#51 TERROR COMES TO OUR DOORSTEP

The Boulder Terrorist: Failing to make sense of a very old conflict

In the mid-80s I worked as an orderly in a Boulder nursing home.  I became friends with another orderly (Jewish, gay, and Republican) I shared the graveyard shift with. We had a lot of interesting conversations in the middle of the night.  Once I asked him what he was reading then.

“A lot of books on the Holocaust,” he said.  We had, in fact, a concentration camp survivor on our ward.

“What have you learned?” I asked.

“They’re all just people,” he said.

They’re all just people.  I’ve thought a lot about that comment over the decades since.  If it’s “just people” who both created and suffered the Holocaust, I guess that’s how bad it can get, and it points to how ordinary people can get swept up in the karma that somehow stops being under anyone’s control and gains a life of its own, where even ordinary people end up doing extremely despicable or heroic things.  You can turn your animosity into hell on Earth, and everyone has to deal with it from within their limited perspectives.

On Sunday, I was teaching a Shambhala Training level at the Boulder Shambhala Center.  We had come out of Jaipur, an Indian restaurant where we routinely eat lunch during our programs, when I happened to notice the little parade, “Run For Their Lives,” done every weekend by a local Jewish group to draw attention to unaccounted for Israeli victims infamously kidnapped by Hamas.  I had a little time, so I took a walk up and down the Pearl Street Mall, and then returned to the Shambhala Center, a block away, to continue our program.

My mind was on a theme that weekend of “screens vs. live,” meaning that nowadays we do our trainings for people on line as well as a live audience practicing meditation in the room with us, and I’ve found myself kind of split over how effective what we do would be for people at home with no change in outer environment.  People on the spot pass through more of a journey, I’m sure, but then people in Minnesota and New Mexico could still join us in our study.  That nevertheless also adds a whole layer of potential technical problems that they never had in Tibet.

Shortly after I got back, an Egyptian, Mohamed Soliman, whose work visa had expired, attacked the Jewish marchers—including an 88 year old Holocaust survivor— with a home made flame thrower and Molotov cocktails, right in front of the court house on the Mall, setting them aflame, injuring 15 victims in a desire, he told police, “to kill all Zionist people.”

We heard a lot of very loud sirens at the Shambhala Center, and I was told later the people in the 2^nd floor shrine room got up for walking meditation and instead all went to the windows to see what was going on.  I was at the other end of the building trying to do meditation instruction with someone on line, while the screen kept freezing and her voice became unintelligible.

Then before I knew it, the police wanted the building evacuated.  There was some talk of a bomb threat, though that didn’t come to anything.  Fortunately, two of the staff happened to be there, Center Manager Andrew Bowen and Community Coordinator Lea Spiess, and they quickly got the building cleared and shut down, including a forty person retreat going on upstairs.  I didn’t have a chance to address my group before I found myself driving home, suddenly free for the afternoon, under a disquiet I spent the rest of the day trying to dispel.

Though it had nothing to do with us, an intensely violent, hate-fueled conflict from the other side of the globe came up to our doorstep.

This savagery took place literally around the corner from us a half block away.  At least the guy didn’t have a gun.  Had he been an American citizen, he could have gotten one.

At the same time, this was precisely what the teachings we were studying meant to address: how to have an authentically healthy, sane, considerate society, which starts with citizens who are awake enough to resist the seduction of aggression and composed enough to act thoughtfully toward others.

Wednesday morning vigil, Boulder Court House

This act, of course, constituted the very opposite of that, one of an ever-increasing number of anti-semitic incidents cropping up around the U.S.  On Wednesday morning, I managed to get to a vigil held in front of the court house, right where the attack took place, that featured the Colorado governor and mainly Jewish representatives.  I missed the governor and came in during Rabbi Marc Soloway’s speech.  He talked about how angry he’d become at the increase in anti-semitism and the acceptance of hate speech on the basis of the First Amendment.  Anti-semitic acts in America have increased 900% in the last ten years, he stated.

All of this has been alarming and often outright horrifying.  I don’t know how he began his remarks, but I couldn’t help sensing simultaneously that he seemed to lack feeling for what was happening to Palestinians in Gaza, and on that score, I can understand hatred with no problem at all.  In all likelihood, Mr. Mohamed Soliman had dwelt in the pain of it till it drove him into a blind fury, doing something completely senseless that he believed would somehow accomplish revenge for Israel’s governmental decisions.  Now he can look forward to the rest of his life in an American prison, at least if they’re not anxious to deport him.

In a further interesting twist, the chaplain—someone I know professionally—at the Boulder County Jail where Soliman’s being held, was part of our Shambhala Training weekend, and now has to look after this guy’s spiritual needs.

Maybe he should talk to Imam Nader Elmarhoumi, who spoke at the Wednesday morning vigil.  Very reasonably, the Imam advised Soliman to have instead tried to approach the marchers and have a discussion with them.  That would have the potential to humanize both sides.  Blind aggression dehumanizes everyone—and likely will now determine how Mr. Soliman will be treated during his carceral American holiday.

Imam Elmarhoumi noted that the Prophet Mohammed had taken a Jewish wife and had peaceful relations with three Jewish tribes.  By my own recollection, one of those tribes had made a military alliance with Mohammed and then betrayed him, prompting him to kill them.  Which merely points to one of many ugly karmic entanglements that go way back through Middle Eastern and European history, long before the disposition of the current nightmare.  Still, that they could live peaceably together provides a ray of light shining through Gaza’s smoke, twisted pipe, and rubble.

Hamas, looking to spark a war among the area’s nations, as they sensed Israel gaining some normalcy and acceptance in the Middle East, kidnapped about 250 Israelis and killed 1,200 more.  It seems they didn’t anticipate the response they got.

As of today, 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli government, 80% of whom are civilian non-combatants, mostly women and children, with their neighborhoods ravaged by continuous bombing, with food and medical care choked off—and international aid largely blocked and aid workers sometimes killed by the Israelis.  Nearly 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, around 90% of the Gazan populace.  The excuse for this is that Hamas hides among civilians, and the Israeli government must destroy Hamas.

But to everyone else who has any objectivity, we should call this what it actually is: ethnic cleansing—and though the Israeli flag once meant triumph over that very thing, now it’s coming to symbolize genocide.

Quite interestingly, the Israeli populace blames the October 7^th Hamas attack on Benjamin Netenyahu, and has all along.  87% think he should take responsibility for what happened, and, as of March, a poll found 70% of Israelis thought he should resign, either now or after the war.  All along, the number one concern of Israelis has been to free the hostages, something Netenyahu’s government has largely ignored in favor of decimating the Palestinians in Gaza en masse.  He’s made the hostages into sacrificial lambs for the sake of staying in power through the support of the Israeli far right.  Not unlike Donald Trump, he’d otherwise come into legal trouble that threatened his freedom and power.

And, of course, speaking of Trump, the enormous spike in anti-semitism coincides with his 2016 ascension to the White House, with his frequently bald racism giving cover to and normalizing racists.  As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum in this space, all his thematic statements of intent mean the inverse; his current proclamation that he’s fighting anti-semitism at universities belies the fact that he’s implicitly encouraged it through coddling neo-Nazis and the like.  It is probably safe to say that his emotional animus focuses more on Muslims, and in this regard, non-citizen Soliman’s attempt to burn American Jews to death in the Boulder courthouse yard aids his desire to force non-white, non-Americans off American soil.  The administration has already tried to deport his family with no immediate evidence that they had anything to do with it.  It’s been clear, from many instances now, that the operative transgressions consist solely of being non-white, non-Americans in order to earn the masked, anonymous rendition of black-clad ICE agents.  They don’t care if you’re undocumented or have committed a crime at all.  You’re a criminal based on race.

The Israelis and Palestinians can point to a very long history of actual crimes committed by one against the other.  You can say to me, “What if they broke your door down, raped your mother and your wife and shot your children in front of you?  How would you feel?”  I’m quite certain I’d feel exactly like anyone else would: completely and bitterly enraged.  But that’s just it.  On this basis, there’s no way out and never will be.  From a Buddhist point of view, hell is not some place you’re sent by an external deity punishing you for worshipping in the wrong religion or something.  It’s an internal psychology of violent hatred that projects an external world of violent hatred that rebounds back, trapping you in a never-ending, self-feeding cycle.  Essentially, it has no true beginning and no eventual end.  That’s precisely the karmic reality of the Israelis and Palestinians.

American taxpayer dollars go to both protection of Israel and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.  This, too, binds us interdependently with their hell realm, and one moment of that vicious animosity took place right across the street from our Shambhala program.  It wasn’t merely on a screen (as appalling as that can be to watch).  It reminds us that we aren’t finally separate and uninvolved, and what we’ve been asked to learn and apply isn’t an ivory tower exercise but is meant for the real world.  I know that it’s a lot to ask of anyone who has suffered such outrages, but then our choice becomes burning in the fires of our own hatred or rising beyond its ferocious gulf—which, after all, is only our own minds—to see how we are one fabric of humanity.  The Buddha addressed this directly in the Dhammapada, and in no uncertain terms:

In this world
Hate never yet dispelled hate.
Only love dispels hate.
This is the law,
Ancient and inexhaustible.

The Buddha: Steadfastly proclaiming the bigger picture