Some years ago I interviewed leaders of the Hamas movement in Gaza, including the founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the chief operating manager of the organizations, Dr Abdel Aziz Rantisi. While Sheikh Yassin mostly spouted religious rhetoric and said little about the organization, Dr Rantisi was quite forthcoming. I have quoted him in my book, Terror in the Mind of God, and now have gone back to my notes from that interview to give a fuller account of it in an attempt to more fully understand the perspective of Hamas on the use of violence, the possibilities of living alongside Jews, and its prospects for the future.

We met in Dr Rantisi’s comfortable house in Khan Yunis, not far from the compound where Sheikh Yassin lived and taught. I had some trouble finding the location since my Gaza taxi driver spoke little English and I could not converse in Arabic, but we picked up some students at the Islamic University in Gaza who were Hamas supporters and were eager to join me and facilitate my meeting.

Rantisi was wearing a three-piece suit and greeted me at the door, and looked very much like the middle-class medical practitioner and professor that in fact he was. He greeted me with passable English, and invited me inside where he had prepared tea and biscuits.

We talked a bit about his background. His family home had been somewhere between what is now the Israeli cities of Ashdod and Tel Aviv, and was now obliterated. His grandfather, an uncle, and three cousins had died in their struggles with the Israeli occupation, though he didn’t say how.

But he did not hate Jews, Dr Rantisis was quick to reassure me. He only despised Zionism and the occupation of Palestinian land. He reminded me that Jews and Christians are “people of the book” in Islamic reckoning, and they could live amicably side by side.

“Even in Israel?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “as long as you didn’t call it Israel.” He said he could envision a single state solution where people could have common citizenship regardless of their religious affiliation.

I was a bit surprised by this since Hamas was organized around the idea of the political unity of Islam. When I had earlier met with Sheikh Yassin he said that Palestine would not be fully free until it was a Muslim Palestine.

“Yes,” Dr Rantisi said, as if there was no contradiction in the two positions. “But we are hospitable people,” he explained, “and we would welcome Jews and Christians to live in Palestine, just as they have before.”

Rantisi went to Egypt for medical studies, and when he was there he admired the Muslim Brotherhood movement. When he returned he was determined that a similar movement would give life to the floundering efforts at Palestinian liberation. It was then, in the late 1980s, that he met with Sheikh Yassin and others to form a union of activist Muslim groups in Palestine roughly patterned around the Muslim Brotherhood. It brought together a coalition under the common name, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, better known by its acronym, Hamas.

Sheikh Yassin become the titular head of the movement even though he was severely disabled by a progressive neurological condition. Still he held daily discourses in his compound in Khan Yunis, as I observed. He was brought in via a wheelchair and propped up on a carpeted dais where he delivered homilies based on the Qur’an. When I was there he used me as the foil for his sermons. He would invite me to ask a question, and when I asked something that I thought was straightforword, such as how Hamas was founded, he would launch into a Qur’an based discourse that had little to do with my question.

Dr Rantisi, on the other hand, was more forthcoming. He was recognized as the true strategist and political leader of the movement, and was widely respected and careful in his plans.

For that reason, I told him, I was surprised that he would authorize the method of suicide bombings. At the time I met with him they were the most dramatic and visible signs of Hamas’ war on Israel.

He did not authorize them, he told me. His answer was certainly meant to avoid any legal responsibility for the acts, but it was also theologically correct, as he explained to me. Suicide is prohibited in Islam. But martyrdom is not. Quite the opposite, martyrdom is praised within the Islamic tradition. But you cannot be commanded to be a martyr. The act has to be chosen freely, as one’s own way of standing up to a perceived oppression.

“We did not allow such martyrdom before, when we thought that the Israelis were serious about negotiating a solution that would provide for Palestinian statehood,” he said. “But now that they have closed the door on that,” he averred, “we have decided to allow it again.”

I said I thought that the Qur’an prohibited the killing of innocent people. Dr Rantisi agreed that it did, but he said that it also allowed—indeed required—that there should be a response to such killing against Muslims, and that the response be in kind. Otherwise, he said, you would just allow the killing to go on.

He gave the example of Dr Goldstein, a Jewish settler in Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron. He attacked a group of innocent Muslim worshipers in a mosque at the cave of the Patriarchs, sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians as the resting place of Abraham, Sarah, and other early figures in biblical history. “We have a duty,” Dr Rantisi said, “to respond in kind.”

I challenged him about these acts of what we call suicide bombings and he called self-martyrdom. I pointed out that the Israeli military was one of the most fortified armies in the Middle East and that these sporadic violent acts were certainly painful to Israel, they would never tip the military equation. You cannot win your war with Israel this way, I said.

He looked at me as if speaking to small child and said, “perhaps not in my life time, or even in my children’s lifetime, nor my children’s children’s lifetime. But in my children’s children’s children’s lifetime we might succeed. This is not our struggle, he said, “this is God’s war, and we cannot lose.”

