Sins of the Fathers

 According to news reports and their own statements, the Trump administration has apparently arrested and detained the entire family of the suspect in the Colorado fire-bombing case—including five children. Now, they are trying to deport them through expedited removal—apparently without any legal basis to do so (assuming they came into the country under the same visa as their father). 

There's something profoundly authoritarian and chilling about this. Imagine if the police tried the same in a criminal context—a horrible crime was committed, so the cops go and arrest the suspect's wife and children, in the hopes of being able to extort information out of them. It's the kind of thing that would ordinarily happen only in dictatorial regimes. 

Of course, in a criminal context, the police generally couldn't do this. They would need probable cause to arrest people who merely know or are related to the suspect. They couldn't just preemptively jail them as a fishing expedition to get information. But, of course, here as elsewhere—the administration treats immigration as a Constitution-free zone, where they think they can get away with abuses of power that would be unthinkable in any other context. 

Unfortunately—in this era of apologetics for antisemitic terrorism—it needs to be reiterated that the underlying crime here was truly appalling. The man reportedly threw Molotov cocktails at people who were peacefully gathered to call for the release of civilian hostages. He is also alleged to have brought a homemade flame-thrower to the scene, apparently with the intent originally of burning people alive. No one should try to minimize this or make excuses for it. 

But where I come from, we don't collectively punish families for the crimes of individuals—no matter how horrific. 

Indeed, the U.S. Constitution has something to say on the matter. Before the Bill of Rights was added to the text, the framers were largely silent on the rights of criminal defendants—but one of the few passages they included on this subject in the main body of the document was a prohibition against working "corruption of the blood"—a proscription on the inheritance rights of children whose parents were accused of treason—because the framers saw this as as a despotic abuse of monarchical authority. 

Of course, the Bible speaks of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children—which the administration is now apparently doing to this family in the most literal sense. 

But most of us—regardless of scriptural texts—can sense the obvious moral problem with (as the Bible elsewhere put it), "punishing the innocent along with the guilty." As Thomas Hardy put it in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (in one of those many passages of commentary on the iniquities of the Christian Deity that Hardy could never pass up, if given the chance)—"though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature."

This crime, by the way, should not be conflated with its political context. In the most basic moral sense, the context of the War in Gaza doesn't matter. It's wrong to lob incendiary devices at peaceful protesters—full stop. Whatever someone may have thought they were trying to accomplish by doing so is irrelevant. 

But with that said, I can't help but observe that this terrorist attack was also utterly destructive of the cause the perpetrator was ostensibly trying to advance. This, if anything, further underlines the tragedy and waste of the incident. After all, most of the families of the hostages still held captive in Gaza are the ones actively agitating for a ceasefire. They are putting pressure constantly on Netanyahu to cut a deal to end the war—because they want to see their loved ones again. 

Attacking advocates for the hostages, in the name of stopping civilian deaths in Gaza, is therefore desperately counterproductive. If this suspect were seriously committed to saving lives in Gaza, he would be making common cause with the families of the hostages in order to stop the war—not trying to burn them alive. 

But, of course—the whole MO of Hamas and its sympathizers is not actually to end the slaughter; but to exacerbate it, because that serves the Islamist group's political ends. 

Meanwhile, almost every day this week brought news of another mass shooting in Gaza. Israeli troops overseeing a new Israel-controlled aid distribution system in the enclave have repeatedly opened fire on civilians gathered to receive food and other necessities. Every time, there's the same pattern of accusations and counter-accusations: tens of innocent people, including children, are reported killed. The Israeli military responds with vague counter-claims—people "strayed from the designated path and ignored warning shots," etc. 

The families of the Israeli hostages—and their advocates—don't want these killings to continue. They want the war to end as badly as the Palestinian civilians do. They should be treated as allies in pushing for a ceasefire at this point—not attacked in the streets for peacefully calling for innocent civilians to be liberated from Hamas captivity. They are against the war. 

The only people who still want the war and killing to continue are Netanyahu's right-wing government and Hamas on the other side. 

Reading the horrifying reports yesterday of defenseless Palestinian civilians being shot down while they were gathered to receive food for their families (food that is too scarce and unevenly distributed to reach everyone who needs it—resulting in fistfights and chaos as starving people scramble for life's basic necessities)—I was reminded of another episode from history in which authorities gunned down innocent and hungry people: the Peterloo massacre that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote about in the "Mask of Anarchy." 

Except that Peterloo all told only took the lives of 18 people. In Gaza, since the new "aid" system was rolled out, we've had practically a new Peterloo every day for three days. 

It is sometimes forgotten or ignored, though, that Shelley in his poem about the massacre actually denounced two parties at once. He excoriated the soldiers who fired on peaceful protesters (and even more strongly—the government and administration that ordered them to do so). But he also condemned the "false friends" of the people—like Cobbett—who encouraged the latter to take violent revenge for these wrongs. Shelley fiercely rejected both, and encouraged people to respond to injustice with nonviolence. 

The same principle applies here—perhaps even more patently. We condemn the soldiers and Israeli government shooting down innocent civilians in Gaza. But the "false friends" who engage in or endorse terrorism on behalf of the Palestinian cause are also partially responsible for their deaths. Netanyahu and Hamas are both keeping this war going—because both know that it is the only way for them to retain power. 

In such a context, advocates for civilian victims on both sides of the conflict should be making common cause to end the bloodshed—not doing all they can to continue it, by egging on others to perpetuate a cycle of violent revenge.