मान न मान मैं तेरा मेहमान!

The Israeli and western media seem to be aghast that Egypt is refusing to take any Palestinian refugees and keeping its border crossing closed, endangering innocent lives, even as hundreds of thousands are trapped in the crossfire in Gaza.

This logic is something like this: Imagine you have a neighbour who’s assaulting his wife and kids and is pushing them out of their home, which is next to yours. They ring your doorbell, but since you are already full up and unable to take in any new guests, you request the husband to perhaps stop beating up his family and allow them to stay in their home. The husband now turns to you and accuses you of being inhuman for denying his family a refuge and leaving them to suffer (he forgets to mention that he’s the cause of that specific suffering, because he thinks that’s somehow irrelevant to the matter at hand, given that his wife recently threw the crockery at him, tired as she was of the frequent beatings, and this crockery hit him in his nuts, where she no doubt aimed it at, which kind of makes his raising his hand on her and the kids kosher, if you know what I mean).

He claims all your love for humanity and your concern for his family is fake given how you won’t even accomodate these poor, molested (by him, but then, as he insists, that’s nitpicking and merely semantics…and she started it anyway), needy people in your nice, warm, cosy home, but you’ll sit in judgement about how he, the master of his house and family, is supposed to treat his own wife & children. What a hypocrite, he’d say to you.

In this, he’d be joined by his friends, family, other neighbours, and even random people unconnected and unaffected by this entire fiasco, as they loudly proclaim your lack of humanity and tell you to, ‘have a heart, yaar!’

And you’d not have an answer except to gape open-mouthed at this reversal of roles, as you turn from a concerned neighbour to someone equally evil as the perpetrator himself, and wonder how the hell this happened, where you are now, suddenly, the villain of the piece, responsible not just for the welfare of this family, but also squarely to blame if they were to find themselves bleeding and homeless.

How fucked up would that situation be, right? Right?