by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Nov. 7, 2023) —
“A rock reveals itself to be sacred because its very existence is a hierophany: incompressible, invulnerable, it is that which man is not.”
Mircea Eliade
Iron rains and blood pours in the Holy Land again, where America’s pound of flesh was claimed on 7 October: thirty-three lives, a stark toll, and one of the darkest days in American civil history. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says ten American lives still linger in the Land of the Captive, Gaza, hostages of Hamas. But who knows?
There was a time when such horror would seize the press from coast to coast, the President’s voice would thunder with threats of fire and fury until America’s children were returned unharmed; screens would keep score, syncing the nation’s heartbeats with the fate of the missing. Now, there is silence, quieter than an afterthought.
At best, the collective wisdom is that it was their tough luck, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. But deeper than this is the gnawing truth that they are simply the wrong people. Second-class victims of a perpetratorless crime.
In 2014, when similar terror struck as hundreds of girls were taken by Boko Haram in Nigeria, then-First Lady Michelle Obama was quick to signal that wasn’t OK, sparking a global campaign of hashtag diplomacy. Even though she had the ears of the most powerful man in the world, she decided that the best course of action was to raise the hostages to the prized status of ‘the current thing’, as if she could tweet them away from captivity.
Yet here we are, a full month on, and the American hostages remain off the agenda for Mrs. Obama and the American establishment. No hashtags, no pledges, no outcry. In fairness, she also lost interest in the dozens of girls still missing in Nigeria to this day. The spotlight has moved on, and with it, Mrs. Obama’s interest — perhaps to the politically greener pastures of climate change, abortion, and LGBT pandering.
Now, I understand the humanist approach of ‘all hostages matter’, or the nationalist approach of ‘American hostages matter.’ What puzzles me — and makes me sick to my stomach — is the tribalist approach of ‘only the hostages I see as my own matter.’
Biden’s #MeToo moment: he’s also a hostage
“He who defends everything, defends nothing.”
Frederick the Great
Napoleon famously prayed to find a coalition on the opposite side of the battlefield. President Biden — the ‘leader’ of the increasingly dysfunctional rainbow coalition — knows exactly why. And he is reminded of that daily, which is helpful since he struggles to remember even where he is most of the time.
On the plus side, he can count on the mainstream media to fight his battles for him. They’ve got the memo that acknowledging a hostage crisis would make him look even more like the second coming of Jimmy Carter, further damaging his chances in 2024. The media drama over the Boko Haram girls in 2014 — or the similarly doomed Chilean miners in 2010 and Thai boys in 2018 — meant a ratings frenzy for little to no cost. But with the American hostages in Gaza, the political cost is so high the press is tiptoeing around the issue as if the floor’s littered with landmines.
And lest we forget Brittney Griner, who wasn’t even a hostage. Her perceived ‘captivity’ monopolised headlines for months, ending with an extreme sacrifice from Biden, exchanging the ‘Merchant of Death’ for an otherwise pointless card-carrying member of the ‘coalition’ — who landed herself in trouble through her own stupidity. A sick joke, where the American hostages in Gaza are now the punchline.
Ignoring these hostages amounts to nothing less than their dehumanisation, which can only be partially justified by our unspoken expectation that this hostage crisis will not end well, that the grim reaper is due a field day. That only underscores the US Government should call it what it is: a war crime. To dismiss this fact signals more than virtue; it shows a tolerance for war crimes against America’s own — an untenable stance in the long run.
But Biden himself is a political hostage to his motley crew. He can’t call a spade a spade — to acknowledge this hostage crisis as an attack on America would fracture the very coalition he’s in bed with. When Americans are killed or kidnapped, he must pussyfoot around terror and its sponsors. He’s hamstrung, and his voice lacks the fervour needed for deterrence.
Qatar doesn’t lose a second’s sleep over the possibility of being labelled a ‘terrorist haven’ or any threats to turn over known Hamas leaders in the country or else. Serving as a reliable purveyor of weapons, diplomatic mediation and even financial aid to the likes of Hamas, Al Qaeda, and others has become business as usual for them.
Read the rest here.