The caravan is plagued by thievery, and Darius discovers Arslan’s dark secret.

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A Hard Land

Not every Afghani village welcomed strangers so openly. Some watched from behind shuttered windows. Others gathered silently upon distant ridges, leaning upon spears and old hunting bows. They neither threatened nor greeted us. They simply watched until we disappeared into the next valley.

“The kindest village may hide a thief,” Sergeant Karim reminded us one morning as we resumed our march. “The coldest village may be perfectly honest. Judge no one too quickly.”

I’d imagined our journey from here would be a gradual descent into a Persia that was hot and flat, where masjids towered to the clouds, and where the streets were paved with alabaster and pearls. Well, maybe not exactly, but something like that. Instead we began to climb. As we did, the land grew harder, and the people too.

The fertile valleys of Central Asia gave way to mountains that seemed designed to keep men apart. Villages clung to rocky hillsides like weeds. Fortified towers overlooked narrow passes, and nearly every settlement appeared prepared for war. The roads wound through barren valleys strewn with boulders, while jagged peaks watched from every direction. In some places the mountains rose so high that sunlight reached the valley floor only briefly each day.

The men here wore loose trousers beneath long tunics, with woolen cloaks draped across their shoulders against the cold mountain air. Turbans and pakol-style caps were common. Most of the men carried weapons openly. Even boys scarcely older than Haaris often wore knives at their belts.

Many villages were closed and fortified, with guarded walls. When it was possible, we traded with the locals. We ate flatbreads baked in clay ovens, roasted lamb seasoned with unfamiliar spices, rice studded with raisins and carrots, and thick yogurt. More than once I found myself wishing Lee Ayi could taste some of it. She would have loved to learn the recipes.

The caravan grew tense as we crossed those lands. Extra guards rode the perimeter. Watches were doubled. The merchants spoke in quieter voices. Even the horses seemed nervous. Karim spent much of his time studying maps and questioning locals about conditions ahead.

What Happened to Us?

Meanwhile, Weili continued drifting farther away from me.

At first I told myself I was imagining it. Then I told myself it did not matter. Eventually I found myself searching for her without meaning to. I invariably found her beside Arslan. They rode together, practiced together, shared meals, and spent hours struggling through one another’s languages. The more comfortable they became together, the less interested she seemed in having even the shortest conversation with me.

One evening, after watching them laugh together beside a campfire while Arslan mangled Chinese pronunciation for her amusement, I finally reached the end of my patience.

I found her later near the horse lines, checking a bowstring by lantern light. For several moments I simply stood there watching her work. I had rehearsed the conversation in my head dozens of times. Now that the moment had arrived, I had no idea how to begin.

“What happened to us?” I finally asked.

She glanced up, surprised. “Us?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

The answer irritated me immediately. Why couldn’t she just be honest? “We used to spend time together.”

“We still do.”

“Maybe you greet me in passing and ask how I’ve been. That’s it.”

She lowered the bow.

“Darius…”

“You spend all your time with him now.”

Understanding flickered across her face. “Oh.”

Something about that response made my temper flare. “That’s all you have to say?”

“What exactly do you want me to say?”

I folded my arms. “We spent months together. We studied together. We talked every day. We shared things about our lives. We meant something to each other. Then this man appears and suddenly I’m invisible. We don’t ride together, you don’t come to study the Quran with me, you don’t ask about me. We’ve barely spoken since I told you about my birthday.”

I wanted to say, I miss you, you hurt me, you abandoned me. But I could not bring myself to say such words aloud.

Her expression shifted from confusion to disbelief. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“You can’t?”

“No. It’s outrageous.”

The anger I had been carrying for weeks finally boiled over. “What do you mean, outrageous? You’re the outrageous one. You were supposed to be with me. You were my girl.”

The words escaped before I could stop them. The instant they left my mouth, I knew how they sounded.

Weili’s face hardened. “Darius, I never promised you anything. Absolutely nothing.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She spat the question like a rock she’d found in her food.

“Yes, but I thought -”

“You thought wrong. I was your friend. That’s all. We traveled together. We studied together. We became friends.”

“Then why did you stop being my friend?”

“Only a child would ask that question.”

That was the moment when I knew there was nothing more to say. On some level I knew that her resorting to diminishing me in that way meant that she had no genuine answer to my question. And anything I said would be devalued as a childish complaint. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from saying softly, “I’m sad. I feel alone.”

I knew these words did in fact sound childish. I didn’t say it to garner sympathy. I said it because it was a deep truth, and I was in pain.

Her face hardened. “I’m sorry. But that’s not my fault. I’m not your wife or your fiance. So don’t try to manipulate me or blackmail me emotionally.”

For several moments neither of us spoke. Then she picked up her bow. “If you misunderstood our friendship, I’m sorry. Truly. But that isn’t my fault. It’s best if we don’t talk anymore.”

With that, she walked away.

A Major Sin

The next several days were a bad time for me. Up until that moment, I’d still had hope that Weili would come back to me. I loved her. I had imagined a future with her as my wife. She’d dote on me like Gulnur did on Kuangren. She’d give me many children like Ahmed’s wife had done. We’d have our own home, and Far Away would live with us.

Now that was all shattered.

There were moments, as we rode along narrow trails beside steep cliffs, when I thought about throwing myself over the side. Even with all the hardship I had been through, I had never experienced such thoughts before.

Once I nearly did it. I let myself fall back to the rear of the caravan. When the caravan turned a corner around a mountain ridge, I held back. The path was narrow, with a sheer mountain face on one side, and a vast drop on the other. I dismounted from Belly, and removed his tackle – his saddle, bridle and cinch – so that he would be free to go on his own. Then I stepped to the edge of the cliff. My toes projected over the edge. Far, far below, a raging river was a tiny silver ribbon.

I knew this was a major sin. Suicide was haram in Islam, as it was a rejection of Allah’s plan. I breathed the frigid air, and when I let it out my breath billowed visibly out over the precipice. Perhaps Allah would understand my pain and be merciful with me.

“Belly will miss you,” said a voice from my heart.

“Belly will be fine,” replied my logical mind.

“What about Far Away?” my heart voice said. “No one loves you like he does. He nearly died following you. He’s still waiting for you to come home. If you could soar through the sky back to the farm, you would find him right now, perched on the wall beside the road, watching for you to return.”

