By Tommy Airey, originally posted to his Substack, which provides an audio version and important links
*A letter to my niblings (ages five to thirteen), on the 3rd anniversary of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
Dear Riley, Mason, Milo and Haylen,
Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that the whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Abraham Joshua Heschel was a rabbi and professor who marched with MLK in the Black freedom struggle.
You already know who MLK is. You’ve read about him in children’s books. You’ve seen photos and murals of him all over the place. You hear about him every January, in the lead-up to his holiday weekend.
It is one thing to know who MLK is. It is another thing to be impacted and influenced by him.
My hope is that you and your generation will not only be impacted by MLK’s beautiful words, but also that you will be influenced by his brave actions.
Six years before George Floyd and I were born, MLK said that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world was his own government. A lot of Americans got really angry when he said this. The next day, 168 newspapers condemned him.
MLK made it clear that real terrorism is what America does to other people all over the planet.
There’s a good chance that no one has ever told you this about our own government. There’s also a good chance that you will be told that what MLK said and did about our own government is all in the past, that our own government has made a lot of progress.
Please. Do not believe them.
What MLK said back then about our own government is still true today.
I am telling you this so that when people in your life blame Palestinians and Communists and Black people and dark-skinned immigrants for the problems of this world, you will know the truth, and like Jesus said, the truth will set you free.
I am telling you this right now because some people in your life will talk about violence this week, in the lead-up to the three-year anniversary of an event that happened on the other side of the planet in a place called Palestine.
Your friends and neighbors will tell you that, on that day – October 7, 2023 – terrorists did all sorts of terrible things to innocent people because they hate freedom and democracy and Jews and Christians.
Please. Do not believe them.
What happened on October 7, 2023 was a response to decades of terrorism done to innocent people, all of it fully supported by our own government.
If you are brave enough to tell the truth about unpopular things like this, it will probably feel like you are alone. MLK felt alone sometimes. So did Jesus.
But when you tell the truth about these matters, you will never be alone. Because you will be standing with divine Love, the greatest force in the universe. You will also be standing with masses of people, all over the planet, who know, full well, that October 7 was not a “terrorist attack.”
Most of the people on this planet know that whenever anyone is being terrorized, they not only have the right, but the responsibility, to resist terrorism.
Most of the people on this planet know this because they have been terrorized by the same imperial power that terrorizes the Palestinians today: our own government.
An imperial power is a bully that uses intimidation and violence to take land and resources from other people all over the planet.
The United States of America is a bully that goes on play dates with other bullies like Israel, Great Britain, Germany, France and Australia. These countries with white majority populations play together in a sandbox filled with sand stolen from people all over the planet.
This imperial club of bullies is called Western Civilization, and it has been terrorizing the rest of the world for centuries.
The good news is that there are alternative clubs that resist the bullies and live for Something Else.
One of these clubs is called The Hague Group. It schedules play dates that imagine and build a world without terrorism. It consists of countries with dark-skinned populations like Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.
Recently, more white bread countries like Iceland, Ireland, Spain and Norway have also been asking to get in on these play dates. It’s really dope.
In order to explain just a little bit about what Western Civilization has specifically done to Palestinians, let me go over a few terms that you’ll need to know, in order to understand what’s really happening.
The Palestinians have endured a Nakba for longer than your Nawny has been alive. Nakba is an Arabic word that means something absolutely terrible is being done to them. People with guns and bombs and bulldozers stole their homes and the land their families tended for centuries.
The Palestinians were rounded up like cattle and forced into refugee camps. It has only gotten worse over time. In fact, Palestinians are enduring the longest unresolved refugee crisis in the world.
In the land of Palestine, a country called “Israel” was created as a home for Jewish people. It is an apartheid state, which means that they’ve made a whole bunch of rules that favor Jewish people over Arab and Muslim people.
After the Civil War, when Southern states in the US had these same kinds of segregation rules, it was called Jim Crow. MLK and the Black freedom struggle dismantled Jim Crow.
Palestinians have been enduring an ongoing, illegal occupation, which means that our own government continues to support the stealing of Palestinian land and the construction of settlements that segregate Jews from Palestinians. Settlements are gated communities with manicured lawns and mansions, many of which are the second homes of Jewish-Americans.
