Eventually, this happened in Northern Ireland, so why not elsewhere? Get the extremes off center stage. To stop what is going on-not just for now-we shall have to figure out how to marginalize the extremists-to drown out their cacophony of stridency. We had better answer it before the voices of moderation are drowned out altogether. What is dumbing us down? This could be the question of our age. Even some of the comfortable, educated people welcome the blatant lies of the demagogues, while much of the regular leadership, so-called, fails to get past repeating the mantra of "This has got to stop”, while nothing stops. Every once in a while, humankind goes mad. Every society has always had its extremists, but what we are seeing today is a proliferation of mindless extremism that is silencing moderation. This pairing of extremism on two sides is hardly restricted to the Middle East it has become pervasive in so many areas of conflict. But the latest hostilities have shunted them further aside, or else driven more of them into the extreme camps. As Thomas Friedman put it in a 2021 comment in the New York Times, which could have been written today: Netanyahu and Hamas have “each exploited or nurtured their own mobs… have kept power by inspiring and riding waves of hostility to ‘the other.’” The moderates on the two sides also have common cause: to get on with building their lives, peacefully. The extremists on the two sides have common cause, perhaps now more than ever. Netanyahu is determined to wipe out Hamas, yet by traumatizing so many children, he is creating its next generation. Both are delusional neither will get their way. Blind on one side are those extremists determined to drive the Jews into the sea, and, on the other, those extremists who lay claim to territory because, millennia ago, it was Jewish for several centuries. And yet again, as the extremists provoke each other by going to greater extremes, they further marginalize the moderates-those people who had managed to remain open to dialogue.Īnyone who fails to see the rights and wrongs on both sides is blind to what has been going on for decades. Yet again nothing will change until this conflict is recognized for what it is: between extremists and moderates no less than between Israelis and Palestinians. Yet again there is war in the Middle East. I adapt it here now, regrettably finding little that needs to be changed. In June of 2021, I posted a blog by this title.
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