Tear off the mask mr. minister
By Khaled Salih
As someone who has written about Saddam Husseins’s genocide against the Kurds in Iraq in mid-1980, I allowed myself to reply to an op-ed by the FM of Qatar in Washington Post. Here is what I propose on behalf of one hostage family whose loved one is still in captivate in a dungeon tunnel i Gaza.
“There are no facts, only interpretations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
On the morning of October 7, 2023, our world ended and kept ending. We buried parents without children and children without parents. We searched the fields and the safe rooms and the phone videos for faces we loved. Some of us have not buried anyone because our loved ones are still not home. When we read the Qatari minister’s op-ed in the Washington Post casting Israel’s strike in Doha as an “assault on diplomacy,” we recognize a second assault: on truth, on memory, and on the dignity of the murdered and the stolen.
The minister’s approach wears the polished mask of neutrality: Qatar, the tireless mediator; Qatar, the indispensable bridge; Qatar, guardian of “international law” and “shared humanity.” But for us, the families who woke into sirens and broken doors, this rhetoric is not neutral. It is immoral. It turns the cause into the consequence, the perpetrator into the arbiter, and the victims into a footnote. It does so by three manoeuvres: deletion, distortion, and generalisation.
