Where Do Terrorists Come From?

On Israel, Palestine, and the United States (and why terrorism doesn't exist in a bubble)

Photo via Francis Bedford courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art

I apologize in advance if my words are messy or inadvertently offensive to those I care about. That’s not my goal, but I am a passionate person with strong opinions. I’m never one to turn down thoughtful, well-reasoned, empathetic criticism, of course, and my comments will be open to subscribers and will not be deleted for mere disagreement. I have friends who are Muslim and friends who are Jewish. I know people from Palestine. My grandparents were Middle Eastern missionaries. I do not tend to shy away from different perspectives. If I did, I would still be a monogamous (but miserable) conservative Christian.

I’m a white Christian, always have been, and always will be. My ancestors have been on this stolen land in the United States for generations on all sides of my family and have been the perpetrators of great harm rather than the ones experiencing it. My perspective comes from this identity, and I cannot change that.

But while I have been sharing strongly worded memes and posts elsewhere on social media, I wanted this Substack to put my feelings firmly into place: I support Palestinians and believe Palestine has the right to its land, self-governance, and, most importantly, for survival. I think that what is happening in Palestine is genocide, and I do not believe any civilian deaths — especially those of children — are necessary for any reason whatsoever. I am against Zionism, even though I understand its appeal from a logical perspective: these are scared people who want safety and familiarity and thought this was the best way to accomplish that. The Western Christian world was more than happy to prop up this government amid Arab lands full of resources and history. It put them in a unique position.

This isn’t a history lesson, however. There are educators out there who know way more than me: Saira Rao (a recent connection local to Richmond who is doing hands-on activism), Rafael Shimunov (a long-time social media acquaintance for whom I have great admiration), and Zahraa Al-Akhrass, a journalist who was recently fired from Global News for supporting Palestine.

As I look through the news each day, I’m often horrified to the point of tears: an ongoing cycle since I was a child, worsened by my love for journalism, politics, and ethics. I consume media and become forlorn. I suppose that’s better than becoming immune to trauma, and I would rather be heartbroken again and again than turn into one of those people who genuinely doesn’t seem to give a shit about the world’s horrors.

I see the mass shooter in Maine, a psychologically damaged human being who needed to murder innocent people before killing himself. I see a broken terrorist organization in Palestine, grasping at straws to make a difference but putting civilians in danger with their actions. I see the uprising of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the dangerous words around us. A Palestinian child was murdered, and a Jewish city leader stabbed to death in front of her home. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that people are being fired just for speaking their hearts in support of Palestine or the anti-Zionist Jews fighting against the IDF narrative who are ignored by every media conglomerate even as they protest en masse.

You may know Christian Zionists today, but European and American Christians were silent at best and complicit at worst in every antisemitic movement until after the Holocaust. Corrie ten Boom, a celebrated Christian Holocaust survivor who hid Jews in her home, was one of the rare exceptions in WWII, and she explicitly belonged to a pacifist, universalist (ahem, liberal) denomination that did not teach that Jews were to blame in the murder of Christ. 

I was raised in a strongly pro-Israel denomination. Evangelicals, especially Pentecostals, have a support of Israel derived from their hatred of Arabs and/or Muslims. These people “stand with Israel” and love to speak of a “Judeo-Christian” world and love going on trips to the “holy land,” but make no mistake: they will always choose Christian nationalism over Jewish camaraderie, and the grand majority of them believe that Jews will go to hell, as they have not accepted Christ. Some ally, huh?

“These people are animals,” say elected Israeli leaders. “They are not people.” They make no distinction between Hamas and Palestine, nor mention of the civilian casualties from any Western leaders. Palestinians who cry in grief are told to “denounce Hamas,” and it blows my mind how many hoops they have to jump through to be seen as human or get even a single vague sentence of concern on some multimillionaire celebrity’s pro-Israel Instagram post.

Now, good information is hard to come by on this topic at present. I tend to trust Al Jazeera, but I often wish I could get quality journalism from American sources since I don’t usually have the nuance (and would like a broader perspective) than what Al Jazeera has. But I saw one sobering statistic that blew my mind if it’s true: 85% of people in Hamas lost a parent from an Israeli airstrike in Palestine.

Now, I don’t know that for a fact, and again, highly accurate sources are challenging to find. But I do know that God loves each and every human, including terrorists. Babies are not born with the desire to bomb a music festival and hold civilians hostage. Where does that come from?

I wonder if, after 9/11, any American official anywhere asked why they attacked us. Sure, because they hated us, our “Western” ideas, our sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and liberated women and LGBTQ acceptance. (Of course, if you’ve been a woman or queer person in the USA, pretty laughable.) Our Christian religion! That’s what I believed myself, after all. Muslims hate Americans because of Jesus! (Did you know there are paintings of Jesus and Mary in the Kaaba at Mecca because of how much respect Muhammed had for them?)

