Provocation and Evil Behavior

On the Hospital Bombing In Gaza and Attempting to Determine Blame

There are a couple of issues that have been disturbing me about a couple of ideas that have been floating around since the Hamas invasion and the current chapter in the one-hundred and thirty year Middle-Eastern conflict I feel compelled to comment upon.

Cultural Discrimination and Defining Cultures To Be Discriminated Upon

The first thing I feel  compelled to point out is there is no connection between discrimination against what we term to be “black” America and Jewish Americans.  The results of the discrimination are of course the same, but the causes and the reasons are not at all the same.  American descendents from Africa, called black, was not a singular ethnicity, but several, which is difficult to determine with any exactitude by those currently defined as being from African descent.  Thus they were of various ethnic distinctions in culture, behavior (determined by culture), language, and physical resemblances.  These people, brought here, did not just lose their name, language, culture, and identity from Africa, they lost their identity as differing races from within Africa and were redefined as a singular race not just as descendents from a common continent, but lumped into a common racial identity as African, even though Africa was not, and still is not, an homogenous cultural unity; and I often find black Americans who had their cultural identities erased are often just as guilty as descendents of European-Americans of thinking of themselves as African in a singular sense.  People within Africa are of no such illusion, and the prime cause of what we view as dysfunctional and corruption among African nations today are simply because of artificial nationships that combine racially distinct cultures that are less able to convince these ethnicities  they are of one “national” descent and these identities often feel discriminated against within the national identities.   It is like Basque identity or Scottish identity within European nations.  

So “black”  Americans, also discriminated against by assigning them to a skin color that is not even an identity that arose out of any common cultural bond and not even every single one of their ancestors came as slaves (the principal majority, quite possibly 98 or 99% were of captured identity.  But there were black immigrants who actually did come here unfettered from slavery—i.e., are descendents of blacks who arrived “free”. But this is itself complicated because some were descendants of blacks taken to Europe as “servants” and then migrated free , some that had migrated as “Moors”, who were themselves an admixture of Mid-Eastern, North Africans descended from earlier settlements of Middle-eastern and southern Europeans, and some more native African cultures that had become Islamic and joined in force to invade  Iberia.  Some free blacks escaped from being slaves in the Caribbean, and some of those remained free by joining with colonies of existing Native tribes in America.  Adding to all of that, is, that when slavery was completely outlawed in America, the “free’black (whose descendants may or may not have even been held in bondage) were once against clumped into a singular non-culturally rooted category, but were now all black Americans and so I’m sure that descendants of whatever non-bound descendants of African heritage and descendants of bound Africans intermingled, probably making it almost close to impossible that there are very many modern “black” Americans with no bound ancestors in their family genealogy.  Then to complicate the situation any further, there's very little likelihood that there are very many of those same black descendants of Africans that came bound that have no European ancestry in them because of forced seduction (rape) of the women descended from  Africa.  This results  not in African-Americans which is a supposed legal classification, but what I call the Afro-American, the hybrid who is descended from European and African ancestry but are equally cast  into the common pool of ethnic “blackness”.  So while, as my wife and Mr. Kenyatta point out, the “afro” may be a hairstyle, the Afro-American to my mind is the disinheritance of the European bastardization that casts such persons into remaining clumped genetically unpropertied from the European portion of their inheritance.  So while the “afro” may have been a hairstyle, the “Afro-American”, as I see it, is the genetically disinherited, and I have clung to this concept since I first came across it in the 60’s, I believe in a speech by Stokely Carmichael.  

African-American came into common parlance in the 80’s when Jesse Jackson attempted to change the common ethnonym from “black”.  While I totally agree with Jackson that black is a separation that inferiorizes people, and African-American was to be an inclusivization of descendants from Africa into an integrated unity of a common American identity, since that has not occurred, and the entire “race” is not determined by ethnicity but by color, then the only way to speak of the false identifiable label of people by a skin color is to identify them through the label that has been attached, even though my argument is that the attached label itself is misinformed, ahistorical, and used exclusively as a deceptively perpetrated fraud, I am incapable of confronting the fraud by euphemisms that distort that the fraud of the label itself is the identification of people of any kind by labeling them via a skin shade.

The point of distinction with Judaism is  that “black” and its antecedent “Africanism'' should not even be an identity, is certainly not a singular race or a singular identity and the identity is imposed upon them in order to marginalize through discriminatory practices.  On the other hand Judaism is a self-proclaimed identity, not limited to a religious identification, but simply through vague cultural rituals.  I am not using vague in the sense that the rituals themselves are vague, the rituals are quite explicit.   No, by vague I refer to the idea that whether or not the “Jewish” person obeys, or even believes in the rituals, they identify themselves as Jewish because of the unity of the cultural rituals themselves,  so practice of the ritual is not relevant, but the identity to Judaism is the culture created from the ritual. Thus Judaism is a religion with posessed properties of belief, but Judaism is also an identity that extends and can exclude belief in the Jewish religion.  In this sense Judaism is a true and identifiable ethnicity that no matter what part of the world the Jewish person may live in, no matter what allegiance they might have, or even what level they may participate in any government anywhere, they continue to self-identify as Jewish. 

Felix Frankfurter always identified, and apparently did not mind being identified, as a Jewish justice.  Nevertheless he was totally assimilated into Americanism, and in cases about Jewish discrimination he looked at the issue through the lens of American law and not through the actions of whether American practice discriminated.  At the same time (and this is hearsay, not personal research) he remained devoted to Judaiam, donated to Jewish causes both through participation and monetary donations, but steadfastly maintained what he thought was his prime allegiance as a Justice which excluded his Jewishness from his interpretation of the American law.  And while I may not often agree with too many of his decisions, he was necessarily extremely “judicial” in his attempt to deny his personal identification with Jewishness from influencing his decisions.  So while I applaud that, whenever I come across a decision where Frankfurter himself weighs in on a case where discriminatory practices have been proclaimed as the issue why Frankfurter might not be able to do so.  

