Monique - 1/10/2004

Question: Why did you choose this title? By avoiding the constraints of taking too narrow a view of YOUR beliefs, one begs to aquire facts for a language, not to rewrite history and invent a new discursive space, but to address the questions of hate, and perhaps most importantly, the transmission of conflicts that lie in the body of your reasoning. It is a function of language use,you see, a negotiation between truth and the perceived forementioned. Your "essay" is a good example of selective ommission. If we-the Jews-did influence the media, news outlets would never adopt the Palestinian version of events as if it were an established fact. Readers, unaware of the flagrant selective omission, are led to the false belief that trigger-happy Israeli troops open fire against non-threatening Palestinian "protestors." For instance, an actual scene of stone-throwing "protest" in Nablus, captured by an Associated Press photographer on Jan.2 depicts young Palestinians using cement building blocks thrown from a few stories high. These are deadly weapons by anyone's standards. "Protestors" carry placards; they don't hurl cinder blocks. This can be classified as first-degree murder. Facts entail an encounter not simply with a closed-off past or a static, fossilized archive, but rather with a continuing history of testimony, a history that emerges and speaks to us in various ways as a single event might be told. To assume a place in this history, then, might also be to allow the story to teach us how to listen to it, to teach us how to inhabit a moment without a predetermined misguidance. The very nature of cruelty when 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929. Why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? How do you interpret a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and declared war? Forced into forms of reiteration, these questions depend on a sense of lack; it is always deferred and in that deferral, pushed out of its confinement the idea for lack of peace. The problem of selectivity under the stress of wanting to hate has likewise prompted and must be situated at another level, where the inverted image rebounds upon the so-called normal world, and shows that this world is itself hateful. The illusion, the false reality of knowledge that distracts us from the truth like a distorted mirror image that captivates us while alienating us from reality. And so it goes...