[This column is being sent for posting early in the morning, Eastern US time, of Wednesday April 8. A two-week ceasefire — conditional, fragile and in places ambiguous — between US-Israel and Iran seems to be in place. For the first time in more than a month, the region’s skies seem mostly free of bombs, missiles, and harmful drones, and a high-level US-Iran meeting in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, is said to be likely on Friday the 10th. Whether the ceasefire will also apply to the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which has taken a huge toll in Lebanon, is being disputed. The text below was written on Tuesday, except in places where a past tense has replaced the present.]
Almost every US city contains a multi-purpose, multistoried, medical-care building (or more than one), with enough space for parking, where patients show up to be tested for a range of possible issues, and where some doctors, surgeons and dentists keep their clinics.
On April 6, while waiting for a ride back from the entrance of one such building in a town adjacent to New Haven, Connecticut, I observed again the courtesy and helpfulness that people in America display to one another, whatever their age, race, or disability/fitness,. Quick to open or hold a door for someone else, these health-care pursuers and their companions were unreserved in offering thanks when others assisted them.
The total opposite of this trait was seen in President Trump’s unforgettable, unrepeatable threats to the Iranian people. Not that Trump has hesitated to talk insultingly to fellow Americans. Foul language appeals to some humans, but you’d imagine that anyone pining for the Nobel would nurse at least a fleeting interest in what the future might think of him.
Irrespective of how the war on Iran ends, or how it wounds daily life wherever people need fuel to cook, or move about, or warm themselves, the future is likely to record shame and shock at Trump’s rhetoric.
LEWD SUPREMACY
Supremacy spiced up with vulgarity is found in India too. Professor Apoorvanand of Delhi University, one of the country’s most eminent scholars of Hindi literature, has written about it. A son of the eastern state of Bihar, Apoorvanand watches happenings across the entire land. His report of incidents at the recently concluded annual Hindu festival of Ram Navami — where the birth of the loved icon Ram (or Rama) is acclaimed — is deeply disturbing, to put it mildly. Here’s what the professor writes (April 6) in the online portal The Wire about a widely circulated video of a song-and-dance from celebrations in an unnamed town.
“This is a must-watch video for all Hindus. Since it is a video, the first thing you do is see. You see a crowd of young girls and women. Dancing with abandon. Thrusting their bodies backwards and forwards. You see men too. Free intermingling of men and women. A liberatory moment. Women in motion, free of all the inhibitions that tradition had chained them with. All are dancing. The experience of sheer ecstasy cannot leave you untouched. You also see saffron flags swinging in the background.
“Now is the time to unmute the video. You hear a song being played on a DJ, and realize that it is the song that is making these girls dance to its tune. You try to decipher its meaning. It is not what we understand as song. The words are crude abuses describing the vagina of the mothers of the traitors of the nation, the anti-nationals. The worst, crudest words that everybody knows but no parent would allow their children to use. The words are repeated to deepen the pornographic pleasure they communicate. You can see in the movement of the bodies that they are relishing it.
“This song is a musical weapon to injure Muslims psychologically. Hindu apologists claim that it does not include the word ‘Muslim’. It only degrades and abuses women who are the mothers of anti-nationals. Why are Muslims identifying with the word ‘traitor’? Is it not an admission on their part that they are traitors? What is wrong with abusing anti-nationals and their mothers? After all, the mothers are the real culprits. They bring the anti-nationals into the world.”
In some places, the professor informs us, Ram enthusiasts loudly sang songs right in front of mosques to taunt Muslim neighbors. While the police did nothing, defenders of the taunting complained that the Muslims weren’t tolerant. “Why are Muslims so touchy, so hypersensitive, so intolerant that they cannot bear a little hatred, a little violence?”
Apparently there was no public denunciation by anyone of this repulsive mix of hate, obscenity, arrogance, and intoxication. Going against what a good-deal-less-than-democratic regime wants is risky and becomes exhausting.
DIDN’T BEND HIS KNEE
On Friday April 3, I jotted down these thoughts: “It’s Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus was ‘eliminated’ this day. One crime of his was to refuse to bend his knee to the day’s greatest empire. Another was that he asked everyone, including fellow Jews, to love their neighbors, whoever they might be, Jews, Gentiles, Romans, or anything else.
“A third offence was Jesus’s lack of interest in slogans and outward observances and a focus instead on what lay in the hearts of those around him. He not only spotted people’s greed, hates, and fears; he also recognized the human hunger for a caring, nobler, unselfish life.
“The current destruction in what we can fairly call Jesus’s backyard – the region that contains Iran, the Gulf countries, Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon – has among other things vaporized lives, bridges, schools, and hospitals. If lucky, you survive, but danger and hardship give you round-the-clock company.
