Clean House

As I said yesterday, sometimes it takes a bunch of men with guns to do what needs to be done.
HA!

What horrifies me about the Hamas takeover of Gaza is not Hamas, or their anti-Israeli policies, or even that the grounds for a civil war (if you can call fighting between two bodies that occupy an area not officially recognized as a state a civil war) have been laid out in the road like so many carcasses.

What horrifies me is the idea that the only way for anyone to get their point across in this world is by shoving a gun in someone's face and screaming "Listen to me!"

There must be another way. And there is! It's called diplomacy.

And anyone who has any real concept of power knows that the moment you resort to violence, you are openly admitting that you have no power, no influence, no integrity and no commitment to your ideals. Because if you have to force someone to do something by threatening them with pain or death, you have descended into the depths of animal instincts and no recovery of human sensibility is possible.

If you can't convince someone that you are "right" on the basis of your reason and commitment alone, you can't convince them, and you'd better be ready to hold a gun to their face for the rest of your life, or theirs.

That's why any attempt to assign blame in this situation is useless, pointless, and completely devoid of meaning. It's a game of who-picked-up-the-gun-first, and it's an unanswerable, unwinnable game. Because it's not about having an answer, or about winning.

Ultimately, it's about how humans can live together, and conduct our lives with dignity and self-respect.

Hamas isn't teaching that, and neither is Fatah (or is Fateh?). Neither is Israel or the US, despite skillful manipulation of rhetoric and publicity. The Palestinian Authority has compromised itself so many times that global, regional and local respect are so far away it's laughable, if you are the type to think the debacles of international politics is funny. [And I am.]