Monsters Feel No Fear

Terrorism Isn't What You Do. It's Who You Are

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It's been 23 years since we declared war on terrorism, which should be plenty of time to figure out what that word means. Make that your next movie, Matt Walsh.

Last week, in Lebanon, 2800 pagers originally sold to Hezbollah alerted all at once. Users picked up the pagers to check their messages (or, in the case of one man, had his eight-year-old daughter pick it up). Seconds later, the devices all exploded. Twelve people died, and over 1800 required surgery. They lost hands. They lost eyes. The Lebanese people now live in a constant state of fear that their personal electronics might explode and kill/maim them or their families at any time.

What word is there for this state of being other than terror? What word for the act that caused it other than terrorism?

I am told that the pager attack was not terrorism because those pagers were specifically sold to Hezbollah, a militant Islamic organization and the most powerful non-state military in the world. They have, for some mysterious reason, been rocketing Israel for almost a year straight (and were plenty hostile before that). I do not support Hezbollah, militant Islam is very bad actually, but quick definitional question: does terrorism only count when it's deployed against people we consider the good guys?

The de facto answer has always been yes, and here's why: fear is something humans feel. Monsters do not feel it. How many horror movies have you seen where the villain crawls after the heroes despite injuries, indifferent to their own suffering in their fanatical need to maim and kill? Monsters don't feel fear. They are fear.

Monsters are terrorists not because of what they do, but because of what they are. This is why Israel and the people who support them tend to use “Palestinian” and “terrorist” interchangeably. Two million terrorists, two million monsters, live in Gaza. The children of monsters will grow up to be monsters. In the words of Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister of Israel, starving all two million of them to death would be “justified and moral.” Against such evil all things are permitted, up to and including rape:

A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to "terrorists" in custody.

Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"

"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"

Milwidsky is in the majority. An Institute for National Security Studies poll found that 65 percent of Israelis believe these rapists should not face criminal charges. Some of those people think the Army should at least give the rapists a slap on the wrist, but the Israeli far right is so pro-rape that they stormed detention centers in protest when the slightly less insane portion of the Israeli government mounted an investigation into this one issue, this one prison. Israel has dismissed multiple other reports of abuse (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) as terrorist propaganda. Keep in mind, though, that until the press got their hands on the military’s own surveillance footage, they described accusations of rape as terrorist propaganda as well.

(and by the way, next time you decide to criticize the media for being a bunch of useless amoral click-chasers, remember that it’s the only institution that can shame the powerful into basic accountability. Israel is prohibiting access and killing journalists for a reason. You will miss us when we’re gone).

The crimes go so far beyond prisons. Doctors and Israeli media both report that Israeli snipers routinely target children. Soldiers were recently filmed throwing Palestinian bodies off of rooftops. They have massacred starving civilians waiting in line for food. The truly unusual thing about that incident was that Israel allowed the aid to enter Gaza in the first place: an investigation by our own state department found overwhelming evidence that Israel is preventing humanitarian aid from entering Gaza in the first place. They provide no verifiable evidence that Hamas operates out of the many hospitals they targeted. They repeatedly bomb areas they’ve told people to evacuate to . Footage shows drone and ground force attacks on unarmed Palestinians (and Israeli hostages). Israeli soldiers routinely burn down Palestinian homes after occupying and clearing them. More than 80 percent of Gazan schools destroyed. Cemeteries desecrated. Streets destroyed so that ambulances cannot reach casualties. Ambulances themselves bombed. This list of war crimes is not comprehensive. There are new ones every week.

When organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah commit atrocities, we correctly condemn those actions as terrorism. Israel’s actions, on the other hand, are “jusified and moral,” because terrorists do not feel pain or fear like we do. They do not value life or love their family like we do. All they love is killing.

It’s a trope that should be familiar to all of us here in America. We infamously declared war on terror back in 2001, but you’ll notice that we did not attack our enemies for being terrorists, our enemies were terrorists because we attacked them. How else do you explain our decision to attack our evil enemy Iraq instead of our good friend Saudi Arabia? Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. So is Saudi Arabia. So, it seems, are we. Harris has committed to Biden’s policy of giving Israel the weapons it uses to commit these war crimes, and Trump — well, it’s never entirely certain what Trump will do, but he was a rabid Zionist during his first term and wants Israel to “finish the job” as soon as possible. It’s also worth noting that Netanyahu appears determined to provoke a regional war a month and a half away from the American presidential election, which strongly suggests a preference for Trump.

Our own wars of naked vengeance killed 1-2 million people and destabilized the entire Middle East. Israel should take note: they have also done terrible damage to America, the country we were supposedly defending. All those nasty habits we learned overseas have made their way home: dehumanization pervades American politics today. Our enemies overseas are terrorists, terrorists are monsters: therefore, all our enemies are monsters. We brought a predetermined set of policy positions that we called freedom and democracy to the Iraqis and Afghans at the barrel of a gun. Now, at home, we have a party that takes the same approach. Democracy is when people vote for us. Freedom is the freedom to pass any law we want. We will secure these things by force if we have to; we will destroy democracy in the name of saving it.

How long can a representative democracy last, when so many of its citizens think this way? None of this is fringe anymore. All of it is mainstream. Republicans writ large are currently advancing the most blatantly xenophobic, racist, and disgusting campaign against an immigrant population that I can personally recall in my 37 years of life. Haitians afraid to leave their houses. Over 30 bomb threats, none of which involved actual bombs but all of which necessitated a police response and the shutdown of government buildings. School cancelled. Community events cancelled. Far-right brawlers in the streets. All thanks to a baseless lie that draws on our ugliest anti-Black stereotypes and spread by Actual Goddamn Nazis. It feels strange to mention this after discussing the actual bombs and actual shutdown and actual real-life slaughter in Gaza, but both are symptoms of dehumanization, and it is not the sort of impulse that grows less violent over time.

Harris has condemned Trump for spreading baseless rumors and called the reality of Springfield “a crying shame.” It took her a week to decide it was politically advantageous to do this. She has, to my knowledge, still not mentioned Springfield at her rallies, and she has ignored questions about it, for the same reason she will never meaningfully criticize Israeli terrorism: she wants to win. Harris is still the better candidate by a thousand miles and I will vote for her. The bipartisan immigration bill she loves so much is virtually identical to Trump’s first-term policy, but he’s moved farther right and she will not encourage these kinds of pogroms; the most vulnerable among us will be far safer with her in the White House. I think Trump will be far worse on Israel too.

Is this really the best we can do? What kind of future does this country have, where dehumanization is mainstream and opposing it carries so much risk?