since the axe fell on Thursday:

·         The Washington Post

·         Washington Jewish Week

·         Washingtonian Magazine

·         New York Times

·         The Jewish Daily Forward

Roth’s firing by his employer, the Jewish Community Center of Washington, was the culmination to date of a campaign spearheaded by a group called COPMA, which stands for Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art.  COPMA didn’t take long to proclaim victory in an e-mail blast.  The DCJCC “Takes a Stand for Israel,” COPMA announced.  It went on to say that the DCJCC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington “did the right thing in refusing to continue their financial support of the anti-Israel programming that Mr. Roth spearheaded at the DCJCC – programming that falsely accused, maligned and undermined the State of Israel, and in doing so, caused harm to the Jewish people.”

You’d think from this description that Ari Roth had turned Theater J into an orgy of Israel-bashing.   Believe me, there are plenty of Jews who support just that.  But Ari Roth isn’t one of them.  Ari is a proud Jew and a lover of Israel.  As an intelligent, thoughtful mensch who has absorbed the central principles of the Jewish faith, Ari believes that high-brow theaters have an obligation to facilitate not only entertaining dramas but also a free and open marketplace of ideas.  To his credit, he doesn’t shy away from taking on the big issues, whether they involve theology (as when he twice ran a play about Spinoza’s excommunication) or politics.  When he has addressed the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, he tends to present both the Israeli and the Palestinian perspectives so that he can stimulate his audience’s hearts and minds, not to mention their dialogue.

As someone who has devoted considerable time to enhancing Jewish-Islamic encounters in the Washington area, I was asked to participate as a panelist on “talk back” programs after two of Theater J’s most controversial plays regarding the Conflict.  On each occasion, I was allowed freely to express my views, which are definitely pro-Zionist.   I cannot imagine why people who attended either the plays or the talk-backs would have concluded that the theater was “anti-Israel” unless they are themselves “anti-intellectual.” 

During Ari Roth’s tenure, Theater J has been one of the Jewish community’s shining lights in the Washington, D.C. area.  It has maintained both high artistic standards and a respect for the principles of Judaism as a living, breathing faith.    Fortunately, Ari has no intent to leave Washington. He is planning on continuing to put on quality theatrical productions in a different DC-area playhouse.  

So all is well, right?   Not even close.  What we have witnessed this week is a symptom of a larger problem.  The Jewish community is fracturing before our very eyes, much like the American body politic.  In each case, there are many folks who are turned off and tuned out – which is itself a symptom and outgrowth of polarization – but a huge percentage of those who haven’t given way to apathy are heading in one extreme direction or another.  What we’ve seen this week at the JCC is a victory for the right-wingers: the Jews who are so paranoid that they cannot abide knowing that their tribesmen are being exposed to the Palestinian narrative, even if it is being presented together with its Israeli counterpart.   But that type of paranoia doesn’t just happen in a vacuum.  It has grown together with the rise of groups like Jewish Voices for Peace on the left.  Just as it was once said of Rudy Giuliani that his every sentence included a noun, a verb, and a reference to 9/11, JVP cannot utter a sentence without a noun, a verb, and a reference to “the Occupation.”   And the more traction that JVP and other anti-Zionist Jewish groups are getting on college campuses and liberal Christian churches, the more paranoid Israel’s right-wing zealots are getting.   Extremism in both directions tends to feed on itself.    In this context, one result is that liberal Zionists like me are wondering if this is a train station with only two platforms, neither of which leads down the path towards a two-state solution … or a just and secure peace.  

No, I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little.  When it comes to the Jewish civilization, the sky never really falls.  We encounter horrible tragedies, but we also figure out ways to bounce back.  In today’s New York Times, there is an opinion piece stating that Netanyahu may indeed face a legitimate challenge in the next parliament election.   If he loses and a more progressive voice takes over the Israeli government, maybe the Jewish organizations here in America who frequently become mouthpieces for the Israeli government’s party line will themselves head back towards a more tolerant, less paranoid form of liberal Zionism.   

