On his web site, for­mer Talk­ing Heads front­man David Byrne writes:

I received this email last Fri­day morn­ing from my friend, Bri­an Eno. I shared it with my office and we all felt a great respon­si­bil­i­ty to pub­lish Bri­an’s heavy, wor­thy note. In response, Bri­an’s friend, Peter Schwartz, replied with an eye-open­ing his­tor­i­cal expla­na­tion of how we got here. What’s clear is that no one has the moral high ground.

First comes Eno’s clear­ly heart­felt con­dem­na­tion of civil­ian deaths in Gaza (par­tic­u­lar­ly the death of chil­dren) and Amer­i­ca’s appar­ent indif­fer­ence to what’s hap­pen­ing there:

Today I saw a pic­ture of a weep­ing Pales­tin­ian man hold­ing a plas­tic car­ri­er bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shred­ded (the hos­pi­tal’s word) by an Israeli mis­sile attack — appar­ent­ly using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You prob­a­bly know what those are — hun­dreds of small steel darts packed around explo­sive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Kha­laf al-Nawas­ra. He was 4 years old.

I sud­den­ly found myself think­ing that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than any­thing has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they want­ed to launch a com­mis­sion into that. Amer­i­ca won’t sign up to it.

What is going on in Amer­i­ca? I know from my own expe­ri­ence how slant­ed your news is, and how lit­tle you get to hear about the oth­er side of this sto­ry. But — for Christ’s sake! — it’s not that hard to find out. Why does Amer­i­ca con­tin­ue its blind sup­port of this one-sided exer­cise in eth­nic cleans­ing? WHY?

What fol­lows is part of futur­ist Peter Schwartz’s response, which, rich in his­tor­i­cal detail, splits the blame some­where down the mid­dle. Echo­ing Byrne’s sense that the two sides have lost their moral posi­tions, Schwartz notes:

Even though I have no sup­port for the Israeli posi­tion I find the oppo­si­tion to Israel ques­tion­able in its fail­ure to be sim­i­lar­ly out­raged by a vast num­ber of oth­er moral hor­rors in the recent past and cur­rent­ly active. Just to name a few; Cam­bo­dia, Tibet, Sudan, Soma­lia, Nicaragua, Mex­i­co, Argenti­na, Liberia, Cen­tral African Repub­lic, Ugan­da, North Korea, Bosnia, Koso­vo, Venezuela, Syr­ia, Egypt, Libya, Zim­bab­we and espe­cial­ly right now Nige­ria. The Arab Spring, which has become a dark win­ter for most Arabs and the large scale slaugh­ter now under­way along the bor­ders of Iraq and Syr­ia are good exam­ples of what they do to them­selves. And our nations, the US, the Brits, the Dutch, the Rus­sians and the French have all played their parts in these oth­er moral out­rages. The grue­some body count and social destruc­tion left behind dwarfs any­thing that the Israelis have done. The only dif­fer­ence with the Israeli’s is their claim to a moral high ground, which they long ago left behind in the refugee camps of Lebanon. They are now just a nation, like any oth­er, try­ing to sur­vive in a hos­tile sea of hate.

We should be clear, that giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty, the Arabs would dri­ve the Jews into the sea and that was true from day one. There was no way back from war once a reli­gious state was declared. So Israel, once com­mit­ted to a nation state in that loca­tion and grant­ed that right by oth­er nations have had no choice but to fight. In my view there­fore, nei­ther side has any shred of moral stand­ing left, nor have the nations that sup­port­ed both sides…

I don’t think there is any hon­or to go around here. Israel has lost its way and com­mits hor­rors in the inter­est of their own sur­vival. And the Arabs and Per­sians per­pet­u­ate a con­flict rid­den neigh­bor­hood with almost no excep­tions, fight­ing against each oth­er and with hate of Israel the only thing that they share.

To read the com­plete exchange, head over to Byrne’s site and read Gaza and the Loss of Civ­i­liza­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Lis­ten to “Bri­an Eno Day,” a 12-Hour Radio Show Spent With Eno & His Music (Record­ed in 1988)

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies”

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve