I Would Not so Lightly What, Now?

 

Mast: I think when we look at this, as a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians. I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians pic.twitter.com/OqDpJHZiHV

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 1, 2023

There weren't "Nazi civilians." There were German civilians. There were people whose government and everything else went violently wrong. The participants in the war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis had to pay, but the nation of Germany, the civilian population, were not assumed to be, every one of them, collectively responsible for the great evil that was done in the Holocaust. The movement tried to co-opt every aspect of German life, from hero mothers to Hitlerjugend. But there had to be a limit to the toll exacted on the people for the crimes of their leaders. 

I would not so lightly throw around the idea that every German was a war criminal because of what had taken place as a part of the demented "solutions" of a degenerate fascist movement. So can Rep. Mast tell me this:

What is the culpability of the Palestinian toddler at his sitte's knee or in the lap of his seedo? What is the fault of the baby at his mother's breast or the child in the womb? Is the infant Palestinian born to be a rocket--screaming and heated for an instant, explosive? A sandbag on a trench fortification? A strand of razor wire of separation? From the cradle to a crater? 

Is martyrdom a congenital condition? What does it mean when you have labeled someone a criminal, deserving of violence, from their ethnicity or religion, from their birth status--is that not what the Nazis did? 

Or is a child unto us given every day a blessing with agency to be something, anything at all? Where is the pro-life thinking here? 

Mast would not so lightly talk about human life if he ever thought deeply enough to understand that the lives of each generation of Palestinians can only be more immiserated unless we think of them as people, not treat them all as potential terrorists. This is how they need to see themselves--valued, a part of the process of their liberation and given choice over their future. This idea of evil as a demographic identity is the thinking that recruits and forms people into weapons. 

I know he's fronting for a specific audience. He probably knows he is too. But how cheap is human life that the option to perform such a language of violence is perceived as necessary or even worthwhile?