Then he added a telling afterthought. “Besides,” he said, “Israel must be reminded that we are in fact at war.”

It was a war that he experienced daily, he told me. And it was frustrating that Israelis could go about their daily lives nonchalantly, as if there was nothing amiss. A bomb in a market place, he implied, would wake them up to the reality of war that was always in his consciousness.

Did he feel any remorse in allowing young people in the fullness of their youths to undertake these suicide missions and die in such a violent way?

No, he said, since there was something worse than death, and that was to live in constant humiliation. He said that Israel is fighting for land, but Hamas was fighting for pride; he used the Arabic term izzat, which means honor as well as pride. “You can’t understand the humiliation and frustration of the occupation, he said to me, adding that “the occupation is the worst kind of slavery.”

He asked if I had been to a Palestinian refugee camp. I had, I said, including Jabalia camp in Gaza. “It is even worse in Lebanon,” he said. “If you go there you will know what hell is like.”

I asked him about Fateh and the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Rantisi said that he hoped that they would unite in the future, but he seemed skeptical since he thought Arafat and the Fateh leadership were too eager to compromise with the Israelis, and abandoned their principles. Palestine should not relinquish more land, he said.

What would a future solution look like, I asked him. “When Palestine is free,” he said. I took that to mean when the whole of the Israel-Palestine region was no longer controlled by Israel.

And what about the millions of Jews in Israel, I asked, must they leave or be destroyed? Rantisi seemed surprised at the question. “No,” he said, “they would be welcome to stay. When we are in power we will not treat them the way that they have treated us. But we must all be free.”

.

A conversation that I had some years ago in Gaza with one of the leaders of Hamas may help to explain why Hamas persists in what may seem to be quixotic and suicidal attacks on Israel.

By any objective standard these are battles that Hamas cannot win. The likelihood is that the hundreds of jubilant young Arab men who recently poured through a breach in the barrier separating Gaza from Israel and occupied Israeli towns, terrorizing and sometimes killing civilians,  will themselves be killed or captured.

Why do they persist in doing it?

I posed this question to Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who at that time was the political head of Hamas.  The issue then was suicide bombings. Hamas and other extreme Palestinian Muslim groups had conducted them against Israeli targets, including marketplaces and ordinary buses.

“Israel has one of the largest armies in the Middle East,” I told him. “These bombings will not do anything to weaken their strength, and this is a war that you cannot win.”

He looked at me as if he was speaking to a naïve young child, and said “yes, maybe in my lifetime you are right. And maybe in my children’s lifetime. And even my children’s children’s lifetimes. But maybe in my children’s children’s children’s lifetimes we might prevail. We cannot lose. This is not our war, this is God’s war.”

I did not know how to respond to this  divine timeline of conflict. So I said nothing. But then he added,  “besides,” he said, “we need to show them that we’re still at war.”

That last sentence was telling. Sometimes, like many other acts throughout the world that we regard as terrorism, the display of war is in fact the point. As one of those who planned the 1993 attack on the world trade center told me, “you people need to be shaken awake to see the truth—the world is at war.”

Following the dramatic incursion of Hamas militants into Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu proclaimed that Israel was “at war.” I suspect many activists associated with Hamas were nodding their heads. “Finally,” they may have said, “you’ve gotten the point.”

From their point of view, the war to reclaim Palestinian rights from Israel has been going on for decades. What may have appeared to be a peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians was hiding a deep and desperate conflict. Their recent attack on Israel brought it to light, and now all Israelis and all the world can see the war that they have been experiencing for some time.

It is, however, a tragic display of momentary power. It is not just the combatants on both sides who will be killed and injured, but the many innocent civilians in Israeli towns and in Gaza schools and apartments who are caught in the crossfire between Hamas attacks and the government’s militant response.

It will not end well. Netanyahu has pledged to destroy Hamas. This might mean leveling portions of Gaza and its inhabitants to oblivion.

But if both he and Hamas are right, and this is war, than it cries out for what is often the resolution of wars. It calls for explorations of solutions to the underlying conflict that will lead not just to a temporary stalemate but to an enduring peace.

Maybe everyone has a  Dianne Feinstein story but here’s mine.

After 9/11 when I was doing a lot of TV interviews about global terrorism, I was in the makeup room of the Washington DC studios of CNN preparing for an interview with Anderson Cooper. I happened to notice Dianne Feinstein sitting in the makeup chair next to me, and I introduced myself as a California constituent and an admirer.

Then I said to her “I guess you have to go through this makeup procedure every time.

“Yes,” she said, “it makes me look young and attractive.”

“Well then,” I said, “that’s a good reason for me to do it too.”

She looked over it me and smiled and said, “Dear boy, in your case it’s hardly necessary.”

Ah Dianne, I’d like to think you’re still correct. What a kind and decent lady, and an attractive one at that!

[An interview with the news website, The Conversation, regarding what Khalistan is, and why it has featured in Canadian politics, following the tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions between Canada and India as part of an escalating row over the killing of a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil.]

The expulsions follow claims by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that there are “credible allegations” linking the Indian government of Narendra Modi with the death of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Nijjar — a prominent member of the Khalistan movement seeking to create an independent Sikh homeland in the Indian state of Punjab — who was shot dead on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia._

With tensions between the two countries rising, The Conversation reached out to Mark Juergensmeyer, an expert on religious violence and Sikh nationalism at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to bring context to a diplomatic spat few saw coming._

## 1. What is the Khalistan movement?

“Khalistan” means “the land of the pure,” though in this context the term “khalsa” refers broadly to the religious community of Sikhs, and the term Khalistan implies that they should have their own nation. The likely location for this nation would be in Punjab state in northern India where 18 of the 26 million Sikhs in the world live. Another 8 million live elsewhere in India and abroad, mainly in the UK, the US, and Canada.

The idea for an independent land for Sikhs goes back to pre-partition India, when the concept of a separate land for Muslims in India was being considered.

Some Sikhs at that time thought that if Muslims could have “Pakistan” — the state that emerged through partition in 1947 — then there should also be a “Sikhistan,” or “Khalistan.” That idea was rejected by the Indian government and instead the Sikhs became a part of the state of Punjab. At that time the boundaries of the Punjab were drawn in such a way that the Sikhs were not in the majority.

But Sikhs persisted, in part because one of the central tenets of the faith is “miri-piri,” the idea that religious and political leadership are merged. In their 500 year history, Sikhs have had their own kingdom, have fought against  Moghul rule, and comprised the backbone of the army under India’s colonial and independent rule.

In the 1960s the idea of a separate homeland for Sikhs re-emerged and formed part of the demand for redrawing the boundaries of Punjab state so so that Sikhs would be in the majority. The protests were successful, and the Indian government created Punjabi Suba, a state whose boundaries included speakers of the Punjabi language used by most Sikhs. They now comprise 58% of the population of the revised Punjab.

The notion of a Khalistan separate from India resurfaced in a dramatic way in the large-scale militant uprising that erupted in the Punjab in the 1980s. Many of those Sikhs who joined the militant movement did so because they wanted an independent Sikh nation, not just a Sikh-majority Indian state.

## 2. Why is the Indian government especially concerned about it now?

The Sikh uprising in the 1980s was a violent encounter between the Indian armed police and militant young Sikhs, many of whom still harbored a yearning for a separate state in Punjab, a Khalistan.

Thousands of lives were lost on both sides in violent encounters between the Sikh militants and security forces. The conflict came to a head in 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi launched Operation Blue Star to liberate the Sikh’s Golden Temple in the pilgrimage center of Amritsar in order to capture or kill the figurehead of the Khalistan movement, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. He was killed in the attack on the Golden Temple, though Sikhs around the world were incensed that their sacred place was violated by police action. Indira Gandhi was assassinated in retaliation by Sikh members of her own bodyguards.

In recent years, several firebrand Sikh activists in India have reasserted the idea of Khalistan, and the Indian government fears a return of the violence and militancy of the 1980s. The government of Narendra Modi wants to nip the movement in the bud before it gets too large and extreme.

## What is the connection between the Khalistan movement and Canada?

After the Sikh uprising was crushed in the early 1990s, many Sikh activists fled India and came to Canada, where they were welcomed by a large Sikh community — many of whom had been sympathetic to the Khalistan idea. A sizable expatriot community of Sikhs has been growing in the country since the early 20th century, especially in British Columbia and Ontario.

Sikhs have been attracted to Canada not only because of its economic opportunities but also because of the freedom to develop their own ideas of Sikh community. Though support for Khalistan is illegal in India, in Canada Sikh activists are able to speak freely and organize for the cause.

Though Khalistan would be in India, the Canadian movement in favor of it helps to cement the diaspora Sikh identity, and give the Canadian activists a sense of connection to the Indian homeland.

## 3. Has the Canadian government been sympathetic to the Khalistan movement?

The diaspora community of Sikhs constitute 2.1% of Canada’s population — a higher percentage of the total population than in India. They comprise a significant voting block in the country and carry political clout. In fact, there are more Sikhs in Canada’s cabinet than in India’s.

Although Prime Minister Trudeau has assured the Indian government that any acts of violence will be punished, he also has reassured Canadians that he respects free speech and the rights of Sikhs to speak and organize freely as long as they do not violate Canadian laws.

