Dumb and Dumber

            Go to the section of the library or google “warfare” and you’ll find many august titles like “ The Guns of August,” or “ The Greatest Generation.” If I were to write a book about warfare, I’d call it “ Dumb and Dumber.” Men give many excuses for going to war: land, security, and even women. Thousands of lives were lost and persons of different religions were killed because people of “The West” ( who wouldn’t have their “West” were it not for contributions from Muslim philosophy architecture science and medicine; it was the Muslims who rescued Aristotle’s works) were searching for a cup from which Jesus of Nazareth was supposed to have drank.0sama Ben Laden says that one of his grievances stems from the humiliation that the Arabs suffered from their defeat in The Crusades. When I visited Acala,  Spain, I was told by a Spanish scholar that Osama Ben Laden says he wants everything south of Madrid, a city founded by Muslims. He wants to recover a Muslim past.  

            A Zionist whom I met on my second trip to Jerusalem said that the Muslims had no claim on Jerusalem. Their Holy Land is located in Saudi Arabia, he said. He said that there is no evidence of Muhammad having set foot in Jerusalem. His blonde blue-eyed daughter lived in a settlement on the west bank and spoke of Arabs as though they were vermin.  

            He wants to recover Israeli glory. He says that the Muslims are hiding rocks that were part of the first Temple. Oh, right, men go to war over rocks, too. He’s from New York City and used to teach at City College. He left a copy of Malcolm X’s speeches under the door of my hotel room.  

            During a previous trip, in 2000, to the Middle East, I became the first American writer to visit Beirut since the civil war. While the American ambassador was hiding on a hill behind a tank, a closed minded ideologue, a young cultural aide, an idealist, was using her own funds in an attempt to begin communications between members of Beirut’s intellectual, cultural and artistic community and the embassy. Carla and I were invited into the homes of artists and intellectuals and I visited universities and colleges. When I returned home, I printed poems by some of those students enrolled in Lebanon’s schools.   

            I also spent a few hours being guided through the redevelopment plans for downtown Beirut, a plan that placed ancient and postmodern styles side by side. I took in about two hours of the lecture, and examined scale models for the downtown.  Modern architecture existed along side Roman baths that had been uncovered. Beirut was getting it back together after a horrible civil war.  

            I’ve visited Israel twice and have made friends and found a vibrant exciting society where they play Charlie Parker in Tel Aviv drug stores. While the left in this country has crumbled as a result of their demonizing its most dynamic element, black men, the Israeli left is very active. I attended a writers’ conference in Jerusalem and heard a poet and member of the Knesset read a poem about the murder of an  Arab shepard who didn’t understand an Israeli soldier’s order to freeze. Tel Aviv reminds me very much of Beirut.   

            While in Beirut we got a chance to hang with members of Kahlil Gibran’s family, and in Haifa we had breakfast with the great Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua. In Jerusalem, We also met Simon Lichman, a  man who works in a program that brings Jewish and Arab Israeli kids together. Unlke Thomas Friedman who, according to Little Russ of “Meet The Press,” “Knows the Arab Soul and Mind,” Simon speaks Arabic.   

            Now it’s gotten terrible . Hundreds of people who had nothing to do with the capture of two Israeli soldiers have been killed. Men who say they want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth are lobbing rockets into Israeli cities and Israel, with one of the most powerful armies in the world, equipped with over two hundred nuclear weapons,  with the power to wipe out the entire Middle East in a few hours, claims that it is threatened by Hizbullah, the gang that can’t rocket straight. These men don’t know how much they frighten millions of people and how they not only murder children but damage their psyches with a lot of dumb macho rhetoric and woofing and lobbing their gonads at each other. Children are being mutilated maimed and killed and Beirut this lovely city is being destroyed. The people of Haifa and other Northern cities of Israel cannot go about their daily business without being disturbed by threats of violence from the sky, but any objective observer will conclude that Lebanon is getting the worst of it. Much worse. Some have called what the Israel government and its American Neo-Con advisors are doing to Lebanon, genocide. People in Lebanon likened the Israeli occupation of Beirut with that of the Nazi occupation of Paris. But you can understand that someone threatening to wipe you off the planet or drive you into the sea might induce collective paranoia.  

            The President of the United States continues to be an embarrassment. You could see Tony Blair squirm in embarrassment as President Bush showed himself to be ignorant of the history of the Middle East and the positions of both sides during a performance at a press conference that was painful to watch. Of course, the whites that were responsible for his being elected did so because he painted the Democrat Party as the party of race mixing. A tactic used by his father.  

            This man is incompetent in both domestic and foreign policy and doesn’t seem to know what’s going on in his administration. The white middle class is squawking because it finally occurs to them that he and his friends don’t give a damn about them. Their blind devotion to white supremacy prevents them from noticing that while their white supremacist representatives in the Middle East are hiding behind tanks or hanging out in green zones, Muhammad Ali, and Jesse Jackson traveled to the Middle East, talked to the leaders of Syria and Iraqi with respect and successfully negotiated the release of hundreds of prisoners. Maybe instead of Condi, we need Jesse.   

            We’ve tried to introduce some rational discussion into this catastrophe. Something different from CNN and Fox News who are so much in bed with the administration that I don’t understand why they don’t join Tony Snow and set up offices in the White house.  Noga Tarnopolosky and Eva Heinstein have sent letters telling us what life is like from day to day in Jerusalem and Elmaz Abinader writes a poem about the situation in Lebanon where every citizen is considered a terrorist. Jack Foley, one of our regular contributors, reports on a trip to Syria where he didn’t encounter one monster or demon.   

            In my trips to the Middle East, I found  many artists scholars and intellectuals who wish to be delivered from ancient bronze age feuds that have pitted cousin against cousin. But that would take imagination and they are living under regimes that despise imagination.     Some one like Ron Dellums, the new mayor of Oakland and one of the few American politicians with a global sense should bring Lebanese, Israeli and Palestinian artists and intellectuals to Oakland and have them participate in a writers’ conference. Bring them away from the generals and politicians.  

            As usual, there is a debate about who began the current slaughter. Do we really care? They say that all over the world where guys need an excuse to go on a rampage of rape and carnage. He started it! No he did! It started when one man  killed another man and the murderer was thrilled by his action. When I visited Nigeria, I saw hundreds of Nigerian soldiers climbing on trucks that would take them to fight in Sierra Leone. They were ecstatic. Grinning and carrying on.   

            Finally, if the result of the Civil Rights and Feminists movements was Condi Rice then these movements have to rediscover what their goals were. But this poor woman is merely following orders and like her predecessor Colin  Powell doesn’t seem to have the guts to do the right thing: resign. Now her name will be stained with the slime of this big mess. But however one might disagree with her, I found the cartoon, printed in a Palestinian newspaper published in London, depicting Ms. Rice as a black woman pregnant with a monkey to be outrageous. The Palestinians, who are supported by many African-Americans as a result of their being the underdog, should protest this cartoon. The explanation we’ve heard, that the monkey represented a symbol in Arab folklore doesn’t wash.   

            Fall Konch will be published in early October. We wish to thank playwright Charles Fuller for his generous donation.  

Ishmael Reed