Israel has full control of everything and everyone coming in and going out of the illegally occupied territories of Palestine. Israel will not allow a lot of basic necessities through the border. This is called a blockade – and our own government backs it up.
Many politicians in Israel and all over the West have publicly supported the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing means taking a whole group of people from their land and sending them somewhere else. Genocide means attempting to completely wipe a whole group of people off the planet.
American politicians continue to vote (overwhelmingly) to send weapons to Israel to support this genocidal campaign.
All of this state-sponsored terrorism started before your Nawny was born – and it is still happening today.
These are facts, not feelings, and you should never ever agree to have a conversation about Israel and Palestine with anyone whose feelings get in the way of acknowledging the horrific facts of the Nakba, the occupation, the blockade, apartheid, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The really unfortunate thing is that many your friends and neighbors will have feelings that get in the way of acknowledging the facts of what our own government has done and is doing to Palestinians – and all sorts of other people too.
These people in your life will be bound to knee-jerk reactions. They will say that Palestinians are violent people, even though Palestinians have consistently resisted terrorism with the same creative nonviolent strategies that made MLK famous.
Palestinians and their friends around the world have organized boycotts, sit-ins, hunger strikes, freedom flotillas, tent encampments, marches and much more.
Palestinian resistance has been suppressed and dismissed and ignored and violently crushed by the actual terrorists, who continue to accuse Palestinians of being terrorists. This is called projection, which is the cheat code to understanding how our own government and its sandbox of bullies tries to control the narrative:
Every accusation is a confession.
They say that Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) are barbaric, backwards and violent. They say that they do terrible things to women and children. They say that they want to kill all the Jews. They say that they lie and distort reality. They say that they brainwash their children. They say that they take civilians and use them as human shields to protect their soldiers. They say that they use religion to justify atrocities. They say that they are anti-democratic.
They falsely accuse Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims) of doing all these terrible things – while they do all these terrible things to Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims.
Not only for the past three years. For the past century.
October 7, 2023 is the type of event that inevitably happens after decades of nonviolent civil disobedience is suppressed and dismissed and ignored and violently crushed by the actual terrorists.
On October 7, 2023, the democratically-elected leaders of illegally occupied Gaza organized an armed prison break. For a few hours, they got out of Gaza, a place that, for the past couple decades, has been described by a lot of scholars as “an open-air concentration camp.”
The leaders of Gaza called their prison-break campaign Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
The goal of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was to catch as many Israeli soldiers as possible with their human flood and then use these soldiers as leverage to gain the release of Palestinians detained in the Israeli prison system, which is a network of torture camps.
Thousands of Palestinians are being held without charges in Israel.
When you are held in prison without charges, you are not a prisoner. You are a hostage.
Three years after this prison break, there is zero evidence that these Palestinian freedom fighters did terrible things to women or that they beheaded babies. But the state-sponsored terrorists in control of the US and Israeli governments still accuse them of doing these things. Because they need an excuse to justify carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians.
The genocide is still being carried out. Even a year after a “ceasefire” was declared.
Also, it is crucial for you to know that, on October 7, 2023, Israeli soldiers were given what’s called “the Hannibal directive.” They were told that they should do whatever possible to stop Israelis from being taken hostage – even if it meant killing them in the process.
Many, if not most, of the Israelis murdered on October 7 were murdered by their own government – which was fully supported and funded by our own government.
Most Americans are grossly misinformed about the events of October 7, 2023 and they desperately want to believe in the myth that “we” are the good, innocent, civilized people – and “they” are the violent barbarians.
Most Americans need to believe in this myth, in order to justify the massive wealth disparity that divides most Americans from most people on this planet.
The problem is not that most Americans are stupid or ignorant people. We are spiritually sick people. We are fearful, anxious, ashamed and entitled people. We are also racist and Islamophobic people.
We are a people addicted to supremacy, the ridiculous notion that we are more valuable and worthy than other people. Supremacy is a dismissal of the dignity and humanity of most of the people on the planet.
Not only Palestinians, but dark-skinned masses from Somalia to inner-city Detroit to Puerto Rico and Papua New Guinea and Pakistan and Pine Ridge.
When you dismiss or minimize the dignity and humanity of masses of people, each of whom are imprinted with the image of the divine, something happens to your soul.