This does not mean to suggest Frankfurter accepted direct active discrimination.  He never accepted that whatsoever.  But he permitted indirect discrimination, the individual who might protest he was being discriminated against because he was black, Jehovah’s Witness, or Jewish.  And one point he wrote discrimination could be invited if one used one’s identity to separate oneself (paraphrased).  So this is the point I am attempting to distinguish.  The black identity is a label imposed to permit discrimination.  But a Jewish person often invites discrimation by identifying with the label, by placing the label  upon himself.  That  does not mean I think indirect discrimination is acceptable–I do not.  It can be more insidious, and by permitting indirect discrimination, it opens to door to direct discrimination, although it is illegal, is perpetrated because the individual who is permitted to discriminate in any way does not necessarily distinguish where the line crosses from gerrymandering against black votes to bombing black churches, or Jewish ones.  If blacks can be legally discriminated against then where is the line of action drawn between segregating them in society and lynching them if they are perceived to be in rebellion from that segregation?  I’m not suggesting either is a lesser form of segregation, only that the line cannot be easily drawn between direct action and indirect segregated permissions.  If the permissions are indirectly granted then that can lead to the direct actions because the lines themselves are not always distinguished in the human mind.

The Perception of Provocation

The other issue I am having trouble with is “unprovoked”.  Because this discrimination exists not only in America, but throughout the world as “governments” attempt to suppress “cultural” identifications as opposed to national ones—and of course that is the original cause of conflict to my way of thinking from the entire historical record; and the most important solution necessary to alter world conflict anywhere is for cultural identifications to surpass national identification. 

As the European colonists expanded across the western continent they often said that “Indians” who might feel “provoked” by the colonists would attack them; it was always an “unprovoked” attack.  Provocation is totally in the eye of the beholder.  If one is attacked one feels the attack was “unprovoked.” Consequently the response is to attack more viciously, in this instance to “eliminate” Hamas.  But by eliminating Hamas, the Palestinians feel the action against them is “unprovoked” and therefore feel they have been provoked.  It’s a useless argument.  To “prove” the evil of Hamas, Israel showed pictures of Hamas killing women and chidren.  To “prove” the evil of Israel, Hamas shows the bodies of women and children that died from Israeli bombing in Gaza.  And whether Israel bombed the hospital that might have taken nearly 500 lives themselves or it was done in a retaliatory response that failed to properly launch to its intended target, is of no consequence.  It is an incident like the Maine or Pearl Harbor that can be labled “unprovoked” and “evil” and cause as much “evil” by the retaliatory consequential effects, and this bombing will be seen as provoked and evil by the Arab world no matter who actually authored the initial bomb or rocket.  

There is no moral ground here.  Whether blacks killed in America by policemen may have needed to use force  that took Floyd’s life was seen differently from the officer’s who felt Floyd provoked them. Floyd had been accused by a liquor store,I believe, who had called the police because Floyd had “provoked” the liquor store to call the police.  (I’m not identifying a person from the liquor store because I’m uncertain if it was an owner, a worker, a bystander or any, maybe some know, I do not.) The caller was provoked to call the police who retaliated and resulted in Floyd’s death which resulted in massive demonstrations, etc.  Was Floyd a model citizen? Probably not, but then what is a model citizen and what circumstances caused or prevented Floyd from being one?.

There is no moral ground, because the perspective of morality and provocation are not relevant except to the mind who is feeling provoked or feeling wrong has been perpetrated upon him.  Of course the reaction against Floyd was seen as overblown by many of any race; but police brutality will not end because not only the police, but some citizens, continue to not view the need to suppress blacks who are evil gang-members and need to be suppressed.  If blacks are presented to consciousnesses as “bad”,  then those consciousnesses will continue to take actions of suppression.  The demonstrations in reaction then provide the proof that more suppression is needed.  Not trying to suggest it was alright to take Floyd’s life, but that the reaction against his death perpetrated some to believe more suppressive reactions were necessary against the demonstrators.  

The issue to me is not who is right or who is wrong, but a mere perspective of who is right or wrong.  And why I often include that the original sin of humankind towards both his fellow humans and his own environment, was the definition of right and wrong.  The truth of the matter from my perspective is that defining the right and wrong creates the perpetration of wrong upon those who feel they are right and the consequential perception of those who feel they have been wronged by those whose right may not be their perception of rightness to begin with.  

To refute the evils that are perpetrated upon mankind, we have to first refute the evil of the judgment of moral rightness in the first place.  Moral rightness creates the moral wrongness and the perspective of who behaved “badly”; who is “provoked”, and who is to “blame” for any incident is non-linear and occurs because of a series of proclaimed evil upon the other that leads to a continued moral conundrum and creates the very evil that continues to perpetrated one upon the other.

I act badly in response to feeling acted badly upon.  But I am aware that in acting badly I have in turn provoked negativity against me.  The answer, unfortunately, is not blowing in the wind, because the cannonballs will continue to fly until we understand every action provokes a response.  Actions against nature provoke a response by nature, actions against a man provoke an action by the man, and provocations by an ethnicity against another provoke responses by that ethnicity feeling provoked.  The reactions to counter the provocation endlessly cycle themselves into further provocations.

In short, the very concept of “unprovoked” is always in the mind of the beholder, but is never a reality.

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