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Social Justice - A Conversation
Unknown Speaker 0:03
Hi, I'm Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Honors College of UNLV. And the Boyd School of Law.
Unknown Speaker 0:09
Hi, I'm Gabriella Tam. I'm a fourth year accounting student.
Unknown Speaker 0:13
And welcome to social justice, social justice, our conversation, a conversation. Well, good evening, everybody. Hi, this is Charles Stanton. I'm here along with my partner, Gabriella Tam. We're going to do tonight, a special edition of our show. Usually, when we do this program, we go into a lot of different issues over a half hour period. But tonight, we're going to just concentrate on the one issue, which is a worldwide issue, humanitarian issue, moral issue. And then, of course, is the situation in Israel and in the West Bank, and all those related things. So I guess we could get the ball rolling. I had the opportunity over the last few days to actually converse with a bunch of people and also to, to see the the tapes of actually what happened during the Saturday onslaught by Hamas. And I think one of the things in our world is that due to the internet and social media and everything, there's the danger of all of us being desensitized to violence. But but seeing the but seeing some of those tapes, a few in particular, were extraordinarily disturbing. And it made me think of a story my father told me a number of years ago when he was alive. My family on my father's side was Irish. And my father was very much for Irish unification, the the unification of the northern part of Ireland, and the unification of the southern part of Ireland. And when he was a young man, he had gone to a recruiting meeting for the Irish Republican Army. And then once they went out, they were in this, I guess it was a warehouse on the west side in New York. And they were talking about all the different things that they were going to do to get England to leave, to leave Ireland. And they were discussing basically blowing up schools and, you know, putting bombs on trains, and all kinds of stuff. And my father had always been a very passionate believer in Irish unification. And, and he remained so until until the time he died. Well, the meeting ended and the man came up to my father and said, you know, we have all these plans. He says, Do you want to be do you want to be part of what we're going to do? And my father looked at me, and he said, something that I thought was almost hopefully universal, universally applicable. And my father said, he said, you know, he said, there are some things that a man may not do for his country. And I and as I was seeing those, as I was seeing those tapes, and the, the murder, the actual murders of two little children, and the the women who are being sexually abused, and then and then shot in the head or beheaded. I said there for this, there was no justification. You know, there, there was war, and there was all the rest of these things and armies and everything. But what it reminded me of what it reminded me, somewhat of was the Russian invasion in the Ukraine, where they had gone into the Ukraine, and they had committed, you know, mass murder and torture, oh, these, you know, horrific things, and how the whole population basically what was terrorized but by what they did, and that was one of the that was one of the things that, that that stuck with me, you know, and of course, you know, that's not to that's not to, you know, say that there isn't a you know, injustice and wrong on the other side, but it is, it is to say that there are there are rules that you cannot, you cannot basically commit acts, acts and atrocities like that, because ultimately what you have done is you have to complete dehumanization, and basically, it You're supporting basically. mass murderer.
Unknown Speaker 5:05
Yeah. I think like, these people are going for, like killing the wrong people. They're killing innocent people, and maybe made me feel like they're going to the wrong people like, Who the hell like Hamas wants? It should not be these innocent people not want these innocent people did?
Unknown Speaker 5:29
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, I think I think one of the things that you're dealing with there is you're dealing with with people who have basically either cannot or will not talk to one another about trying to read some kind of a dialogue as to you know, what the future is going to be? And that the only the only answer the only answer is violence, but violence is not an answer, because violence ultimately promotes for more violence. You know, I agree, you know, it's like, when you in one of my favorite movies is Ben Hur. And Esther says to Ben Hur, she said, violence begets violence as dog eats dog, you know, once it gets started, once it gets started, you know, you can't stop it. And, and that's, and that's what you're having. Now, the question, of course, be? Well, I know, we've we've both given us a lot of thought, you know, why, why, just at this particular time, they decided to, they decided to make this attack, because they weren't really attacking the vast majority people that were unarmed, they had no, they were not connected to the military. Yeah, you know, it was it was just like, it happened out of nowhere. But, you know, and reading about it, and, you know, talking to people who, you know, you know, live over there, and also people who live here, that one of the one of the things that they wanted to try to do, Hamas was, was disrupt the treaty that was going to be signed between Egypt would between Saudi Arabia and Israel, where they would basically, you know, agree to acknowledge the State of Israel, and then they could have, you know, economic ties and, and all the rest of it, you know, and, yeah, I don't think that's going to happen now. I think that I think, yeah, I think this is gonna be a long, prolonged OS. It may be for Israel, it may be Israel's Vietnam. It may be Israel, where they, where they get to where they get stuck in this basically endless war. And I remember, when I was a young person, you know, the government to our government, the United States government, kept giving kept giving people assurances that, you know, we just need so many more troops. And Warren is going to be one. And we started out, we started out actually, with President Kennedy sending the original troops in there. And then when President Johnson came in, they had like, you know, 50 or 75,000 troops. And then the generals, were talking to the president, he said, we just need another 50,000 troops. So he sent it another 50,000 troops. And they went on and on and on, to the point where we had almost a million troops in Vietnam. And we still couldn't win the war. You see. And so I don't know, I don't know where where this is gonna go. But I mean, I don't see. I don't see any. I don't see any. I don't see any end to it.
