Americans love fantasy. We enjoy cheering the good guys, booing the bad guy and a story with a happy ending.
Fantasy is innocent and fun in the make-believe worlds of movies, television and sports, but when it spills over into real life, it can be nightmarish.
The recent war in Gaza is a prime example. We’ve reduced it into shallow conflict with a simple plot. It has bad guys (Hamas terrorists), innocents who must be saved (the Gaza civilian population) and swashbuckling allies (Israel) to round out the cast.
The plot is Hollywood-perfect. Israel must vanquish Hamas while protecting innocent Gazans from harm. What will happen next? Stay tuned for the next episode as the credits roll.
The reality, of course, is as far from a movie set as the White House is from Gaza City. Before the current war, the coastal enclave was not the open-air prison Americans imagined. Entire neighborhoods featured fashionable villas and apartments, luxury cars, five-star restaurants and malls overflowing with designer goods. Gazans had access to higher education in Gaza universities and abroad. Together with Western money and Israeli aid that poured into their territory, the flourishing population was mostly well-nourished.
Yet in an election deemed legitimate by Western observers, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip voted for Hamas and its platform of killing all Jews, no matter where they live. They chose hate over coexistence and the education of their children in an Islam-superior belief system over tolerance. And it cost them.
The deeply held beliefs of the average Gazan and their educational system are hardly secret. They have been open about their worldviews. It is we Americans who choose to conform their reality into our fantasy of an open, welcoming and tolerant society. Hence, we have Western progressives defending a society that executes gays, women marching for those who subjugate women, and liberals championing a system that considers their opinions heretical.
Lest you think the devastation of their cities changed their ideology and tempered their zealotry, recent polls conducted by Palestinian research teams show that Hamas remains highly popular among Gazans.
The West Bank (the more correctly named Judea and Samaria) is another made-for-television thriller. In this full-length feature, the righteous Muslims valiantly try to recover their lost homeland from the world’s favorite bogeyman: the evil Jews. Its high drama includes Jewish “settlers” destroying olive groves and attacking villages. What can be better theater than a burning olive grove or more pastoral than a village?
The movie is fiction, of course. The reality is that Israel has been the Jewish homeland since biblical times. That the more recently settled Arabs were content to live under the brutal and corrupt rule of their fellow Muslims, the Turks and the Jordanians weren’t bothered by secular British rule, and only developed national aspirations when Jews founded their democratic State in the Holy Land, is dismissed as an inconvenient backstory.
The sporadic acts of aggression by Jewish extremists, whose actions are condemned by most Jews, present a far more compelling narrative than the Muslims who have murdered 1,500-plus civilians and destroyed thousands of acres of farmland and forests in the past five years alone.
This willingness to conform reality to fantasy goes beyond Israel. Americans are so desperate to believe that Islam at its core is a peaceful religion, albeit with a few fringe extremists, that we wave away the reality of Islamic terrorists murdering a quarter million people in more than 65,000 ideologically inspired attacks in the past 45 years with the ease of a magician making things disappear with the flick of his wand.
Our imaginary bubble extends to brutal tyrants whom we build into moderates. We cast Mahmud Abbas, the 90-year-old dictator of the Palestinian Authority, who pays a salary to every terrorist who kills an Israeli or a Westerner, as a reasonable man. We do the same for the Syrian leader who dons Western-style suits and ties, and is miraculously transformed from a murderous ISIS commander to a peace-loving statesman within the space of a week.
Americans aren’t the only ones who live in dreamland. Governments in France and in Scandinavia refuse to acknowledge neighborhoods that are off-limits to non-Muslims. In England, entire areas that practice Sharia law are completely ignored. And in Germany, under the guise of promoting democracy, speech condemning Islamic violence and hatred is strictly verboten.
To confront modern threats, Americans need to confront modern reality. Conflicts rooted in ideology, religion and history cannot be solved by pretending they don’t exist. If we persist in mistaking fantasy for reality, we shouldn’t be surprised if our happy ending turns into a hellish nightmare.