My logical mind had no reply to this, and I burst into tears. I could not do this. It wasn’t that I feared death. If it were nothing but an empty void, I would welcome it. But in my heart I trusted Allah. He would make a way forward for me, a way out of my pain. He would bring me back to those who truly loved me, and who I loved.

I was about to step away from the edge when my boot skidded on loose shale. Pebbles rattled away into the abyss. My arms flew out instinctively as I struggled to regain my balance. I teetered over the edge. Vertigo made my head spin. No! I didn’t want to die!

Before I could fall, Belly lunged forward and seized the back of my tunic in his teeth. The sudden jerk pulled me off my feet in the opposite direction. I landed hard on my back in the middle of the road, staring up at the cold blue sky.

For several heartbeats I could only breathe.

Belly stood over me, licking my face until I reached up and laid a trembling hand against his neck.

“Alright,” I whispered. “I’m alright.”

Always Dangerous

Belly had saved my life, and I’d learned a powerful lesson in that moment. I wanted life, not death. That was unquestionable. Weili had broken my heart, yet she had not broken me as a human being.

Yet the sadness persisted. I distracted myself from thoughts of Weili by reviewing Five Animals forms as I rode, and by reciting Quranic surahs. At night, I practiced my fighting techniques. More than that, I threw myself into training with a kind of desperation.

Whenever the caravan halted for the evening and my duties were complete, I would take up my dao and walk beyond the last wagons where there was room to move. I began with the fundamentals of my family art: tiger, crane, leopard, snake, dragon.

I repeated the forms until my clothes clung with sweat despite the mountain air. When one form ended, another began. I imagined opponents rushing me from every direction. I cut, spun, ducked beneath invisible blades, sprang over imaginary obstacles, and rolled across the rocky ground before coming up with my sword already moving.

Where the forms ended, my imagination began. My movements were acrobatic, perhaps unrealistic, and always dangerous. With a blade as sharp as mine, a wrong move could sever one of my own limbs.

The younger guards began gathering to watch.

“You’re trying to kill yourself,” Brother Ahmed observed one evening.

“It wouldn’t matter,” and I meant it. Suicide was one thing – I’d established that I would not do that – but death in an accident or in battle wouldn’t be my fault.

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded sadly.

A Smart Horse

I often talked to Belly as I rode. “I should have kept my mouth shut,” I told him one afternoon.

He flicked an ear.

“I know. You’re right.”

Another flick.

“You always take everyone else’s side.”

One of the merchants riding behind us laughed. “Who are you talking to, Darius?”

“My horse.”

“The horse talks back?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What does he say?”

“That I’m an idiot.” That brought laughter from several riders nearby.

Before long it became a running joke. “If anyone has questions,” Meilin called out one afternoon, “ask Belly. He has all the answers.”

“He talks about you too,” I told her.

“What does he say?”

“That you’re a great fighter but meaner than a bear.”

She snorted. “He’s smart.”

I never told them that Belly had saved my life. Then they’d really think I was cuckoo.

A New Rogue?

Kaungren had by now recovered from his lashing. He walked upright again, and resumed his duties, though he and his wife were still granted the luxury of a private wagon. He no longer sneaked into passing towns and returned with locals hot on his heels.

Instead, Arslan seemed to have taken his place as the disobedient rogue. Three times, as we passed villages, I saw the young archer split from the caravan and ride into town on his own. He always made sure to do so when Karim wasn’t watching. Initially I thought nothing of it. I knew he spoke Persian, as did these locals. I thought maybe he was going into town to trade, or buy personal supplies. But I also worried that he might be pulling a Kuangren – going into town to drink, gamble, or steal. This worried and angered me, because he might bring disaster upon us.

Or so I told myself.

I confronted him after one of these unsanctioned side trips. The caravan had stopped to feed and water the horses. These mountains were strange, for the air was cold, and the wind cut through the passes like Karim’s bullwhip, scouring one’s skin; yet the sun had an oddly piercing glare that made you want to seek shelter. But there was work to do, and the best you could do was drape a cloth over your head and stay busy. It was a hard land, and I found myself thinking that I would never want to fight people who had grown up in this land.

I found Arslan sitting in the shade of a wagon, rather than tending to his horse. He claimed he’d gone into town to buy a few arrowheads. His eyes were vacant and his speech slow, and there was a strange scent about him that was familiar, but that I could not identify. Yet he was not drunk, for I knew the signs all too well from my father’s alcoholic binges, and I did not see those signs on Arslan.

I dismounted Belly and stood before him.

“What are you into?” I demanded. “What’s your story?”

“I’m to good thing,” he replied in my language, and his speech was slow and dreamy. Not slurred like when a man was drunk. More like he was sleepwalking.

“Leave Weili alone,” I told him flatly. I had no right to say this, but I said it anyway.

“You think she girl for you?” He smiled faintly, and continued in his own language, saying something that sounded to me like “If she was your girl, she would be your girl.”

I studied him. He was a tall and broad-shouldered young man with a wide face. Muscular and prematurely bald. Handsome. There was something almost beatific about his face, as if he were in perpetual prayer. And he was the best archer I’d ever seen. He could shoot me down from five hundred paces, but in any type of hand to hand combat I would demolish him. Then we’d see who was a child, and who was a man. I wanted to kick him and say, “Get up and fight.” I almost did.

But what was the point? He was right. If Weili loved me, she would be with me. I shook my head and rode away.

I briefly considered telling Karim about Arslan’s unauthorized disappearances. But that wasn’t my way. I wasn’t a tattletale. Such a tactic would for sure not bring Weili back to me. And I still didn’t actually know what Arslan was up to.

Enemy of the State

That night, the skinny kid with the scraggly beard – Memdooh – was reciting poetry again. I saw a number of faces I recognized around the fire, including Weili’s. Arslan was nowhere to be seen. This cheered me, and I went and sat cross legged next to Weili. She turned and saw me, and to my surprise she gave a rueful smile. “I was too harsh in what I said,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I felt warmth rush through me like a great draught of steaming hot tea. “Forget about it,” I whispered back. We fell silent in order to listen to Memdooh. He swayed back and forth and gesticulated with his arms as he chanted:

My horse is a Mongolian.
He’s small, I can’t control him.
His temper is hot
but he never stops.

I’m no Mongolian,
but I’m red hot.
My arm is lightning,
my sword is faster than thought.

I rolled my eyes at this. Memdooh was a decent fighter, but if his arm was lightning, my farts were thunder.

