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dehumanization
The Duty to Grieve: On Dehumanization, War, and the Cost of Witnessing
Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows.
Apr 07, 2026
More than a month into a war with Iran, President Donald Trump finally addressed the nation (perhaps appropriately) on April Fool's Day. It was his first televised speech to justify a war to the American people that he had promised would never happen. During that brief 19-minute speech, which mostly repeated his arguably unstable and unverified posts on social media, he said nothing new, closing with: "We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the stone ages where they belong."
Where they belong. To the stone age. Where THEY belong. While speaking to the nation in an effort to help us see the reason for the costs we are incurring, Trump placed an entire people outside of modernity, outside of civilization, outside of the category of the fully human. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, rhymes about ignoring basic moral obligations to our fellow humans every chance he gets: "Maximum lethality, not tepid legality"; "Violent effect, not politically correct." While Iranian neighborhoods burned and children in schools were bombed by US weapons, Trump was having this exchange on Fox News:
"Do you have any insight as to how they are doing? Do they have drinking water? Do they have food? It's upsetting," Dana Perino asked.
"I do, but first, do you remember when we had lunch years ago in the base of Trump Tower when it was a brand new building?" Trump continued… "You have not changed," he told the Fox News host before turning his attention to her looks: "Now, I'm not allowed to say this—it's the end of my political career—but you may be even better looking, okay?"
When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief.
The performance was grotesque in its banality. We are no longer surprised. The ridiculous rhymes, the dangerous dehumanizing language, the slimy sexism—all of it has become the grammar of power and the grammar of war under Trump 2.0.
No clarity was offered about why we are at war with Iran. Not to Dana Perino, not to the American people who tuned in during prime time to watch the president talk. No articulation of what the goal is. No naming of the dead. Instead, our daily content about the war is a cacophonous chatter of stock-market updates, defense-contractor earnings, and abstract references to "success." The human beings on the other end of our weapons have been evacuated from the language entirely.
I know we are all feeling this on some level. Because as Dana Perino rightly noted, the starvation of people is upsetting—but also because of what this dehumanization is doing to all of us.
What we are witnessing is not thoughtless language. It is the operation of a very old logic—one that critical psychologist Thomas Teo calls subhumanism: a way of thinking, feeling, and being that makes certain people disposable. The philosopher Achille Mbembe gives this logic its political name: necropolitics, which is the power to decide who may live, who must die, and the creation of what he calls "death-worlds," where entire populations are reduced to a kind of living dead. When Trump threatens to bomb a country "back to the stone ages," he is exercising necropolitical power in its most obvious form on prime time television. He is not merely threatening destruction but declaring that the people who live there already belong to a time before civilization, and therefore their annihilation is not a devastating event. It is not even, really, an event at all.
This is how dehumanization works. Steadily, without blinking an eye, looking straight into the cameras, evacuating humanity from the people we intend to harm.
And this has become the norm, not an aberration. We might even be experiencing numbness in the face of its routine relentlessness. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas "bloodthirsty monsters," he was laying the groundwork for the immoral destruction of Gaza and the families within it—a destruction that has, at the time of this writing, caused unspeakable harm to entire communities, and that the United Nations has unequivocally identified as genocide. As David Livingstone Smith has documented in On Inhumanity, the language of monstrosity has a horrific lineage. For centuries, European Christians represented Jews as monstrous beings, a trajectory that culminated in the Holocaust. During Jim Crow, Black men were cast as subhuman predators enabling the horrors of lynchings—and then the same language is used to justify our inhuman incarceration policies. First the language changes. Then the unquestioned permissions to eliminate communities follow.
The language used around the war in Iran follows this same pattern. And it is not separate from what has happened—and continues to happen—in Gaza. The pattern enacts the same story over and over again: that some lives are disposable, that some deaths do not count, and that the proper response to their destruction is not grief—not the acknowledgment of our shared humanity and brokenhearted-ness—but a market update.
There is a concept in psychology called moral injury: the harm that comes from witnessing, participating in, or being forced to live inside systems that violate one's deepest commitments. It describes what happens to us—educators, clinicians, organizers, parents, ordinary citizens—as we watch atrocity become normalized. It names what we feel when the excruciating recognition of lives lost to senseless violence gets replaced by financial indicators, and we are expected to go on as though nothing has happened. This is the crisis many of us are living through right now. Not the crisis of war alone, but the crisis of witnessing. The demand is not simply that we tolerate violence. The demand is that we stop feeling it.
And yet, feeling persists. It persists because we know that we belong to each other, we are responsible for each other. And this is what motivates acts of incredibly courageous resistance.
The people of Iran have been resisting—through art, through protest, through organizing—often at devastating personal cost. The Women, Life, Freedom movement is among the most courageous uprisings of our time. Women refused to be silent even when the consequences included imprisonment and death. It was not Trump who advanced liberation in Iran. It was Iranian women, students, workers, artists. What the current war has done is undermine those very movements and murder the very people who have been fighting for their own freedom.
We must hold both of these realities at once: the machinery of dehumanization, and the stubborn, courageous insistence on humanity by those targeted by it. The moral injury is real. And so is the resistance. Both require us to refuse numbness and keep feeling.
Poet and scholar Audre Lorde wrote that to resist, to survive, requires feeling. To grieve is to insist that a life mattered. When we are told, implicitly or explicitly, that the people of Iran or Gaza are not people in the way that we are people, the first act of resistance is to interrupt that narrative of dehumanization by allowing for the swelling of our own grief. To insist that what has been done to them is a wound in the fabric of all of our humanity. You cannot organize on behalf of people whose deaths you have not allowed yourself to feel. You cannot resist a logic of disposability if you have internalized the numbness it requires.
