Wichita State University's student-run news source publishes opinion piece sympathizing with Palestinian terrorists
Opinion/Media and Terrorism
After the Hamas attacks on Israel, a lot of people began to weigh in on the issue. One person who weighed in was Salsabila Attaria, the arts and culture editor for The Sunflower, Wichita State University’s student-run news source and a health and science major at the University.
Her opinion piece, which was published on Wednesday, October 11, started off by asking people to imagine themselves as a young Palestinian boy born in the early 2000s and what it would be like to grow up being attacked by Israel. She goes onto talk about what you would be like as an adult in 2023.
“You spent your childhood watching the genocide of your people as Israeli settlers frolic on Tel Aviv beaches and set Palestinian olive groves on fire,” Attaria writes. “You are old enough to have heard your grandparents and parents’ stories of more of the same. Naturally, inevitably, the anger and the pain of living under occupation leads you to take action.”
The big issue with how Attaria starts her opinion piece—and this is a theme throughout it—is its clear lack of nuance and biased ideation of an issue that is far from black and white like she seems to want it to be. The thing we have to understand is that this whole issue didn’t start with the Hamas attack on October 7, or even anything Israel did back in the early 2000s. This has been a decades-long conflict dating back to the mid-20th century, and this is something that this very news source acknowledges—albeit, in a biased light—in an article from Monday, October 16 where WSU held a vigil, not for the more than 1,300 Israeli’s who were just murdered by Hamas terrorists, but for Palestine.
Here’s the thing, Palestine has suffered a lot from the Israeli government. Palestine has also suffered a lot from their own government. As corrupt as the Israel government is, it’s the only government in the Middle East that is actually a democracy. People are so obsessed about Palestine being the victim or Israel being the victim that they forget that the real victims are the innocent people in both of these countries. The people in Israel who were victims of the Hamas terrorist attacks were also civilians—many just trying to enjoy a music festival. We get caught up in the extremes of these situations that too many people willfully ignore the reality that innocent children that had nothing to do with any of this lost their lives because of extremely evil acts by radicalized individuals. The idea that people are excusing that is absolutely sickening. They’re excusing the raping of women and the terrorist attacks in general because “one side is much more in the wrong than the other,” and yes, that is an actual quote in the article about the vigil. Defending someone in the wrong because you perceive the other side as “much more in the wrong” shows a disinterest in actual justice and should be called out for what it is: Disgusting.
Attaria goes onto quote civil rights organizer and pan-Afrikanist Kwame Ture, who wrote, “in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.” This was in criticism to “the peaceful approach taken by other African-American leaders in the face of deadly anti-Blackness.”
Not only are these words by Ture horrible, as they are meant to encourage violence by dehumanizing the opponent by declaring the opponent has no conscience—a very human thing to have—but these words have also been debunked by another civil rights leader that’s way more well-known—Martin Luther King, Jr.—one of the most important people in all of American history, for doing the most to bring equality to Black Americans and doing it through peaceful means.
Nevertheless, Attaria goes onto write about what this statement means to her, which is “the white-hot spotlight on (the Palestinian people’s) self-defense after 75 years of indifference to violent colonization by Israel.”
Newsflash for Attaria: Raping women and beheading babies has nothing to do with “self-defense” and actually puts the Palestinian people in more danger of retaliation, because, again, the people who did this are not your average Palestinians who are (by the way) oppressed by their own government—it was Hamas, which is a Palestinian Islamist political group that took control of Gaza in 2005, forming a government in 2006.
Attaria goes onto write about how liberation isn’t achieved through peace, stating, “It’s painful, ugly and the product of long-endured systemic oppression. And never the fault of the colonized.”
While I don’t disagree with this statement, I do find her premise to be horribly ignorant, because, again, the people of Palestine are oppressed by their own government, yet she seems to not understand that part. What about their liberation? She is writing a piece that is shilling for a cruel government that stands against a lot of the things that she likely believes in. Afterall, in Palestine, LGBT people are not looked at favorably—so much so that there are laws banning them from certain human rights, and yet this opinion piece of Attaria’s is shown to have two contributors. The second being the opinion editor for the news source, Sascha Harvey, who wrote an unhinged opinion piece against Chick-fil-A for its homophobic history.
Ironically, Attaria states that “outrage at Palestinians in Gaza, whether they are affiliated with Hamas or not, resorting to violence against their colonizers is selective and hypocritical,” as if her whole opinion piece isn’t selective and hypocritical.
First, again, some of this violence is not against “colonizers.” It’s against children. Their only crime is being born in Israel, and that is enough for this woman to defend the atrocities committed by Palestinians against them.
