Forgiveness and gibberish

Erika Kirk forgave Tyler Robinson, her husband's killer. A man yelled "Free Palestine!" at a N.H. country club before shooting, but did he mean it? Where speech is not free.

“I forgive him because it is what Christ did,” Erika Kirk spoke before a giant crowd at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. “The answer to hate is not hate.” The crowd was there to honor Charlie Kirk, Erika’s husband and father of their two young children. The long memorial service featured President Donald Trump among other dignitaries; Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were seen shaking hands and chatting together, like they never traded insults and barbs. Forgiveness was on the menu.

In Nashua, New Hampshire, a 23-year-old man yelled “Free Palestine!” before firing shots at Sky Meadow Country Club, where people were eating lunch and a wedding was in progress. Hunter Nadeau has been identified by police as the suspect. One man, Robert Steven DeCesare, 59, tried to stop the shooter, and was killed. The Boston Globe reported a witness description to a local television station: “He hit him over the head with a chair, and he probably saved a bunch of lives just doing that.”

Authorities say they don’t know a motive, and speculated that what the shooter said may have simply been to create chaos. If the words “free Palestine,” and “forgive” have lost their meaning, does anything have meaning anymore?

Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group that was once led by David French, conducted a study on free speech rights at colleges. The Globe’s reporting highlighted Boston-area universities. Of 257 schools surveyed, 65 percent received an “F”. MIT got a “D-minus.” In general, campuses are places where one might find the most restrictions on speech, and the least free speech. It’s ironic that institutions that charge a lot of money to teach young people how to think critically, are so itchy to keep people from free expression. More troubling is the place where ideas, expressions and words are given meaning, seem to denigrate the value of those words, by jamming their meanings into tight narratives where little to no variation is permitted.

Take the words “Free Palestine.” Starting with the second word, there has been no place with that name, historically, until fairly recently (The People’s Republic of China recognized Palestinian statehood in 1988). The Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the small province of Judea to Syria Palestina as part of a general order to wipe the culture and religion of the Jews from the empire (to them, the world). The Judeans were a particularly bothersome burr in the side of the empire in that part of the world, refusing to settle down, and subject to violent revolt. Then there was the troubling influence of the followers of “The Way,” led by personal witnesses of their Messiah, Yeshua, who was reported to claim kingship over—something. These people did things like retrieving discarded babies from the Roman dumps, raising them as their own, and forgiving those who killed and persecuted them. These were ideals Hadrian wanted to bury.

For over 1,800 years, few people lived in the land formerly known as Judea, until the Zionist movement began with some Jews purchasing land from willing Arab and Bedouin sellers in the late 1800s. The Balfour Declaration in 1917 determined that Jews should receive that land again as a national homeland. More Jews began to move in, and for each Jew, the Arabs determined to match immigration one for one. After World War I, the British took over administration of the land, having defeated the Ottoman Empire. World War II created a large number (600,000) of Jewish refugees with no place to return to, since they were liberated from concentration and death camps run by the Nazis.

A high commission created to look into the possibility the land would support such a large number of people concluded it could not. But the Sabras, the Jews who pioneered rebuilding the land, proved the experts wrong. As much as the British and other nations tried to stop Jewish immigration, more Jews poured in, again, matched one for one, by Arab immigrants, who were paid to live in the land.

Before WWII, in 1937, the British Royal Commission (the Peel Commission) introduced the concept of a two-state solution, with a Jewish and Arab state. The 20th Zionish Congress rejected the proposed map but agreed to give their leaders authority to negotiate an acceptable map—partition as a concept was not rejected. In 1947, the Jewish Agency accepted the U.N. plan for partition and two independent states. The Arab League walked out of the U.N. general assembly, and has never accepted the plan.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed on an extension to the Oslo Accords, giving the Palestinians an independent state, giving it 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank, with a framework for security, refugees, and the status of Jerusalem. Yassir Arafat rejected the plan, preferring to blow up buses and begin the Intifada. Clinton labels that act as one of the “great tragedies of the 20th century.”

In 2008, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert offered near-total control of the West Bank, a link to Gaza, and a status-of-Jerusalem plan, complete with a map, to Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas rejected the plan.

In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry, under President Barack Obama, attempted to negotiate a U.S. framework for a two-state solution. The talks led nowhere.

Through it all, those who call themselves “Palestinians” (Arafat was an Egyptian) called for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. They didn’t want a two-state solution. The words “Free Palestine” are synonymous with destroying Israel, not a two-state solution. They cite terrible conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. They call it an “apartheid state.” They ignore the constant danger of terrorism flowing out of those areas into Israel. They ignore the Arabs who live as citizens of Israel, with full rights to vote, to work, and to own property. They only focus on the fact that the Jews who control Israel should not succeed, and they are angered by Israel’s success.

So the words “Free Palestine” have lost any meaning, devolved into gibberish, something to be shouted on college campuses, along with “from the river to the sea,” when most of the students can’t identify the river, the sea, or who lives between them. They only know what they’ve been fed, and with no free speech allowed on campuses steeped in victim-worship and intersectional power structures based on embedded ideas of what racism is (Jews are white, Palestinians are brown-skinned, they say, while if you take 10 Israeli youth and 10 Palestinian youth and place them side by side, these people could not pick them apart), they believe the Jews are cultural invaders and Palestinians are indigenous oppressed people. They don’t know history or the meaning of words.

The U.N. general assembly is about to recognize “Palestine” as a state, without granting them the dignity of recognizing a government or head of state to represent them. The U.K., Australia, and Canada have recognized “Palestine” in this way, which is to say, symbolically, written in gibberish. It’s all talk and no action. The only acceptable action to those leading the Palestinians is to punish Israel. So there will be a bloc of nations in the U.N. and around the world that have no clue how to make a Palestinian state work, but know that the goal of a two-state solution is a panacea, so they’ll put that aside and focus on a one-state solution, to remove Israel from its sovereign right to the land it reclaimed from a mosquito-infested swamp and desert, and built modern cities upon.

Some nations, like Spain, will refuse to sell arms to Israel or to buy them, but Israel will be free to sell to whomever else it wishes. Spain’s GDP is nearly four times Israel’s, but Israel’s per capital number is 50 percent higher than Spain’s. You can call it a bit of economic leverage, but in the end, Israel will accept a lot of pressure when the alternative is its own existence. And foisting a non-starter two-state solution on Israel, when there is no such solution the Palestinians (certainly not Hamas) would ever accept, is an existential issue. Nobody talks about that outside Israel or Jewish organizations, or the Trump administration, which is alone among large developed nations to stand with Israel.

Just like after Erika Kirk said she forgave her husband’s killer, the words “forgive” are gibberish, just syllables to use to get political points and communicate more propaganda. Outside the bubble of people who really believe what Christ taught, and really hold to the Bible, Kirk’s words mean nothing.

We have grown a nation with a population so divorced from words and meaning, and taught our young people that these words are just gibberish, that we can hear the words spoken day after day, and suffer unspeakable violence, yet not decide to restore meaning to words, and history, and morality. (And by the way, if Erika Kirk can forgive Tyler Robinson, nobody else should be canceled for forgiving him.)

There must come a point where we change direction. If not, then we are heading into a desert of meaning. A nihilist era. A time when all words become gibberish, and all ideals apart from violence are lost in the void.

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