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| the light of hope wilts and dies in hot air |
It was one of those random serendipities which are a valuable spice of life. Actually for those of us who have a well-developed P (errr … abbreviation for “proclivity for serendipity”, not what some of you were thinking) serendipity is life. This is a joy that those with sub-developed P will never understand. It must be so dull to structure every moment until a limp serendip slaps your carefully constructed visage and catapults you to adventure in the glorious unknown!
But, as is the wont of a well-exercised P, I digress. I learned well
from that other Anglican priest, Laurence Sterne, it seems, whose magnum opus
was one glorious digression. I digress from a story of love. And hate. I
digress from a chance encounter on the pixelated pages of discourse, where I
was reading up on the fate of Linda Wenzel.
Ms Wenzel is the sixteen year old German girl captured in Mosul, now
the subject of an entire planetary atmosphere of hot air as punters discuss whether
she should rot in hell, die by torture, be covered in honey and fed to ants,
or, in a very few cases, given a chance to have her life restored.
It was one of the last of those, the perhaps five per cent of commentators,
who caught my attention. I’ll rename him to protect identities: we’ll call him Kashif
Bilal. Sporting a potentially Muslim name and Facebook profile photo, this
brave stranger stood like Jesus in the stone wielding crowd, suggesting that Linda
Wenzel be given a chance. Not slapped over the jaxie with a wet cauliflower, but
punished proportionately and given a new life. Not necessarily treated with any
more leniency than, say, the Bulger murderers, but oh my god, let’s not up the hate with more
hate?
Certainly that’s more or less what Kashif and a tiny few others were attempting
to say, amidst the spewings of hatred. Donald Trump supporters’ infamous “lock
her up” and other misguided vomits were mild compared to the GIFs and paragraphs
of vengeance and hatred directed at Ms Wenzel.
Many were of the “I should give
a fornication why?” variety. Most, as it happens, read as if they belonged at a
Trump rally. “Build a wall.” Build revenge, build hate, screw the female dog,
hang her, hate her, and then hate the next one and the next one until I am
alone on earth with only myself left to hate (and maybe that’s who I hated in
the first place?).
Impressed by Kashif’s bravery I messaged him. What makes an obviously
young Muslim man stand up, even in pixels, to choruses of hate? It is the same
rare ingredient that makes a Keshia Thomas put her body on the line in front of
a crowd of angry bloodlusters when they
set out to treat a fallen KKK activist the way the KKK would treat a fallen
black, led her to stand up against her own people to protect a hater from
reciprocal hatred.[1] “Violence
is violence, nobody deserves to be hurt, especially not for an idea” said then
school girl Keshia, when asked why she saved a hater’s life. “"I knew what
it was like to be hurt," she said.
Ah, forgiveness, restitution, a second chance. Dudes, if you haven’t
ever sinned feel free to chuck a stone, said Jesus. “You’re fired” say political
leaders and church leaders and peddlers of hatred and unforgivenness and
non-compassion in pixels and realities around the world and throughout time.
String her up! Lock her up! Screw the female
dog! Sometimes escalating hatred is dressed up in fancy words: after due
consideration and receipt of advice I have decided that the … whatever. That Linda
Wenzel and all who have made mistakes should rot in hell while the judges and
stone-chuckers live in their bubbles of self-righteousness. Often in the name
of Jesus, too.
So what did Kashif say? “I have a daughter and I worry for her. I want
her to live her life loving people and not with hatred. All we can do is keep
positivity.” Not far removed from Keshia Thomas’ “nobody deserves to be hurt”
or Jesus’ “seventy times seven.” But a million miles from the “you’re fired” or
“hang the female dog” that are the dominant narratives on our airwaves and pixel-paths
of hatred whether underscored by self-righteous religion or self-righteous
irreligion.
I fear the dominant voices will prevail and Linda Wenzel will pay with
her life for a very dumb mistake that she made as an angry teenager in a
Dresden dormitory town. The bullet wound she has already received in her leg
will be nothing compared to the words of hate that will dictate the discourse
of what may well be her last days. The dumb mistake of allowing herself to be
groomed on-line by Daesh’s version of haters will be escalated by the hatreds
poured on her by the civilised Europeans’ own narratives of bloodlust. Even if
the unproved assumptions that she has participated in blood crimes are right,
her frightened death will not bring back those killed by Daesh and the cycles
of hatred will go on and on.
But thank God for those few like Keshia Thomas, Kashif Bilal and
Jesus of Nazareth who kinda figured that hate should not be the last word in
the life of a human who made mistakes.
And thank God, too, for the serendipity that permits us occasionally to
exchange a few words with a fine young man who loves his daughter, who wants
her to grow up in a world where the words that surround her are not “die, you
female dog” or “you’re fired”, but words of love.
Kia kaha, Kashif Bilal.
[1] See http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24653643 … and yes, I refer to
this in my Entertaining Angels, 76.
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