## 4. What is the broader context of Canada-India relations?

The Bharata Janata Party (BJP) of India’s Prime Minister Modi tends to support Hindu nationalism, as indicated by Modi’s recent use of the term “Bharat” rather than “India” as his place name at the G20 conference. Bharat is the region cited in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, and many non-Hindu minority communities in India, including Sikhs and Muslims, have taken Modi’s use of it as another example of the BJP privileging Hinduism and disrespecting their traditions.

Considering the high percentage of Sikhs in Canada’s population, Prime Minister Trudeau understandably wants to assert the rights of Sikhs and show disapproval of the drift towards Hindu nationalism in India.

And this isn’t the only time that Trudeau and Modi have clashed over the issue. In 2018 Trudeau was condemned in India for his friendship with Jaspal Singh Atwal, a Khalistani supporter in Canada who was convicted of attempting to assassinate the Chief Minister of Punjab.

Yet both countries have reasons to try and move on from the current diplomatic contretemps. India and Canada have close trading ties and common strategic concerns with relationship to China. It is likely that in time both sides will find ways to cool down the tensions from this difficult incident.

The day that we left Maui the wind was so strong I could scarcely close the front door. The sheer ferocity of the hurricane-induced gale signaled trouble.

On arriving on the mainland the next morning my text messages reported fire at the Historic town of Lahaina near our condo at Maalaea Harbor. Later that night the town was totally decimated. Our place was saved, but what was lost was incalculable.

It was not just the horrible loss of life and the upended tragedy of thousands of evacuees that we all mourned. We also lost some of the important symbols of Hawaii’s history.

Lahaina had once been the capital of the islands, and the old courthouse reminded us of its former political importance, as did the Baldwin house and Pioneer Inn. A banyan tree imported from India and planted in the 19^th century was the second largest in the world, incorporating a whole city block. Front street shops and the boardwalk along the ocean front were magnets for tourists. Zoning laws kept huge hotels away from the center of the city which provided small wooden homes for 13,000 workers and other permanent local residents.

It’s all gone. In a few hours the storm of fire thundered through the town, catapulted by hurricane-force winds, consuming everything in its reach. Dozens of people perished and thousands are homeless. Property destruction is in the multi-millions.

The loss included some elements of Hawaii’s religious history as well. Before European contact, the Lahaina region was regarded as the home of Kihawahini, a goddess who had the ability to transform into a lizard that lived in a local pond. In part because of its sacred significance, and because of its good harbor, King Kamehameha I made it the islands’ first capital after he managed to unite them under his military power in 1810.

With the influx of British and then American settlers later in the century, missionaries brought Christianity to the region. In 1823 William Richards, a Congregational missionary from Massachusetts, came to Lahaina and in a predatory move erected a thatch hut next to the sacred pond of Kihawahini, hoping to attract native Hawaiians to the religion. He succeeded, and in 1828 a more permanent building was erected from stone and wood on the site, the Waine’e Church (renamed the Waiola Church). It is the oldest in Maui, though the structure destroyed in the fire was a version rebuilt in 1953.

The church became the hub for Hawaiian Protestant Christianity in the islands. Though the history of Christianity in Hawaii is deeply intertwined with colonialism and the Euro-American control of land, the faith was also promoted by its native Hawaiian royal supporters. The graveyard of the church is testimony to its influence. In it are buried Queen Keopuolani, the wife of Kamehameha I, and the first Hawaiian to be baptized as a Christian, ushering in a tradition of royal acceptance of the faith and providing the stage for intermarriage with British and American Christians. The body of the last king of Kauai is buried there; his island was the only one not conquered by force by Kamehameha I. The list of royalty goes on, and the cemetery has been used as a location for presentations about Hawaii’s history.

It is impossible to know exactly why the native Hawaiian royals so eagerly embraced Christianity. Perhaps they were trying to curry favor with the British, who after all had provided the weapons that allowed Kamehameha to seize control of all of the islands. Or perhaps they wanted to cement their power by undercutting the influence of local kahuna (Hawaiian priests) and provide the islands with a common culture. Or maybe they simply found the fellowship and beliefs of the faith to be appealing.

Whatever the reason, the Christian missionaries found a willing acceptance from the local citizenry. When the first missionary chose the sacred pond as the site for his church he was setting a pattern for many missionaries to come, constructing churches near or actually on the stone ritual platforms (heiau) of native Hawaiian religion. The point was to obscure native Hawaiian religion, of course,  but it also proclaimed that it could be absorbed into a kind of Hawaiian Christianity. Since many mainlanders and children of missionaries married native Hawaiians, a Christian-Hawaiian religious syncretism can still be found especially in Congregational and Episcopal churches.

For instance, in the Episcopal Church in Wailuku where I am a parishioner, the stained glass windows portray King Kamehameha IV and Queen Emma (of mixed British-Hawaiian heritage) who provided the land for the establishment of the church in 1866. Today the church is a very Hawaiian ethnic mix of Filipinos, native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Haole (mainland White people like myself) and others. Every Sunday two of the hymns are in Hawaiian language, including a sad prayer written by the last monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, while she was imprisoned in Iolani Palace after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Our church service also includes frequently prayers in Ilocano, the language of the region of the Philippines from which many of the parishioners originated. They were part of an independent Catholic Church that broke away from the official church in the Philippines that was in league with the colonial rulers, and in Maui have joined the Episcopal congregation.