Unknown Speaker 9:10
And it's also really sad, because this is all going on, while like, all the war between Ukraine and Russia is happening. So it just feels like there's violence everywhere, and it's really heartbreaking. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 9:25
laughs I will. Absolutely. I mean, so many of the things that, you know, as I said, before, that Hamas did, the Russians did. And now Now, of course, you know, you have you have great instability in the Congress. Because you're apparently you know, that this this guy that is supposed to be the speaker Steve Scalise, hopefully he's, you know, relatively sensible. But, you know, other countries look at look to the United States for leadership. And that's one of the things that over the past 567 years we haven't had, we've had instability dire, you know, and it's interesting because we're a democracy. So always other countries, you know, say, well, United States, you know, they have a democracy, and they have, you know, all these different things that we don't have in our own country.
Unknown Speaker 10:20
But yeah, like, where the standard? Yeah, well, this democratic like standard? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's
Unknown Speaker 10:27
interesting. And, of course, the other thing, and I think I've, we've talked about it is like, the lack of leadership from the United Nations, well, we're on, you know, like, when, on the Sunday after, you know, they had the, the, the attack, you know, they all get together, and they all have these meetings. And it's, it's, it's parallel, so many different world crises, the UN, they never can ever make a decision, they can never can get a consensus on actually, what needs to be done to bring peace. And, you know, we've seen We've, we've absolutely seen it in the Ukraine. And that's because the, when the United Nations was founded, they gave the five original signatories to the UN Charter, a veto power of over whatever the General Assembly would do. So now, basically, what you have is in Ukraine, and in, you know, of course, in the Middle East, that Russia and China primarily, they oppose any kind of peacekeeping, any kind of like peace conference? Because it's in their interest, that there'd be the stabilization? Yeah. And I don't know, I don't know how, at this point, you can, I don't know how in this point, you can change it. But obviously, you know, something, something needs to be done. And then, of course, you know, you know, getting back to getting back to, you know, the West Bank and Gaza and all that. The it is a high, it is a very high risk situation for Israel, because, of course, they're gonna go in there. And their primary mission and going in there, obviously, is to is to eliminate Hamas. Well, you're not going to eliminate Hamas no more than you eliminate al Qaeda. Or Hezbollah. It's an idea. It's an ideology, okay. It's a belief, it's a belief system, you could kill, you know, you could kill tons of people, but it doesn't stop the ideology from persisting. And, you know, then of course, the other issue. The other issue, of course, is, you're gonna go in there, the place is basically falling apart from the bombing and the lack of infrastructure. There's, there's dozens and dozens of tunnels, and you don't know, when you go in there, who the enemy is, and who the ally, you know, you don't know whether people are gonna be peaceful, or they're gonna attack you. And it's so much reminds me of Vietnam, it's so much reminds me of Vietnam. When I was going to law school. I had a I had a professor, and he had represented some of the my white defendants. They were accused, they were accused of war crimes. And, you know, they will go into these villages, and you didn't know, like, if somebody, you know, who seems to be innocent, you know, had a Molotov cocktail, or they had a grenade strapped to them, or what have you, you know? Yeah, it's, it's really kind of scary. And, you know, it's kind of, in my mind reminds me too, that, you know, our country has been relatively lucky as far as like, you know, we've had terrorism and we had, we had 911, and everything, but we haven't really had like, what a lot of these countries go through, where you have, like people, like, every night they go to sleep, and they don't know when they're going to wake up or not, you know, with all the you know, with all the missiles flying around, you know, Hamas has the missiles has was the missiles, Israel has the missiles. And I think it's really like, like, conviction created. I think, in both societies, a sense of hopelessness, like that this is this is going to continue and continue and continue. And, you know, it's never it's never going to it's never going to end and I don't know I don't know how you I don't know how you change the Elena how you change that dynamic to have to have The dynamic where people, you know, talk, Thomas Friedman, the guy who writes to the Times had a really interesting article last week, and he was talking about, you know, what the, what the lay of the land is there. And I think that what Hamas wants, and what what what Hezbollah wants is they want as as massive an invasion of Gaza as they possibly can get. And and that way they will be able to recruit all these other people to, to their cause. And by doing that, also, they would they would basically wipe out any host of peace that could be could be created between Israel, and, you know, the Arab countries. Yeah. How do you, you know, because because, you know, you know, your Chinese, how do you see, do you see any comparison in that, and the relationship, say, between, like, the Republic of China and Taiwan visa vie that dynamic?