The proclamation is made
the hour is late
They classify me
with the enemies of the state.

There was some muttering at this. Criticism of the emperor was not permitted in our land.

Demons pour forth
from a crack in the land
None of them guess
what I have in my hand.

I draw my sword
and empty my head
They can’t kill me
if I’m already dead.

This was intriguing. He was talking about River Flow. Yet Memdooh did not fight in River Flow. In battle he shouted in anger, bellowed in triumph and occasionally screamed in fear. Not that there was anything wrong with fear.

We’re far from home –
strange cities and bazaars –
Yet we’re never alone
For we are Five Stars.

Memdooh waved his arm in a flourish and we knew he was done. The audience applauded and broke up. Weili approached the young poet, and I accompanied her.

“That was amazing,” Weili gushed. “So good, so much fun. How did you learn to do that?”

“My grandfather was a poet,” Memdooh boasted. “He studied with the great Wu Weiye.”

“That last stanza was spot on,” I said. “But what was that about being an enemy of the state?”

He looked me up and down. “I am not a rich, comfortable Hui like you, brother Darius. My people are White Mountain Turki Muslims from Altishahr.”

I stared at him blankly.

He sighed. “What the Chinese called Xinjiang. In the far northwest.”

“Oh.” I nodded.

“The Chinese invaded us. So yes, I am an enemy of the state.”

“Yet you work for Five Stars, a company that serves the emperor.”

He glared. “I have my reasons.”

Weili pulled me aside. “Can’t you just enjoy a thing without analyzing it?” she demanded. “You don’t always have to prove how smart you are.”

It felt like I’d been slapped. So much for leaving our fight behind and making up. Still, there was something on my mind and it couldn’t wait.

“I have to tell you something,” I said. “There’s something strange going on with Arslan. He sneaks into local villages sometimes. And there’s something about him, something weird. Like he’s not completely awake. He’s all dreamy and distant. I don’t know what it is. But you need to be careful. There’s something not right about him.”

Something that might have been guilt flickered across her face, but it was so quick I could have imagined it. It was replaced almost immediately by outrage.

“Are you spying on him?” she hissed. “What about me, are you spying on me? You nasty little creep, stay away from us!”

I took a physical step back, as if I’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. My mind went completely blank.

Weili turned and stalked away.

A Thief Among Us

Over the next several days, things began disappearing.

At first no one thought much of it. A pair of ivory chopsticks went missing. Then a whetstone. Someone spent an hour searching for his leather belt before finally borrowing another. Brother Ahmed misplaced his prayer beads, only to discover them hanging from his saddle where he himself had left them. A merchant complained that his ink brush had vanished, then sheepishly found it tucked inside a ledger. One of the cooks searched everywhere for a small pouch of cumin before deciding he must have left it behind at the previous campsite.

Longwei loudly declared that old age had finally caught up with the caravan.

“We’ve marched so far,” he announced, “that our memories have refused to come with us.”

That drew some laughs.

Then one of the merchants discovered that six silver coins had disappeared from his purse.

The following day another merchant reported that a small pouch of saffron, worth nearly its weight in silver, had vanished from his wagon. A teamster swore someone had taken his wife’s jade hairpin, which he carried wrapped in cloth as a gift for his return home. Before long, another merchant found that several tiny packets of cinnamon and cloves had disappeared from a locked chest.

No one laughed anymore.

Those were not the sort of things a man misplaced.

Each item was small enough to slip unnoticed into a pocket, valuable enough to exchange in almost any village, and nearly impossible to identify once sold.

From then on, every man counted his belongings before bedding down for the night. Purses were tied beneath tunics instead of left beside bedrolls. Merchants began sleeping with one hand resting on their strongboxes. Conversations grew quieter, and more than once I caught men studying one another with narrowed eyes.

One evening I overheard two merchants speaking in low tones.

“It’s Kuangren,” one said. “It has to be.”

“But,” the other objected, “I heard that his own wife’s ivory comb went missing.”

The first one chuckled. “It takes a cold-hearted man to steal from his own wife. That Kuangren is incorrigible.”

I shook my head. The old Kuangren had been a fool, a gambler, and a womanizer, but he had never stolen from the caravan. And the man who now prayed beside Brother Ahmed every evening scarcely resembled the one who’d been whipped in Kyrgyzstan. To steal from his own wife? Impossible. He doted on her. More than once I had seen him helping Gulnur carry water.

No, it wasn’t Kuangren.

Opium

A thought nagged at me, and eventually I sought out Hakim Yusuf.

I found him trimming dried herbs outside his wagon.

Without looking up he smiled. “Nothing is bent sideways today, I hope.”

“No.”

“Good. Have you come to assist me?”

I smiled ruefully. “Not yet, sorry. I need to ask you about something.” Without naming Arslan, I described the condition in which I had seen him beneath the wagon. His slow speech and distant expression. The strange sweetness in the air around him. The dreamy look in his eyes.

Hakim Yusuf stopped trimming the herbs. “Opium.”

The certainty in his voice startled me. “You know about it?”

He gave a little wave of his hand. “I don’t know who you’re referring to. I know the symptoms.”

“What is it?”

“We physicians use it as a medicine. It’s very useful to dull pain before a difficult procedure. If I have to operate or amputate, for example.”

I snapped my fingers as recognition struck. “That’s how I know the smell!”

Hakim nodded. “Many physicians use preparations derived from opium, but diluted, and only when necessary. No one would use it raw. It’s too powerful.”

“Why would someone take it if he’s not injured?”

Hakim shook his head sadly. “Why do we humans do anything? We are foolish creatures. Allah offered the burden to the heavens and the earth and they refused it, but we took it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It brings a feeling of peace… even bliss. Particularly the first time. It allows a man to forget his pains and regrets for a while. Don’t we all want that? But it extracts a heavy price.”

“You mean it’s expensive?”

“Yes, it is, but the price I refer to is addiction. A man discovers that yesterday’s dose no longer satisfies. He takes more, then more again. Before long the good feeling is gone, and he is only taking it to avoid the severe pangs of withdrawal. He stops caring about anything but the drug, and to get it he will lie and steal. Eventually it will kill him.”

That sounded like being trapped in a nightmare. For a moment I actually felt sympathy for Arslan. Who wouldn’t want to escape the pain of this life for a while? But…

As if hearing my thoughts, Hakim Yusuf  said, “Such a man would be a danger to the caravan.”

