One Man Got It Wrong

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Photo credit: Wikipedia

One Man Got it Wrong

No, this is not about Donald Trump, who gets everything wrong in his move to put the US back into the medieval historical epoch. This is about a one-man play for which I ushered last night. The play was generally about one person’s struggle to fit in living in the US with an incredibly varied heritage of Middle Eastern origin. The play, in my opinion, was great, and the actor was superb! But there was one glaring error of a factual nature that threw me off base sitting in the small and intimate theater’s venue.

In referring to the protests that took place in New York City following the preemptive attack by Palestinians, led by Hamas fighters, on October 7, 2023, the script read that protests were “violent.” I don’t know why the playwright, who was also the performer who single-handedly acted in the play, chose to use a word that is a complete distortion of how protests took place in answer to the total lack of proportionality in war and the killing of noncombatants in the Gaza Strip that continues up to the moment I write this commentary.

Both on and off college and university campuses in the US, including New York City, protests were peaceful, both by student protesters and citizens acting in response to Israel’s inappropriate and illegal war. This is what The International Criminal Court found in regard to Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attack:

Currently, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, has not been found guilty of war crimes.

However, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant against him, as well as against former Israeli Defence [sic] Minister Yoav [sic] Gallant and a former Hamas commander.

The warrants allege that they bear criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip from at least October 8, 2023, to May 20, 2024 (generated by artificial intelligence).

In fact, the opposite was true, returning to the nature of protests in the US. Many college and university administrators gave police in New York (New York Police Department) and elsewhere carte blanche to enter academic and other spaces on campus, and in many cases, to violently repress the well-established right to peacefully protest in the US. Civil disobedience was mocked. In some cases, protesters who were foreign-born were thrown into the hands of the federal legal and immigration system and dealt the harshest treatment imaginable.

One word can mean a lot, especially when that word represents an unreality in which protest to an illegal and vicious war continues and human rights are grossly violated.