It began with a reader’s question that lingered longer than the post itself.
“Did those perpetrators grow up with an oppression myth?” he asked.
I had written about Yahya Sinwar, often called the butcher of Khan Yunis by his critics, trying to understand what shapes such a mind. The reader reminded me that suffering does not always create monsters. Sometimes it builds moral memory.
Jews remember the ghettos, the camps, and the silence of the world. Yet they do not blow up buses in Munich. They built museums instead of militias. The pain of extermination was turned into vigilance and remembrance, not revenge.
In much of the Muslim world, the opposite happened. Our stories of loss were not healed; they were inherited as anger. The rhetoric of humiliation became the air our children breathed. The “oppression myth,” once rooted in truth, hardened into ideology. It became a tool for leaders who found power in grievance.
Sinwar is only one symptom. Behind him stands a generation raised on the memory of occupation but not on reflection. The same trauma that once demanded liberation now sustains the logic of endless war.
Maybe that is what separates memory from myth: one seeks to preserve the dead, the other to avenge them.
Still, I do not believe pain must always end in blood. Perhaps the real question is not why the Jews remember differently, but why we keep teaching ourselves to forget in the same way.
The Myth of Oppression
Every nation builds its stories around loss. Some turn those stories into maps for survival, others into trenches.
In our part of the world, “oppression” became a permanent identity. From classrooms to Friday sermons, the message stayed the same: We are victims of the West, of Israel, of history itself. It was not always untrue, but it became too useful to question.
The rulers found comfort in it. The preachers found power in it. The people found meaning in it.
And over time, the story grew louder than the truth.
Real grievances—poverty, corruption, the failure of education—were hidden beneath the grand idea of a besieged ummah.
You can see the result in the eyes of young men who grow up believing they are born to avenge the world.
That’s not faith. That’s indoctrination.
And it kills both the body and the spirit of a society.
Memory Without Murder
The reader who commented on my piece reminded me of something simple: remembrance can be sacred without becoming violent.
The Jewish people never forgot what was done to them. They built their memory into museums, universities, and archives. They taught their children to speak, not explode.
That doesn’t make them saints, but it shows a difference in what trauma can become. Memory, when faced honestly, can teach humility.
In contrast, we in the Muslim world often hide our trauma behind pride. We mistake rage for dignity.
Look at how the word resistance has been emptied of meaning. Once it meant the right to exist; now it means the right to destroy.
Our heroes are men with rifles, not reformers with pens.
Our martyrs are those who die killing, not those who die creating.
Sinwar’s Shadow
Yahya Sinwar embodies that broken inheritance.
He calls himself a liberator, yet the people under his rule whisper another name: “the butcher of Khan Yunis.”
His power feeds on perpetual siege. Every rocket he fires strengthens the narrative that Gaza can only live through death.
But the deeper tragedy is not Sinwar himself; it’s the silence that allows him.
The world looks at Gaza and sees a victim. Gazans look inward and see a cage built by two hands—Israel’s and their own.
No one wins in this geometry of grief.
Sinwar’s story could have been different. He spent years in Israeli prisons, learned Hebrew, studied his enemy. He could have used that knowledge to imagine coexistence. Instead, he turned it into a manual for vengeance.
Perhaps he believes he’s making history.
Perhaps he knows he’s only repeating it.
The Choice of Memory
We can’t choose what happened to us, but we can choose what we do with it.
Jewish survival, Rwandan reconciliation, South African truth commissions—these are proof that even the worst pain can be reshaped.
In the Muslim world, that work has barely begun.
We remember our martyrs but not our mistakes. We build monuments to conquest, not compassion.
If memory is power, then we’ve spent ours poorly.
Maybe it’s time to reclaim it—to remember without hating, to mourn without teaching revenge.
Until then, men like Sinwar will keep rising from the ruins, and the myth will keep devouring the truth.
Comments
Post a Comment