We are closed in, and the key is turned
on our uncertainty…We had fed the heart on fantasies,
the heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
more substance in our enmities
than in our love;
(WB Yeats,The Empty House of the Stare)
Traumas make for suffering as scholasticide becomes a destroyer of learning, thus tearing asunder the intricate tapestry that once was Gaza;
Disintegrating communities satisfy the perverse faces of self-deception as an ethnocratic leadership legitimizes their criminal intent;
Traumas are re-enacted again and again on children whose future emerges from a past shaped by a perpetrator’s acquisitiveness and their pernicious need to cause ethnic-cleansing;
Displacement and dispossessions have induced a parade of platitudes to exonerate destructive shelling, reducing whole buildings to fragments;
“Might” inundates rights when ancient narratives are invoked to extol an exodus that never took place, a parting of the sea that never happened,
In Noah’s Law it is said “not to steal” not to take another’s property with the intent to deprive the rightful possessor of that property; Such is the moral code that is ignored when leaders demand sovereignty; But rabbinical voices respond: “The pious men of other nations [also] have a share in the world to come”
What are the consequences of buildings saturated with grime and rubble and the ache of children emerging from debris and tents made desolate with cries that fill the void?
Can the body politic of the West remain ignorant of the implications of outrages, and the guilt perpetuated upon a people innocent of the wrongs projected unto them?
Why did America give pretense to appeals for humanitarian aid while allowing the carpet bombing of a densely populated enclave? Can dark humor begin to comprehend such an inversion of reality with its upside-down thinking?
Maimonides speaks: “when one does an evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad……for the knowledge of truth removes hatred and quarrels and prevents mutual Injuries”….”The court must implement laws against the one who assaults another or damages another’s property”
But all of that seems of no account when trigger-happy minds, infantilized by hair-splitting decisions, are more concerned with which children’s bodies to aim their sniper’s rifles;
The false glee after lethal exhilaration spirals into moral degradation when it runs counter to the eventual need to beg for forgiveness to oneself;
How then can hapless pilots live in the pretense of rational conduct as an international Court calls it what it is: an orgy of slaughter, a willful genocide?
Beyond that is the deliberate ignoring of International Humanitarian
Who then is able to atone for the immorality of war? Augustine absorbed the wisdom of divine reason and “lamented the necessity of [conducting] just wars” although requiring that they be fought by a “good state on behalf of good faith…”?
A “good state” in “good faith” are phrases that can never reflect the compulsive need to justify massacres on Gaza;
Prophetic voices invoke the futility of war that brings an ebb and flow to lives half-lived, doubly having suffered from apocalyptic bombardments;
The Prophet Isaiah in ancient days spoke against “…deceived men with deluded minds being led astray; “who hath formed a god, molten a graven image [of one-ton bombs] that is profitable for nothing”; they that make [a graven image] are all of them vanity……and they are their own witnesses, they see not nor know that they may be ashamed……they have not known nor understood; for He hath shut their eyes that they cannot see and their hearts that they cannot understand.” (Isaiah 44:9-18)
Gaza. Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. H/t Wikimedia.
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