What Is The Meaning Of This?

It’s always the same after every terror attack in that nothing is ever the same anymore.  Everything we thought we knew must be rethought all over again.  In the week since the attacks in Paris rocked us to our cores, the very meaning of basic principles we thought we once understood are up for debate.  What does Freedom mean?  What does it mean to be Brave?  Or Innocent?

In response to the Charlie Hedbo shooting, and specifically to the Charlie Hedbo shooting, Hamas said “any differences in opinion is no justification for killing innocents.”  Now, why would they say that?  Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s wrong coming from them.  This is the same organization, after all, who indiscriminately fires rockets into Israel to kill anyone they can and more recently instructed Palestinians to drive their cars into crowds of Israelis, resulting in the deaths of a mother and her baby in its stroller.   A baby.  What could that baby have possibly done?  Was it not innocent?  Or according to Hamas, are no Israelis innocent?  Or are the implications even more troubling?

Hamas-run Al Aqsa TV airs a children’s program called The Pioneers of Tomorrow.  It’s a show in the same vein as Barney & Friends in which a young female host named Saraa and costumed characters entertain and interact with their young viewers, callers and in-studio guests.  And disguised in the fun, they also educate with stories and songs and special guests.  They teach the children key life lessons, or as the first mascot of the show, a Mickey Mouse-type named Farfour, put it: “we are placing together the cornerstone for the ruling of the world by an Islamic leadership.”  In that way, it does differ a bit from Barney.

The first element in that cornerstone is pride in speaking Arabic and not English, the crass language of the infidel.  Though, in later seasons, the benefits of knowing the language of the enemy to better understand them is encouraged.  The show presents thought-provoking debates about what to do with the Jews in Israel.  Saraa takes the stance that they should be expelled and left to scatter around the world, while Nassur the bear contends the Jews should be slaughtered.  They ultimately reach a compromise wherein Jews are expelled from Islamic holy lands, but by any means necessary.  So if they won’t go peacefully, then it’s expulsion by slaughter.  Until that time comes, the host and cast of characters encourage children to throw rocks at Jews, shoot them, punch them, kill them, and Assud goes so far as to promote eating them.  And in 2008, when a cartoon came out of Denmark, he broadened his appetite to include Danes.

If there is a central theme of The Pioneers of Tomorrow, it’s the need to protect Islam and the Al Aqsa mosque and take revenge on the criminal infidels who occupy it “by means of morning prayers, blood, sacrifice, and pain by means of martyrs and endurance.”  And to drive home the point, over the life of the show, three of the mascots, Farfour the mouse, his cousin Nahoul the bee, and Nahoul’s brother Assud the rabbit die on screen a martyrs death.  Just in case anyone thought they were getting too preachy and not putting in enough practice.  They even sing the classic “When We Get Martyred” song.  It goes a little something like this- sing along if you know it:

When we get martyred we will go to Paradise.

When we get martyred we will go to Paradise.

No, don’t say we are too small, this life has made us grown ups.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Even if they gave us all the money in the world, it won’t make us forget.

I am willing to sacrifice my blood for my country.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Without Palestine, our childhood means nothing.

Our childhood means nothing…  It’s not just Israel.  In the Radical world of Islam, there simply is no innocents.

The Taliban has been taking advantage of gullible children, coercing and bribing them to be suicide killers for years.  al Qaeda has its Birds of Paradise and Islamic State their Zarqawi’s Cubs Camps where they train prepubescent boys in, and romanticize the life of jihad.  They take their own young and darken their hearts and wash their minds of the ability to make their own choices.  Which is what it means to be Free: to be able to make your own choices.  And standing by those choices in the face of adversity and consequence is what it means to be Brave.  And being Innocent is the ability to make those choices free of prejudice.  And right now, that is not what it means to be Islamic in too much of the Muslim world.  And it's the meaning of Islam which is at stake here.

Howard Dean and President Obama can say the radical terrorists aren’t Islamic, but that’s like the world telling America what it means to play football.  If anything, that just makes America angrier about soccer.  Only Islam can define Islam.  The free world can fight the immediate threat of the radicalized subset of Islam, but the real war is for the innocents of Islam.  Not just for now, but for the future generations of Islam.  Will those generations be future representatives of peace and love or will the innocents be lost to violence and hate?

Right now, those two diametrically opposed sides are making their cases, but one is making theirs a lot louder than the other.  We keep hearing that moderate Islam is condemning terror in the name of Islam, we just don’t hear about it all the time but it's there.  Well, we have to hear it, because we hear the Radicals, and they seem to be winning.  If not the hearts of the world, then the minds.  If moderate Islam is going to win out, they must stand up in the face of Radicalism and in a full throat, with no justification or equivocation, they must condemn the acts and make clear what it means to be Islamic and as they're acts today are defining Islam for today and tomorrow, any acts done in the name of Mohammad are returned in kind on Mohammad.  If you are respectful in the name of Mohammad, then you are respecting Mohammad.  If you love in the name of Mohammad, then you are loving Mohammad.  And if you kill in the name of Mohammad, then you are killing Mohammad.  This must be done, not just for the peace of mind of the rest of the world, and not at all to take ownership of or apologize for Radical Islam, but to save the innocents of Islam, to ensure the meaning of the innocence of Islam.