Unknown Speaker 16:14
I mean, like, I'm I, my family from Hong Kong, so I'm more familiar with the stuff going on in Hong Kong. And honestly, like, look, like Hong Kong is constantly being invaded, like first by like Britain, and then they finally got, they were able to run their own country, like city. And then now we're, like, we're under trying to drill again. And now it's just like, it's not the same. It's not the same place, the same place that I would visit, and not the same. Like home for my for my mom, you know,
Unknown Speaker 16:56
right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's interesting now, how we're seeing so much so many these countries, turning to dictatorships, you know, you have you have, well, Russia, Russia, history of Russia has always been a dictator to the only had like, a few years, where they actually had actually had freedom. And, and China too, but you're seeing you know, you know, a very right wing party in, in the country of Italy. You had it in the Philippines. You know, there's a whole bunch of places. And,
Unknown Speaker 17:34
like even here,
Unknown Speaker 17:36
well, even here, yeah, even here, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. What do you what do you think causes? What do you think the attraction of that is to people? Why there's so many people who are willing to support those kinds of governments?
Unknown Speaker 17:56
I think I think that maybe they're tired or something and they see him or they just see what the other party like, are saying. They're like, Oh, that's what I want. Even like, though, they're extreme, like, extreme, right? Like, I'm tired of. I'm tired of being, like, oppressed, I guess.
Unknown Speaker 18:30
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think I think you're right on that. I think that, you know, we had the movie, we had the verdict movie, which I think is so profound. And he you know, he talks about, you know, he makes things he talks to the jury. He talks about how people feel, they feel that the system is corrupt, they feel that the institutions have failed, that there's no charge, there's no justice in everything. And I think I think that's true, I think in a lot of places. That's exactly what people fail. I think that's that's exactly what people people feel here. Yeah, I mean, you know, is the justice system is the justice system and equal justice system. So in other words, like, you know, if you were a poor person, or you were a person of color, do you get the same justice as a as a white person would get? And the obvious answer is no. And then if you're a white, and then if you're done, if you're a white person, you will be asked, well, you have a white person, but you think you get the same justice as a person who's rich? And the answer was no. So both the minority community, the people of color, and the people who are Asian and the people who are Latino, and the people who are who are white middle class, they don't get it. So people are looking people are looking for an answer. And somebody shows up on the scene, who's supposedly will be the answer to all their problems and say, basically, you know, well, I'm you know, I'm for I'm for equality, and I'm for all these different things. And you know, you know, we're gonna stop, we're gonna stop the people coming in from the border and all the rest of the stuff. But then once you see what they do, it's just a different version of what the people were against in the first place. It's just not exactly it's like it's denial of rights, but just it's a denial of rights to another bunch of people. So it doesn't really, you know, it doesn't really, it doesn't really change anything, you know, but our our, you know, but our political system here, I mean, I mean, you know, Benjamin Franklin, when he, when they when he was leaving convention hall, he said that, you know, they A man asked him, he says, What did you do in there? What did you create, and Benjamin Franklin says, we created a republic, if we can keep it. And he I think he understood even then, that democracy is so precarious, that democracy really depends on the good intentions of the people who are in positions of power and authority. And if people are, you know, really don't believe in those things, but just use the, you use those positions to, to benefit their own needs. Eventually, people will grow very disillusion. And then that's where you have people thinking about, like, alternate extreme measures. I think that's what I think. And, you know, I'm not really a social media creature. But I mean, you know, you would probably be more of a social media creature than I am. But, but but, but, you know, you know, in the class and the class that I teach that you're in, I'm sure, I'm sure that you folks come across a lot of dissatisfied people who really, really have issues with our government.