You miss out on being impacted and influenced by the beauty and brilliance that these other people offer the world.
You lose the capacity to be open-hearted, emotionally expressive, tender, nurturing and generous.
Supremacy is a spiritual epidemic that has gone airborne. It spreads through systems and institutions. It is embedded in American culture. This means that you can catch the disease just by following the rules.
Please. Don’t follow the rules.
When you follow the rules of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, you become bound to supremacy.
But you can break rank. You can switch sides. You can pledge allegiance to the people that America terrorizes. You can commit to doing whatever it takes to protect their humanity and dignity.
When you do this, you start swimming upstream to the source of Something Else.
In this process of personal healing and collective liberation, you will become known as a pariah, persona non grata, unpatriotic, a pain in the ass, a hater, an antisemite and a terrorist supporter.
You will get canceled and ghosted. But you will also get free.
People will try to tell you that when Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims lay down their weapons, there will no longer be violence in the Middle East – but if Israelis lay down their weapons, there will no longer be an Israel in the Middle East. Just tell them that peace will not come when one side lays down their weapons. Peace will come when justice prevails.
People will try to tell you that the apartheid state of Israel is absolutely necessary because, without it, Jewish people will not be safe. But the opposite is true. Israel makes Jewish people less safe because it is committing genocidal atrocities and a lot of ignorant people in the world, believe it or not, now equate all Jewish people with all the atrocities that Israel is committing.
Also, wealthy Americans and Israelis spend millions of dollars every year in ads and commercials to get you to believe that Jewishness and the state of Israel are the same thing. This most certainly is not helping matters.
My beloved niblings, it is crucial for you to know that many Jewish people do not believe that Israel should exist as a Jewish supremacist state. They are horrified that Israel has been committing terrorist acts for a century, in the name of Judaism.
It is also crucial for you to know that all of this terrorist nonsense started about four hundred years ago when white Christians in the US and Europe wanted to send all the Jews in their countries to a new country called “Israel” which would be created in the middle of an ancient place called Palestine.
These white Christians – called Zionists – claimed that the bible says that, when Israel is established, Jesus himself will return in rapturous glory – and then all the Jews will have the opportunity to convert to Christianity, so they can go live in heaven with Jesus for eternity.
My beloved niblings, these beliefs are batshit crazy – and totally antisemitic.
A lot of your friends and neighbors believe this batshit crazy antisemitic nonsense. When they try to evangelize you, just tell them that none of this end times fascism has anything to do with the divine Love that Jesus taught and lived in the Gospels.
People will try to tell you that the terrorism our own government is supporting and funding in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is not a genocide. When they tell you this, just remind them that many well-respected human rights orgs have done the research and diagnosed it as a genocide, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Human Rights Council and B’Tselem.
People will also try to tell you that you must press the mute button on the issue of Israel and Palestine because this issue is extremely complicated and there are so many different perspectives that you need listen to before you ever take a public stand on it.
It is important for you to know that most of the perspectives on this issue are propaganda, which is a word that means the opposite of telling the truth. These perspectives are designed to make this extremely unjust and oppressive situation seem super complicated. So that you will just shut up and move on with your life.
But what is happening to Palestinians is not complicated.
Please. Don’t just shut up and move on with your life.
My beloved niblings, the best way to get free from the propaganda and live in the truth is to listen to real-life Palestinians like Abubaker Abed, Mosab Abu Toha, Ahmed Eldin, Mariam Barghouti, Bisan Owda, Issa Amro, Munther Isaac, Susan Abulhawa, Sami Awad, Rashida Tlaib, Huwaida Arraf and Noura Erakat.
When you hear their compelling testimony, don’t just believe them. Don’t just be content being on the right side of history. Go public with your convictions.
Be like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus, who was a dark-skinned Palestinian Jew, not a white Christian nationalist like some of your friends and neighbors say he was.
MLK and Jesus told the truth no matter what it cost them. Because they were driven by divine Love, the most powerful force in the universe.
I pray not that this force will be with you, but that you will be with this force. Forever. No matter what.
This force will infuse you with the spiritual depth, moral clarity and political courage that you will need to navigate this world.
My beloved niblings, you probably won’t understand most of what I wrote here. But someday you will, inshallah.
Love, Uncle Koo Koo