She goes onto ask where the reader’s outrage was during the injustices that Palestinian’s faced over the recent years as if she doesn’t understand that the news creates the outrage, not everyday people. She also denounces the idea that somehow all Palestinian’s are terrorists, while also promoting the idea that all Israeli’s are colonizers throughout the entire article.
She then claims that the world “defends Israeli colonizers with state-of-the-art bomb shelters and Western countries of origin to comfortably cower in, but never the Palestinians with nothing but smuggled weaponry and rocks from the land they so proudly defend as theirs to protect themselves.”
What she doesn’t mention is how much money the U.S. alone has given to Palestine for a number of things in order to help the people. Last October, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had invested $150 million the past year “to empower Palestinians to build thriving and resilient communities, promote inclusive development, and advance a two-state solution,” and, upon Congressional approval, USAID was planning to “program at least $500 million between 2021 and 2024 in total support of the Palestinian people.” This is on top of the more than half a billion dollars the U.S. provided Palestinians from April 2021 to March 2022, “including more than $417 million in humanitarian assistance for Palestinian refugees through UNRWA, $75 million in support through USAID, and $20.5 million in COVID and Gaza recovery assistance.”
Attaria then states that she finds it “incredibly difficult to find sympathy” for the Israeli’s in the Hamas terrorist attacks who have been raped, held hostage, and murdered, or lost loved ones because the Israeli civilians, who most likely had nothing to do with what happened 75 years ago, were getting a “taste, 75 years later, of the lived experience of those they stole the land from.”
She finishes by urging people to take time to understand the “Palestinian plight” without “fear of being falsely accused of antisemitism or supporting terrorism” and “choose to be on the correct side of history.”
This article, at the time of this publishing, received 51 likes and a lot mixed reviews with some people being in support of it…
Others expressed their displeasure of the article…
Personally, up until now, I haven’t provided my thoughts on what is going on currently with Israel and Palestine. I’ve informed people of what Kansas politicians are saying, but as far as what I think, I’ve been fairly hush-hush for a couple of reasons. First, I think it’s important to just acknowledge the obvious which is that this is a long and complicated issue that has a lot of nuance to it. This isn’t the black and white, this side is right, this side is wrong narrative that so many people and outlets are pushing. Both sides have been wrong several times. Both sides are guilty of oppression, war crimes, murder, kidnapping, rape, and both sides does NOT mean Palestinian people in general or Israeli people in general. Just like in every other country in the world, there are people in these areas who are just trying to live their lives the best they can and don’t support the actions of their governments who are by and large to blame for the horrors inflicted on both sides. When we don’t have that nuance, we run the risk of demonizing an entire group of people, with many who do not deserve to be demonized.
When it comes to supporting Israel, personally, I look at our more than $30 trillion debt and all I think is that we can’t afford to support Israel, we are $30 trillion in debt. When a person has a large amount of debt, often times, that means they can’t even support themselves. What happened in Israel on October 7 was a tragedy and should be condemned. It was an act of terrorism and should be looked at as such. War is a horrible thing, and I don’t support violence on either side of the conflict. However, this is not the U.S.’s fight, and this is something that, ultimately, Palestine and Israel are going to have to decide when it ends because this is their fight.
Much like Attaria, I am not an expert on this issue, and personally, I’m going to be weary of anyone who claims to be an expert on this issue just because it is such a long and complicated history. I am of the belief that government, when it gets too big, is bad and is regularly the culprit in atrocities, especially during times of war and in instances like this we need to understand the difference between actions taken by the government and actions taken by individuals, and also understand that when it is an individuals actions, that only speaks to that individual and not the people as a whole. I think too often people want to take blame away from wrongdoers and put their actions on either the victims, or outside influences, and the reality is the wrongdoers are the ones who did the wrong, there’s literally no one else to blame for the actions of an individual outside of the individual.
I think people need to understand that, even without Israel, Palestinians are still going to be oppressed by their own government—the same could be said for Israeli’s, however, all signs say Israeli’s are not as oppressed by their government as Palestinians, not that that makes it okay, but I think there are things on that level where people like Attaria need to be more honest with themselves.
I am of the radical belief that an eye for eye leaves the whole world blind, and that violence is almost never the answer, because when it is, it’s the only answer (Tim Larken). Being some guy in Kansas, I don’t feel it’s my place to say whether that is the answer for Israel and Palestine. I think it’s obvious that for some people, that is the answer, but ultimately, that is something for Palestine and Israel to decide. I hope that those on both sides can find the healing they need and live to see peace for their people (as naive as that may sound, trying to be an optimist). I’m sure the media and government will continue to come out with stories and statements on this issue, and it will be interesting to see how things continue to develop.
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It's very apparent that the author didn't study middle eastern history.
You are amazing and very informative!!