You keep serving people smoothies, they’re gonna forget how to chew. It’s always a little disheartening to me how poorly Americans grapple with straightforward ideas. I hate seeing this to be true because I’m really glad fate made me American and this our Plague Era has schooled me out of being ashamed of our ruffian kind. I just wish we were a little bit better at mature thinking.
It shouldn’t be so hard to understand that Jews and Muslims are the same in all the basic ways. My people came up with an unfortunate idea and Christianity took a bit of a left turn with it but Islam careered straight ahead and now so many commentators are trying to pretend this hasn’t been one continuous road.
If you haven’t seen the two Israeli shows “Hatufim”/“Prisoners of War” and “Fauda,” better watch ’em now. I don’t think that degree of honesty will be possible again for awhile after the recent massacres of Jewish babies by Hamas.
“Hatufim” had been controversial enough when it first aired. It portrayed terrorists as human beings with motivations one could understand even as one recoiled from their actions. It showed what happens to agents of a security state as they must become monstrous in order to do their essential work and how they destroy their families in trying to protect their country. They are broken and disposable and politicians have no problem disposing of them as convenient.
I’d watched a good few seasons of “Homeland” before I found “Hatufim.” Both shows were produced by the same team and at the same time, and after watching the Israeli version I felt outraged and insulted. The Israelis got hard truths and we got week after week of Carrie Mathison’s trembling chin.
I recommend watching both seasons of “Hatufim” back-to-back, and maybe refrain from reading episode synopses. This is a story arc worth experiencing in its full power and anguish.
“Fauda” is more melodramatic and occasionally ridiculous in its plotting, and protagonist Doron’s Incredible-Hulk-breaking-out-all-over resting face starts to get a little silly after the first 100 sightings, but that show too is rigorously honest about the lives of Israelis and Arabs trapped in a forced territorial marriage all of them want to escape. Reviewers of Arab ethnicity writing in English have been very critical of “Fauda” but in my view that’s just been political posturing. It’s impossible to finish watching without having been made to comprehend how badly everyone’s present has been mutilated by centuries of bad decisions by the more powerful.
And yet, these self appointed/anointed Masters of the Universe seem to succeed in convincing us they “ know best.”....
"straightforward ideas", indeed.
Like the biological definitions for the sexes by which some third of us, at any one time, are sexless ... 😉🙂