The morning after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, my high school history teacher asked, “How many of you think Dr. King’s work for civil rights was important?” Most of us raised our hands. “If you really believe that, then why weren’t you working with him yesterday?” he challenged.
I had no answer. For the first time I realized that even a classroom of 15-year-olds could do something to right wrongs. It wasn’t sufficient merely to have opinions.
As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day this year, more than four decades after his assassination, I worry that we have lost some of this message — about how we identify injustices and act appropriately to effect change.
Yes, things have improved since 1968. Overt racial discrimination is not the problem it was back then. But hatred is, and will always be, with us, causing great damage to our country and our world.
Hatred, like other human emotions, varies in strength. One of the ways to keep it in “check,” to use King’s phrase, is when leaders speak out against it, so it doesn’t seem unremarkable or acceptable, but rather is taboo. Too many leaders today — political, religious and otherwise — either ignore hatred or, worse, endorse it. Likewise, hatred that would be deplored against one target is too often ignored against another, for political or other considerations.
A basic way of identifying this phenomenon is to take a situation, change the “players” and see if the same rules apply. For example, if Jews or blacks or any other group were blamed as frequently for society’s problems as some media figures and activist groups blame “illegal immigrants” these days, I suspect that the racism would be more clearly seen.
On the international stage, compare the treatment of Israel in the United Nations and in much of the foreign press to how other countries are treated. Increasingly, rather than focusing on the difficulties involved in the political problems of two groups with indigenous ties to the same land, Israel is vilified and the Palestinians lionized, regardless of what either side does.
Some say love is the opposite of hatred. I don’t believe so. Many haters (David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) wrap their hatred of others in love for their self-defined own. Rather, the opposite of hatred may be what King implicitly understood: the intersection of altruism and empathy, the capacity to see ourselves as the “other,” and to take action when we see hatred, despite political and other differences.
How many people who rant about “illegal immigrants” can imagine themselves in the position of the people they vilify? What must it be like to worry about being on the edges of society, having politicians and others scapegoat you to the point where, as happened a year ago in Long Island, a group of teenagers thought it was okay to beat up Hispanics as sport, leaving an Ecuadorian immigrant dead?
Conversely, how many supporters of immigration rights can put themselves in the place of a middle-class home owner who barely managed to buy a home, and has to worry about the impact of a rental home down the street that is overflowing with day-laborer tenants?
How many pro-Palestinian activists can put themselves in the position of an Israeli, someone with deep religious and historical ties to the land of Israel, threatened by the president of a nearby country who wants to see it wiped out, and by terrorism from Hamas, a group that is so antisemitic it even wrote Jew-hatred into its charter? Could they switch the scenario around, assume Americans were Israelis, Canada was Hamas-controlled and Mexico was Iran, and wonder what they would want the American government to do to protect its citizens?
Conversely, despite the missteps of Israelis and Palestinians alike, how many Israel supporters spend time putting themselves in the shoes of Palestinians, wondering what it would be like to live with checkpoints in the West Bank, let alone under the oppressive rule of Hamas in Gaza?
Martin Luther King said, “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
King’s message is one we still very much need to heed. Unless we can push hatred to the margins, and remind ourselves of the value of empathy, our ability to tackle today’s urgent problems becomes that much more difficult.
Kenneth Stern is director of the American Jewish Committee’s Division on Anti-Semitism and Extremism.
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Maybe you can put yourself in the position of Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, whom the AJC libellously accused of supporting anti-Semitism and being anti-Israel.
For that matter, maybe you could even put yourself in the position of Hamas. What a shocking idea -- try to see things from your enemy's perspective.
Perhaps the American Jewish Committee will put itself in the position of Palestinians in Gaza who watched their families slaughtered by a rain of white phosphorus (in what the AJC dismissed as an "Oliver Stone" fantasy) - "AJC dismisses white phosphorus attacks and destruction of flour mill as ‘Oliver Stone’ fantasy," Mondoweiss [Philip Weiss]. [Excerpt] "Shame. The American Jewish Committee attacks the Goldstone report and for not one instant examines factual allegations: that white phosphorus was dropped indiscriminately in civilian areas, that the chief food production of the strip was willfully destroyed, and so on. The indifference of a Jewish organization to these actual factual statements is simply staggering blindness." http://mondoweiss.net/2009/11/ajc-dismisses-white-phosphorus-attacks-and-destruction-of-flour-mill-as-oliver-stone-fantasy.html
Or as Helmuth James Graf von Moltke wrote:
"Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day, and another thousand German men are habituated to murder... What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time?"
Norman - The author already asks in his article "how many Israel supporters spend time putting themselves in the shoes of Palestinians..." So your criticism ("try to see things from your enemy's perspective") is quite silly. But as long as you have raised the point, I would be curious to know if you have ever suggested to Hamas that they, too, "try to see things from [their] enemy's perspective". I would imagine that you haven't. That's how it is with the anti-Israel crowd. It is impossible to hear a word of criticism of the policy or behavior of the Arab side. The Hamas Charter calls for genocide, for example, and yet you can't bring yourself to saying that this is bad (it's actually absolute evil). When confronted with the question, the best that you can do is to say that "charters can be changed". True, a genocidal charter can be changed - but as long as it hasn't been changed, it deserves your clear condemnation. It deserves a comment that something is twisted, peculiar and illegitimate in their war aims. But, alas, criticizing Israel's enemies (even when they really deserve it) might be misunderstood as expressing some kind of sympathy with Israel - and that is absolutely against the rules in your anti-Israel activity.
Those who are really interested in peace, Norman, should give their attention to all aspects of the conflict. But, unfortunately, your true agenda is not peace. Your true agenda is hostility to Israel.
Above: "As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day this year, more than four decades after his assassination, I worry that we have lost some of this message — about how we identify injustices and act appropriately to effect change.
Rabbi Brian Walt, "Two visits to Hebron," 1/13/2010. [Excerpt] "The Israeli military had designated the street we were walking a “sterile street,” a street on which only Jews can walk! The Palestinians who lived on the street could not leave their homes through their front doors which were also bolted by the Israeli military.
The physical experience of walking down that “sterile street” shocked me to my core. This town is deserted, the Palestinians are not allowed to walk on their own street because a few hundred very religious (“religious”?) Jews, supported by the overwhelming power of the Israeli military, have created several settlements in the heart of a Palestinian city.
As an ex-South African, I could not help but think about Apartheid. Apartheid was a travesty, a huge crime committed against millions of people, yet even under Apartheid, there were no “sterile streets.” The experience made me confront the fact that this ethnic discrimination and brutality was being done not only in the name of Judaism, by religious Jews, inspired by Jewish sources, texts and beliefs; but it was also made possible and fully supported by Israel, the state that speaks in the name of the Jewish people. The walk down that street, a little more than a year ago, changed my life. Having seen with my own eyes the effects of the discrimination, having walked with my own legs down that street, I could no longer avoid confronting the racism that was at the core of Israeli government policy, at the heart of Zionism, and in parts of my own religious tradition. I could no longer just ignore, avoid or easily reinterpret those ideas in our the sacred texts that inspired these settlers: the ideas of a Promised Land, an exclusive covenant and about destroying the peoples of the Land of Canaan. I could also no longer ignore the privileging of the rights of Jews over the rights of non-Jews that was at the core of Zionism."
http://rabbibrian.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/two-visits-to-hebron/
"change the “players” and see if the same rules apply"
OK, change the United States to Israel. Do the same rules apply? Israel is explicitly an ethnostate. Why aren't you outraged about that racism?