Nothing But The Truth

On December 18th of last year, The Colbert Report signed off.  Nine years of reporting at people from the gut.  Because as he explained on his first show, when he introduced The Word “Truthiness” to the world, “The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you; I promise to feel the news at you.”

As it turned out, Colbert was only playing a character, satirizing the prevalence of opinion journalism in today’s media where journalists don’t report the news as much as inform their audience what they feel the news is really about.  In reality, Colbert was making the point that you can’t use feeling as a basis for policy.  Feelings can be misleading.

People feel afraid of household spiders.  They want to crush and flush them, but the reality is spiders are beneficial.  They eat disease-ridden bugs, like mosquitoes and bed bugs, and pests that destroy crops.  In fact, if we got rid of all of the spiders, we would quickly fall into a devastating famine that would threaten the very existence of the human race.  So while we may feel afraid of spiders and feel it necessary to kill them, they’re actually there helping us. And that's a rule which can be applied further. For instance, to the Police.

But that’s part of a conversation we’re about to have.  At least that’s what everyone keeps saying.  That we need to have this conversation.  Though, we’re still waiting for it to begin.  People are talking, yelling and chanting from all sides, but no one seems to be listening to the other.  Yet, somehow, one side has managed to reach their conclusion.

The protesters in New York have demanded the job of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and an end to the “Broken Windows” policy, in which Police target small crimes in order to curtail an atmosphere where bigger crime can thrive.  A policy which protesters feel endangers their lives.  But just because they feel it, doesn’t make it true.

Mayor de Blasio himself just last month stood up at a press conference to announce that crime in New York City, under this policy, is down to more-than-decade-long lows.  In Newark, one of the most crime infested cities in the country, the “Broken Windows” policy was implemented by now-New Jersey Senator, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker and crime dropped.  In 2010, the mid-point of Sen. Booker’s Newark reign, the city experienced its first murder-free month in more than forty years.  

Yes, feelings are real, but the facts bear out reality.  And the facts are that the Police make neighborhoods, especially dangerous neighborhoods, safer.  So now, with protesters demanding the end of a productive policy and the removal of a Commissioner who has been at it since before most of these protesters were born, and with chants dedicated to men who didn’t deserve to die but whose last acts on earth were criminal, it feels like the protesters aren’t fighting for inherent rights, but for the right to commit crime.

But that’s only a feeling.  And I’ll allow for it be wrong- In fact, I’m sure it will be proven to be so, once we get into the conversation and find the facts that do that.  So where do we start?

We could start with Police arresting minorities at a far greater rate than white people.  But it wouldn’t be a complete picture without mentioning that minorities are caught committing more crimes, so maybe we should start there.  But then why are Police in minority neighborhoods more to make those arrests?  Is it only because minorities neighborhoods provide more opportunity to fill a quota of a rigged system?  But that still doesn’t account for the reason why minority communities provide that opportunity, which seems to set off the entire cycle.  So maybe we should start there.

Or maybe we should go further back.  152 years back.  To New Year’s Day in the year 1863.  The day President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the first of the slaves from that day and henceforward.

 

Now, President Lincoln’s Proclamation didn’t end racism in this country.  It didn’t even entirely end slavery.  The struggle continued for many, many years.  The War itself didn’t end for two more years.  Then there were the fights for equality: To own land.  To work.  To get educated.  To vote.  To sit on a bus.  To be a person.  Heck, the struggle continues now.  It’s a struggle that should never have been necessary, but one that has proven to be immensely valuable and worthwhile, and it was only made possible by that Proclamation and the millions of Americans who conspired to make it happen.  But sometimes it feels like whenever there’s a conversation on race in this country, it carries the undertone, sometimes even an overtone, that this is a nation with slavery and racism at its core.  A tone that ignores the Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that hundreds of thousands of American men died fighting to meet its purpose.  And when they’re sacrifice is washed over, it feels like those men died in vain.

But the fact is those men fought and died for something. And it wasn’t to conquer land, for self preservation, or even to win a voting bloc.  It was for the North.  For the Union.  For freedom.  Because they knew a Truth.  A Truth which was self evident, that all men are created equal and with rights.  Among them: liberty.  The same Truth that less than one hundred years prior, Americans, in their own name, fought and died for.  And it’s that Truth which set the slaves free. Because that’s what the truth does.

Yes, there was slavery in this country.  Yes, America profited from it.  And yes, there is racism in this country today, but it’s not the core of this country.  Freedom and equality is the core.  That’s the truth which the facts bear out.  The lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought for the rights of African men and women prove it.  And that truth, and not some truthiness version of it, must now set us free from the deep-seeded resentment which has infected every conversation this country has ever tried to have on race.  And it is only from that place where we must start and finish the last conversation we should ever have to have on the subject.