And we owe each other the right to feel. In a culture that rewards numbness and calls it professionalism, that treats emotional response as naivety, that measures the success of a war by the Dow Jones—the most radical thing we can do is refuse to stop feeling. To insist that the people being bombed are people. To feel our hearts shatter when we think about the kids in the school who were annihilated by a bomb paid for by us, as taxpayers. To let that shatter us. To not move on.
And, importantly, this grief must be a shared grief. Isolation is a tool of the authoritarian. Our grief points us toward the injustices that we can no longer tolerate and enable. It allows us to trace the wounds—to feel where our humanity is being carved away by the witnessing of this brutality. So grieve in community. Grieve alongside the Iranian people. Grieve with our neighbors who are being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Grieve with our trans siblings. And let that shared grief become the foundation for what we do next, because grief that is felt together demands action.
Yes, we must march and allow for spaces where resistance can be joyful and defiant and absurd, because joy in the face of a regime that demands despair is its own form of refusal. And we must show up for our communities, organize alongside them, and hold the pain in our souls together as we feel the immeasurable loss of human lives. Grief shared, grief felt, grief that moves us into the streets and into each other's arms, is the soil from which solidarity grows and is the place where we refuse to let the necropolitical grammar of war, of subhumanism, become the grammar of our souls.
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Will We Give Birth to a Loving or Shackled Future?
A tale of two births challenges us to consider what kind of world we want to create.
Nov 17, 2025
It occurs to me that “giving birth to the future” isn’t simply a metaphor.
I say this as I continue wrestling with infinity—that is to say, working on the book project I began a decade ago: a book about creating peace. My exploration into all this goes beyond politics, global or otherwise. There are countless ways that humanity needs to change and, indeed, is changing. For instance:
For much of the 20th century, the childbirth process in this country didn’t invite a lot of active participation from parents. Mothers in labor were given heavy doses of drugs, and fathers were banished to waiting rooms.
So wrote David Colker in the Los Angeles Times in 2015, shortly after the death of Elisabeth Bing (at age at 100!), the German-born woman who cofounded Lamaze International in 1960 and helped profoundly change the way we birth the future. When she was a young woman, Bing, then living in England, began working as a physical therapist in a hospital. This, Colker wrote, was “when she first viewed childbirth. It was being treated more like a disease, she thought, than a joyous occasion.”
I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
She helped bring caring and sanity—and love—into the birth process for many (though not all) women, and for men as well, for which I cry hallelujah. Suddenly dads could now be part of the birth process beyond passing out cigars. That’s not even a joke anymore; men, if they’re involved in their child’s birth, have a role larger than sitting in a room with the other soon-to-be dads, waiting for the doc to come in and cry, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy.”
Empowering both women and men—and partnering them—has helped launch a social shift that’s still in progress, bringing men into the core of nurturing, the family’s loving center. I can’t begin to describe how grateful I am that I was present at my daughter’s birth nearly 40 years ago—not just present but, oh God, part of it.
I came home for lunch that day in July and there was Barbara out in the backyard, radiant and excited, weeding the coleus bed. She told me that her water had just broken. She also was feeling slight contractions—light, easy things that mainly seemed to amuse her. They were delightful curiosities. Neither of us was really sure this was true labor, but there was all that fluid leaking all over her panties. We went to the hospital. Almost immediately, Barbara’s contractions turned serious. She went into active labor, and I went into my role as breath-and-contraction helper. Her back pain was severe, but I was always with her, pressing my hand as hard as possible against her back, giving her relief with my counterpressure and breathing—“ahee, ahoo!”—along with her. This lasted about six hours. It was the longest six hours of both our lives.
The only time it got close to desperate was well into the evening. “Talk me out of using drugs,” she begged me. I knew she could make it and gave her all the encouragement I could muster. Turns out she was moving along beautifully. By 8:30 pm she was fully dilated.
Then came the most intense part of the process, the pushing. She was at this for nearly two and a half hours, from 8:30 till the birth at 10:50. In this phase, I added a new duty to the man’s role. I was the guy who counted to 10 during each push. She usually got three pushes in per contraction at this stage. Later—as I saw the hair on the baby’s head appear at the vaginal opening—my role became more than just counter. My encouragement became intense, and linked to the rhythm of Barbara’s pushing. “Come on, Barbara, down and out. Down and out! DOWN AND OUT! COME ON, BARBARA!”
When our daughter finally arrived, I cut the umbilical cord. The nurse put the baby up on Barbara’s stomach, and later I held her, danced around with her. We had brought a radio with us, as our Lamaze teacher had advised: Bring music! As I held Alison Grace, Ravi Shankar began playing the sitar. And our squalling newborn became silent in my arms.
“A gentle birth,” writes Barbara Harper, “takes place when a woman is supported by the people she chooses to be with her during this most intimate time. She needs to be loved and nurtured by those around her.”
But there’s also another type of future we also continue to birth: “My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn’t get my legs apart.”
Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
The words are those of a woman, given the pseudonym Maria Jones, quoted some years ago in an Amnesty International report. She was pregnant and had been arrested for violating a drug law. She was in jail in Cook County, Illinois. When she went into labor, she was handcuffed and shackled to her bed.
