I forgive you

Published : 24 June 2015, 11:06 AM
Updated : 24 June 2015, 11:06 AM

"I just want everyone to know that I forgive you".

So said Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year old victim Ethel Lance, in an emotion-choked and electrifying victim statement, when confronted with the evil of Dylann Roof.

She went on, "You hurt me, you hurt a lot of people, but I forgive you".

This little runt of a man (a skinny misguided kid really) executed 9 people in a church after participating in an hour-long prayer and bible study.

The intimacy of the crime is breathtaking and unfathomable but it was not unforeseeable. The hate that ferments against races, religions, colours, and in general, the fear promoted by simple differences between people overwhelms our sense of right and wrong, and we then end up with the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston and nine dead people who were known for their kindness and their love of other people.

I do not want to rant and rave of about gun culture, nor do I want to talk about racism or the Confederate flag flying high and mighty in southern skies of the US.

I will let lily-livered politicians like Barrack Obama and Lindsey Graham froth about the underlying causes of such evil. They will talk till they are blue in the face, they will huff and they will puff. No doubt they will make nice speeches, but they will do precisely nothing.

Such is the state of things in my adopted country where leadership is measured out in spoonfuls, based on the latest poll numbers.

No, I want to talk about this thing called hate and love.

"Hate won't win," said Alana Simmons, granddaughter of Rev. Daniel Simmons who was 74 when the hate-filled gunman took his life.

This whole proceeding at the court forced me to reassess the tapestry of the world, which is full of hate. Yet there are people like Alana and Nadine who carry the light of love and hope even at the depths of unimaginable loss.

Does hate win?

If you look at the history of hate and love, you would be tempted to say that hate wins hands down. Genghis Kahn killed about 40 million (give or take a few millions) during his reign. Some historians say he was reacting to rough childhood. His father was poisoned by rival Tartars when he was only 9. His own tribe expelled him and forced him to hunt and forage. He and his wife were kidnapped and enslaved. Historians say that, this rough life made him such that he never ever left a score unsettled.

I am not sure a rough childhood justifies the killing of 40 million people. Is this paranoia, or is this something else? In more modern times, Hitler and Stalin killed around 50 million people between them.

Then of course, there is the Rwandan genocide and the genocide by the Pakistani Army in Bangladesh during Liberation.

It seems hate does win in the short run, but the short run can change the history of the world and the path of civilisation. However, does it leave behind a lasting civilisation? Can hate build a world and sustain it for eternity? The massacre in Charleston forced me to examine the modalities of existence.

There exists not a single civilisation that had hate, fear, and paranoia as its core principle. The Third Reich in Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and many more simply cannot exist because the foundation of such regimes are based on a self-cannibalising fear and hate.

In the US, the KKK and the Skinheads are all based on this self-cannibalising hate, fear, and self-loathing. They will continue to cause damage, but society as whole will reject their hatred and they will fade into the gloom of history.

This is possible because the countervailing power of love exists in various religions, civil societies, and people, like Nadine and Alana. America has had a lot of goodness among so much badness and madness!

I keep thinking is there a countervailing force of love in the land of my father or the Muslim lands in general?

I am hard-pressed to find anyone in my ancestral land and my co-religionists who would have come out in the middle of a mind-numbing tragedy and declared, "Hate will not win."

In Bangladesh, we are sending old men to gallows for crimes committed 43 years ago. The judgements are passed mostly by people who know nothing about the times that defined us all, some 43 years ago. I happen to have been alive in those times, and I bear witness to the many atrocities and the many acts of courage and love.

In Iraq and Syria, ISIS is murdering and enslaving people with impunity.

Here at last we have the inkling of the psychosis that must been pervasive during the days of Genghis Khan. ISIS murderers are absolutely full of hate and loathing for everyone but the blindly obedient soldiers of mayhem.

They want to settle every score, they take offense at every slight, and murder is their answer to everything. This is very much like the behavior of Mr. Roof in Charleston, and Genghis Khan so many years ago.

My thinking is that ISIS and other vendors of Hate will soon disappear from the world, but I am afraid they will cause a lot of damage to the Earth before they become irrelevant. The 40 million killed by the Great Khan has probably changed the course of humanity in some fundamental way. We just cannot tell how.

So, as I write this article in a very hot day in Colorado, I wonder how we can confront hate without being hateful.

Unlike Nadine and Alana, I do not believe in proffering the other cheek to be slapped. But if love has to prevail, we must find a way to confront and condemn the acts of hate without condemning the human being.

As the day wound down and I struggled to find a clear distinction between the Act and the Actor. I must say I failed the test. Unlike Alana and Nadine I cannot forgive the punks named Dylaan Roof, Al-Baghdadi, Bashar Al-Assad, and the rest of them.

I wish pox on all their houses. Is this hate or is this justice?

Kayes Ahmed is a businessman running multi-national operations from Colorado, USA.