But it’s never that simple, is it?

Most terrorists are people who have lost family in wars, wars perpetuated or influenced by American or European imperialist forces. They are young men who feel desperate and alone, and they’re seeking answers to get back something they think they’ve lost: their culture, their homeland, their jobs, their resources. If they’ve seen American flags on tanks and drones, they know the enemy right away, and it’s hard to unseat that kind of hatred: the kind based in trauma.

I’m not defending terrorists here, and I really hope I don’t get accused of that because I seek to empathize, which is something I believe is a Christian duty as well as a leftist prerogative. I’m an outspoken polyamorous queer woman*, and a communist and a Christian to boot, and there are not many types of terrorist organizations (I am NOT just speaking of Arab terrorists here, and it’s often a racist or xenophobic reaction to assume terrorist = Arab) who would warmly welcome me with open arms. I’m just asking — where do we look at the cycle itself? How do we learn to help people like this?

It is quite unlikely that people want a life of violence, war, and death; true sociopaths are not so culturally minded. You’d have to be pushed pretty far to sacrifice the potential of family, love, and honest work to risk your life and willingly harm others who haven’t directly hurt you. Israel was formed in 1948, but Hamas wasn’t formed until 1986. What made them do it? Is a cycle of war, Islamophobia, and imperialism coming to a head? What if we could prevent the formation of terrorism by providing a fair and just world rather than constantly trying to fight against it without understanding where it comes from?

I had a more typically liberal-to-leftist position on mass shootings in the United States until recently. I thought it was the guns, and statistically, it is. How ludicrous that it is easier to become licensed to carry a weapon than to drive a car! It’s also ludicrous to compare the life of an oppressed Arab terrorist whose home has been stolen and whose family has been murdered to a white man with money in the United States.

But while we speak from a place of privilege for these sad white guys (and I’m more wary of identity politics when it comes to “I hate men” discourse these days — I no longer find it helpful or valuable in my language) I think we, too, should ask where it comes from. How do you get to a point where you no longer value human life to this extent? Where the craving for attention or notoriety becomes more important than anything else in your life, or where you become so susceptible to online propaganda that you think you need to kill innocent people in a bowling alley to accomplish some political or personal goal? Was mental health care available — and if it was, was it accessible? Was it encouraged by a supporting and loving family?

Therapy can’t fix a broken society, though. There’s no meditation or healing course to offset deep poverty and state violence. This really is end-stage capitalism, and we are in a loneliness epidemic, even in our safe American homes. There’s something deeply wrong with this society, and we all realize that electoral politics aren’t fixing anything. We’re helpless, and we know it, and while everyone disagrees on the cause… more and more people feel that it’s a matter of life and death here in the United States. We’re in a state of reactionary politics, and we’re scared of our homes and jobs and security being gone. Gone are the days of widespread community where we all took care of each other, replaced by capitalism and the pervasiveness of the patriarchal nuclear family. Some people’s entire lives are taking place online, and it’s not enough. The internet can’t hug you or take you to dinner or hold you as you sob.

I don’t know if we could “love” terrorists and mass shooters enough to get them to change their ways. Understanding goes a long way, but the individual hippie ideology doesn’t work because there’s no systemic change. I could send a letter to each and every person in Palestine and tell them I’m on their side, I love them, I’m praying for them, and that even though I’m a Christian American, I will support them. Even if it made them feel good, and even if I sent all the money I could manage, it wouldn’t change the fact that their relatives are dead and their lands and homes are being stolen. I can’t fix that, and neither can you. But can we recognize all the systemic issues that lead to this?

I’m scared for my Jewish friends. I’ve seen people attacked for being Jewish, assuming all Jews are Zionists who support the IDF. I’m afraid for Palestinians who have no agency at all. How many of them will be left when Israel is done? Will people continue to get fired? Will our free speech be repressed while all the anti-cancel-culture, freedom-of-speech people are suddenly silent if it’s not someone being fired for using slurs but for supporting their homelands?

This is a brutal world to weather, and humans turn to terrifying and dangerous ideologies to combat the wrongs against them. We’re seeing that in play, and atrocities are occurring right now that will be written in history books as a warning to others, but we are genuinely powerless to stop it. For now.

There are no easy answers, but for now, I hope you can learn to empathize and stand for what’s right — even if nobody else is.

*If you have time, I think it’s a good idea to look up “pinkwashing.” It paints people, mostly Arabs and/or Muslims, as regressive people, and thus need to be saved by a white, Western, or Christian influencer. But this is just like the racist “save the savage” ideology that was used to defend colonization.