I chewed on my lip. “Where would this opium come from? How would a man get his hands on it out here in the middle of nothing?”

Hakim looked toward the dark mountains surrounding us. ““Much of the opium traded across these lands begins right here.”

I followed his gaze. “Afghanistan?”

He nodded. “One would only have to enter a local village to buy some. You know what, that’s a good idea. I’m a bit low, maybe I should stock up. I’ll talk to Karim…” He entered the wagon and started puttering about.

I called out my thanks and left. It all made sense. Arslan was the thief, selling the stolen items to fuel his addiction. But, I realized, there was nothing I could do. First, I had no proof. Second, even if I could prove it, Arslan would be whipped and exiled. I wouldn’t mind seeing that. But Weili – who, I suspected, already knew about Arslan’s problem – would hate me forever. She would never, ever forgive me.

A Flicker of Light

Three nights later we camped in a narrow valley where a small cave overlooked the caravan from a low ridge. The mountains pressed close around us, shutting out all but a ribbon of sky overhead. The air carried the bite of approaching winter, and after evening prayer everyone gathered close to the cook fires until the flames burned low. Gradually the laughter faded. One lantern after another winked out until only the sentries remained awake.

Weili had accused me of spying on Arslan. It hadn’t been true then, but it was now, in a way. I made a point out of checking his duty station during the day, and his bedroll at night. Walking  past his bedroll now, I found it empty.

It might mean nothing. Men often wandered away from camp for a few moments of privacy. But as I was settling my blanket beside Belly, I noticed a brief flicker of orange light among the rocks above us. It vanished almost immediately, as though someone had cupped a hand over a flame.

I should have called for another guard to accompany me, and maybe even alerted the Sarge. But I did not. Without waking anyone, I climbed the rocky slope. Loose stones shifted beneath my boots. The night was silent except for the whisper of the wind threading through the pass.

The smell reached me before the cave did. It was faint, sweet, and strangely familiar.

When I stepped into the cave, I froze in shock. The cave itself was shallow, scarcely more than a hollow in the mountainside. Its ceiling was blackened by years of smoke. A tiny oil lamp burned, throwing wavering shadows across the stone walls.

There, in the light of the lamp, with their backs against the rock, sat Arslan and Weili. He sat with one knee raised, head lolling to the side, seemingly asleep. As for Weili, a long pipe resting loosely in her fingers. Wisps of pale smoke drifted lazily upward before disappearing into the darkness. I could hear the tiny hiss of the lamp flame. The sweet smell of the smoke hung heavily in the still air, clinging to my clothes.

Weili smiled as though I were an old friend arriving for tea.

“Darius.” There was love in the way she spoke my name, and it nearly broke my heart.

“Come,” she said, and she lifted the pipe toward me with slow, dreamlike generosity. “You try.”

“Weili,” I said, and my voice broke.

“You are so good,” she said dreamily. “You always loved me. No one…” She inhaled from the pipe, then let the smoke rise slowly from her mouth. “Ever loved me before. I never… deserved you.”

My mouth fell open. What was she saying? Hope surged in me. I reached out a hand.

“Then come with me. Forget Arslan. He’s a thief, he’s rotten. You don’t need him, you don’t need  this drug. It’s poison. Hakim Yusuf told me so.”

Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “You told Hakim Yusuf about me? You rat!” She tried to stand, but her legs gave out and she slumped back to the ground. “Get out of here. I’m with Arslan now, get it through your brick head.” She picked up a loose stone from the cave floor and flung it at me. I ducked as it flew past.

Arslan roused from his stupor. “What…. going on?”

With her eyes on me, Weili threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. “Nothing, my love.” She passed him the pipe, and he inhaled.

I wanted to run away. Instead I said, “You’re better than this, Deng Weili.”

She released her hold on Arslan and slumped against the wall of the cave. “No,” she said sadly. “I am exactly this. You loved…” She twirled a finger in the air, trying to think of a word. “A mirage. Go away, Darius.”

I stumbled out of the cave. Tears made icy sideways tracks on my face as the wind hit.

There was nothing I could do. If I went to Sergeant Karim, I knew what would happen. Twenty lashes for Arslan for sure, for the thefts. As for Weili, I did not know. What if she had stolen as well?

An Eerie Pass

Personal items continued to go missing. Men cursed under their breath and searched one another’s faces with growing suspicion.

I said nothing.

Each complaint felt like another stone added to the burden I was carrying. And every day that I remained silent, I became a little more ashamed.

The mountains grew higher. The valleys narrowed until the road became little more than a ledge carved into the mountainside. Dark cave mouths peered down from impossible heights, some scarcely larger than doorways, others wide enough to swallow an entire wagon. I found myself studying them more often than the trail beneath Belly’s hooves.

I no longer monitored Arslan’s movements, or tried to talk to Weili. I divorced myself from the entire matter, and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. But her words haunted me: You always loved me. No one ever loved me before. Those words went around and around in my head like a pair of squirrels chasing each other endlessly. Her little show of affection toward Arslan didn’t bother me at all, but her saying, “I never deserved you” – that was like an arrow in my gut.

We crossed a rocky pass with high mountains on either side. The mountains were riddled with caves. The entire place was blanketed in an eerie silence. Even the birds seemed reluctant to enter that pass.

The attack came without warning.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 22 – The Raid

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Pieces of a Dream | Part 1: The Cabbie and the Muslim Woman

Trust Fund And A Yellow Lamborghini: A Short Story

The post Far Away [Part 21] – Opium appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Southern Lebanon has been devastated by the Israeli assault; ruins dot the county of Nabatieh.

A significant aspect in the ongoing war and negotiations between the United States and Iran has been the related Israeli attack on Lebanon, whose Shia community and in particular Hezbollah militia has close religious, historical, and political ties to Iran. As it has done for over fifty years, the Israeli military has intermittently attacked Lebanon since 2024, but this latest round that began in spring 2026 has received proportionately far less attention than earlier attacks despite enormous bloodshed and its direct relevance to both the war in the Persian Gulf and the genocide of Palestine. More than anything, the war and a blatantly lopsided ceasefire that went into effect last month has exposed the limitations and bluster of a Lebanese government that loudly asserts its privileges but chronically fails to meet its responsibility, especially security against a rabidly aggressive neighbor.