When I started to developed a two-acre plot for a fruit orchard in Iao Valley to raise bananas, papayas, mangos, guavas and the like, I asked a local Episcopalian priest to give the blessings. Since he was partly native Hawaiian and also served as a kahuna, a Hawaiian religious priest, he was able to perform chants and blessings in Hawaiian language. Evacuees from the fire are now camped out in the orchard.

But native Hawaiian and Christian religions were not the only emblems of religion that were destroyed in the Lahaina fire. Japanese immigrants brought Jodo Shinshu Buddhism to Maui, where it has flourished. Temples are found throughout the island, including a magnificent one in Lahaina punctuated by an elegant pagoda and a giant statue of the Buddha.

They are all gone now, whisked away in moments by fiery winds. Remarkably the Roman Catholic Church, though badly scorched, is still standing. But not our sister Episcopalian parish. I talked with my priest about our fellow Episcopalians in Lahaina, inquiring whether they were all right. Some did not survive he said, and most are now homeless. But they are determined to rebuild and continue the fellowship in a renewed Lahaina. Developers are eager to move in and snatch up the burned parcels for high rise hotels, but the county planning commission vows that the rebuilding will be solely for the benefit of the working-class community that lost their homes, and provide space for the religious institutions that served them.

There are tough times ahead for Lahaina. But the local residents have faith that their town can ultimately be restored. Buildings are burned and lives are lost. But the spirit of Hawaii, though charred, will surely endure.

In what has been described as an “unhinged rant,” Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of four regions of Ukraine that were purported to have voted in favor of joining Russia. In this wide-ranging and often incoherent talk, he blamed the West not just for supporting the rights of Ukraine to maintain their independence but also for what he described as a “satanic” view of the world.

This would appear to raise the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine to a whole new level of conflict. It was now not just a fight over territory but over righteousness and civilization itself.

Putin was not the first to cast the war in these religious terms. It was previously portrayed this way by his comrade and co-conspirator in bellicose language, Patriarch Kirill, the titular leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.

On March 5, 2022, at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Patriarch delivered a sermon on what was Easter in the Russian Orthodox tradition. In it, he portrayed the battle in Ukraine as not just a mundane military encounter, but a conflict of “metaphysical significance,” in which the existential forces of good and darkness were contesting.

Kirill, and now Putin, have raised the stakes in what was initially described as a military operation. It now appears to be something of a holy war.

In my recent book, God at War, I have mused over the concept of war, especially as it has been used by a variety of groups engaged in terrorism that I have studied in the past thirty years. It strikes me that that there are different ways of conceiving war, even different ways of conceiving the relationship between religion and war.

Often priests and other clergy are brought in to bless the troops and to imply that God is on the side of one’s army during a military confrontation. But what many violent activists are asserting is that their war is more than that—it is part of God’s design in a transcendent confrontation of apocalyptic proportions.

This awesome view of war on a metaphysical level is what I have called cosmic war. It is more than just a religious affirmation of one’s military. It is lifting military combat into the high proscenium of spiritual battle.

This is what Patriarch Kirill and now Putin have done with their war in Ukraine. It is their cosmic war.

Such wars never end well. Like the notion of “absolute war” described by the 18^th century Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz, as long as a battle is conceived in cosmic terms there is no possibility for negotiation or easy abnegation of the struggle. There can only be absolute victory or absolute defeat.

Putin’s annexation of portions of Ukraine and his strident talk about fighting the “satanic” power of the West seem to be setting himself up for one or other of those two choices. But cosmic war can seldom be achieved by mortal means. It is one of these fantastic visions that ultimately must bend to reality and be abandoned.

This is what has happened in many of the religion-related violent struggles in recent history. Take ISIS, for instance. When I talked with former ISIS militants, most no longer believed they were engaged in a cosmic struggle. Some, however, told me they still believed in the caliphate and the metaphysical struggle against satanic enemies, but no longer believed that the ISIS organization was worthy of conducting it.

Cosmic war can be abandoned as quickly as it has descended. Or, in some cases, it is possible to retain a notion of cosmic war but detach it from earthly struggles.  This happens only when reality sets in, when it is clear that the cosmic struggle is not going to succeed on an earthly plane and there are other options for survival.

The hope is that Putin will realize that his imagined metaphysical war is a fantasy, or that it need not apply to his territorial ambitions in Ukraine. His cosmic war will end only when he is forced to accede to reality, including his increasingly likelihood of defeat.

