Who would bomb a hospital?
What label is appropriate for one who would do such a thing?
Who would corral civilians
desperate and starving
drawing them with the promise of food
and open fire on them with tanks?
Who would develop a nuclear weapon?
Knowing what they can do?
What they have done?
Who would do so
ignoring Oppenheimer’s horror
upon seeing what he had done
claiming for himself the text of the Bhagavad Gita
“I am become Death, The shatterer of worlds”
Who would be so arrogant
as to elevate themselves above god
as though ordained with the right
to give or take life?
Who would scale walls by land and air
and indiscriminately kill and abduct?
What label can adequately encapsulate such cruelty?
And who would build those walls
and dot them with towers
from which to fire bullets
maiming and killing the entrapped population?
If we are to create labels for such things
to what do we attach them?
To the actor or the act?
If the actor, do we affix the label only to them?
Or is the label awarded to all involved?
Those who decide and give the order?
Those who carry out the order?
Those who supply the weapon?
Those who cheer in support?
Those who remain silent?
Does the label vary depending on the scale of the act?
Is the label different when it is 19 hospitals bombed rather than 1?
Does the level of revulsion and horror vary
Depending upon the death toll?
Or do we judge horror by the manner of death?
Does it matter whether the act was accidental or deliberate?
Is it relevant to even consider such gradations?
But what label can we give
to those who so disregard human life?
Is there one label?
One label that will universally apply?
And, if so, what will that label be?
Terrorist?
War criminal?
Butcher?
Should the application of these labels come with terms and conditions?
Are they selective?
The definitions fluid, malleable, discretionary?
Even labels that seem incontrovertible
labels such as “human” and “humanity”
are variable in your hands.
Civilian = human shield
Soldier = terrorist
Murder = neutralised
Assassinated = eliminated
Innocent = Guilty
Child = Casualty
The narrative is dependent upon the storyteller
the label determined by the affixer
and defined by the affixer’s proximity and shared goals
The label’s definition
Truth itself
sufficiently fluid as to serve any end
But when the tale of the hunt is told by the hunter
the lion is always the villain
Gandi’s warning that
“an eye for an eye will make the world blind”
is embraced
as in a blind world
Kings cannot be questioned
and elephants can be defined by blind men
in six different ways
none correct
but all convenient to distract from the truth
The fluidity of our labels
contemptuously mocks and renders false
our most basic assumptions
When we must read “everyone has the right to life”*
* terms and conditions apply
The universality suggested by the right
is determined by the label applied to each
and by whom the label is applied.
And for those who question?
Those who challenge
who resist
for them we reserve the label “antisemite”
But if that be my fate
even though the label be store bought and shoddy
I will join good company
Corbyn, Waters, Thunberg, Tutu
And this ill-fitting label is so much lighter and easier to bear
than those I will hand to you in exchange
Complicit
Hypocritical
Disingenuous
Enabler
Apologist
Is the Decalogue of Exodus so open to interpretation
that the commandment “thou shall not murder”
will allow that abortion is outlawed
but allow the boast that “the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the world”?
Does the commandment to “not covert your neighbour’s house or anything that belongs to your neighbour”
Justify eviction, settlement, confiscation, annexation?
Is the commandment to “love your neighbour as yourself” unclear
to those who slaughter their neighbours?
Do they rest from their slaughter on the sabbath?
Would it matter if they did?
