Addendum to the previous post on Nat Turner and the I.R.A.
Do the Right Thing
I have seen the immediate rise of both-sidesism in the liberal press and from posters following the killing of two staff members of the Israeli embassy.
On the Guardian website yesterday: “Israel starving Palestinians, two killings at a Jewish museum, both are atrocities. But vanishingly few can see it, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland”.
No, one is an act of ethnic cleansing and genocide, the other is a crime that is tragic for the families and friends of the two killed. They are absolutely, obviously not equivalences and the fact that the liberal press are still both-siding after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed is obscene.
Moreover, this strapline completely and intentionally obscures the fact that the starvation of Palestinians is intentional //government policy// whereas the two killings at a Jewish museum were committed by a private individual who is not even Palestinian!
I strongly believe that social media has engendered a massive inability in many people to understand events structurally rather than just individually, leading them to make false equivalences that obscure rather than illuminate the truth. This is perhaps the hallmark of liberal thinking.
I first noticed this in fellow white people’s reactions to Spike Lee’s sterling classic Do The Right Thing (1989). Spoilers, of course, follow.
In Do The Right Thing rising racial tensions in a Brooklyn neighbourhood end up with a young black man being murdered by the police and a subsequent riot. Lee’s sympathies are very much with the Black rioters/ protestors, but (as in life) some of these characters are more likeable (perhaps especially to a white audience) than others.
A montage in which characters we have already met in the film of different races and ethnicities all directly address the camera with a series of racial slurs and epithets makes it clear that even a very likeable character like Mookie (played by Lee himself) is not free from racial prejudices. Late in the film, during the riot, a group of Black characters go to smash or set fire to the Korean grocery and Sonny (Steve Park), the owner, has to convince them that he is not white, which they acquiesce to. Sonny himself is anti-semitic, as shown in the aforementioned montage.
Two of the most irascible characters in the film are Sal (Danny Aiello) and Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito). Sal, an Italian-American, runs a pizza place in the majority Black neighbourhood. Despite having almost exclusively Black customers, he only has pictures of famous Italian-Americans on the wall of his restaurant, which catches the ire of Buggin' Out, who protests against the lack of Black representation by boycotting Sal’s Pizzeria with his friend Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and a local man named Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith). Sal becomes racially aggressive in response to the boycott, smashing Radio Raheem’s boombox, causing the two to fight – a fight in which several other characters soon join in. When the police turn up, they arrest only Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem, with one officer killing Radio Raheem by choking him to death. Mookie throws a brick through the window of Sal’s Pizzeria and a riot breaks out.
As said, I have known white audience members (including students and friends) state that Buggin' Out and Radio Raheem are just as racist as Sal and thus just as blame-worthy. Certainly, Buggin' Out is plenty enraged when a white guy (John Savage) accidentally scuffs his sneakers, demanding that he go back to Massachusetts, to which the guy responds he was born in Brooklyn.
One of the high-rated comments on the Youtube clip of the scene I have linked to reads:
I’m Italian and from Long Island. I hate Buggin Outs character. He made a situation of racial tension that was not Sals fault, malt to a head. Even in this scene, he couldn’t accept a simple apology for a minor inconvenience.
Below this comment, another user adds, “thanks you for saying this he was the true villian in this”.
Radio Raheem is a much quiet character than Buggin' Out – if the film was remade today I suspect he would be coded as autistic. However, if you didn’t enjoy Public Enemy’s ‘Fight the Power’ he would be an admittedly irritating character to be around since it is the //only// song he blasts at full volume wherever he goes. If someone did that with James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’, say, I would probably hate them, no matter their reasons. He also gets irritated at Sonny due to his limited English and, however unpleasant Sal is later shown to be, most restaurant owners would get pissed at someone playing their boombox at full volume while other customers are eating. Fair enough!
In short, the Black male characters in the film are shown as flawed human beings who are not free of their own prejudices.
But, at the end of the day, when the police are called, it is a Black man, Radio Raheem, who is killed; murdered; lynched.
Sal, able to access the privileges of whiteness as an Italian-American, has structural power on his side. It’s a moot point whether Radio Raheem, Buggin' Out and Smiley overreact to Sal’s ‘Wall of Fame’ or whether Buggin' Out seems as highly strung as his name implies. So what? Radio Raheem ends up dead. Sal only ends up with his restaurant burnt down.
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My point is, when I see links to videos showing Palestinians voicing anti-semitic statements or even praising Hamas, it makes zero difference to my secure conviction in knowing that the genocide against the people of Gaza is hideously, monstrously wrong. Likewise – more closely related to the film – when I’ve seen white folks state that George Floyd issued a fake cheque or that Trayor Martin sent "hostile" txt messages to a friend on the day of his murder. So what? They ended up dead with scores of people supporting and speaking up for their killers.
Why should Palestinians be expected to be perfect in their emotional, political or moral conduct? They are being tortured, starved and bombed to death.
You might be able to argue about both sides in a war but what is being done in Gaza (and, indeed, Palestine more broadly) is very patently not part of a war, but a brutually executed plan of ethnic cleansing, which the perpetrators have boasted about again and again and again.
If you try to argue both sides you have lost sight of your moral compass.