Last evening as I was completing this blogpost, my 93-year-old mother fell and broke her hip while I was in an adjacent room.   I told my wife, “All I want is to have hope.”   And that, indeed, is my attitude about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the American Jewish community’s ways of coping with the Conflict.  Sometimes when things in life look bleak, it is easy to lose hope, but we must never give in to those feelings.  

Life is frequently a war between fear and hope.  If you want to know what makes successful people – not to mention successful peoples – look no further than how they wage that war. 

The Speech

In 2004, Barack Obama stole my heart with his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.   That speech, combined with Hillary Clinton’s vote on the Iraq War, sealed my support.   Now, ten years later, I am wondering if there has been another speech that will have the same effect on the 2016 campaign.  This time, the speaker was Elizabeth Warren, and the topic is a question that rank-in-file Democrats have been asking themselves for years:  does their party stand for Main Street or only for Wall Street?   Warren has made her view very clear: the Demos are bought and sold by Wall Street and Wall Street alone.  Now, she has thrown down the gauntlet to all potential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, to prove her wrong.   (Here’s a way to view the speech, if you haven’t yet done so: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/elizabeth-warren-lindsey-graham-citigroup-funding-bill)

One possible response, of course, is that the Dems stand for BOTH Main Street and Wall Street.   To be sure, you’d have to be quite the ideologue not to recognize that middle class people hold interests in the stock market and even those who didn’t would stand to lose money if Wall Street were to collapse.  (See, e.g., the Great Depression.)  But what we’ve seen in recent decades is clearly a sharp rise in the wealth of the richest Americans without a rise in the wealth of middle class Americans.  And when you are a political party whose mascot is the donkey, you can’t keep ignoring this phenomenon and not expect to be called on the mat by one of your colleagues.  In short, “the speech” was bound to happen.  It just happened to be Elizabeth Warren who had the skill to deliver it.

Does this mean “game on” for the Democrats in 2016?   Does this mean that, once again, Hillary Clinton’s inevitability has been overblown?   Not so fast.  I can think of at least two reasons why Clinton’s backers might not yet have to break a sweat.  First, Warren hasn’t yet demonstrated that she has the stomach to campaign against the Clinton Machine.  That is, after all, one heck of a machine.  When Obama took it on, he needed to run an absolutely flawless and extremely creative campaign, and he still barely won.   Warren may decide that she’s better off leading the progressive wing of the party from her perch in the Senate and leaving the campaign trail to folks like Bernie Sanders who will make the same kinds of arguments she would make but without the charisma that she would bring.

Second, I’m not convinced that Warren has a second act in her.  Yes, she can summon her inner Cicero at will when the topic turns to banking reform, but does she have the same inspiration with respect to other topics?   Hillary won’t be defeated based only on her views of Wall Street vs. Main Street.  For someone to overtake her, they’d need to pull the kind of magic act that Obama did – to turn themselves into almost the ideal candidate, not merely a One-Hit Wonder.

In other words, to beat Hillary, you’d have to be the band that wrote “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” not the one that wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  The latter was a nice song, but it won’t get you in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame.  And Warren’s banking reform speeches by themselves won’t get her past Hillary.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Warren has the stomach for a race and finds her voice on topics other than Wall Street reform.  There would remain one more question: does she and/or her people have the stones to take on Hillary – to bring Hillary down, as it were, at the same time that they are propping themselves up?   Are they actually willing to argue that Hillary is the voice of the status quo, whereas they are the voice of progressive change? 

It wasn’t that long ago when William Jefferson Clinton campaigned as a “New Democrat,” meaning a Southern Democrat who was essentially moderate, rather than an old-school liberal.  Are the Warrenites willing to argue that they are campaigning as progressives who are trying to take the Democratic Party back to its FDR-type roots, whereas the Clintonians are mere triangulators who stand for the status quo?  Without such an attack, I still say that Hillary has too many institutional advantages to lose this race.  

