by Salim Mansur
Auden’s lines, “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”, recall the oldest counsel of the wise elders – the shamans, oracles, avatars, priests. In Vedantic scripture Auden’s lines is akin to the meaning of “karma”, the moral principle of consequence of consequence. Or inversely, as Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Or in like manner the Qur’an prohibits killing, for “if anyone kills a person it is as if he kills all mankind.”
The exception to this most ancient counsel of wisdom is that of the Talmudic Jews and their modern descendants, the Zionists. For them, as Auden points out, their psychopathic god time and again counselled his “chosen” people to engage in murder, mayhem, and genocide as their scribes noted in their scrolls. Here, for instance, is the gist of this repeated command from Deuteronomy 20: 16-17:
“However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
Note how contrary is the command of Yahweh, the God that speaks from a burning bush or marches ahead of the “chosen” people as a pillar of fire, from that of the God of Abraham mentioned in the Qur’an, that nations and tribes were made so that they learn from each other to live together.
October 7, 2023, was when the progeny of those ancient people the psychopathic god ordered his “chosen” ones to massacre, revolted by launching “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” against their tormentors doing evil to them for defending their heritage from being erased since the early decades of the last century.
October 7, 2023, was the day that will go into the annals of history as that momentous day in our time when the occupied rose up against their occupiers and when the resistance of the oppressed against their oppressors manifested itself by shaking the grounds underneath the oppressor’s feet, as when the captive “Hebrew” in the ancient land of the Pharaohs broke their chains to escape from captivity led by Moses, their hero-prophet; as when the slaves of Rome shook the Empire with their bare hands with the cry for freedom raised by Spartacus, their slave-leader; as when the 300 Spartans led by Leonidas stood against the invading Persians at Thermopylae and saved their land from conquest; as when a small band of believers in One True God (or “Allah” in Arabic) scattered an army of pagan Arab idol-worshippers in the battle of Badr and laid the foundation of Islam under the command of Muhammad, their hero-messenger of God (or “rasul Allah” in Arabic). And similarly, so did the handful of Palestinians when roused by Yahya Sinwar, their hero-warrior, arose against the might of the occupation forces of the colonial-settler state of Israel and made their fight for freedom one more the moral issue in the contemporary world that had become increasingly indifferent to principles of morality.
October 7, 2023, was not a bolt from the blue. It was long time brewing under the cruel weight of the occupiers. Netanyahu, the leader of the colonial-settler state of Israel, in taking October 7 as a pretext ordered the soldiers of occupation to conduct a genocide of the men, women, and children of Gaza as Amalekites in keeping with the command given by their psychopathic god against Hittites and Amorites and Canaanites narrated in the Hebrew scrolls written centuries before the birth of Jesus.
The colonial-settler Jews of Eastern Europe with fake ownership from three millennia ago arrived in Palestine at the turn of the last century and set upon with the assistance of Western powers to steal lands from Palestinians, forcefully drive them from their homes and farms and orchards, engage in ethnic cleansing of those from whom lands were stolen, all done in keeping with the directives of their psychopathic god and the complicity of those Christians as crypto-Jews behaving like the Pharisees whom Jesus condemned for belonging to their “father, the devil,” who was “a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him.”
October 7, 2023, ripped aside the mask that hid the true diabolical face of those who preach good while plotting and doing evil
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.But more than that. On October 7, 2023, in choosing death over occupation and oppression, those Palestinians who stormed over the fenced gates of occupied Gaza turned into their concentration camp sent an earthquake across the Middle East where fellow Arabs and Turks had stood aside, while watching the cruel fate of Palestinians unfolding under occupation without lending a hand to reprieve them from their occupiers and roll back the unlawful colonial-settler state imposed by external powers in the region.
This earthquake has sent shock waves through the region and beyond so that those who may discern the consequence of evil done to Palestinians who did no wrong to Jews arriving in their midst from the genocidal wars of Europe, have awakened to the unseemly depth of evil done by those very same people who were victims of the European holocaust and then doing even worse openly and remorselessly to others among whom they sought refuge.
The consequence of more than a century long wrongs done by Jews to Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, has therefore let loose the whirlwind of October 7, 2023. Into the fourth year of the Gaza genocide the pillars holding aloft yet the post-World War One architecture of the Middle East – conceived in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France, and the Balfour Declaration by Britain, supported by the United States as the preeminent imperial Western power – has been greatly weakened.
How long the weakened pillars of the Middle Eastern vassal states along with the colonial-settler state of Israel will bear the weight since their making before crumbling might be a matter of conjecture. But the run of history is that empires invariably and with no exception arrive at a terminal point before they disintegrate. And so it will be, sooner or later as expected, with the neo-colonial and neo-imperial architecture of the post-Ottoman Empire hoisted upon the Middle East by the perfidious Albion in collusion with France and the United States.
And when that inevitable hour arrives and thereafter, most people and nations of the world will remember October 7, 2023, when a band of freedom fighters took up arms for their people’s liberty from among the occupied and oppressed Palestinians of Gaza. And whoever among those complicit in support of the occupiers and oppressors of Palestinians go about denouncing them for doing evil, will need reminding of W.H. Auden’s memorable lines “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return” to erase the slate of wrongs they were made to suffer. This is the law of “karma”, and the reckoning comes in kind for them who purposely remain heedless of this law while conniving plots to harm others for wrongful gains for themselves.
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