This was the question raised in a recent television program in CNN’s United Shades of America Series. “Should you visit Hawai’i?” asked the genial host of the program, W. Kamau Bell.

My answer is “yes.” But I would add “with respect for the region’s culture and history.”

Bell raised the question with several Native Hawai’ian activists, whose answer was a resounding “no.” Their concern was that the state was being overwhelmed with outsiders who had little understanding of, or interest in, the history and culture of the islands. Moreover they were raising the living costs to a standard almost unobtainable for the locals.

I have a lot of respect for this position. Today I live half the year in Maui, and some years ago I was the founding dean of the School of Hawai’ian, Asian, and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawai’i. The issue of Hawai’ian sovereignty was a major issue at the Center for Hawai’ian Studies—now a separate School of Hawai’ian Studies—which was part of my school at the time.

But Hawai’ian sovereignty has meant different things to different people. Only some think it’s feasible to return to the kingdom of Queen Liliuokalani that was overthrown by a coup of American businessmen and their militia in 1893. For others reparations are in order, or increased assistance for those who can certify a significant percentage of Native Hawai’ian ancestry.

Moreover, it is difficult to determine who the outsiders are. All ethnic groups in Hawaii intermarry, and none more than Native Hawai’ians and Euro-Americans (White Caucasians).

Historically speaking, all ethnic groups in Hawai’i are outsiders. Originally the islands were uninhabited until Polynesians crossed the ocean on wooden rafts and began to settle in the islands in large numbers about 800 years ago. These constituted the Native Hawai’ian population, which was largely cut off from other Polynesian communities. Still, at a conference hosted when I was at the University of Hawai’i, I was impressed that a New Zealand delegate who spoke Maori could communicate with one of our faculty members who was speaking in Hawai’ian. The languages were similar enough to be intelligible.

After Captain Cook made the first European contact with the islands in 1778, Europeans and Euro-American missionaries and businessmen settled there, some intermarrying with Native Hawai’ians. They also began to exploit the island’s agricultural resources, especially through sugar cane plantations, but they needed cheap labor. That’s when workers from Asia and elsewhere were imported in large numbers.

The Chinese were first, but they soon moved on from the torturous work in the cane fields to shops and other businesses, many buying land themselves. The plantation owners then turned to Japan for laborers but in time they too resisted the cane fields and found other forms of employment, many in business and administrative positions. Portuguese from the Azore islands were brought as workers, and more recently large numbers of Filipinos and some Hispanics. In the 20^th century, Euro- and African-Americans came to serve in the military and many stayed, often inter-marrying with other ethnic groups. New arrivals in this century include retired mainland Americans seeking a warm environment and an easy style of living.

Today the sugar plantations are no more, the last cane fields abandoned. They are no longer competitive in the global market. But the ethnic groups that were brought to service them over the decades, along with the arrival of mainland Americans after statehood, have made Hawai’i the most ethnically diverse state in the union.

The largest ethnic group in the islands today is “Asian,” according to the US census figures. But intermarriage makes precise figures difficult. The census figures claim that 37% of the population is “Asian alone” (not intermixed with another ethnic group), but that includes Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos and Koreans all lumped together. Other figures indicate that Filipinos are the largest Asian group, followed by Japanese and a relatively smaller number of Chinese and Korean.

Euro-American (aka White, Caucasian) constitute 25% “alone,” not intermarried with another group, and native Hawai’ian 10%. But these two communities are the most likely to intermarry, not only with each other, but with Filipino, Japanese, and other ethnic communities. A statement of Kamehameha Schools—which provides education for children of Native Hawai’ian background—claims that of the 400,000 people in the United States who can claim some Native Hawai’ian blood only 8000 are 100% Hawai’ian.

The elected officials of Hawai’i give some hint of the ethnic makeup. Currently the governor is David Ige, of Japanese background. The senators are Maize Hirono (Japanese) and Brian Schatz (Euro-American). The US Representatives are Ed Case (Euro-American) and Kaiali’i Kahele (Native Hawai’ian). The winner of the Democrat Primary election recently, and therefore likely to be the elected governor in November is Josh Green, a Jewish Euro-American who is married to a local woman of partial Hawai’ian ancestry.

Like many Euro-Americans in Hawai’i the likely next governor, Josh Green, was raised on the mainland. Green attended Swarthmore College and then medical school in Pennsylvania. He came to the big island of Hawaii to open up a clinic in the rural area where he identified with Hawai’is diverse population, and married a woman from Kane’ohe, O’ahu. The mother of his wife, Jaimi Ushiroda, was 50% native Hawai’ian.

To become kamaina—a local, in Hawai’ian parlance—you just have to show up and then integrate yourself in the local ethnically diverse population. If you get a Hawai’ian driver’s license you’ve passed the first step to being a local. After that it’s up to you and how you’re accepted.

