Righting The Unreal Spiel Of Rula Jabreal

Rula Jebreal called Hakeem Jeffries a monkey and insulted his very name, then excused herself for it by talking nonsense and claiming he’s controlled by Israeli lobbyjng money as conspiracists do. Hakeem Jeffries is a Black man and any way you rationalize it, saying calling a Black person a monkey (especially with how she excused herself after,”With all due respect — and I don’t mean it in a racist way. He is just basically an errand boy, and we’re done and tired.”)invokes racial animus in a way that’s not really a gaffe. Black people, including the Black Congressional Caucus have already been pointing this out to her and since I’m not Black I’m going to focus more on her excuse since she also misused a commonly-misunderstood concept on top of her execrable characterization of Representative Jefferies. Though before that, I want to point out that her quip about his name being Hakeem was also incorrect; not only has he tried his best to unite House Democrats, Hakim means more than just a physician and echoes his middle name of Sekou.

Let’s examine Rula’s monkey business (a term that comes from the Bengali “bãdrami”, meaning “monkey-behaviour” as in describing mischief) involving “the three Japanese monkeys”, more properly known as Mizaru, Kikazaru, and Iwazaru whose names come from a Japanese saying meaning, “see not, hear not, speak not”.

Ironically, as a Jew and yoga practitioner whose early years were in Michigan’s capitol, growing up in surrounded by people of many nationalities and with the influence of Taoism, Buddhism, and several East Asian cultures as near as the presence of my literal neighbors, I had never truly taken the time to consider the meaning of hearing no evil, seeing no evil, and speaking no evil until I heard it Rula use it as an excuse for very typically blatant racism. It’s quite instructive.

I looked it up and realized I could relate it more to the yogic limb of pratyahara, which is the practice in yoga of turning one’s focus from exterior senses to internal, as well as the yamas (ways yogi(ni)s balance their behavior ethically) of ahimsa (non-violence) and satya (truthfulness), since the point is not about literally closing your eyes and not hearing so much as not internalizing what you see and hear.

Or from an embodied Jewish perspective, I would relate the concept to reeh, shema, and lashon hara. See and hear God’s blessings in order to choose them over curses, and do not choose evil speech. This is never as easy as it sounds, as Rula is finding out. It’s very easy to focus on the negative and trash talk, something I personally continue to work on daily; tshuva that continues into 5787, percieving and responding mindfully and consistently.

Rula, I don’t know you and it’s not my place to absolve you or even accept your apology. You stepped in it in your way running to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories and then tripped over your own wagging tongue. We cannot correct every mistake we make, yet this one is still fresh enough for you to own up to the entirety of what you said being wrong just like I owe everyone with the surname Epstein an apology for my own ill-considered quip just because Gary wrote several things I found deeply unfunny. Sorry Gary, sorry Epstein family, sorry for taking so long to own that and thank you Sharon for being an excellent and kind teacher. We are never defined by the worst actions of our families and our people, especially when we work to do better on our own terms.

Yet that point of tshuva brings up something else, Rula. I cannot pretend that every Arab and every Muslim is antisemitic and racist, since that would be an unfair generalization based on people saying things like you did. I grew up with a fair number of Arab neighbors including the first Palestinian I met in the mid-1990s who was friends with an Israeli named Nimrod, both of whom told me ghost stories about Israel’s haunted prisons. If I can see that neither Arabs nor Muslims are monolithic bigots why can’t you criticize Israel without pretending there’s a vast Israel lobby pulling the strings and continuing to carry the false grievance of genocide? Your actions are not working towards a better world, you are clamoring for the destruction of a people you demonize through accusations to the point of dispelling the illusion that this was ever about human rights much less about self-determination.

Palestinians don’t have a country yet because their movement is not and never was designed to accept the responsibility or terms for one. Comparatively, Arabs in Israel deserve better than they are currently getting, definitely yes. While on the other sidebif the yellow line Gazans are getting better than they and their elected leaders gave Israeli on October 7th and in the days after. If Gaza and the West Bank want to be part of a country with the protections if a state, they can ask to join Israel and seek to be Israeli citizens, and they can help Israel expel Hamas and friends as the price of staying on the Israeli land they occupy instead of the forced eviction some MKs call for.

Israel is actually quite real and for all Israel’s faults is a democratic nation where even Islamists have representatives in the Knesset, while Palestinians are ruled by terrorists and kleptocrats who rig elections, steal from the poor, and kill marginalized people while the world actually does ignore such evils. That’s not a generalization, much less false – it’s the reality of a double standard that blames Israel while absolving much worse from a people who demand self-determination at the cost of the only country of the Jewish people. What Israel demands is the opposite of what you demonstrated of anyone who supports my tiny democratic homeland that’s an oasis in a desert of at-best autocracy and compromised democracy.

Embracing Israel has forced me to let go of my own bigotries in order to stand among those supporters of my people and my people themselves. The Palestinian movement has done the opposite, becoming a force of division and destruction while constantly projecting that divisiveness onto politicians trying to fight for human rights, even to the point of undermining former VP Kamala Harris when she ran for president and undermining her political party even now by costing the Democrats potential support. Embracing Israel has taught me not to stay focused on the ignorance of people who say things like Rula Jebreal said while learning to spesk the truth more skillfully.

I don’t always succeed and I can’t catalogue all my failures, yet it’s still incumbent upon each of us to see the good and to respond constructively. When we backpedal on our backtalk, it’s on us to try to own up when we can and repair what we can all the moreso because we can’t fix everything ourselves. The first step is that inward turning in order to calm the “monkey mind” whose mischief leads us into thoughts that get us in trouble. Some people like to meditate, others like yoga or qigong, yet if you continue to believe and repeat lies about Israel your mind will keep tripping you up no matter how much work you do because you keep letting the lies you see and hear determine your reality.