“The doctor came and said that yes, this baby is coming right now,” she said, “and started to prepare the bed for delivery. Because I was shackled to the bed, they couldn't remove the lower part of the bed for the delivery, and they couldn't put my feet in the stirrups. My feet were still shackled together, and I couldn't get my legs apart. The doctor called for the officer, but the officer had gone down the hall. No one else could unlock the shackles, and my baby was coming but I couldn't open my legs.”
“Finally, the officer came and unlocked the shackles from my ankles. My baby was born then. I stayed in the delivery room with my baby for a little while, but then the officer put the leg shackles and handcuffs back on me and I was taken out of the delivery room.”
No bonding. No nurturing at the breast. The traumatized infant is whisked off to some antiseptic holding pen to lie alone in its cold new world. This isn’t rational. It’s not even sane. Beyond the intense torture inflicted on the mother, what in God’s name have we just done to the child?
Shackled births were banned in Cook County some years ago, shortly after the Amnesty report was made public. But they were only allowed—indeed, the norm—in the first place because the prisoner-mom, as well as the child, had been dehumanized, in the name of the law, no less. This is the legacy we still must transcend. We owe it to the future.
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Words Are the First Weapon of War
The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized.
Oct 18, 2025
I sit here at my desk, looking out the window—and see someone walking through the parking lot. This is the most ordinary of moments. I shrug quietly. Life goes on.
My impulse is to stop writing the column here. That’s it. Nothing more to say. Life is totally fine and civilized and I’m here in the middle of it, growing old but giving no thought whatsoever to the darkness that lurks at humanity’s margins. Sure, the news covers that stuff, but what do I care? Things are fine where I live.
But the darkness tugs. I read the news. I know that hell consumes parts of the planet and certain lives have no safety—no value—whatsoever. Here’s a recent New York Times headline, as ordinary as the fact that someone was walking through the parking lot outside my window:
“U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says.”
Well, so what? They were transporting drugs. “The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects...”
To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them.
Minor news, right? But consider the complexity of the context that emerges from these words. The story is critical of President Donald Trump for bombing boats and claiming without evidence that they were transporting drugs meant to be sold to Americans. But there’s a quiet assumption here. By making the point that this was not a war zone, the story quietly leaves the assumption hanging that if it were a war zone—and the boat had been carrying officially declared American enemies—well, that would be a different matter.
War itself is unchallenged and accepted—certainly by the mainstream media (whatever is left of it). And also by the collective American, and perhaps global, norm. And here’s the problem. War is a 50-50 deal: There’s a good side and a bad side. And if you’re on the good side, the war you wage is just. That means you have the moral leeway to kill whomever you want... excuse me, “must.” This includes children.
But “permission to kill” is psychologically—indeed, spiritually—complex. It requires a further step, one that lets us off the hook from our own inner moral sensibility: We’re all humans. We are deeply alike. We are one.
The way around this emotional difficulty is simple: Dehumanize the enemy! It happens virtually automatically, as soon as a particular group is declared the enemy, i.e., “them.” But it requires linguistic assistance: The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Now it’s a weapon. Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized. Language is the initial weapon of war, and is an indispensable tool of those who wage it.
Indeed, dehumanization exists almost as though it’s part of who we are. I believe with all my heart that it is not part of the human DNA, but it sure seems to act like it is. To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them. We can just dismiss them.
Welcome to racism. Welcome to ethnicity. Welcome to borders, both political and religious. Welcome to us vs. them—the hole in the human heart.
In my lifetime, here in the USA—in the wake of World War II—the primary way to dehumanize someone, at home as well as abroad, was to declare them a communist. The term had instant power. Every leftist was a commie. They were taking over Hollywood, not to mention Washington. They were under our beds! Because of the existence of nuclear weapons, America’s powers-that-be wisely avoided going to war with the Soviet Union or China, but we nonetheless had the wherewithal to create the military-industrial complex here at home and engage in proxy wars, killing a few million people and, oh yeah, intensifying our long-term, unacknowledged war on Planet Earth itself.
Another dehumanization term that emerged from those wars was “collateral damage”—a unique form of dehumanization. Those who were collateral damage were not necessarily our enemies, just people in the vicinity of the just war we were waging. They were merely in the way. But the term did its job. It took the humanity away from anyone our bombs unintentionally eliminated and turned them into scrap metal at a junkyard.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, however... uh oh, now what? The communists were done with, but we still needed an enemy! Governing is so much harder without one. Enter the terrorists, our primo enemy of the last couple decades and a word with enormous potency. For instance, anyone who criticizes Israel for killing 70,000 Palestinians (or far, far more than that) is both pro-terrorist and antisemitic. The flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza is a terrorist operation.
And then, closer to home, we have the “illegals”—aliens, wetbacks—who are not just fleeing poverty and crossing the border into the USA, but invading it. Looks like we’ve got another war on our hands, folks.
I’m not worried about the guy I saw walking through the parking lot a little while ago, but what if he looked like an invader? Hey, ICE...
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Responding to Charlie Kirk's Killing With the Wisdom of Our Inner 3 Year Old
Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Sep 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s killing last week—and the aftermath of grief and political outrage—are too overwhelming to ignore, even though I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.
The best I can do is wander into the spiritual unknown and perhaps ask an impossible question or two. The first one is this: Are words adequate for the exploration of life and death? I ask this question as a writer. To me, words are virtually magical entities. They give us the means to shape, if not the world itself, at least our comprehension of it... and thus we assume we know what’s going on around us.
For instance, here I am, sitting at my desk, looking out my window on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon. The leaves on the tree in front of me flutter in the breeze. A woman in a red coat walks through the parking lot, which is mostly empty. Everything is calm. The time is 2:43 pm on a Tuesday. This all seems simple enough, right?
But of course this is nothing more than the surface of this moment—a real-life postcard, you might say. Putting it into words, at least in one sense, limits what I see. I see what is “known,” categorize it all as normal—and move on. If I were 3 years old, I’d still be staring at the tree, perhaps one leaf at a time. I could well be lost in its beauty and complexity.
Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
As I return to the news, I’m suggesting that we bring with us our inner 3 year old. The news of the Kirk assassination is given to us with simple us-vs.-them clarity. He was speaking at an event in Utah. Someone fired a rifle from several hundred feet away. He was hit in the neck. He died.
And then it turns political. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Charlie Kirk was a husband, the father of two young children. No matter where you stand in regard to his right-wing, MAGA politics, the horror of his death—the horror inflicted on his family—is explosive. "No!” screams our inner 3 year old. The nation is stunned.
But almost immediately, things turn political. US President Donald Trump and others instantaneously blame the “radical left” and let their hatred spew. Kirk is now their martyr, and they feel they have permission to make the most of his death politically that they can. Eliminate the left. I can feel the joy oozing from their hatred, which gushes like blood from a bullet wound.
All progressives can do is express shock and grief. Kirk’s murder isn’t “political.” He was a human being! And here’s where words can too easily fail us. This isn’t Side A vs. Side B. This is “We are all one” vs. “We’re great and you’re evil, and we’re comin’ for ya.”
But the divide is infinitely deeper even than that. Charlie Kirk’s murder is international news, but it’s also only one murder out of unknown thousands and thousands every day. Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
Killing requires dehumanization. That’s the nature of war—every war. And the larger the number we kill, the easier the dehumanization becomes. Oh, they’re just “the enemy” or, ho hum, collateral damage. Any questions?
And here’s where language deeply, deeply, deeply fails us. “Left” and “right”—life and death—are simply equal opposites, at least in much of the media coverage of this. Nothing could be further from the truth: Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Here are the words of Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, speaking at a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice award ceremony the day of Kirk’s killing:
Before I begin, I do want to take a moment to address the horrific political assassination that just occurred today in Utah. Charlie Kirk is dead, yet another victim of gun violence in a nation where what should be a rarity has turned into a plague. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all...
We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, and the refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done, when it comes to Palestinian lives...
We know, because the United Nations tells us, that by the end of the month, millions will be facing starvation, if they are not starving already. This is not accidental. This is not due to a freak blight. This is not because the world now lacks the means to feed the hungry. It is because those decisions made by the Israeli government and by our government here continue to ensure that that is a reality. And if that does not stagger the conscience, what will?
Let me repeat these words: “the shared notion of humanity that’s behind us all.”
Our inner 3 year old knows this. How do we start embracing it politically? Humanity is a collective entity. We can’t kill our enemy without eventually killing ourselves.
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag
When political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.
May 27, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump opened Memorial Day in the most disgusting way possible, not by praising our fallen heroes but by attacking Democrats. He wrote on his Nazi-infested social media site on Monday morning:
Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds…
When the President of the United States calls members of the oldest political party in the world and a former president “scum,” it’s not just another ugly outburst that embarrasses America before the rest of the world: It’s a warning sign. A bright red flag.
It tells us that something far more sinister than partisan posturing is afoot. Something our media has already decided to overlook in their perpetual effort to normalize the abominable.
This kind of rhetoric isn’t new, and it’s not harmless. History has shown us—again and again—that when political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.
Words matter. In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words.
In a healthy democracy, political disagreements are expected. Even fierce debates over policy and direction are part of the process. But a functioning democracy depends on a shared understanding that both sides, no matter how much they disagree, are legitimate participants in the system.
The moment that idea is tossed aside—when one side starts branding the other not as the loyal opposition but as enemies, traitors, or “scum”—democracy starts to fail.
When a president engages in this kind of language, he’s not just lashing out at critics. He’s explicitly trying to erase the legitimacy of any voice but his own.
This tactic is not original. It’s ripped from the playbooks of authoritarians throughout history.
- Hitler routinely referred to Jews, communists, and democratic socialists as “vermin” and “filth,” conditioning the German public to accept ever-increasing acts of brutality and repression.
- In Rwanda, Hutu leaders called Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio for months before the genocide began.
- In Serbia, Slobodan Milošević labeled political opponents and ethnic minorities as “parasites” and “traitors” before launching ethnic cleansing campaigns.
Language like this isn’t about winning arguments. It’s about destroying opposition.
Donald Trump has flirted with this disgusting sort of rhetoric for years, calling the press “the enemy of the people,” mocking disabled journalists, referring to immigrants as “animals,” and branding his political opponents as “radicals” or “traitors.”
But labeling Democrats—over 45 million American citizens—as “scum” is a different level of escalation. It’s not just name-calling. It’s a signal. A test balloon. A way of seeing how far he can go. And if there’s no consequence, he’ll go further.
What happens when a leader no longer sees himself as the president of all Americans, but only of those who worship him? What happens when one party becomes synonymous with the state, and all others are demonized?
You get systems like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where opposition leaders are jailed, poisoned, or pushed out of windows. You get Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where the ruling party rewrites the constitution to lock in power and crush dissent. You get a country where elections still happen, but they no longer mean anything.
