Understanding Gaza

Reem Salahi

As bombs fall and bullets fly in Gaza, the bombardment is actually taking place tens of thousands of miles away. It is a war of rhetoric and mind control – where the only casualties are the civilians. A population cannot be controlled through tanks or violence. It can be stamped out of existence or weakened to the point of non-existence, as is taking place in Gaza, but it cannot be controlled. Despite the death toll in Gaza that increases daily by the hundreds and the wounded tally which increases by the thousands, the Gazans have not been controlled. They awaited the incursion of the Israeli tanks and soldiers – not because they believed that this time David would defeat Goliath – but because they are still free to discern the difference between oppressed and oppressor, occupied and occupier, and fighting in self-defense and engaging in genocide. Their minds are not the casualties of this war of mind control which has incapacitated so many of us living in the United States.

Control is the product of a reconstruction of truth and loss of critical thought. It is the ability to make one say that two plus two equals five or that black is actually white, not because that person fears for his life if he were to say otherwise, but because he actually believes that two plus two equals five. Mind control requires the complete loss of the ability to think and discern. One’s mind becomes a piece of putty to be shaped and shifted in the hands of others, yet all the while one does not realize that his mind is no longer his own. The greatest and most difficult aspect of mind control is that it must be done obscurely – those whose mind is being controlled can never know that they are merely parrots. Rather, they must see their beliefs as ultimate truths that are unquestionable. Any opposition is blasphemous and is responded with assertions that are memorized, internalized, and on perpetual autopilot. While most of these assertions are illogical and irrelevant, for those who have been lost to mind control, such assertions are ground-breaking and earth-shattering.

I recognize that I am speaking allusively and in the abstract. I write this all not as a sociological study of the mind, but rather to make sense of the current situation in Gaza. For me, the tragedy of the dead and wounded in Gaza is second to the tragedy of the loss of critical thought here in the United States. Through the mind control that came from decades of media propagation, buying and selling of political candidates, rewriting of history, Hollywood, and the capitalization of words such as anti-Semitism, Holocaust, and self-hating Jew, the occupation and massacre of the Palestinian people has been redefined as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” What is happening in Gaza as we speak is the collateral damage of mind control in the United States. When the President of the most powerful nation in the world can stand before cameras and unequivocally place complete blame on Hamas and the President-Elect can relinquish any responsibility because he proclaims (for this issue alone) that there should be one president at a time, such assertions can only be consumed and digested by a population whose mind has been controlled.

Nothing – not law, not facts, not logic, not analogy – can justify Israel’s attacks into Gaza. Legally, under humanitarian law and the laws of occupation, an occupied people can resist an enemy occupier. The occupied’s right to resist does not, then in turn, allow the occupier to engage in genocide of the occupied under the guise of “self-defense.” Factually, Israel’s incursion into Gaza is an offensive military move that has been premeditated for over six months as documented by Israeli news sources. The retroactive redefining of an offensive military incursion to a defensive mode of protection is the equivalent of claiming black as white. Logically, Israel cannot destroy Hamas in Gaza without murdering half of Gaza’s population, for there is only so much precision that can be attained by bombing indiscreetly from Apache Helicopters and tanks into the most densely populated city in the world. However considering that nearly all of Israel’s citizenry are members of its military, it is questionable whether Israel even knows what civilians are. Analogically, a woman who is being violently raped cannot be denied the right to scratch, bite, and kick in self-defense. Yet the rapist cannot use the woman’s attempts at self-defense to justify homicide.

Unfortunately, the analogy will not hold. Our minds in the United States have been molded to view the Palestinians’ plight outside of any other context and any other mindset. Logic, reason, law, and facts are way-sided and autopilot is turned on. No matter how egregious Israel’s actions are, Palestinians are always wrong and Israel is the perpetual victim. And because of Israel’s need for defense against the Palestinian terrorists, we in America unquestioningly and unresistingly pour in the money, military support, and infrastructure. Israel is to America what Romeo is to Juliet – a union made possible through mind control.

Thus, while I would not go so far as victimizing Israel, I do point the finger of responsibility at the think tanks, the media, the politicians, and the educational institutions in America that have hijacked our minds and made us believe that two plus two actually equals five. The massacre of Gaza is a repulsive testament that the war for the minds is being lost and we have entered an Orwellian world composed of allusions and lies. With the unapologetic mass murder of Gaza, I can only wonder what other collateral damage will result from our mind control here in the United States.

Photo Courtesy: Reuters Pictures