The area most obviously abandoned to repeated Israeli attack is the largely Shia south, which has suffered immense damage not simply during the mid-2020s but from Israeli incursions, on and off, for over half a century. The south is often pathologized, certainly by Israel but also by domestic Lebanese critics, as a reckless hotbed whose fealty to Hezbollah will only bring peril to Lebanon at large. Yet Hezbollah, for all its faults, has managed a security and level of services that the Lebanese government has never afforded the region.

Nor are the southern Shias alone as scapegoats for Lebanon’s plight. Historically, one group after another has been blamed whenever Lebanon’s integrity is violated: at the moment it is Hezbollah and Shias in the south; earlier it was Syrian refugees and their largely Sunni supporters in areas such as Arsal and Sidon; earlier it was alleged Sunni “jihadists” in cities such as Tripoli; and earlier, at the outset of the 1975-90 war, it was Palestinians and their Lebanese supporters across a number of the country’s demographic groups, largely Muslims or Druze.

Lebanon was originally set up in the 1920s by France as an enclave for the region’s Christians, especially Maronites who shared the Catholic faith of most Frenchmen. At the time, anti-Muslim sentiments ran deep within French colonial policy, which largely caricatured the Muslim majority of the region as naturally predisposed to violence against minorities. In addition they were inclined to side with Maronites in a long-running feud with Druze, another of Lebanon’s minorities. It was only belatedly and grudgingly that France resorted to a long-outdated formula of splitting power between the elites of various confessional groups. Yet the fact that even in a newly formed Lebanese state Muslims, Sunnis and Shias, soon outnumbered Maronites contributed to the system’s inherent tensions, which were already apparent in the 1950s and resurfaced with major violence in the 1970s.

During this period, conservative and rightwing Lebanese politicians, often but not always Maronites, were inclined to resort to an ossified form of nationalism that exceptionalized  Lebanon and pretended that it existed in a regional vacuum. Where links with France were seen as natural in preserving this Lebanese exceptionalism, links with outsiders – whether those of Sunnis with Palestinians or of Shias with Iran – were treated with suspicion. Today, after the 1980s Lebanese war’s resolution contributed to an officially more equitable adjustment in the confessional balance of power, this nationalism manifests itself chiefly in loudly decrying the “foreign links” of Hezbollah with Iran while ignoring those of every other Lebanese actor with other foreign powers.

The lopsided peace deal that Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam’s Lebanese government struck with Israel has virtually signed away practical Lebanese independence when it comes to the United States and its approved regional states, while loudly asserting Lebanese sovereignty when it comes to disarming Hezbollah. This rests on the pretence that Hezbollah does not have a major domestic constituency based off years of not only warfare but genuine sociopolitical services. It also rests on ignoring countless Israeli provocations and incursions throughout Lebanese history, since long before Hezbollah was founded.

The irony is that time and again Lebanese ultranationalists, who frequently scapegoat their compatriots for undermining the state, have time and again been the quickest to give way and even collaborate when the country is actually invaded: this was the case throughout Israel’s repeated invasions since the 1970s and largely through the thirty-year Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Both these invasions were directed, principally and initially, at the Palestinians in Lebanon. One reason that many other factions and most of the Lebanese government faded meekly away before these invasions, which came at the cost of not only Palestinians but Lebanese citizens as well, was because Palestinians had been scapegoated for Lebanon’s sociopolitical problems.

When the Syrian occupation of Lebanon ended in 2005, complaints about the occupation, its corruption and abuses, were commonplace among rightwing and conservative Lebanese nationalists: yet it had been the same current who had welcomed and benefited from the original 1976 invasion in order to crush their Palestinian opponents. Many rightwingers, particularly the populist far-right militias of the so-called Lebanese Front and the South Lebanon Army, supported the even more brutal 1982 Israeli invasion, which installed their leader Bashir Gemayel as a shortlived vassal before his assassination. The Palestinians’ removal as a significant factor from Lebanese politics only brought the turn of other Lebanese citizens, ranging from Sunni Islamists in the north and Shia Islamists in the south to Druze leftists in the east, to come under attack by either the Syrian or Israeli armies, or both.

The most significant of these have been the Hezbollah group, which is now some forty years of age. An unusual closeness to Iran, who sent a large number of military “advisors” to train and equip the group in the 1980s, was frequently noted, yet treated as an exception, by rival groups and factions themselves close to one foreign power or other. In its early years Hezbollah fought Israel and, alongside Palestinians and Sunni Lebanese, the Syrian occupation of Hafiz Assad. Eventually and controversially, Iranian brokerage prompted a Hezbollah rapprochement with Syria, to the extent of assisting Assad’s son Bashar during the 2010s war.

Collaboration with the Assads, in which Lebanese nationalists were themselves involved until it fell out of fashion, is not the main criticism of Hezbollah. Rather, like the Palestinians of the 1970s, Hezbollah is blamed for having provoked Israeli “reprisals” in the service of a foreign agenda, thereby weakening the Lebanese state. Yet the record is clear that Israel has repeatedly, deliberately, and systematically attacked Lebanon since long before Hezbollah existed. The Lebanese state itself has little record to which it can point, certainly not in the south, even during peacetime. And as for foreign agendas, the scapegoating of resistance in Lebanon – whether that resistance was by Palestinians in the 1970s or Hezbollah in the 2020s – has long been led by those actors who were most amenable to actual foreign invasions of Lebanon, whether by the Assads’ Syria or by Israel.

Under fire: Lebanese army commander Rodolf Haykal has come under sustained foreign criticism for his reluctance to attack Hezbollah on behalf of Israel.

The year 2026 brings several anniversaries of this record. In summer 1976, Assad dispatched a major invasion to support the Lebanese rightwing against a combination of leftist, Muslim Lebanese, and especially Palestinian opponents: this brought about three decades of occupation where the Assad family famously manipulated and shaped the Lebanese political process. Israel’s role was even worse: having already mounted an invasion all the way to Beirut as well as made repeated raids during the 1980s, in the spring of 1996 and the summer of 2006 Israel again made major, pointedly brutal incursions into southern Lebanon: it was here that the Israeli military gave a moniker to its longstanding tradition of deliberate viciousness, the “Dahiya Doctrine”, named for a town that was flattened over and over as a form of pressure. The Dahiya Doctrine has of course been on full view in other Israeli misadventures, notably Gaza. Yet as in Gaza, it had little demonstrable military effect: instead, particularly in summer 2006, Hezbollah shot to international fame for having outlasted and outfought a more powerful Israeli foe.

