The cruelty, madness, loss continue to spark palpable rage. Actor Mandy Patinkin, a Jew aware of history, on the corrosive effect of “the revenge business”: “How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and do it to someone else?!” Omar El Akkad - born in Egypt, raised in Qatar and Canada, a US citizen - on “what it means to live under an ordering of the world that abides slaughter, and whether any ordering ever stood for anything at all.” He wrote the book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, though its full title is One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will always have been against this,“ what one critic calls ”a cathartic savaging“ of empire, Western hypocrisy on Gaza, selective empathy in ”the most privileged sliver of global society.“
“When the unspeakable happens, the world should stop but it doesn’t,” he writes of the comforting bubble of a white nationalist world run by broken men and their accomplices. They blithely “shrug at one kind of slaughter,” having developed “a terrible immunity…When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power?” The time to choose is now, he adds, and hindsight will not undo or excuse their crimes: “At the time they say, ‘Yes, this is tragic, but necessary’…The alternative to the countless killed and maimed and orphaned…screaming from under the rubble (is) barbarism.” “There is no way to finish the sentence, ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead but…’” he movingly writes. “There is no such thing as someone else’s children.”