I'm traveling, I'm eating, I'm living, but at the same time people I know are not living, are not eating, are not traveling, except between one world and the other, unbidden but not hidden. I know things I shouldn't know and they creep into my daily perception, like ghosts of the apocalypse. These are my reflections on reflections. This is the glass in my eye.

I travel through Qatar and Gaza City is a point on the in-flight map, as I watch in-flight entertainment, as my children eat in-flight snacks. Gaza, gauzy Gaza, where people have been in flight from their homes for years, for generations, where their suffering has become perverse entertainment in the Cable-TV Colosseum, and where there's nothing to go back to. I digress because they distress, but right now my children are interrupting me, an unimaginable luxury in itself, to those many bereft. As the poet Khaled Juma wrote,

Oh rascal children of Gaza,
You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window,
You who filled every morning with rush and chaos,
You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony,
Come back –
And scream as you want,
And break all the vases,
Steal all the flowers,
Come back,
Just come back…

We focus on the children, we focus on the starvation of children because this is the nature of people with any culture since we were microbial. We have been focused on the children ever since we abandoned the garden of cell division (ie, eternal life) for sexual reproduction, billions of years ago. As the poet Elizabeth Stone said, “Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” What they don't tell you (they don't tell you anything, kids come with less instructions than a toaster) is that, as James Baldwin said, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” This means, of course, a world of pain if you think even remotely seriously about it. And now the remote has been stuck on a dead channel for two years, a mass extermination across mass media, focusing on children, on hospitals, on civilians. This is the true meaning of Western ‘Civilization’. No one else can have it! We must, at this point, conclude that they want us to watch, to know that they have the power to kill the future, by killing children.

I don't mean to focus on the children, I am an adult and don't like being killed or starved either, and feel my pain most keenly. But that is where I focus because I have children, and other people are unhaving them, and I can't imagine it. I say can't imagine because it's really happening, I don't have to imagine anything. I see the dead everywhere, in the smallest moments of living. I can't see concrete without seeing rubble, I can't open a tap without seeing foul water, I can't eat without tasting ashes. The reflections of the real are everywhere, in the fake life I'm idly living. Every time I feed my children it hurts, because I know other parents cannot, and I feel the terrible gnawing in my Asian soul. If a child in our household hasn't eaten, three generations spring into action. When I look at our extended family I think of the multi-family apartments bombed in the beginning of the Gaza Genocide, on purpose, to eliminate pediatricians and all their children. It all passes in an instant but the moment, every moment, is subtly ruined.

When I'm at the pharmacy I think of the pharmacies targeted and bombed, with British planes, American bombs, and 'Israeli' people (if you could call them that). When I'm at the pizza parlor I think of the Gaza pizza parlor obliterated, and the neighborhood food-seller murdered in the streets. These are all real people, whose names are buried in the even more real people killed after them. When my daughter plays piano I think of the neighborhood piano teacher killed in her home and left to bleed out. The pain is everywhere because they're killing everyone, everywhere. I can't do anything in peace because they're at war with everything.

The reflections, the reflections, like shards of a broken mirror, they get into everything. Lord Buddha knows there was always suffering, that this world always was suffering, ever since the Big Bang tore us apart and we spent time itself trying to put humpty back together again, through humping. However, lately, Māra was getting so strong that we began to have digital delusions. Who needs meditation when you have meditation apps, that can help you work harder and be more productive? The dream was increasingly becoming real, the lonely road we walked out of Eden seemed to be leading to it. But that was all a deal with the devil, what Malcolm X called the white devil, wasn't it? Now the dream world—the ladder of whiteness so many of us were climbing—has become a nightmare that we can't wake up from. I'm struck by the fact that this is all intentional, the pogrom is the programming, a dying Empire wants you to see all the killing, as if human sacrifice will bring back their inhuman ambitions.

Every major company is complicit in this, and then they sanction the UN Rapporteur documenting it, because that's bad for business, and business is bad, as in evil. So you walk through the airport—the Qatar airport—and you see that the desert Arabs are in on it, with long Adidas thobes at the duty free, to show their adulation of White Empire as much as ‘their’ military bases (Qatar proudly pays for its own occupation). I think of the Quran, which says, “Those desert Arabs who remained behind will say to you, ‘Our belongings and our families kept us occupied, so ask forgiveness for us.’” I don't know if I believe in God, but I definitely fear them, and I can't imagine how people who profess belief cannot know their final destination. The signboards are everywhere. The last screen on the in-flight entertainment is the Quran, and it says, clearly, that “Satan’s promises are nothing but delusion.” Yet they incarnated Satan in inhuman corporations, gave them the world to rule over, and act surprised when they're sacrificing children to their own profit margins.

As Abu Obeida, who labors under no such illusions, said,

We say this to history—with all bitterness and pain—and in front of all the sons and daughters of our nation: O leaders of this Islamic and Arab nation, O its elites and major parties, O its scholars—you are our adversaries before Almighty God. You are the adversaries of every orphaned child, every grieving mother, every displaced, homeless, wounded, devastated, and starving person. Your necks are burdened with the blood of tens of thousands of innocents who were betrayed by your silence.

In a Quranic, ie a moral, sense, this is a deep condemnation. The Islamic view, which is honestly the same as the Buddhist view except more socially active, is that (I quote Allah out of fear, not expertise, read the Quran yourself, in Arabic),

It was not proper for the people of Madinah and those desert Arabs around them to hold back from following God’s Messenger, and to prefer their own lives to his life. This is because whenever they suffer from thirst or weariness or hunger for God’s cause, and whenever they take any step which provokes those who deny the truth, or inflicts any loss upon the enemy, it shall be counted as a good deed in the sight of God—God will not deny the righteous their reward—and whenever they spend anything [for the sake of God], be it little or much, and whenever they traverse the land [in God’s cause]—it is recorded to their credit, and God will grant them the best reward for all that they have been doing.