Despite the bruising blows that the group has suffered over the Israeli invasion of 2024-26, there is no indication that Hezbollah will fold on this occasion either: indeed, as Lebanese army commander Rodolf Haykal among others has recognized, the group’s prestige has only soared after fighting Israeli invasions. Once more, as in the summer of 2006, it is the Lebanese government that has looked impotent and inept, browbeaten by the United States into accepting a lopsided agreement. Wiser exceptions to this rule, such as Haykal, were subjected to diplomatic snubs and a smear campaign by neoconservatives in Washington, such as Lindsay Graham, and their confederates in Israel: he was accused of having “gone rogue” and defeatism against Hezbollah. Defeatism against Hezbollah, a Lebanese group operating in its homeland, was apparently a bigger crime than defeatism against a pointedly brutal Israeli invasion.

That the country invading Lebanon could accuse the Lebanese army commander of being a “defeatist” against his own compatriots is an indication of the ludicrous expectation that the Lebanese state is meant to act not as a government for its citizens but a check against those same citizens. That is, of course, how Israel and thus, unfortunately, much of Washington see the Muslim and Arab worlds at large: that is to be expected. What is particularly absurd is that Lebanese “nationalists” with a long and almost seamless record of collaborating with foreign invasions should then turn on their own compatriots in the name of strengthening the Lebanese state. Very often, as in the case of the rightwing, this is accompanied by anti-Muslim prejudices that in effect call into the question of Lebanese Muslims, whether it was the Sunnis of the 1970s or Shias since the 1990s.

No state is strengthened or its people served by a hostile foreign invasion. But the pretence that Iran is the only foreign actor involved in Lebanon serves as a method of justifying actual foreign invasions, with undisguised brutality and contempt for Lebanese life, by far worse actors. The Lebanese government and its supposedly nationalist supporters do their country a major disservice with this selective patriotism.

The post Selective Memory undermines Lebanese Patriotism and Populace appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Olympian and Labor Friends of Israel patron shared posts about Palestinians that were ‘dehumanising’, Muslim advocacy group alleges

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Former Labor senator Nova Peris has been accused of amplifying anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian content by sharing posts that claim Gaza is full of “savages” and “fucking monsters”.

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network (Aman) has identified dozens of what it describes as dehumanising posts seen on Peris’s verified X account between April 2024 and March 2026.

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Jalsa Salana in Hampshire has had enhanced support from police, emergency services and local authorities

Security has been increased by several hundred additional staff at the UK’s largest Muslim convention, Jalsa Salana, alongside enhanced coordination with police, emergency services and local authorities, against a backdrop of growing anti-Muslim sentiment.

Last month, another big Islamic gathering was forced to close early after 12 people were arrested, including three on suspicion of conspiracy to murder, over a suspected far-right threat.

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Historian of Iranian descent sues university over politically motivated "firing."

Satellite images show the establishment of at least three new Israeli military bases in eastern Gaza.

My family’s latest displacement was unlike all our previous ones.

US-Israeli pressure on the refugee agency has resulted in a financial crisis that has affected not just those dependent on UNRWA services but those delivering them.

US sanctions have forced human rights groups to halt evidence-sharing with the ICC as Marco Rubio vows to dismantle the court “brick by brick.”

The soccer tournament positioned the United States as a convener of global joy at the precise moment it is facilitating mass death.

Occupation demands visibility. So does the world. Between surveillance and testimony, ordinary life in Palestine begins to vanish.

The yellow blocks that mark Israel’s “yellow line” are a new way to measure how close we are to a new round of displacement.

Progressive Congressman Ro Khanna insists on nonviolence for Palestinians enduring genocide, while justifying the bombing of Gaza.

Diplomat ignores role of Microsoft in mass surveillance.

Jordanians live in one of the world’s most water-starved countries.

A report on the Spectator’s coverage of Muslims makes for grim reading. Conservatism is now focused on this minority to the exclusion of everything else

I start this column already resigned to the tune out, to the glaze over, the click away. This is not to say that I do not have faith in you, dear reader, to keep reading and caring. But I am aware, and this is central to the problem, that it is now normal, when it comes to a certain minority in this country, to speak of them as if they were some sort of plague. Islamophobia has become so common as to be mundane in large parts of the British media. Foremost among the offenders is Britain’s oldest political magazine: the Spectator.

A large and comprehensive report from the Centre for Media Monitoring reviewed 3,733 articles published in the Spectator relating to Islam or Muslims. Released last week, it criticised the publication for “a sustained and systemic pattern of biased coverage of Muslims and Islam”, according to the CMM, “with more than half of all relevant articles rated as biased over an eight-year period”. It is grim, grim reading.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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Loneliness wears its finest clothes on Saturday afternoons, and it gathers by the hundred in hotel ballrooms, drawing the accomplished and the ordinary, the celebrated and the overlooked, each one quietly hoping to be chosen, each one just as quietly appraising everyone who might do the choosing. They have spent their twenties doing everything they were promised would lead here. They will go home tonight exactly as they arrived, alone, and bewildered to still be so.

This is not, in the end, a story about a checklist, though the checklist is real and the arithmetic beneath it is merciless. It is a story about the people holding it, about what they are running from, what they secretly long for, and the strange way that wanting something too precisely can place it forever out of reach.

Where the Wanting Goes Wrong

I know my worth; I’m not lowering my standards. You hear it everywhere now, in group chats and matrimonial profiles alike, the anthem of a generation that refuses to settle. The first half is a hard-won victory. For generations, some women were handed to men like furniture, appraised by families and expected to absorb whatever flaws their husbands arrived with. To stand up and name your own worth was a correction, and a necessary one.

The second half is where the trouble begins. A healthy instinct, run through the machinery of a consumer culture, can curdle. Worth was meant to be a foundation, a quiet certainty that you deserve dignity. Instead it hardens into a ranking, measured against the curated lives scrolling endlessly across a screen. And the moment worth becomes comparative, it becomes “insatiable”. She wants him taller, richer, more visibly devout. He wants glow without effort, grace without heft, a spark that can’t be taught. The bar does not rise once. It rises every time you open the app.