Trump’s use of the word “scum” may seem like just another day in MAGA world, but it is, in fact, part of a much larger and more deliberate strategy. It’s designed to radicalize his base, to cast Democrats not as fellow Americans with different ideas but as dangerous enemies who must be defeated at all costs. It’s designed to terrify Trump’s opponents and paralyze the media.
When you convince people that the opposition is not just wrong but evil, the next logical step is to justify extraordinary actions to stop them, whether that’s purging them from government, throwing them in jail, or inciting paramilitary violence against them.
We’ve already seen where this leads.
January 6, for example, wasn’t some spontaneous tantrum. It was the inevitable result of years of delegitimization and demonization of Democrats. The people who stormed the Capitol sincerely believed they were saving America from “scum” who had stolen the presidency. They were acting on the poisonous lie that only one side has the right to rule and that any electoral outcome that contradicts their will is illegitimate. A lie that came straight from Trump and his morbidly rich neofascist enablers.
This is how democracies die; not all at once, but in a slow, deliberate campaign of character assassination against political rivals, institutions, and the rule of law. It happens when a strongman convinces just enough people that he alone is the embodiment of the nation, and that anyone who opposes him is a threat to the country itself.
And once that belief takes root, atrocities become not just possible, but justified. And, in most cases, inevitable. We’re already seen this in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the Venezuelans who Trump deported to El Salvador and the Asians he deported to Africa, in both cases in defiance of court orders.
From Pinochet throwing small-d democrats he called “subversivos” and “terroristas” out of helicopters over the ocean, to Stalin using the phrase “enemy of the people” (враг народа) to describe democracy advocates, to Mao calling educated people monsters and demons” (牛鬼蛇神) as he killed an estimated 35 million of them, this is an old, old story.
It’s the same type of language that the Klan used for centuries here in America as they embarked on campaigns of terror and murder. And that the paramilitary groups that have largely replaced them in the 21st century continue to use.
It’s also important to note that when Trump calls people who didn’t vote for him “scum,” he’s not just talking about elected officials. He’s talking about more than half the country.
He’s talking about your neighbors, your coworkers, maybe your family members. He’s talking about teachers, nurses, scientists, union workers, veterans; millions of Americans who simply don’t buy into his brand of neofascist grievance politics. He’s trying to turn Americans against each other so he can seize even more power out of the chaos he creates.
This kind of dehumanization also serves a more practical political purpose: It undermines accountability. If Democrats are “scum,” then their investigations into Trump’s corruption are not legitimate. If the media is “fake news,” then any critical reporting is a hoax. If the courts rule against him, they’re “rigged.” It’s a classic authoritarian tactic: Delegitimize all checks on your power and paint yourself as the sole source of truth.
In doing so, Trump is also poisoning the well for any future attempt at national unity or reconciliation.
Once you’ve labeled your opponents as subhuman, how do you work with them? How do you compromise to do what’s best for the country? You don’t.
And that’s exactly the point. He doesn’t want compromise. He wants domination. He wants a political system like in Russia or Hungary, where the only choice is himself.
We can’t afford to normalize this. We can’t laugh it off as Trump being Trump. We can’t wait and hope that someone, somewhere, will step in and draw a line. We have to be that line. We have to call this what it is: a deliberate, dangerous assault on the core of American democracy.
Words matter. In every fascist movement of the 20th century, it started with the words. Before the arrests, before the beatings, before the camps, there were the words. And in every case, those words went unchallenged until it was too late.
It’s not too late now. But we are closer than we’ve ever been. We must push back hard against this dehumanizing rhetoric, demand better from our leaders, and defend the democratic principle that every citizen, no matter their party, is entitled to dignity, voice, and full participation in the political process.
Because once a president gets away with calling fellow Americans “scum,” it’s only a matter of time before he treats them that way.
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By Dehumanizing Others, Trump Makes Sure We Remain Our Own Worst Enemies
If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear.a
Jan 24, 2025
And now Trump consciousness purports to claim—or reclaim—control over America: the land of white Christian nationalists and no one else, damnit!
But of course that level of selfishness—mine, mine, mine!—is only possible to maintain with a huge helping of fear alongside it: fear of the enemy. Fear of “them.”
Thus Alexandra Villarreal, writing in The Guardian about Trump 2.0’s first day in office (on Martin Luther King Day), noted, “He immediately involved the military, ordering the armed forces to ‘seal’ the U.S.’s borders ‘by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration.’
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving.
She goes on, “This new system at the border—replete with intense militarization and explicit violations of human rights—comes straight from the imagination of the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, which pushes the racist idea that non-white immigrants are ‘invading’ predominantly white nations and ‘replacing’ white culture.’”
Governance is so much simpler when you can conjure up a wicked enemy for your followers to fear, but the cost of doing so can be monstrous—and not simply for those dehumanized as the enemy, who are usually not in positions of power and therefore easily exploited. Those pulled into us-vs.-them consciousness have also seriously minimized their own lives. For instance, Andrea Mazzarino, writing about U.S. President Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them ‘vermin’ who are ‘poisoning the blood of this country,’” stirred up an old childhood truth in me: Takes one to know one!
You can’t dehumanize others without belittling your own soul.
And this begins to get at what makes the Trump 2.0 phenomenon so painful, at least to that part of the nation that sees beyond him. It’s not just because “they” (i.e., MAGA) won. Hate rhetoric—hate consciousness—is once again expanding its claim on who we are as a nation. But it’s not like this is new. Most of our history is inextricably linked with the exploitation, dehumanization, and, often enough, the murder—of... uh, non-white people of one sort of another.