An argument can be made that even if Elizabeth Warren isn’t really ready to rumble, she should still jump in the race as sort of a state-of-the-art sparring partner who will get Hillary in fighting trim for the general election.   From Hillary’s standpoint, a half-motivated Warren might well be the perfect foil during primary season.  But I don’t see Warren assuming that role.  The woman who spoke in the Senate this week wasn’t a mere sparring partner.  She was a title contender with one heck of a punch.  And remember, in the “Fight of the Century” between “The Greatest of All Time” and a Philly boy named Joe Frazier, it was Frazier who came out the winner.  (Ali won their next two bouts, but Frazier took the first one.)  So I’m not counting Warren out.  All I’m saying is that she still has a major uphill struggle, and in this uphill run, she’s going to have to cross some pretty big hurdles along the way.  In her case, those hurdles won’t take leg strength – they’ll take intestinal fortitude.  If Warren has that fortitude, Madame Inevitable could indeed have a fight on her hands.

It's Wake-up Time in America

Climate Change

Racism

Poverty

Homelessness

Social Polarization

Spiritual Apathy

Rampant Materialism

            These are all facts of life in contemporary America.   They are either altogether denied, ignored, or ultimately disregarded.  We have given up on our ability to make progressive social changes other than technological improvements.  We have stopped believing, for example, that the institutions of government are capable of producing social or environmental uplift.  We have essentially turned inward – to hobbies like marathon running or helping our little brats get into elite colleges.   You see, we haven’t given up on our ability as individuals to amass great wealth, financial security, or social status.  It’s only when it comes to “changing the world” in a direction of peace, justice or truth that we start throwing up our hands and saying, “yeah right.”

            Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”   I agree with that quotation.  It’s literally true.  But the problem is, the statement has two parts, and interpreters tend to ignore one of them.

            The arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice.  We as a society are less racist, sexist and homophobic than we used to be.  We also have more appreciation for animal rights and for the need to educate every child, regardless of whether their test results are “promising.” 

But the first part of MLK’s statement, and perhaps the most important part, is that the arc of the moral universe is long.   In other words, societal moral change takes place VERY slowly.   The bigotry, status consciousness, greed and hatred that we see vividly on display at certain times and places are always around, under the surface, even in the most “civilized” of subcultures.

As our moral universe changes ever so slowly, our technological prowess advances rapidly.  In some respects, that is a wonderful development.  But it also means that we are increasingly able to create weapons of mass destruction.  For example, just look at the effect that fossil fuels are having in drought-suffering California and now imagine all of the people in Africa who are likely to pass away in the next century or so because we are unwilling to tackle the scourge of climate change.  That is definitely a WMD.

Our society resembles the good ship Titanic.   We hum along at great speed, reveling in our superficial affluence, sophistication, and power.  And then, when we see icebergs in our path, we convince ourselves that we are powerless to do anything about them.   We just don’t have a nimble turning radius.  The arc of our moral universe is simply too long for us to react in time to avoid these icebergs.  And so, at the time they hit us, we’ll probably be doing what Winslet’s and DeCaprio’s characters were doing in the Titanic movie – pleasuring ourselves.  Why not?   It’s not like we as individuals can save the world, right?  Haven’t we learned something since the days of Woodstock? 

That, my friends, is the kind of cynicism that has brought us to where we are today.  It’s a dreadful, defeatist attitude, born not of sophistication and wisdom, but rather of ignorance and complacency.  This is what happens when you live in a society where progressive religiosity is moribund, and liberal-minded people no longer feel commanded to fight for higher values.  

I won’t talk in this blog about Ferguson or Staten Island or anywhere else where folks are debating the topic of justice in our legal system.  I make my living fighting for justice in our legal system, and my blog is devoted to my avocations, not my vocation.   But this much I will say:  we Americans, we complacent ones, now have an opportunity to wake up, rise up, and do something meaningful other than simply feathering our own nests.  We have an opportunity as individuals to come together and tackle large social scourges.   Will we make something of this opportunity?   Or will we return to our shells, like a pack of tired turtles?

I can’t answer those questions.  But what I can say is that it’s high time that we remember the other half of MLK’s statement.  The arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice.  It’s our obligation as individuals to apply some strength and bend that sucker as forcefully as we can.  We can’t just sit on the sidelines any longer.  We’ve tried that for a generation or two, and look what it’s gotten us?