And the expectation no longer tracks anything in particular. This is not the private affliction of the successful, earned by a wall of degrees; it has become the cultural default, the air everyone breathes, felt just as keenly by those the world overlooked as by those it celebrated. The asking price went up across the board, all at once, for everyone.

“The moment worth becomes comparative, it becomes insatiable.”

The apps did to marriage what the buffet did to appetite. They convinced a generation that the next plate is always available, so why finish this one? “Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing,” and it does its damage by aiming the eye at the possibilities instead of the probabilities. The man with a flooded inbox keeps every door open and therefore walks through none, mistaking the open doors for freedom, never noticing that a man who keeps all of them open never actually enters a room. And keeping your options open is not only greed. It is fear in the costume of abundance, because to choose one person is to become vulnerable to one person, and so to risk being seen, disappointed, left.

Worse, the market rewires desire itself. Scarcity passes for value; the heart confuses difficulty with worth. So the kind, available, devoted person reads as desperation, while the one who barely answers reads as a prize. It is the logic of a slot machine, where unpredictable reward grips harder than reliable reward. People chase the feeling of being wanted, mistake it for love, and go home, again, to an empty room.

We Already Have Too Much

Step back from the ballroom and the same pattern is everywhere. No generation in history has had more than we do. More food than we can eat, more clothes than we can wear, more schooling, more attention, more of everything than survival ever required. And we feel less for all of it. Abundance raises the baseline so high that nothing moves the needle. The body’s reward system, built for scarcity, goes quiet in a world that never lets it go hungry. We are full and unmoved.

The mistake we keep making is to treat that numbness as a shortage. If a full closet does not satisfy, buy more clothes. If a hundred matches do not move you, line up a hundred more. But more is the disease, not the cure. The person drowning in options is not starving for options. They are starving for the ability to be moved by what is already in front of them.

That ability is not fixed. It can be trained. The same plate, eaten with attention and real hunger instead of distraction, gives back its pleasure. The same ordinary day, met with gratitude instead of comparison, returns more than a better day met with contempt. Dopamine is not only a function of what arrives; it is a function of how you meet it. With practice, you can pull far more out of what you already have. That is the quiet skill an abundant age forgot to teach, and it is most of the game. Islam had a name for it, and prized it above every fortune.

Richness, the Prophet ﷺ said, is not an abundance of possessions but the richness of the soul. [Bukhari 6446] That is the one thing a culture of plenty cannot buy and has forgotten how to grow: the capacity to be filled by what is already in front of you.

The Same Is True of Love

A relationship obeys the identical law. You will not squeeze joy out of a partner by upgrading to a better one, any more than you squeezed joy out of your closet by adding to it. Depth comes from attention, not acquisition. The couples who go the distance are not the ones who found flawless people. They are the ones who learned to draw the good out of an ordinary, decent human being, day after day, the way you learn to draw flavor out of a simple meal.

So here is the practical shape of it.

Be strong. A husband or a wife is not a luxury product delivered finished to your door. It is a person you build with, which means you have to be solid enough to build. Compromise, since no one worth having arrives without edges. But do not compromise so far that you disappear, because a person who vanishes into a marriage has nothing left to give it. The line between bending and breaking is the entire art.

Choose someone you can work with, and become someone worth working with. Bring the best out of them, and let them bring the best out of you. Push against each other, sharpen each other, stand and fight side by side through the parts that are hard, because that friction is not the failure of the thing. It is the thing.

Courtship is hard, and often you enter it only half-convinced, pushing yourself toward something you are not yet sure of, perhaps only filling a void, but hopefully trying in earnest. When what you find does not match what you pictured, work with what is there and set your intention to make it work. And if the interest dies altogether, look for an honest way out, and take it whether or not the other person grants you the grace of understanding. That is your part, and it is why you cannot be speaking to several people at once. To divide your attention is to withhold the respect the person before you is owed, and no absence of a “formal tie” excuses it. The heart was never built to be spread thin across many at once, and comparison will quietly drain the joy out of every one of them. This is a serious journey. If you choose to walk it, walk it with the utmost respect.

You Are Also the Room

But the room is full of other people, and they are trying, too. This is the part the lonely rarely consider. You are not only a seeker moving through the crowd; you are also the crowd that others must move through. The same eye that ranks a partner turns easily on everyone else’s chances, and a whole culture has quietly agreed to let it. We have become a people who appraise each other’s pursuits the way the ballroom appraises its guests, coolly and comparatively, always to someone’s diminishment.

Refuse it. When you see two people who might be good for one another, and one of them is hesitating, nervous, half-convinced they are not enough, be the one who gives them courage. Stand at their side. Speak the good you know of each to the other, honestly and generously, and let the best of one meet the best of the other. It is quiet work, and unglamorous, and it is holy. You are amplifying a goodness that is real but too shy to announce itself. The world is not short of decent people. It is short of anyone willing to help them be seen.

And resist, with everything you have, the sweeter temptation to do the reverse. It is so easy, and it wears the face of care so well. A whisper about someone’s past, a rumor you never witnessed but are glad to carry, an afternoon spent excavating a stranger’s history as though you were guarding someone from harm, when what you were really doing was entertaining yourself. Do not carry what you did not see with your own eyes. And the digging itself, the compulsion to know exactly who a person used to be, will not move one letter of what is already written, for them or for you. What is decreed does not wait on your findings. You cannot audit a soul into being safe to love.

Many will disagree, and I will not pretend I can prove it. But I have watched people make a pastime of meddling in one another’s affairs, dressed up as concern, certain it costs nothing, and then sit in their own quiet rooms, bewildered, wondering why the harvest will not come. And least trustworthy of all is the counsel of anyone with something to gain from keeping two people apart, who warns you off the one they quietly want for themselves, or who would sooner see a match fail than watch a person they resent flourish. No one should stand between two people while their own heart has something to win or lose. You cannot spend your days salting other people’s fields and expect your own to bloom.

And if you are the one who helped, if you gave them courage, spoke the good word, turned two lives gently toward each other, then keep it to yourself. Do not return to collect the debt. The instant you announce it, the instant you say, “I did this, I made this,” you convert a gift into a transaction and drain the barakah clean out of it. Good done in secret keeps its blessing; good done for an audience has already been paid, in full, in the cheap coin of your own credit. Let them believe they found each other. Do the thing for its own sake, and disappear.