In my case I’m still not quite local. After all, I keep my California driver’s license and my California connections. But in other ways I’ve become part of the local community. The Episcopal Church I attend in Wailuku is largely Filipino, and was founded in 1865 by King Kamehameha IV. Every Sunday we sing two hymns in Hawai’ian language written by the deposed Queen Liliuokalani, and often a hymn in the Filipino language, Ilokano.

I also purchased a couple of acres of rural land in ‘Iao Valley where I raise papaya, mango, banana, coffee and other crops, and I’m planning on growing the traditional taro (which is called kalo in Hawai’ian). I’ve built a bamboo retreat house on the site in Polynesian style. It has no walls or windows, only screens to keep out the bugs and shutters when the storms come. It’s off-grid and totally self-sustaining.

I’m aware that my property was ancient Hawai’ian farmland, and have had Hawai’ian blessings performed on the site by one of my neighbors of Hawai’ian ancestry who is a kahuna, a native priest. It was his father, a Filipino-Hawai’ian, who sold me the property. It was not passed down through his family, however. Previously the land had been part of a coffee plantation, and he just made a shrewd real estate investment buying up a sizable tract of farmland in the valley.

But we share a respect for native Hawai’ian culture and history. Lately I’ve been talking with Kainoa, his son (the kahuna) about starting in Maui a version of DeTour, which is a tour for tourists created by some faculty members of the University of Hawai’i on O’ahu island. The idea is to bring tourists to sites that illuminate the history of the ethnic groups and the exploitation of workers over the years by plantations, the military and the tourist industry itself.

The idea is to welcome people to the islands, and to enable them to enjoy the beauty and calm of the environment. But also to let them understand the history and culture of what makes this region so vital and remarkable. Tourism is the economic life blood of the islands, and without visitors many of my neighbors who work in the hospitality trade would be out of business.

During the strict lockdown period of the covid pandemic the islands were virtually empty of tourists. I have to admit it was a pleasure for us who lived there to feel like we had the islands to ourselves. At the same time, I watched as many of my neighbors struggled financially without a steady source of income. It was sad to see many small shops and restaurants that I had loved close their shutters forever. If this were to be a permanent condition, without tourism many locals would be forced to leave the islands, as many in the younger generation have done already, to seek viable employment.

So the paradox is that for Hawai’i to stay Hawai’i a certain amount of outsider presence is economically beneficial. It would be good, however, if our visitors regard themselves as guests in someone else’s home, and respect the land and the people while they are here. In Lahaina, in the center of Maui’s tourist area, a nightly historical drama in a graveyard tells much of Hawai’is tragic history. I wish more tourists would take the time and interest to watch it.

So for all who are contemplating a trip to Hawai’i: aloha- a wonderful word that means love and hospitality and toleration. Welcome to the islands. And when you hear aloha again when you leave, return refreshed but also, I hope, with memories of a unique culture and history and some quite remarkable and persistent people.

Several years ago I happened to sit next to Salman Rushdie at dinner when he was at UC-Santa Barbara to give a talk. I asked him why he didn’t have any security guards around him.

“I have to live my life,” Rushdie answered. And after nine years of living in hiding under the pseudonym of Joseph Anton (Joseph for Joseph Conrad and Anton for Anton Chekhov, two of his favorite authors), it is understandable that he would want to celebrate his freedom. He moved to the US to do that– America supposedly is, after all, the land of the free and the brave.

But the fatwa remained. It had been proclaimed by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 and ignored by the Iranian state in recent years. But it had never been retracted. Finally, it seemed, someone had carried it out. On August 12, at the historical Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, a young man leapt on the stage and stabbed the novelist ten times, seriously injuring him.

But why? The alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, was an American who was born in California and was living in New Jersey at the time of the attack. He came from a Lebanese family, and at age 24 he was born years after the original fatwa was proclaimed. It is surprising that he even knew about it, much less motivated to do something about it.

There were a few hints, however, that Matar was becoming more involved in radical Islamist circles. His mother said he abandoned his academic studies to focus on religious education. In 2018 he traveled back to his father’s village in southern Lebanon, a stronghold of the Shi’a Muslim movement, Hezbollah, and his mother claimed that this trip transformed him. I remember traveling through that region some years ago and being impressed with the many banners and posters portraying the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian Shi’a leaders.

Yet even if he was enthralled with a politically extreme Shi’a Muslim position, there were many other imagined foes of Iran who could be targeted. It is not clear why Matar would see Salman Rushdie as the one to get. Some reports claim that Matar had been in contact with members of the Quds Force, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who might have given him specific instructions to attack the novelist. A similar operation by the Revolutionary Guard focusing on the former US national security advisor, John Bolton, as the proposed target was recently intercepted and the murder-for-hire figure was arrested.

Like the planned Bolton attacker, Matar could have been paid by the Revolutionary Guard to undertake his action. Or he might have done it gratis to impress them and receive what he imagined would be accolades from the Shi’a community.

