Rhetorical Questions as a Tool of the Oppressor: Another Think Piece During a Genocide
Part I: I Dare you to fight me in the comments about it
Over the last two weeks we’ve been watching a genocide unfold.
I already had someone argue with me about that very word.
“A genocide? Really?” they asked. Haughty in their rhetorical precision: You used words wrong. I win.
An assertion usually comes next. Can you feel yourself bracing for it already? Will I stand with her or against her?
An assertion can be an invitation to war. And maybe you’d call me cowardly if I dodged like a fox into a hedgerow looking for covert ways in.
So here is my assertion, so we can fight on the plains like men:
Rhetorical questions are a tool of the oppressor.
I’ve seen thousands of them in the last few days — and if you’re following the news at all, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Rhetoric itself is something I prize — it’s what I studied during my master’s program. But rhetoric is not serving us. Right now rhetoric isn’t being wielded to create dialogue or connection — it is being wielded as a chance to tout one’s own prowess and righteousness. It exists to win.
Right now, it’s becoming more and more clear that the western world is choosing to try to win, the same way that people have chosen to try to win throughout history: through brutal enforcement of colonial power. (There I go making another assertion already, don’t I.)
I must pause, then, and switch up my course already. This is war, remember? Let us decorate ourselves and enter the arena. It would be fitting to start with an invocation — a prayer asking a being or god to attend:
I grew up evangelical Christian, steeped in the Gospels which told about Jesus’ time wandering and preaching. He told scores of parables — cryptic stories that were supposed to help me learn how to be a moral person — so I thought.
The stories were about treasures found in the middle of fields, little old women with coins and brooms, anthropomorphic weeds choking the fields, robber invasions, barn burnings. Class wars from the abyss between heaven and hell. They were vivid stories — but confusing ones. Unless you become like little children, he’d say, you cannot enter the kingdom of god. Or, the kingdom of god is like a mustard seed…the smallest of all seeds. Or, the last will be first and the first will be last.
In all my years of Christendom I never heard a proper sermon or read a passable essay that sussed out the dimensions of this intangible kingdom. Even the theologians seemed confused. The kingdom of god is already among us, Jesus would say. You can’t see it, but it’s already here.
And then at the end of the story, he’d say, “He who has ears to hear. Let him hear.”
This is the being I’d like to invoke: he who has ears to hear.
Part II “Do Israeli’s Deserve Justice?”
Mona Chalabi, British journalist and writer, put that phrase into ChatGPT on October 16, 2023, using a brand new account.
“Justice is a fundamental principle that applies to all individuals and groups,” it told her. Easy, right? “Liberty and justice for all?” American Christians have been holding strong — in theory, anyway, to this ideal for decades.
She swapped out one word in the sentence and tried again:
Do Palistineans deserve justice?”
“The question of justice for Palestinians is a complex and highly debated issue,” replied ChatGPT.
Read that again.
If I make an assertion, you will argue with me — and that’s a distraction. I’m here to wrestle, not to win.
Read it again.
I study words and meanings and how we hear things or don’t hear things through the medium of language. Chat GPT is a giant projection of our collective mind. It’s a zoom-out for the industrialized world. A question I am asking right now is, do we hear ourselves?
In their poem, “Grammar Lessons,” Alok Vaid-Manon, a gender non-conforming writer and performance artist, writes about how the dynamics of power play out in our language as constructions of control. As an activist, they routinely experience death threats and brutal derision for what they wear, how they act, and what they say.
“It’s not just about who can speak, but who gets to speak,” they write. “He who controls the word controls the world… What they mean is: Don’t object to remaining object. You are not a subject (unless you subject yourself to me.)…
“Subject. Predicate. Power. In order to be understood, you must have power. What this means is we could both launch the same words and they would land in different places. What this means is that so often their words are prioritized more than our lives.”
Over the last twelve days I have read countless comments and thinkpieces and reels that portray some version of “understanding both sides.” That the “war” is “nuanced.” Meanwhile I went straight to the source, following Jesus’ command about the least of these — find the people without a voice.
Gazans. With cameras, and phone, and voices, witnessing, sharing and speaking, and crying, then screaming, as they watched the western world portray them as literal animals, rejoicing over their ongoing deaths, or took time for “self-care” or broadcasted their “neutral” stances all over the first slide of their posts.
Despite being heavily censored, shadowbanned, and accounts taken down, millions of people all over the globe have decided to start listening.
He who has ears to hear. Let him hear.
Growing up with decidedly Zionist teachings (I didn’t know they were but was thought they were promises Christians in the Bible texts) I had experienced a rude awakening when my friend who had spent time in Palestine during her peace studies program described what it was actually like there.
Rude, actually, is an understatement.
It radicalized me.
“Sometimes American activists just go to Gaza and watch the Israeli guards at checkpoints,” she told me. “Because they won’t commit as many atrocities when a white person is there to watch. So they just go. And they witness.”
“You learn from the part of the story you focus on,” said gay comedian Hannah Gadsby. It took one person telling me the story of when she visited Gaza for me to break me into a new reality — or should I say OUT OF an old one — the prison, you could say, in my own mind. The new kingdom I found on the other side was bigger than the one I’d been living in before. More brutal, less mine, but more true. Less blind.