Keep Going

And if you love someone, do not let hesitation cast the deciding vote. Fear will always argue for the safety of waiting, and waiting has buried more love than rejection ever did. But let the courage be the “lawful kind”. And aim for the pleasure of Allah , and keep it before the pleasure of the heart. The Prophet ﷺ taught us that nothing was ever seen to equal marriage for two who love one another. So gather your courage and say the words that can be said in the light. Love does not reward the cautious. It rewards the brave who stay.

An honorable approach may falter the first time, and the second, for reasons that have nothing to do with your worth. The geography of two lives is rarely simple;  two clocks may strike different hours, a heart may be mid-repair from a storm you cannot see, or their path may already be crowded with another pursuit. Sometimes, you may step forward only to look within and realize your own foundation is still settling. A threshold that closes because the seasons did not align is not a verdict; it is the cost of trying at all. Keep going until you get it right. And if the right person has not arrived yet, stop scanning the room for them and turn the work inward. Become the kind of person the right one would be lucky to find. Be the good one, quietly and patiently, knowing that what is written for you will never lose its way.

You were right to know your worth. You were only wrong about where it lives. Worth was never something to be ranked, presented, or proven; it was something to be built, slowly, on ordinary mornings, out of attention and effort and the refusal to quit. The loneliest people in those ballrooms are not the ones who wanted too little. They are the ones still waiting to be handed a feeling they could have learned, all along, to make.

 

Related:

– Getting to Know A Potential Husband/Wife? 3 Questions To Ask Yourself First

– You Found “The One” In Your MSA [Part 1]: First Steps

 

 

The post The Arithmetic Of Longing: On Loneliness, Desire, And Learning To Want Well appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Dr. Mimi Syed and Wes J. Bryant on Israel’s targeting of children. Ali Abunimah on Democrats and Ro Khanna. Jon Elmer on Iran and news from across Palestine and Lebanon.

Ann Widdecombe, European Parliament, 2019

Last week, following the murder or assassination of the former Tory, later Reform UK, politician Ann Widdecombe (right) the week before, the Reform party started making demands that the public purse should pay for their security. I even heard a representative tell a Radio 4 interview that their politicians were under particular threat because they address issues of particular sensitivity and importance, namely immigration and asylum. Widdecombe’s suspected murderer, who was arrested in Rotherham, 250 miles away from the scene, is still being interviewed by the police and has not been charged with anything, though police released some information that said they believed it was politically motivated, though not what the alleged motive was, and that she was targeted specifically rather than at random. Widdecombe was last an MP in 2010; she had also been a Brexit Party MEP during their last term before we left the EU in 2020, and following that party’s relaunch as Reform UK, she had been their immigration spokesperson. She was also well-known for appearances on TV dancing shows and in pantomime and lived alone in a village in the Dartmoor national park in Devon.

Politicians often complain of verbal abuse directed at them by members of the public, especially since it became easy to email or tweet to an MP, but there have not been many assassinations of politicians in the UK; only nine in the UK’s history and none between 1922 (Henry Wilson) and 1979 (Airey Neave). There have been two since 2016: Joanne Cox in 2016, shortly before the Brexit referendum, and David Amess in 2021. Between Spencer Perceval in 1812 (the only assassination of a prime minister) and Jo Cox in 2016, all the assassinations were by Irish Republicans. The PM, Home Secretary and Defence Secretary all get state-funded security and armed bodyguards; other ministers may get security guards at their request or a security advisor’s advice, and since Amess’s murder (and an attempt on the life of the Labour MP Stephen Timms in the 2000s), MPs are offered security guards at constituency surgeries. Ordinary MPs are not usually offered bodyguards or other conspicuous security unless there is a demonstrable threat to their safety and Nigel Farage has never been part of any government, only an opposition MP, and his continued status as an MP depends on winning the by-election that has been called in Clacton, which despite a boycott by all the mainstream parties, he is not certain to win.

Since Cox’s murder in 2016, there has been a trend towards demanding that the general public be kinder to MPs and to remember that they are human too. Recent examples are this piece from the New Statesman and this piece by Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, though Brendan Cox (Jo Cox’s widower) has been banging this drum since his wife’s murder. Both the two articles mention that Reform politicians have contributed more than most to the vituperative tone of modern politics while demanding security for MPs that would cost the public purse billions if applied to all MPs. Yet they fail to appreciate that the tone of politics has an impact on everyone else, and that politicians and the media have used ordinary members of the public as scapegoats or hate targets, in particular portraying disabled people as scroungers or idlers, legal immigrants as illegal until proven otherwise (as with the Windrush affair) and immigrants in general (and anyone perceived to be immigrants) as thieves, thugs and rapists. Politicians make decisions that affect everyone, and can cause people to lose their jobs, or be expelled from the country despite it being their home, or to be deprived of healthcare, or to be criminalised for speech or protest, or to have to deal with rampant crime or sexual abuse because the authorities turn a blind eye or are not funded to tackle these problems. Politicians will often call these decisions ‘difficult’, but the difficulty is not borne by them. If they want us to remember that they are human, they might like to remember that we are also human beings, not pieces on a game board.

In some circumstances it is quite right that politicians or other officials receive state protection. One is during a civil war or a terrorist campaign; another is when there are professional criminals who would kill anyone who challenged them in any way; a good example is the Italian mafia which assassinated the judge Giovanni Falcone whose “Maxi Trial” had put hundreds of gangsters in prison in 1992, 19 of them for life, as well as another long-standing anti-mafia investigative judge, Paolo Borsellino. Nigel Farage belongs to neither of these categories; he is just a divisive, rabble-rousing politician. Maybe he wants the state protection because he really does feel endangered; maybe he wants it because it would make him look more important, and that isn’t a good use of public money. Generally speaking, politicians’ safety should be ensured by their own behaviour: a good leader, it has been said, does not fear the hand of his (or her) assassin. Some assassins or would-be assassins are just extremist, as with Thomas Mair and Ali Harbi Ali (the murderers of Jo Cox and David Amess respectively), but in other cases they are provoked by oppression, impoverishment or violence stoked by the politician’s own policies and behaviour. A politician who does not ensure the safety or quality of life of his constituents or those he rules does not have the right to expect those same people to pay for his security, and if he stokes hatred and violence, he has only himself to blame if he falls victim to it himself.

Image © European Union 2019, European Parliament, via Wikimedia.

Back in Zurich, I dissected the propaganda used to justify genocide and the political shift now rattling Israel’s defenders.