Still, it was a daring act, especially for someone described by those who knew him as a shy loner. Why would he undertake such a risky operation that provided no easy escape, and that almost certainly would result in his injury, death, and/or a long period of incarceration?

What we know about Matar replicates the story of the Tsarnaev brothers who were convicted of terrorism in the Boston marathon bombings in 2013. The older brother especially was something of a loser, having failed at every attempt he made to succeed. In Matar’s case, he also had failed academically and was working at a Marshall’s clothing store in a job that did not inspire him. In the off-hours he worked out at a gym and was trying to learn how to box, though some of the other regulars at the boxing gym said he was not very good at it.

What did inspire him, apparently, was the lure of a great adventure. He was swept up in the scenario of a grand imagined battle between the forces of good and evil, where he had the opportunity of becoming a hero. He could enter into the fray and slay a demonic being and receive the applause of the faithful.

It was an imagined war not unlike the one that Ashli Babbitt thought she was fighting when she joined the insurrection that seized the United States capitol on January 6, 2021. In that moment prior to her death she was exhilarated to be a part of what she thought was a conquering army. Like Matar and the Tsarnaev brothers, she was willing to risk martyrdom for what she believed was a righteous war.

These are tragic illusions. They are double tragedies, in fact, for the victims are both the targets and the perpetrators of the attacks. Yet their assaults are not the actions of lone wolves. In their moments of glory they imagine themselves to be cheered by thousands of sympathizers who like them believe they are living in an age of cosmic wars.

But the costs of their illusions are massive. They are payments of irreparable damage that affect us all.

July 31, 2022 may go down in history as the day that al Qaeda died. This was  when Ayman al Zawahiri was killed by an American drone as he stood on the balcony of a house in Kabul, Afghanistan. The missile strike terminated not only the life of this partner and successor to Osama bin Laden, but also removed the last major symbol of al Qaeda leadership.

There are groups in Syria and Yemen and other places around the world that claim to be affiliated with al Qaeda that will continue to operate as they have in the past. But they were never really a part of the al Qaeda organizational structure. Though they subscribed to the movement’s ideology, they mostly used the name to give them a kind of street credibility.

The movement suffered a major blow with the killing of Osama bin Laden in a daring nighttime raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. Zawahiri, who had been at bin Laden’s side since 1998, soon proclaimed himself the leader of the movement, but in fact there was little to lead.

Al Qaeda soon became eclipsed by the Islamic State (ISIS) both in media attention and among radical Islamic militants. Unlike al Qaeda, ISIS showed that it could win over large swaths of territory and rule as if it were a caliphate. Al Qaeda had only the illusion of global power.

Nonetheless Zawahiri was good at propagating this illusion. Perhaps more than bin Laden he was the mastermind of the movement. Though he lacked charisma there were never serious rivals for his leadership. Osama bin Laden’s son, Hamza bin Laden, who was a formidable contender and would have been a possible successor to Zawahiri, was killed by a U.S. counter-terrorism operation along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in 2019.

It is hard to say exactly what Zawahiri’s contributions were. Some claim he was instrumental in helping to plan for the 9/11 attacks, though the official U.S. 9/11 Commission Report identifies Khalid Sheik Mohammed, imprisoned in Gauntanamo, as the prime organizer. This makes sense, since he and his nephew, Ramzi Youssef, had been involved in Jihadist plots earlier involving airplanes, and Youssef was convicted and imprisoned for his role in the unsuccessful 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.

But bin Laden and Zawahiri seemed to know about the terrorist plot on 9/11 before it happened, took credit for it, and came to be the symbols of the attack. In that sense, President Biden can boast that he completed the mission begun by President Barack Obama in the US military raid that killed bin Laden.

There is no question that bin Laden and Zawahiri were close. They were the dual leaders of their shadowy operations. Though bin Laden was a Saudi and Zawahiri was Egyptian, they joined forces in 1998 in Afghanistan. Soon after they conducted the first terrorist operation that was clearly linked to al Qaeda—the dual attacks on American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed over two hundred.

It was to Afghanistan that Zawahiri recently returned after years of living in Pakistan. It is a testimony of the friendship of the Taliban’s ruling Haqqani network that they would allow Zawahiri to travel freely in the country. And it was a testimony to his sense of security that he could step out on a balcony for a bit of fresh air.

That turned out to be his undoing. Though the U.S. had located his Kabul residence a month earlier the camera on the drone now had a clear shot, and they took it. The Taliban leaders immediately closed off the area to allow Zawahiri’s family to leave safely. They also condemned the U.S. for violating the conditions of the Doha agreement that the Trump administration had signed, leading to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. They did not mention, however, that the very fact that Zawahiri was being sheltered in the country was the Taliban’s own violation of the Doha agreement.

But the deed was done. Zawahiri was gone. And with him the awful memories of al Qaeda.