Part III: Questioning the Question
The question of justice for Palestinians should not be a complex or highly debated issue.
Is the assertion so many have responded over the last two weeks. And a collective voice has risen against that assertion, wanting, needing to win. For many, it’s simply reality: the question of justice for Palestinians is a complex and highly debated issue.
Which should horrify us. But those who cannot hear the brutality of that stark comparison start the war with a rhetorical question, instead:
“But what about the terrorists?”
— they ask in scores, right underneath reels of Palestinans begging the free western world to raise their voices to stop their ongoing massacre. Right in the middle of an ongoing genocide.
I have seen at least five news anchors supposedly interviewing Palestinians whose families and friends were just bombed speak over them instead, demanding that they “condemn the violence.” I’ve watched the anchors raise a barrage of non-words right over the words of grieving who refused to be backed into a rhetorical corner:
“But, but but but but — ” they interrupt, so persistently that the interviewee either has to shut up, or speak more loudly — aggressively, violently over the cloud of b–b-b-b-bombs, trying to obliterate the bodies of their voices trying to escape from behind the wall they made.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I’m here to wrestle; not to win.
Read it again.
Over the last five years I have watched, weaving patterns over time and space, as marginalized bodies of all kinds have been suppressed and ignored right in front of me, in left and right spaces both. During Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, it was the black women who were pushed to the back and ignored and were called rabble rousers while white men hollered slogans from the megaphone. In Christian schools, teachers and staff have told the “least of these” to sit down and be quiet and unquestioningly obey. At “reform schools” where I worked they were villianized and brutalized as criminals-to-be. As a woman, I have experienced abuse through physical violence and emotional terrorism, and watched and pleaded to men of my churches, who claimed to protect me and my friends, only to be told flat out that my version of reality — wasn’t. Ten witnesses to one authority, all he needed was to say the word no.
The truth is objective, I was told. And the object of truth belonged to him.
And I’ve watched long enough I know the patterns, not just with my mind, but in my very body. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
There is actually a field of critical theory about this. It’s called intersectionality, and it was built by black women, who have experienced the violence of racism and patriarchy both in their marginalized bodies. They stand at the crossroads as advocates for the idea that liberation is not possible without the willingness to witness the Other across many intersections, not just a single binary. It creates fields instead of rulers.
In Jungian psychology, it’s called shadow work. Jesus talked about it too. Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone, he said.
Every day since the attack on Israel, the reality gets less “nuanced,” and the propaganda more desperate. Palestinians have begged on camera for media outlets and the public to call for an end to the bombing, and journalists are still asking them right over their begging voices. Again and again:
“But what about the terrorists?”
Let’s ask better questions.
Like: Who owns the language ?
Who gets to define what a terrorist is, what a slaughtered baby is, and what fight back is allowed to mean?
The answer is echoing:
We own you. We get to define what is human and what is animal. We get to define what is slaughter and what is self-defense. We get to demand the deference of the already-subjugated, asking, forcing you to “condemn” you own resistance fighters when youhave no one else in the world actually fighting for them, as if an assertion to morality will bring back any of the Israeli dead.
The word terrorist is a wall — as solid as the one around Gaza while it is being bombed with nowhere to run. The question herds them. Corrals them: No, I do not support terrorists: puts them back into thier lives in prison. Yes, I support terrorists —
gives us permission to kill them too.
Read that again.
Part IV We are the Ones Inside the Walls
In May of 2022, @yehavit wrote on Instagram, “Violence isn’t a drop more legitimate when it’s systemic. Anyone who tries to justify it is just as much of a ‘terrorist supporter’ if not more.”
Her tactic is brilliant, and rare. It takes back agency over the language by challenging the word terrorist, for how it has been wielded by those who didn’t have a say in defining it.
Jesus gave us tools to flip the script, too. He intentionally focused on everyone nobody wanted to focus on. He listened. Jesus turns this deadly logic upside down, turning our own deafness against us.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
This is the unfolding reality, resounding in the noise of bombs and rhetorical questions alike:
The western world supports genocide.
It was never about the dead. It was about forcing a subjugated people to remain subjugated, even by their very language. It was about making sure that power in upheld, from a play of words to the destruction of their bodies.
Colonizer rhetoric is exactly like colonizer territory: there are no doors out. There is nothing to relate to or love (the essence of which is relating across difference, as Audre Lorde put it,) and there is no difference when who you are speaking to is simply an annex to your kingdom.
Or a prison inside of it.
I truly believe that when Jesus said, “he who has ears to hear, let him hear” it was an invitation to start listening differently. Instead of answering impossible questions, he was flipping the colonizer logic of what was a considered a THING to be owned and dominated and what was considered a being to relate to.
What if WE were the thing without ears? What if we were the ones with a wall around our hearts and minds?
And what if the gift of hearing must be bestowed onto us? Not the other way around?
What if we had to wait for it? Instead of seizing it?
What if we were the ones that had to beg for it? Instead of demanding its appearance in the court of our mind?
We are currently repeating a history we vowed never to repeat.
Now is the time to beg:
OH GIVE US EARS TO HEAR.
Let us hear.