“Because countries and economies today are interlocked across the globe, and because geographies, oceans, and straits matter, the Middle East’s confrontations are also making life harder and costlier everywhere.”
Four days later, on Tuesday April 7, as the “deadline” nears for “taking out” all of Iran, I asked myself: Which is worse? For the US and Israel to pulverize Iran’s airports, schools, railway trains, power plants, steel plants, drone-making and missile-making plants, and more, and kill key Iranian figures one by one? Or for Iran’s rulers to block the Strait of Hormuz and permit passage only to a handful of favored ships, thereby making life harder across the globe, including for very poor millions?
RECALLING THE SEQUENCE
Part of my response was to remember the sequence of events. Towards the end of February, just when (with apparent seriousness) US-Iran negotiations (sponsored by Oman) were taking place in Geneva on the toughest issues, including Iran’s presumed nuclear ambitions, the world was surprised by a massive US-Israeli attack on Iran which began on February 28 (and was touted to attain an almighty scale on the night of Tuesday April 7). Could Iran have responded to this deceit except by tightening the Hormuz Strait?
Asked if he was concerned about possible war-crimes charges, Trump replied that he was not. He added that in any case the biggest war crime would be for Iran to make a nuclear weapon. Can someone explain to me (and the world) why making the nuclear bomb was Israel’s right but for Iran would constitute an intolerable crime?
I will nonetheless join in the world’s relief should countries like Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt succeed in their valiant — but as of writing vain — efforts for a Middle East ceasefire in which, among other things, Iran categorically repeats its rejection of a nuclear weapon, those who have attacked Iran pledge compensation, and the Strait of Hormuz is freed for all ships.
As the minutes ticked away towards his April 7 deadline of 8 PM Eastern US Time, Trump declared – in a tone of unconvincing regret — that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
He has also said: “We have a plan — because of the power of our military — where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock [on the night of Tuesday/Wednesday], where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again. “I mean complete demolition by 12 o’clock (midnight), and it’ll happen over a period of four hours — if we wanted to.”
A few may speak admiringly of the ruthlessness required from a US president in a wicked world populated by fanatics, but the world as a whole is more likely to see in the White House’s current occupant an abnormal love of his own desires — plus an extraordinary willingness to yield to Israeli pressure.
IMPERIAL ISRAEL
The resolve of the present Israeli government seems to be to greatly extend Israel’s land area, taking over much of the space that has belonged to Lebanon or to the Palestinian Authority, which retains only nominal control over what’s now a continually shrinking piece of Palestinian territory. Imperial Israel thinks it can kill anyone it wants in Iran, or in Lebanon, or anywhere else in the Middle East, and compel Palestinians to cede more and more of their lands to Tel Aviv.
American might, and Israeli influence over that might, may well create a Greater Israel for the time being. Will the US be able preserve this new Middle East superpower? It is extremely unlikely that the American people will endorse or pay for a long-term commitment to govern and look after the Middle East, whether by itself or in association with Israel.
Meanwhile the people of Iran, and of the other old nations of the Middle East, including Turkey, and Egypt, and other Arab lands, will also want their say. They too have their histories and their civilizations. They have pride and self-respect. They have numbers. And their lives have been shaken roughly and dangerously, fatally in thousands of cases.
And there’s the rest of our planet, some of it freshly pictured for all of us by Artemis II. Designs for the Middle East’s future matter to the peoples of Europe, Africa, Russia, China, the rest of Asia, Latin America, the nations of the Pacific, and to the proud people of the Arctic, including Greenlanders.
SPIRITS CAN BE TOUGH
Related questions have sprung in all our minds. Can Iran survive comprehensive, ferocious pulverization? Can anything justify the pulverization? Is it, was it, morally right to seek to destroy Iran’s spirit? Is it practically feasible?
There are related questions. Was it morally right, or practically feasible, for some of Iran’s political and theological leaders to seek to destroy the individual spirit in Iran? Have they reflected on those thousands of Iranians, most of them young, who were evidently gunned down in December and January, weeks before the US-Israeli attack?
There’s probably a record somewhere in the universe of everything we say, do, and think. Trump’s stretch for the ugliest language he could find to describe the people of Iran would not have pleased the Record-keeper in whom much of the world believes, who misses nothing and remembers everything. Did the language, the unremitting destruction, and the savage threats only bring the people of Iran closer to a regime many of them had hoped not long ago to topple?
Finally, can those of us who form the rest of humanity beckon onto our hearts all the wounded, bereaved, and amazingly resilient people of the Middle East, be they Arab, Jewish, Persian, or Turk? Be they Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or anything else??
Source Credit: http://www.weareonehumanity.org/
