An American surfer walks into a radical Islamic party

All politics is local.

Yesterday a mighty tempest broke out in BeachGrit’s truck stop diner mug (buy here). Comments lighting right up, backs snd forths and backs again, underneath Monty Webber’s “The Excruciating Irony and Willful Blindness of Surfers for Palestine.” I read, knowing, half way through, I’d have to rebut. Derek Rielly texting me in the evening, “Saaaaay, the blood has only just dried on the grass here and the lil girl only got put in the dirt yesterday. May not be best time for rebuttal if it’s rebutting Webber’s story.”

I responded, “I’ll go gentle. He went too far, though.”

I got home very late from the California Center for Performing Arts in lovely Escondido, exhausted. It is Nutcracker season, the show goes live this Saturday, and I, per the usual, am a stagehand, running props from wing to wing, making sure the cannon has its smoke machine all cued up and ready to go, making sure the Rat Queen has her sword. I wondered, as I worked, about which angle to take contra Webber, and wondered more when I finally fell into bed, staring at the ceiling fans.

This morning, sun peeking over the fog promising another glorious day that I’ll spend in the darkened maze just off stage, I decided to go straight up anecdotal. Who needs more facts and figures on the dead in the Gaza War? Another history lesson on who was living in now-modern Israel first and for how long?

Webber, in his closing argument, set up a distinction between, “Those raised to love and those raised to hate. The intergenerationally gentle and the intergenerationally violent. The intelligent and the stupid. Civilisation and Barbarism. Good and evil.”

Muslims, here and sans distinction, hateful, violent, stupid, barbaric with evil baked right into the DNA.

I wonder how much time he, or Derek Rielly, or anyone with such certainty in regards to the Islamic soul has spent in the region? I wonder how much reading  about or about the wild diversity in both people and how they practice the religion?

I’ve done many multiple turns, weeks in Syria, months in Lebanon, months upon months in Yemen. Egypt, Jordan, Oman, the UAE and Turkey thrown in for good measure but I’ll just share one story from one place and time.

Make of it what you will.

During Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, pal and I were snagged by Palestinian Liberation Organization just outside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which the gentle, intelligent, civilized and good Israeli army had besieged, some 24 years earlier, refusing to let anyone escape while the Israeli-backed Phalange militia went on a 43-hour rape and kill orgy inside.

Between 2,000 and 3,500 dead at the end.

We had been covering the war for Al Gore’s Current TV, heard a missile strike in Hezbollah’s Beirut neighborhood and decided to drive our amazing motor scooters in to get some sweet coverage. We almost got hit, ourselves, sped out and were snagged. The PLO fella who grabbed us quickly opened a roll-up metal screen on a storefront and shoved us inside, protecting us from the angry mob who had gathered who thought we were calling in targets. He told us he’d let us go once everything calmed down but returned, later, glum, telling us that Hezbollah had called for us and he had no choice but to hand us over.

Now, I’ve written/told this story too many times and am bored, myself, with it so allow me to race to the interrogation at the end.

We were taken to a safehouse somewhere we didn’t know, seeing that our shirts had been pulled over our heads. In chairs around the perimeter of the smaller living room sat respected, older Islamic scholars, each with long gray bears and serious faces. On the floor, in the middle of the room, Hezbollah fighters studying us without expression. Pal and I were plopped a loveseat near the door. Our interrogator asked many questions, while the elders and fighters listened attentively, sussing out if we were guilty and of what.

This should not have been happening at all. We should not have been afforded even the slightest benefit of doubt. Our imprisonment, maybe being used as trade chips, our killing just to be rid of the problem, much better/easier and especially for the monsters Webber described.

If the sandal had been on the other foot, if we had been Palestinians stumbling near Mossad’s Tel Aviv headquarters or Iranians poking around Langley, Virgina during any sort of open hostility, we’d, at the very least, be locked up for months.

Hezbollah bought us dinner.

After three or four hours of talk, it was decided that we were all right and that their religion, Islam, would not allow for the shedding of our blood and so a space was cleared, a plastic picnic blanket brought out, and we all sat shoulder to shoulder, enjoying warm bread and cold cheese, the ground shaking from time to time, missiles slamming the earth.

Later, we were walked out to our scooters, which had been recovered from Palestinian teenagers who had snagged them in the initial wildness. The men hugged us before we puttered off, wide-mouthed.

Webber asks, at the end of his piece, “Do we imagine for a moment that the Islamists, when in political power, will be anywhere near as kind, supportive, generous or charitable toward us (westerners, I suppose) as we have been toward them?”

In my case, and on one night, kinder, more supportive, more generous, more charitable.

Other nights too, under starry skies in Yemen and old Damascene houses in Syria, but that’s enough for now.

Again, make of it what you will.