A provoked young man channels political anger into education rather than violence

Evidence

His solution is to fight back with reason and education. “You have to use your head,” he loves to say. When he was at the store, he almost flew into a rage after the Danish cartoon controversy. A customer came into the store cursing the Prophet and saying that he, the customer, believed in only one thing, pulling a dollar bill in front of his face. Akram found it insulting in the extreme, but he was able to hold himself back after his uncle told him in Arabic to pity the man rather than fight him. “The older I get, the more I realize that the violence isn’t going to do anything,” he told me. “Education is important. Being educated about certain things. You have to do that instead of using violence.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of intergenerational Palestinian activism versus the futility of violent resistance, echoing the moral calculus in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart about how a people fights back.
• QUESTION: The “generations now of fighting with nothing to show for it” raises the question of how young diaspora Palestinians calibrate their political participation against a struggle they observe from afar.