When the MAGA-hat wearers cry “Make America great again,” they mean make America deaf again, Make America unaccountable again. Turn Uncle Stam into Jim Crow again.
The belief that love is for white people only belittles love as a transformative concept: as the means to push beyond what, or who, we know, and continue evolving. Consider this quote of Martin Luther King Jr. (which I don’t believe wound up being quoted during the Trump inauguration): “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
This is the faith we need to honor right now, as the second Trump era begins. We find ourselves reaching for a handhold as we step into the darkness: That handhold is love. But what does that mean?
In her Guardian piece, Villarreal pointed out that the mass deportations Trump is planning will be relying on defense—that is to say, military—resources as well as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, which could include the use of military aircraft to transport people back across the border. And suddenly I thought about Woody Guthrie’s iconic song, “Deportee,” which he wrote in 1948, in the wake of a plane crash in California that killed all 32 people on board. Mostly the dead were Mexican farmworkers, being sent back across the border—which meant, according to the media coverage, that they had no names... and didn’t matter.
. . . The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees.”
Woody’s song didn’t bring anyone back to life, but it entered the soul of American consciousness and brought anguish, shock, and empathy into the public—the political—arena. It expanded the public sense of humanity; which remains expanded.
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”
Trump is claiming the power and authority to dehumanize whom he wants, e.g., the country’s 11 million “illegals,” whom he wants to turn into deportees. In the process, he is making sure that we remain our own worst enemies. If Americans hate most of the planet beyond their borders—and go to war with it—they are creating the very reality they fear. They are creating, or continuing to create, hell on Earth. Those who see the irony in this—linking, for instance, “Christian” with “white” and “nationalist”—must once again take that first step, beyond the worst of who we are, into a future that values all of us.
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Walls of Fear Create a World of War
How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear?
Dec 08, 2024
War, war and more war.
It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics — keeps getting louder and louder. Is there a way to get things to change?
To put it another way: Is there a way to transcend the abstract view of Planet Earth in which global politics operates? We have religion. We have values: Be kind, be loving, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — but they don’t seem to manifest collectively. At the collective, that is to say, the political, level, only so much kindness can be tolerated. In terms of security, kindness is weakness.
I quoted these words of Kamala Harris, delivered last August at the DNC as she accepted her nomination to be the Dems’ presidential candidate, in a previous column, but they still strike me as relevant, even though she lost the election:
“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”
She added that this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
Wow, sounds great. Unfortunately, as I noted at the time, the love and empathy of which she spoke stopped at the border. In essence, she was expressing love for an abstraction, a swath of land defined by random lines on a map, created via several centuries of brutal land theft.
Nonetheless, I understand that love is specific. It has limits. We love our partner. We love our surroundings, our community. The problem, as Harris quickly went on to illustrate, is that “love” at the national level — a.k.a., nationalism — doesn’t actually exist unless there’s also an enemy: someone to fear. Our empathy stops at the border. And beyond the border . . .
Harris continued: “And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Oh, how wonderful! The great lie manifests: We need that trillion-dollar annual military budget, America! How else can we remain secure? And our allies also have to remain secure: Israel has the right to defend itself (some love, apparently, does not stop at the border). And it’s not as though Harris’s opponent — what was his name again? — in any way challenged this basic context, nor did the prevailing media: There’s always a “them” out there, who hates us, who wants to steal what we have (what goes around comes around, I guess) . . . who wants to kill us.
So we’ve got to be prepared to kill him first — which means, dehumanize! And here’s where my internal — and, at least in this moment, external — scream begins. I don’t want to be led by a “commander in chief.” I want humanity’s understanding of itself to begin with the awareness of our collective, and planetary, unity. The time for this is now, for an endless number of reasons, all of which are related to the “security” our leaders claim to be so obsessed with.
The most obvious reason, I guess, is that nobody wants nuclear war — yet Russia and the West are playing with this possibility now, as the good guys and the bad guys fight it out in Ukraine. War is the only answer — defeat the enemy, bomb Russia! And Russia responds with “inflammatory nuclear rhetoric,” denounced by the West as, gosh, inappropriate. At some point this game could blow up in everyone’s face. Yet in the current political dialogue, our security requires playing with global suicide. Any questions?
And, of course, even if “mutually assured destruction” holds tight and humanity avoids nuclear Armageddon, the unaddressed climate crisis is something else that could explode in our faces. Shockingly, “climate” doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.
What I’m trying to say is that we — all of us — need to turn evolution into a conscious process. How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear? How do we expand our sense of community and shatter the hatred we now allow to swell unabated toward our declared enemies, especially those beyond our borders? How do we shatter the divide between spiritual and political values? How do we bring, let us say, the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the political realm?
One of his most well-known quotes is this; “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
How do we explain — to the ones in power, to the ones who write about and bow to power — that, by “discovering fire for the second time,” Teilhard didn’t mean developing nuclear weapons? How do we explain it to ourselves?
Perhaps the place to begin is by removing the “national” border from our minds and hearts.
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Call Them 'Terrorists' and You Can Kill as Many as You Want
We have to start claiming collective responsibility for the wrongs of our governments, which means confronting the dehumanization they use to justify atrocities.
Mar 10, 2024
First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved!
You can kill as many of them as you want.
Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world – your world, not theirs – safe. War is such a paradox: killing one’s way to peace. But apparently it’s humanity’s primary organizing principle.
Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize. We’re killing the planet; we’re living on the brink of nuclear suicide. Creating and dehumanizing an “enemy” isn’t going to create peace, but rather, just the opposite. We’re spreading hell across the planet, and not only does war always come home, it continues to create an endless cycle of death and destruction – simply to justify itself.
For instance, Palestinian writer Emad Moussa put it this way recently in the Los Angeles Times: “The general impression among us Palestinians — whether at home or abroad — is that as Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza, what the soldiers saw contradicted their worldview of the inferior, subhuman Palestinian. They had to destroy all and re-create an image of Gaza that matched their imagined worldview. As if to say, dehumanize to facilitate and justify the culling.”
The paradox of dehumanization! When we dehumanize others, we dehumanize ourselves. And as an American, I find it troubling for the nation’s mainstream position on present wars to be free of any self-awareness, any lingering shock and awe, about our own bellicose history.
So I jump back a few decades and a few wars, to Vietnam, specifically to what came to be called the My Lai massacre, where between 350 and 500 unarmed villagers – men, women, children – were shot and killed by U.S. troops in 1968. The deaths were just a small percentage of the war’s total cost in civilian lives (possibly more than 2 million), but the horror of the killings has remained etched in the American, and global, consciousness. It opened us to the moral price of dehumanization.
During the Vietnam war, the good guys were fighting communists, not terrorists, but the terms had essentially the same meaning: bad guys with no moral sanity, who only wanted to impose harm on the world. Seymour Hersh, the journalist who initially wrote about the massacre, exposing it to the world, wrote a New Yorker essay many years later further contextualizing the event. One of the people he spoke to was Paul Meadlo, a participant in the massacre, who said to him: “There was supposed to have been some Vietcong in (My Lai) and we began to make a sweep through it.”
That simple quote reverberates in every direction. Vietcong, Hamas . . . they’re presence (actual or merely alleged) poisons everything: the village, the hospital, the school, the community. Civilians in their midst are now, first and foremost, nothing more than collateral damage.
Hersh’s story continues. The soldiers gathered up the villagers. Then the Charlie Company leader, Lt. Willaim Calley, told the men he wanted them shot. “I started to shoot them,” Meadlo said, “but the other guys wouldn’t do it.” So Calley and Meadlo “went ahead and killed them. We all thought we were doing the right thing.”
But Hersh complicates Meadlo’s account by adding some of the original testimony of other soldiers, one of whom had said Meadlo and a fellow soldier “were actually playing with the kids, telling the people where to sit down and giving the kids candy.” And when Calley and Meadlo started shooting, Meadlo “started to cry.”
Those tears belong to all of us, you might say. We – at least those of us who are not the victims – have to start claiming collective responsibility for these wrongs, which begin with dehumanization. Armed dehumanization, for God’s sake. Why is this where we find ourselves?
In the context of war, peace is just a blank. It’s nothing, or virtually nothing. A quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson puts it this way: “Peace is that brief, glorious moment in history when everybody stands around reloading.”
In other words, we raise our families, create art and culture, emanate love . . . during ceasefires. But the social structure in which we live with relative safety (or not) is only present because armed authorities have cleared the space for it to exist, temporarily, beyond the forces of evil. This is the belief that allows militarism to endure, sucking up some two trillion dollars from the global economy every year.
Ray Acheson, addressing the Ukraine war two years ago, wrote: “The abolition of nuclear weapons, of war, of borders, of all the structures of state violence that we can see clearly at play in this conflict is at the core of the demand for real, lasting, paradigm-shifting change that we need in the world. It can feel like vast, overwhelming, and inconceivable. But most change is inconceivable until we achieve it.”
Conflict among people will never go away. Our fear of the unknown – of people, say, who don’t speak our language, who don’t look like us, who possess something we want (such as land) – will never go away. We can dehumanize those we fear, attempt to kill them, and stay in hell. Or we can attempt to understand them.
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The Only Way to End the Inhumanity Is to Humanize Palestinians
Where are the stories in mainstream media of Palestinian lives lost? Not just in the latest Israeli war on Gaza but in all the wars that preceded it?
Nov 04, 2023
We live in an era where, in theory, we have accepted that all human beings are deserving of equal treatment—that skin color, national origin, language, accent, clothing, and other markers of ethnicity are secondary to the fact that we all deserve dignity.
In theory.
In practice, the otherizing of human beings remains central to the grim calculus by which we justify violence against one another and even accept it as virtuous. This violence, inflicted by states or by vigilantes, is everywhere we look.
In the United States, it’s in the way Black communities are over-policed, Indigenous communities are neglected, migrants are warehoused, and asylum seekers are kept out.
Internationally, it’s in the way our society dismisses the targets of Western wars and capitalism.
Most prominently today, it’s in the dehumanization of Palestinians during what, by many accounts, is an unfolding Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza.
The only way to end the inhumanity is to humanize the victims of war in pursuit of justice.
Dehumanization Lays the Groundwork for Genocide
Israeli diplomat Ron Prosor explained in an October 2023 podcast interview that his nation’s war on Gaza was about “civilization against barbarity,” and “good against bad.” Such language reinforces the equations of Israeli apartheid: Israelis equal “civilized” and “good,” whereas Palestinians equal “barbaric” and “bad.”
Prosor added that the targets of Israel’s military might were “people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.”
His remarks came soon after Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals.” (There’s no shortage of irony in such language given how European antisemitic tropes routinely dehumanized Jewish people.)
Apologists for Israel’s war take pains to say there is a distinction between Hamas—the ostensible “barbarians” who perpetrated the October 7 attacks—and Palestinian civilians. But Israel’s bombing campaign against Gaza is so devastating that even the routinely pro-Israel New York Times calls it “one of the most intense of the 21st century, prompting growing global scrutiny of its scale, purpose, and cost to human life.” The distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians means little within a scenario of mass indiscriminate bombing.
Recall when the U.S. waged wars on Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s and claimed to be striking al-Qaeda “terrorists,” while dismissing the predictable, resulting mass civilian casualties as “collateral damage.” The “war on terror” quickly became a “war of terror.”
A decade earlier, analyst Norman Solomon pointed out in a 1991 op-ed against the first Gulf War how Time Magazine defined “collateral damage” as “a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood.” That descriptor can easily be applied today to Gaza, a minuscule and densely populated strip of land subjected to a savage bombing campaign akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
As the 1994 Rwandan genocide so aptly demonstrated, the first wave of weaponry in any pogrom is the use of dehumanizing language. Next comes extermination. If Palestinians are not people, their deaths are easier to stomach. If they are merely human animals, barbarians, and collateral damage, they can be killed with impunity.
When Context Is Forbidden
It’s not enough to employ dehumanizing language against Palestinians. Israel’s apologists have waged a long and effective narrative war on any and all critiques of Israel as well as any and all defenses of Palestinians. From academic exile, as in the 2014 case of University of Illinois professor Steven Salaita, to media censure, as inflicted on CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill in 2018, Israel’s defenders have routinely canceled critics of apartheid.
Most recently, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is facing calls for resignation merely for pointing out that Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israeli settlements “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Contextualizing acts of terrorism even while condemning them is verboten, and not just for high-level diplomats. A science journal editor named Michael Eisen was recently fired for sharing an article by the satirical paper The Onion on his private social media account titled “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” Eisen happens to be Jewish American.
It is a testament to the extent of censorship in reference to Israeli apartheid that The Onion is bolder than most mainstream media outlets for pointing out the absurdity of limiting discourse. The outlet (perhaps in response to Eisen’s firing?) filed another story titled “Share This Image Of Smiling Netanyahu To Get Your Job Back.”
When Some Lives Are More Equal Than Others
Israel understands how significant the use of narrative is to the maintenance of its occupation and control of Palestinian territories. To underscore the idea that they are responding to inhuman terrorists, the Israel Defense Forces released gruesome photos and footage of Hamas’ October 7 attacks as justification for bombing Gaza indiscriminately. Such imagery, when presented without any historical context of occupation and oppression, offers a sympathetic portrayal of Israeli civilians as the victims of unexplained and unprovoked barbarism. Any mention of broader context is strictly forbidden.
Indeed, when we see the faces and learn the names of the dead, it is unfathomable to justify the violence that ended their lives. Bringing up the context of Israel’s occupation sounds jarring when juxtaposed against the heartbreaking story of how Shlomi and Shachar Matias were gunned down by Hamas fighters as they protected their son from bullets. The surviving boy told the press that his parents “wanted to us to be happy, to be whimsical… They wanted us to be joyful. They wanted us to be in peace.”
Commercial media outlets have been flooded with such stories, centering the Israeli victims and survivors of Hamas’ assault. Israeli humanity reigns supreme. It is civilized and good.
Where are the stories in mainstream media of Palestinian lives lost? Not just in the latest Israeli war on Gaza but in all the wars that preceded it? And what about the stories of the decades of traumatic land loss and unjust imprisonment and displacement Palestinians have faced?
Winning the Narrative War
In Israel’s previous wars of retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, the same pattern played out as we are seeing today: Palestinian civilians are many times more likely to be killed by Israel than Israeli civilians are by Hamas. This is utterly unsurprising given Israel’s military might and the unwavering U.S. diplomatic and military aid to Israel.
It’s not just Gaza either. In 2022 Israel killed five times as many Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem than it did the year before, as per an independent monitoring group. The bizarre justification was that armed Israeli soldiers were defending themselves against civilians.
Arrayed against such forces, one of the only ways Palestinians can assert their humanity is through storytelling. But this is a challenge given the one-sidedness of mainstream U.S. news, the chilling effect on speaking out in academia, and even alleged censorship on social media.
Still, stories are trickling out. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2014 marked the 50th year of Israeli occupation by publishing short stories about dozens of Palestinian men, women, and children. Arab-centric and independent media outlets such Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye routinely showcase such stories, in sharp contrast to mainstream U.S. media outlets.
Take Awni Eldous, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza. We know his name and his story not because he was profiled in The New York Times or on CNN—he was not—but because he was a YouTube star with a huge following as an online gamer, and because independent media and the Arab press covered his killing.
Bringing up the context of Hamas’ October 7 attack to justify Eldous’ killing sounds jarring. And so it’s easier not to bring up Eldous and other Palestinian victims at all, as evidenced by the deafening silence of Western media outlets on his death and the deaths of countless others.
The long-term work of sharing historical context about Israel’s brutal occupation that began with the Nakba must continue. But the short-term work of stopping the unfolding genocide must happen immediately. To curb Israel’s disproportionate and brutal violence, there must be an unequivocal call for a ceasefire in the name of Palestinian humanity.
It is a sad state of affairs that the world has to be convinced that Palestinians are human beings too. As of this writing, Israel has killed at least 3,900 children in Gaza by some accounts, and the total death toll has surpassed 9,400, nearly five times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas.
How many Palestinian lives is a single Israeli life worth? If the ratio is not 1 to 1, what is it?
Editor's note: This repost has been edited with updated casualty figures.
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