There is one significant issue that Tim Wessel did not address in his recent letter (where he wrote that "if you are on the streets demanding that Israel lay down arms and you are not asking the same of Hamas, you are siding with terrorists, and I question your moral compass"). This issue is also not generally addressed in other discussions about Palestine and Israel, so I'd like to do so here:
I don't like fighting, and I wish people wouldn't do it - but they do. That, unfortunately, is human nature. I do not go out and protest every time people fight, not even if they fight viciously and cruelly. As much as I dislike it, it is silly to protest human nature itself.
But there is a huge difference between people who fight each other while living freely and one person or group keeping another in captivity and then torturing and destroying them.
Fighting may be a sad fact of human nature, but keeping people in captivity and torturing and destroying them is not. It is a perversion of anything and everything natural. While most of us dislike fighting, even more of us feel outright moral revulsion at cruel, torturous, and murderous behavior.
I'm not sure how often I or anyone else comes home from a night of music and says, “Wow, that was exquisite.” We might say it was “awesome,” or “amazing,” but “exquisite”? The word seems a bit out of synch with today's grittier, modern aesthetic. But during In Stile...