I swear to God I see God in everything, and I read the Quran more than the news because it's more relevant. If you're moronic and unable to engage with the Islamic Resistance (HAMAS is an acronym) on its own terms, listen to the PFLP, the communist Resistance arm, which has a Muslim heart irregardless, because they are of the people. The PFLP today says,

The continuation of the new Nazis' systematic starvation war against more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, concurrently with widespread bombing, forced displacement of exhausted displaced persons, systematic destruction of health and service infrastructure, and a severe drinking water crisis threatening the lives of residents, constitutes unprecedented major war crimes that exceed all known history of Nazism and Fascism.

The ease with which starving civilians are killed while trying to obtain aid from American-sponsored death traps brings to mind scenes from Nazi camps that prepared people for death by starvation and massacres. It confirms the direct involvement and actual participation of the United States in this heinous crime, which the occupation commits amidst intense bombing and siege that prevents the entry of the most basic necessities of life.

The world's silence and suspicious inaction in the face of this crime, its inability to hold the occupation accountable, and its blatant complicity with the United States, constitute a resounding moral fall and a scandalous betrayal of all humanitarian values. To leave an entire people to face real famine and slow death under siege and bombing is actual participation in this crime, committed in its most horrific new Nazi forms by the perpetrators of atrocities and criminals of this era, who continue their crimes without mercy, while the world contents itself with issuing hollow statements that are not worth the ink they were written with and have turned into tools of anesthesia and disguised complicity.

The peoples of the world are required to rise up and face their responsibilities, and to hold accountable everyone who participates directly or indirectly in this crime; for the time has come to triumph for humanity and dignity, as what is happening in Gaza exceeds all limits of cruelty and brutality.

Our people will not forgive or pardon those who faltered, colluded, or remained silent and left them alone to face hunger and extermination. The cries of hungry children will remain a witness, and history will not be merciful to the complacent and the onlookers.

As a child, an idle child, I was inundated with education about the holocaust, and imagined always what I would do. It seemed so easy, so obvious. Do the right thing, duh, that's what all the adults told us, and they seemed responsible. Little did I know that White Empire began another, worse genocide immediately after the Red Army liberated most of the concentration camps, by deporting Jews to be conscripts colonizers in Palestine, to genocide those people for generations. The people that inspired the Nazis (the Nuremberg Laws are toned-down Jim Crow) are definitely worse. The Nazis only lasted for 12 years, while the reincarnating White Empire (America, Britain, Netherlands, same thing) has gone on for centuries. Hitler was just their Anti-Christ, he died for their sins so they could sin more, and more sanctimoniously. When you see them killing the future you can see their killing in the past and all their preening and genteel presentability becomes noxious and obnoxious and you want to put it in a box and throw it in the ocean.

I walk by the Nobel Peace Museum (I'm randomly in Norway) and I see Martin Luther King Jr trapped there, like a house slave to imperialism. Like Gandhi, these men were vilified and killed in life, only to become the new imperial religion of nonviolence, preached to the poor but never the powerful. We are all meant to submit peacefully to their oppression, while they give Peace Prizes to Kissinger and Obama, and scorn and violence to actual Resistance movements. We're meant to celebrate the most useless and denigrate the people actually standing up to abuses. They twist words as much as they twist the knife. As Kwame Ture said, peace is the white man's word, our word is liberation.

I have to go now, my children are calling. They want to go to the park, they want to play, they'll want to eat, little things that leave little shards in my heart, while so many children are bleeding, while so many parents are grieving, while an entire people are screaming. While the Empire that's I'm in waves a few flags like they have a conscience to appeal to while I know, as Ture said, that, “Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

I used to make up words to appeal to a conscience that doesn't exist, now I hurl curse words like this makes a difference. I call the whole thing White Empire to encompass this as a historical process, but I'm really retreating to history because I'm a coward. I can neither retreat to the jungle like a Buddhist or advance to Jihad like a Muslim, I'm neither here nor there, though I hear clearly enough. This is actually worse, to know the right thing and not do it. I can't claim ignorance on Judgement Day, or Ragnarok, or whatever you call it. I hear the call of Allah, I am repelled by the life of suffering but I don't do anything because, as Al Pacino said in The Scent Of A Woman, it's just too damn hard. So I am damned irregardless of good intentions.

The fact, repeated into saccharine is that we are all one, life is all just lossy cell division, reproducing the same life form, and we feel pain in other people because we are not other people at all. If you kill one person you really are killing the whole world, we contain multitudes. I think of Allah, who said,

That was why We laid it down for the Children of Israel that whoever killed a human being—except as a punishment for murder or for spreading corruption in the land— shall be regarded as having killed all mankind, and that whoever saved a human life shall be regarded as having saved all mankind. Our messengers came to them with clear signs, but many of them continued to commit excesses in the land.

This is why I feel the killing of Palestine deep in my own soul, and see reflections of the genocide everywhere I go. There are clear signs, for those that look. They are killing all of mankind, our very humanity, and they want us to look. They want to shatter everything into a million pieces and sell us glue. These are my reflections on reflections. It's glass in my eye. It's blood on my soul. I have to go out now, to be with my children, but God knows, it's a war zone.