Unknown Speaker 22:05
Yeah, both sides. I mean, like, even now with the Israel and like the Palestine, I, I'm constantly getting both sides. That's why I like feel so conflicted about it.
Unknown Speaker 22:18
Yeah. Yeah. Well, sure. Well, absolutely. You know, absolutely. And, of course, and, of course, you know, sometimes, you know, they sometimes in life, you know, a one way, it's good that people, people get that steam off, you know, people are able to express themselves in a lot of parts of the world, you can do that. Here, here, you're able to hear you're able to do that. You know, and that's that's true. I suppose, not just in, you know, the issue of the invasion, but I'm sure it's true in a lot of things in our country where it's true on immigration, where you know, people's people see it differently. People see, you know, that, you know, this, they think that's too many people coming in the other side thinks that people are being, you know, this prejudice against the people. Some people see the migrants as evildoers, even though they haven't done anything wrong. So, yeah, you can, you can go on a cannot go on all those different directions, which is a shame, actually, because the country basically was founded on that dream, you know, the dream of the country, you know, the Statue of Liberty and all those things. was the dream of so like people.
Unknown Speaker 23:43
Yeah, like America is literally like, we are a mixing pot of all these different cultures.
Unknown Speaker 23:48
Exactly, exactly. And I think I think that that that has always been, has always been our strength in many ways, that we have people from people from all over the world who not only had to know we had the dream of what America is, but also had but also had that unique talent, that that energy, that that that willingness to succeed, that they understood that America basically, was maybe the one place on earth where people could, you know, come to and be treated equally and be treated fairly, and that they can be as successful as their talents took them. I think that's, that's very important. I came across something. I came across something that I wanted, I sort of wanted to read and to have you take it in and the boat was taken in, and hopefully, all of us take it in. It was written it was written by it was written by a woman who's a rabbi. And it was it was written by a man who was Islamic. We've known each other for years they live in Chicago. They've worked together, they've worked together on a lot of social justice products. And they have issues and they happen to be in Israel at the time of the attack. Yeah. So let me just read this. And this, this will be, I think, a nice way to end our program. That day, right. We are very concerned about the safety of Muslim and Jewish communities here in the United States. As tensions flare in Israel, and the West Bank, the Palestinian people are not the enemy of the Jewish people. And the Jewish people are not the enemy of the Palestinian people. The true enemy is any ideology that degrades the humanizes and diminishes the sacred goodness in all humanity. We recognize that fear, anger and helplessness that so many of us can feel, but in our tradition, it teaches us to turn to prayer, loving, supportive one another, and working for justice and peace as outlets. For these feelings and non violence. We must stand up for the security and safety of everyone. Our hearts break, when we see that so many in both Israel, and in the West Bank, and Gaza, live under the canopy of helplessness and hopelessness. We call upon religious leaders, politicians and our world community to stand together for justice and peace. In a sacred land filled with so much sorrow, death and destruction. We can recall the powerful prophets of the Palestinian American prophet who said, there was death here, and there were promises of more, there is life here. Anyone reading this as breathing may be hurting, but breathing for sure. And if there is any light to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who looked for peace and justice, amid the rubble. And when and when the rhetoric has cleared, the Phoenix will rise. We must affirm life, we must always affirm life, we have got to carried carry each other now. Whether whatever nationality you are, you're either with life or against it. And we must affirm life, may more of us of all backgrounds dig deep into our highest ideals and practices. So we can truly radiate the divine light of truth, justice and mercy so desperately needed throughout Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, across this holy land, and also in our dear country, and across our world. I think on those, I think on those profound and blessed words, we can say goodnight to our audience. Goodnight, Gabriella. Good night.
Unknown Speaker 28:00
Thank you for listening to our show. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at tangi one that is t a M, G, one at UNLV thought nevada.edu. Or to contact Professor charles.stanton@unlv.edu See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai