Well it looks like we're shaping up for WW3 and no adults appear to be in the room. I assume the people who are beating the war drums are fine for their sons to go off and fight and die for Israel.
Instead of fuelling the hysteria we need to try to walk this back, because when it escalates into a global conflict the current death toll of 1400 Israelis and 5000 Palestinians will look small in comparison.
See Tucker Carlson's interview with Colonel Macgregor:
I exchange messages on X with a woman, I only know her through that platform. She's a Jewish New Yorker, passionately Zionist, with zero tolerance for what Dreher calls buttery. She's convinced that the Israelis--she loathes Bibi--had to know something was up and let it rip thinking it could be contained and turned to their advantage. How did they cross the border, execute the horrors, and then make it back with hundreds of hostages. How did it happen?
OK, OK, I'm no expert. But I'm also weary of getting accused of making "telling" remarks when I imply that the Israelis' motives and purposes are on a level lower than Paul Newman's in Exodus. You know? The woman I've been discussing this with is a Jew, a Zionist, and a conservative.
Not just technology. In its early days, Netanyahu funded and encouraged Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
This also fuels a lot of conspiracy theories in the Muslim world about Hamas -- that they are secretly in bed with Israel. (I'm not saying I believe it, but you'd be amazed at how often I hear it from intelligent people.)
The allowed in theory does not make sense to me. Bibi has not benefited politically. The Israelies were caught napping on one of their big holidays combined with the complacency that "technology" on the wall would keep them safe.
Their complacency, Bush Hermit, may well have been compounded by Jake Sullivan's characteristic hubris and ignorance just 2 weeks earlier, when he boasted that the Middle East hadn't known such peace in 20 years...
I think this attack in some ways is like Israel's Uvalde. How did Hamas break through the border undetected (that itself raises questions) and had a free reign of terror for *seven hours* before a military response?
Either gross incompetence or a corrupt desire to justify "mowing the lawn". Either one is bad for the Israeli govenrment.
Ultimately, though, this still leaves egg on the face of the Israeli government that depended on these highly complex, non-robust systems...and that they had no adequate backup to send in troops where and when needed.
It may not be a conspiracy, but this kind of "failure of imagination", like 9/11, was unforseen but not unforeseeable, and the Israeli government failed on its most basic function--keeping its citizens safe.
Alas, even though the article offers solutions (generally very low-tech) what this failure will likely result in will be pretty much what our 9/11 did: disproportionate military response and probably even more high-tech gadgetry purchased to try to plug the hole of the former system, when hiring a few more armed soldiers would work far better. Ah, but the Israeli and American arms manufacturers wouldn't get nearly as much money for that, would they?
Just like the Americans did. One reason that the offensive into Gaza has not started is that the American commander from Fallujah is advising the Israeli generals. Gaza will be a physical and political meat grinder if they do go in.
The young who are supporting the Palestinians will not fight in the next Great War. Canada will see a huge influx in the number of border crossers. No way will they fight.
Plenty of people thought 9-11 would be the beginning of WWIII too. Didn't happen, though a lot of bad stuff did come of it, A direct confrontation between the US and Russia (the only WWIII I care about since nukes are in the equation) is possible in Ukraine, but in the Middle East? Not very possible at all, given that Russia is bogged down badly in Ukraine which is much closer to home and has only rhetoric and maybe some extra weapons to offer outside that theater.
On the larger issue, the question is not "Was Hamas justified in all it did"? Of course it wasn't. The question is, What should Israel do? And while I support Israel taking down Hamas, that does not entail a blank check for Israel to commit atrocities of its own.
I think MacGregor's point is that a lot has changed in the past 20 years. Other countries are stronger and the US is perceived as weaker. This could be an opportunity for other countries to try to break the hegemony.
I don't see anyone rushing into to try that. Russia is completely engaged closer to home. The Chinese are certainly offering themselves as an alternative hegemon to the US but they are not about to send troops to the Middle East. And Israel is still Israel: able to take on its neighbors as needed.
Yeah but I think all bets are off if the US takes a direct swing at Iran. And after the foreign policy blundering of the past 20+ years, I've no confidence we'll show restraint
What do you mean by "direct swing"? Trump had an Iranian general assassinated, which is certainly a causus belli (and unusual even in actual wartime).
So far the the evidence for any intent-- even on Israel's part-- to engage Iran militarily in fairly void. Are there warmongers, in the US, the UK and Israel, who would like to so? Absolutely yes. But there are no signs pointing to their being able to get their way.
Recall that in the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein fired off missiles at Israel although Israel had nothing to do with the conflict itself; yet the US held to its mission in Kuwait and did not use that as reason to go after Saddam after his army was expelled from Kuwait. And given the current disorder (polite word used) in the House right now, it's hard to see how the US could be rallied to such an effort at the moment (Yes, Congress would have to sign off on such a war with some sort of vote or other).
Yeah but I'm not thinking the First Gulf War, I'm thinking Iraq. I'm thinking "regime change." And I'm sure the neocons have allllll sorts of plans to rally Americans to their never-changing cause.
There is zero evidence that Iran has nukes, or can obtain them.
Do you think it possible Israel would use nuclear weapons in a merely conventional war against, say Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah? That the US would green light such a thing? The world's nuclear powers have not been able to entirely prevent other nations developing nukes (India; Pakistan) but they have been united about tamping down any possibility of those nations using them (again, India and Pakistan).
The use of nuclear weapons in the particular geography of this conflict would also come with an extravagant amount of blowback due to fallout patterns. I can see some truly depraved terrorists not giving a hoot and so being willing to expend Arab lives too-- but would any remotely responsible government including Iran, do so?
The idea that the Isrealis would blast off all their nukes against not just their immediate Arab neighbors but against most of the rest of the world, friend and foe alike, in a "burn it all down" scenario in the face of the loss of a conventional has it's own Wiki page.
Thinking that the US has the ability to convince the Isrealis not to do it if they thought they were out of options is pretty naive, IMO.
The US has the ability to turn Israel into a cauterized charnel. So does Russia, China, the UK and France. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect there are unpublicized agreements out there which hang like the Sword of Damocles over every nation threatening destruction on any nation that uses nukes unprovoked. Hence the restraint shown by India and Pakistan too.
It's an unwelcome truth when we're all so uncomfortable: that it's almost unbearable to think of things not changing, but even more awful to imagine what would come after. So as bad as things get there's a sustaining and enormous pressure in quiet corners to keep chugging along. It may make us mad but it's also something to be profoundly grateful for.
There's the Samson Option, though, as Dukeboy pointed out. That's the idea that, if Israel were to be eliminated, it would nuke a large number of Middle Eastern and European capitals first, to go out with a bang. This isn't some weird fantasy; in 2002, the LA Times published an article openly advocating this.
Presumably, however, in most Europe and Middle Eastern capitals, there must also be the foreseen Samson Option, i.e. that if Israel's existence is ever imperilled, it will be nuked so intensely that its forces cannot fire missiles.
There is no clean, sanitized war. There is no war without atrocities. There is no way to "take down Hamas" without a months/years long campaign that will result in hundreds of thousands of casualties. We also take great pains to avoid civilian deaths (I’ve heard the details of this from a retired colonel, and I guarantee few other militaries take the steps we take), but it doesn’t sway world opinion, and it won’t for Israel either. I don’t see that Israel has an alternative to taking down Hamas, either. It really is a rock-hard place situation.
Hamas has carefully structured things to *maximize* civilian casualties. They *want* the videos of bodies and screaming injured children for their world propaganda campaign, which they have very good reason to expect to be successful (it has been for years). I don’t know what "blank check" means here. What would you suggest they do? Symbolically take out a few targets and declare everything goes back to Oct 6? Not going to happen.
If this turns into some vast bloodbath Israel will lose badly in the long run. And yes, I would suggest taking out the Hamas leadership, by assassins if possible. The Old Testament says "An eye for an eye", but it does not say "fifty yeas for an eye." WShy play rigyht intop Hamas';s propaganda campaign? See also: the US response to 9-11. Not a model to be followed.
Well that was the bet the Arab countries took in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and they lost every time. Or do you just mean "lose badly" in "world opinion"? The problem with just taking out Hamas leadership is the decades of infrastructure built for war and terrorism sitting in Gaza, mostly underground. All Hamas leadership would be instantly replaced, either with other Palestinian nutters right there in Gaza or with outside "freedom fighters" supplied by Iran or whomever.
I think Israel is in a trap, and I don’t see any great options. They’re certainly not going to mimic the Bush wars, that’s not even an issue. They’re not about to go out nation building and convince the Iranians of the glories of LGBTQ. I imagine they’re well aware of how they are about to do what Hamas wants and play into their propaganda campaign, but they don’t see an alternative path.
Re: The problem with just taking out Hamas leadership is the decades of infrastructure built for war and terrorism sitting in Gaza, mostly underground
So what? That's just the real world-- no one is going to found the shangri-la. We took down Al Qaida and killed bin Laden but there are still Islamist radicals lusting for our blood too. If you seek a world with no enemies you're only option is genocide, and that will bring down not merely the opprobrium of the world, but the wrath of Heaven too. For all my life and then some we have lived with weapons of such lethal power trained on us that their wholesale use would render trivial every calamity of history added together. Put away millennialist dreams of a Peaceable Kingdom and learn to live with risk and danger, lest in seeking utopia you bring about the very things you fear worst, like some hero in Greek tragedy.
If al-Qaeda had 500 miles of tunnels running through the DC suburbs filled with weapons and command centers, and then they attacked the city and did what they did in Israel on Oct 7, you'd best believe we'd be taking military action and not stopping until the tunnels were destroyed and every terrorist hiding within caught or killed.
The Israelis have learned to live with risk and danger in a much more real way than you or I and with pretty reasonable balance considering there have been multiple attempts to wipe them off the map - not abstractly, like idiot college students talk, but in real life. They thought they were managing the risk by forming partnerships with what seemed like "moderates" in Hamas and starting to loosen the Gaza restrictions a bit. They were repaid with Oct 7. I don't think very many Israelis think that Hamas in Gaza is a risk that can be managed any longer.
We're not talking about milennialist dreams, we're talking about how to survive on a tiny slice of the Middle East. The dream was that the Palestinians would ever accept a state that didn't involve wiping away the Jews. That dream is now dead.
And good grief this has nothing to do with our little domestic kerfluffles-- f*** all that LGBT crap and a plague on both thopse houses-- none of that matters at this level of things.
Things will not be good. But "very, very bad" is a purely matter of human choice-- and Heaven at least will judge those choices.
My only point with the LGBTQ comment was as an example of how very far our nation building efforts strayed from reason and reality. Unfortunately, just after we were finally recovering from Vietnam malaise, the Bush wars poisoned the well and have now left America full of eyes-covered isolationists. That will come back to bite us.
The Israelis are deeply divided between religious Zionists, and hiloni atheists, and the latter, with their stronghold in the tech industry, are full-on with the whole Sexual Revolution show, not to mention transhumanism, AI, etc. - a sort of sci-fi version of Folsom Street.
If there were no Arab threat, there would probably be civil war. However, the one thing the two sides have in common is that they really, really hate Christians.
When I try to think of factions in the Holy Land who I do sympathise with, they're these: (1) Christians; (2) anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews; and (3) moderate, tolerant Muslims.
As in the Ukraine conflict, both sides are using extremely intense propaganda to further their ends. The drip, drip, drip of atrocity porn coming out of Israel is one version, as is the filming of the victims, especially children of Israeli bombing. I refuse to look at any of it because not only is it manipulative it is exploitative and dishonors the dead.
I've told my study group that if they see a supposedly Christian leader engaging in moral equivalence or worse about this, they can know that leader is not to be listened to any more.
Sadly, I've seen two young woke (or woke adjacent) Christians I once thought highly of engage in sentimental moral equivalence. American evangelicals are prone to confuse sugary pious sentiment with truth, justice, and morality. Wokeness and idealism only makes that worse among the young.
The people who believe this stuff about national vs spiritual Israel don’t even realize that odd form of biblical criticism only surfaced in the 1830s.
They also believe (hope) to be raptured so they can sit in heaven and watch the slaughter from their thrones. Seriously. I saw some posts on one of the local FB for the SD small town I used to live in, where they were just in ecstasy because the Rapture is coming, the Rapture is coming, and another which showed a large UFO with rays streaming from it with a meme that said:
"It wasn't aliens, it was Jesus! He called us home! HALLELUJAH! Thessalonians 4:16-17"
There is some seriously crazy stuff going on out here in fly-over country.
I'm being told that Hagee is vieux jeu (there are other guys lined up right behind him), a crook (ditto), etc., etc. But the point of my posting him wasn't Hagee. It was Podhoretz,, University of Chicago, upper West Side intellectual blue blood. It's not just flyover country.
I believe you, Eve. It's so dumb it matches anything The Onion could come up with. Do you know what comes to mind for some reason? Slim Pickens' character ridin' that wild buckin' bronco nuke down, waving his cowboy hat, and yahooing in "Dr Strangelove."
I will directly and forthrightly declare my allegiance to and endorsement of another form of "yes- buttery:"
Yes, what Hamas did was an atrocity, but no, it is not an atrocity against me or one that should justify the intervention of my government into the conflict on my behalf. Especially since it seems clear from the very day that it happened that our blood thirsty neocon puppets like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley are prepping us to use it as an excuse to attack Iran.
Rod is correct that 10/7 is a lot like 9/11. It's being used as an excuse to move forces against a different target. They're trying to use our anger at atrocity to motivate us to attack a bigger target than a few Palestinians crammed into the open- air prison that makes up the Gaza strip. Just as the real target after 9/11 shifted from killing goatherders in the mountains of Afghanistan to rolling tanks into Iraq on the pretext of WMDs, they are running the exact playbook to get a wider war with Iran.
We fell for it once before. Rod admits that he did. I admit that I did. To the extent that the young people of 2023 who will be asked to do the fighting and dying in Tehran for the glory of the Great American Empire are saying "No," for whatever reason, I'm willing to support their decision.
The US will support Israel with rhetoric, Security Council vetoes, logistics and some money. I can't see the US committing its own forces to any combat, or indeed why there would be any need to do so. Israel has shown repeatedly it is capable of fighting off hostile neighbors even if it's been caught napping a couple of times.
This us the irony: Israel doesn't need our help to fight Hamas; and if it becomes a larger war, do we really want to defend Israel to the last American soldier?
There will be no draft. The army does not want thousands of the reluctant and the passive aggressive jammed into it's training system. We can purchase any bodies required from abroad either through direct cash incentives or promises of expedited US citizenship.
Unfortunately we're in up to our necks. The other side of that is we still can exercise some leverage on these people before the worst happens. Have you seen this?
He takes a narrow and legalistic line, but that strengthens his argument. HuffPost reported yesterday that there is a mini-rebellion at State over Biden's refusal to stand up to the Israelis. We could still stop this, if there was a will to.
America should not intervene in the Middle East. Israel will deal with Hamas and hopefully that conflict can be contained to Gaza. If Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel will have to deal with them. I can see Israel being on a war footing for quite some time.
I support using Seal teams and Delta forces to assist it finding and taking back our American Hostages. I would hate to be sitting in some cell thinking my government wasn’t going to free me and kill my kidnappers and those Americans already slaughtered.
The only little wrinkle in that is the impolite question of how many of those American hostages also hold Israeli passports. Why should the United States have to spin up our resources and get into this mess when the other government that claims them is, you know, right there?
I know, I know. We're not supposed to think deeply about the ramifications of allowing people to call themselves citizens of the United States while they also hold legal citizenship in another land.
In the Mouth of Madness (1994) the book editor Linda Styles introduces what I can only describe as demonic logic to the main character, “reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority.”
"There are people who were more morally certain of denouncing people who went to the beach and to weddings and funerals in 2020 than are about the beheading of babies in 2023."
"Because people who believe that anything at all justifies these kinds of atrocities are people who can be convinced that it is good and necessary to do it to you, for the sake of a cause."
Could there have been some conditioning in the Covid panic to allow this latter response. People went to extremes to punish those who legitimately questioned mitigation efforts (and in large measure turned out to be right.). I even had doctors tell me that they would not treat anyone unvaccinated - something I have never seen even during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Non-personhood was accepted in the face of manufactured fear. It only takes one more step from there.
We were played big time during COVID. The first clue was "The Settled Science". Real science is never 'settled'. Newtonian physics was as settled as any field ever was until it wasn't.
Binary thinking has been promoted into every sphere of life. Every recent crisis has been reduced to 'good v evil' 'with us or against us'. No questioning is allowed, no nuance is allowed. We either go along with the accepted narrative or it means we're bad people.
Very true, but I think Americans have been this way for a long time. As a child in Canada fifty years ago I remember my dad watching the news and mocking the "excited states of America." It seems that kind of binary thinking has spread worldwide along side American culture.
I saw a joke somewhere to the effect that England is a relatively placid place because they sent their criminals to Australia and their zealots over here.
England had and has ferocious means of oppression when needed. People were beaten into submission by Cromwell, the assassins of King Charles 1 and their modern descendants etc.......Just ask the Irish.
Thank you for this amazing column. You have said what needs to be said.
I want to be of a little help, if I can. My PhD is in Mathematics Education, so I hope I have credibility when discussing numbers here. The poll you reference, **quoted in the way it was**, does not appear overly credible. You are very credible, but regarding this, I don't want to give anyone an opening to fault you.
(1) The methodology of this poll is suspect. I drilled down and found the original source, linked below. Note the following from the source – quoted below - this means, for instance, that if pollsters believe more youth side with the left, they could “weight” those responses higher.
<<<”Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 2%.”
>>>
(2) Next, not the lack of care in presenting results. The word “blaming” appears to be omitted in the stating the poll question -
<<<”Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”>>>>
(3) Finally – and probably most important -this poll eliminates respondents who answered, “I don’t know”. Other polls have shown significant numbers who answer, “I don’t know”, of course, either because they truly do not know, or because they do not want the poll taker to know their opinion.
Most polls I see that break down numbers for youth and include "don't know" responses do not say a majority of youth agrees with Hamas. But you are so right to say that the number of youths supporting Hamas is heartbreakingly large. (It just does not appear to be a majority.)
(4) Strangely, here are the results of the same poll for the question <<<”Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature or not genocidal”>>> Ages 18-24 say genocidal 62%, not genocidal 38%. Those are not typos.
(5) And of course with a margin of error of +- 2 percent, it might not be 51-49 for Hamas. It might be 49-51 for Israel.
(6) Last - this was a survey of 2119 people. We are to "trust them" that their sample was normally distributed, and thus claims like "margin of error +/- 2%" are accurate (these claims fall apart if the distribution is not normal). But look how credible their "normally distributed" election surveys tend to be. Hmmmm.....
My recommendation: Look at a lot of polls, not just this one. The ones I see, that show "don't knows" do not say it is a majority of youth supporting Hamas, but again, yes, it is far too many.
"They" and their families are all future Democrat voters. Extended voting days and vote by mail will give the SEIU plenty of time to round them up. The border is functioning as desired.
If the migrants were perceived as probable Young Republicans, machine gun fire would flood the Rio Grand day and night.
It sounds like what you are proposing, Rod, is a clean war. One where people are killed without a lot of blood and gore and torture.
Snark aside, your incessant emphasis on the torture and gore plays right into the hands of the forces that are seeking to draw the US into war precisely by appealing to people's emotions. Is the burned body of a Gazan baby any less horrific than that of a Jewish baby? Of course not, but we are not being bombarded with pictures of those. Is the corpse of a Jewish mother mutilated by Hamas fighters any more awful than that of the corpse of a Gazan mother mutilated by an Israeli bomb? Of course not, but we are not seeing those images.
My plea is that you stop focusing on the images, which are designed to manipulate and evidently are succeeding.
I wish we could link or post memes in these comment boxes. Saw a cartoon the other day entitled "Dead Kid Battle!" On the left side of the box a man holds a dead toddler by the ankle and says "This dead kid proves my point!" On the right side of the panel, a woman waving a dead toddler over her head says "Oh yeah? Well THIS dead kid proves MY point!"
When it comes to the propaganda front in this conflict, both sides are definitely having a Dead Kid Battle.
When I was a boy we got the "Scholastic Magazine" or something with a similar title in school. About the 4th-9th grade or thereabouts. It came out periodically and was distributed to us in class. One year there was one issue (maybe more) devoted to WW I, and it had an article showing cartoons shown in British newspapers at the time of the war. These cartoons showed German soldiers bayonetting Belgian babies. Several cartoons. The accompanying article made the point that both sides in a war will use propaganda to demonize the other side and for their own purposes in general. It's a point to remember, and I have. Over the years I’ve come to see that it is not only in wartime that the authorities will do so. There is very little accurate reporting about any crisis; e.g., Hurricane Katrina. It seems there is a political or ideological point in all of it.
Because intentions matter as well as actions, yes, the burned body of a Gazan baby is less horrific than that of a Jewish baby: both are terrible, but if there was no intent to kill the former, it's morally less blameworthy. I'm not saying that there's no blame attached, mind you. A drunken driver who has an accident in which someone is killed is still quite rightly punished by the law because he should have known before he got into his car that there was such a risk. But his term of imprisonment won't be as long as that awarded to the man who hires a lorry and deliberately mows down pedestrians.
You're misunderstanding the analogy. If there's intent to kill babies, then yes, that's equally bad on both sides. But Israel's intent (given that it sends warnings to the inhabitants of the buildings, which are, at least in theory, Hamas military targets) is to destroy military installations and to kill Hamas leaders rather than civilians. I'm not defending Israel's actions here, merely drawing a distinction between the moral weight of the different motivations.
Throwing a grenade at a criminal in a playground is still immoral even if I say I was aiming at the criminal and never intended to kill all the children.
Being able to predict the fact that throwing a grenade in a playground would result in the deaths of the children but still going ahead and doing it makes me morally culpable.
The UN agrees that what Israel are doing amounts to collective punishment. It is against international law and a war crime.
Would it change the calculus if the criminal in question had already killed children and you knew that by letting him escape, he would kill more? If not, why not?
Oh the UN says it? The UN that spends 90% of its time passing resolutions to condemn Israel while saying not a word about all the atrocities that the rest of its members commit?
I don't think "carpet bombing" is a fair or accurate term to describe it. Israel hasn't lined B-52's up and said, "destroy these grid squares." It would be easy enough for them to do this if that's actually what they intended.
Yeah, I don't think that is "carpet-bombing" or else the rubble would have extended to the horizon. There are intact buildings, trees, and green spaces just beyond those two destroyed city blocks, which tells me the buildings in those two city blocks were precisely targeted, which is the opposite of "carpet bombing." I do not know if those buildings were legitimate military targets. Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren't. But they were clearly destroyed with precise intention rather than with carpet-bombing, which essentially means "everything south of this latitude is gone." I'm not trying to be pedantic.
There is no way to engage in war without killing. Are you arguing that only some people should engage in war, and the rest should submit? Should Israel just hand the loving and mostly peaceful Palestinians a state and then flee back into the diaspora (where the rest of the world is busy proving they won’t be safe there)?
Hamas has carefully positioned all their resources to maximize civilian deaths when Israel attacks. They want the deaths because they know they’re winning the information war, and their hope is to inspire enough outrage to start a full scale regional war, which they are hoping to finally win this time - Jews be gone, Palestine "free from the river to the sea" as they shout on college campuses and in European city centers.
I've been reliably informed by my friends on the left that there's not such thing as a "civilian" in this conflict and, in a larger sense, that collective punishment is acceptable in matters of (cough) "justice." I'm not knocking you as one of those people, but their arguments over the past 15 to 20 years make it a lot harder for well-intentioned folks like yourself to argue and persuade from principle.
Your "5000 people are dead - half of them children" line comes straight from the mouth of Hamas, an Islamo-facist, Jew-hating, pro-genocide, murderous terrorist government. And there is no 'carpet bombing' happening in Gaza. Only precision-targeted strikes on Hamas military targets. It is not Israel's fault that Hamas uses - and has used - its civilians as human shields. Civilian deaths in Gaza are the fault of Hamas, Iran, and the wider Arab world, because the 'Palestinian cause' is and has always been a ruse to drive the Jews out of Israel.
Intentions matter, certainly. But on the road to war--especially one in which the United States may be drawn--there never was a more apt analogy than "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
And with "collateral damage", it gets really messy. "Human shields" can be involuntary or voluntary, and even "proximate"--meaning, unless the bombing is ultra-precise, any bombing will have *inevitable* "collateral damage" in tightly packed situations--and exactly what caused those tightly packed conditions? Perhaps refusing 700,000 Arab-speaking Palestinians--and their descendents--from returning to their homes after fleeing violence in 1948 in what is now Israel had a bit to do with it. And fears of not allowing back again--due to their previous experience--is convincing many Gazans to not flee the violence now.
I've said this before, but after Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Murrah building in 1995, a "militia" man came in and crowed about how this was a blow against government tyranny. I asked what about the 19 children in the day care center there and he said, and I have never forgotten it, "War has been declared. There are no innocent victims!" (I knew this guy well - He was, of course, "Christian" and "pro-life.")
Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was...
Yes he did. He had lost his humanity in that he could not feel sorrow for the deaths of innocent children. Madeline Albright had lost her humanity when she said something to the effect that thousands of Iraqi deaths, including children, was worthwhile.
What I'm not sure about is what to do about an enemy like Hamas. The Gazan civilians are primarily in danger because Hamas wants it that way, right? If Hamas didn't weave itself in among the civilians like it does, then the civilians wouldn't be in such danger. But then is that supposed to mean that terrorists are safe and untouchable as long as they behave like Hamas does? Israel can't hit Hamas without hitting civilians (because that's how Hamas has set it up), but Israel also can't just let Hamas sit there in safety, thereby almost rewarding them for pursuing this sort of dishonorable strategy. The whole situation just seems morally impossible.
In principle, they do attack civilian centres in Gaza when those centres are used as civilian shields for Hamas installations, and they warn the residents before the attack. I say 'in principle', because we have no way of knowing either how accurate their information is, or whether in fact they do adhere to these guidelines. And I don't see what my reasoning has to do with the US or its allies - I'm British.
I have a strong aversion to "snuff film" journalism of any sort in any cause. Graphic imagery may be needed in medical and legal contexts, but beyond that it's just a form of sensationalism that sheds heat but no light, appealing to passions not reason-- and when it comes to questions involving life and death reason and not wrath needs to be in the drivers seat. Also, we should allow the dead their dignity in death and not plaster the images of their deaths all over.
While your attitude is understandable, and I'd probably agree in most situations, in this particular case it's necessary because there are many, many people who are simply denying that these atrocities happened. I've read Tweets which claim that the pictures of burnt bodies and decapitated soldiers were generated by AI. Body camera videos are more difficult (though not, of course, absolutely impossible) to forge.
Then let them deny it. Those people are obviously having zero influence on US foreign policy (maybe it's different in Europe?) And Rod keeps doing this. Even if it's necessary to do so, once should suffice. Moreover how much denial of this sort are we finding right here in Rod's readership? There's a range of opinion on the larger questions involved, but no one here is saying "Oh, it didn't happen"-- and this is a fairly closed community with a paywall around it.
Going forward we are going to have to be very wary, in many, many different contexts, that we are not deceived by deep fakes in pictures and videos as the technology for that sort of thing improves. At some point we may need to require sworn depositions, on pain of perjury, as to the legitimacy of any such material before we can uncritically accept it.
I agree with Sue. It’s extremely important to get across to the people whose minds are not yet 100% sealed that what happened on Oct 7 was something new and quite different than the usual "this is what happens in the Middle East". If you get all your news from NPR, for example, you will have gotten a very sanitized version of what happened. Only a week or more later did they even deign to admit a few bits about attacks in kibbutz (whatever the plural is). Nothing about mass gang rape, baby killing, beheading, burning families alive, etc, etc.
The evil of humanity can be very hard to take, but sometimes it’s important not to look away. People need to see Shani's naked corpse in the truck and kids spitting on her body. They need to see the terrified girl being shoved in a Jeep with the seat of her pants covered in blood. People need to know what actually happened on Oct 7.
Assuming one's audience is not illiterate words suffice*-- well written, they can be exceedingly powerful. The urge to post pictures is at its base pornographic (in the larger sense) in nature.
My bias may be showing, but I am an admirer of classical minims in all such things. "The Trojan Women" is all the more horrifying in its depiction of atrocity (and my men the Greek saw as heroes) with its sparse, sharp but simple language than any quantity of superlatives heaped up like some Tower of Babel.
I understand your point and even somewhat appreciate it. And if our journalists still had that literary ability and were willing to use it to get across the gravity of what happened on Oct 7, that would be great. But instead they are doing everything they can to obscure and sanitize and "yes but" contextualize. That is why I think we need the brute force imagery response.
I'll agree with you on one thing: journalism is a pale shadow of what it used to be. Though I ascribe that mostly to the near-collapse of old-time media due to the internet not to the perfidy of individual journalists. We've always had hacks and propagandists in the business-- William Hearst's guys yellow-wrote us right into an imperialistic war. The media of Jefferson's day make James O'Keefe look like a choir boy. But today we have no room, or budget, for excellence. O tempora, O mores I guess.
On YouTube, there is the audio made with the phone of a murdered Israeli woman. A Hamas terrorist has used the phone to call his parents in Gaza and scream with delight that he has just killed ten Jews.
The exultation is beyond creepy. Even worse are the blessings his parents shout back to him.
Without "snuff film journalism" - as you call it ;) - the world would never have known about the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, etc. It is necessary to know the truth.
I am not suggesting we suppress information, only avoid exploiting, pornographic depictions. The written word is more than adequate for the purpose of disseminating news.
As you know, it's why Eisenhower ordered the films made. And still, we have Holocaust denial.
I have almost unequivocal admiration for Eisenhower as the greatest President of my lifetime. I'm constantly recommending a book about him here, and in case you haven't seen any of them, I recommend it to you: "Ike's Bluff," by Evan Thomas.
Try this one, which I mentioned in the comments of a previous post. In the Wasaw ghetto uprising, would the Jews there have been justified in, say, torturing their Nazi opponents, gouging out their eyes, disemboweling them in front of their children (right, I know, but just go with it).
The assassins who killed Reinhard Heydrich - rather than blasting him with a mine, would they have been justified in, say, crushing his testicles slowly beneath a jackboot or giving him the "secret brand?"
In other words, if you consider something to be monstrously evil, as our leftist friends apparently consider Israel - is it it morally legitimate to respond with atrocities and monstrosities? Some obviously think so. But then an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Actually, the equivalent would go further. That the Warsaw uprising did not kill only Nazi troops. They swept into an area where families and children were living and proceeded to torture to death as many of them as they could.
As gruesome as a way to kill enemy soldiers that is, all things considered, I would understand. Not like or be comfortable with, but get it. They are a legit target.
But the families? That is an out and out monstrous evil, specifically targeting them and visiting monstrous evil upon them. There just is no rationalizing it.
But let us also be clear. Gaza is not the equivalent of the camps the Jews were held at. It is not even the equivalent of Apartheid. There is no equivalent, all things considered.
Probably, but most of those have some increasingly warped ideas of how those terms are even defined, as well as other terms, like "male', "female" and the list goes down the rabbit hole.
Yes it would be justified, though that doesn’t mean you should do it. As someone (Douglas Murray?) said, a "proportionate" response would be going into Gaza and gang raping exactly the same number of young women, killing exactly the same number of babies, and so on. And absolutely that would be perfectly justified.
But the Israelis are not savages like the Palestinians, so they won’t do that. They will, however, engage in war to face off what is clearly an existential threat, and that will necessarily involve the deaths of innocents (if one can call the kids that spit on girls' corpses "innocent") - the number of which Hamas fully intends to maximize. And the real moral question being argued is, does Israel have the right to do that?
I say yes, but apparently lots of people disagree, and hide behind abstract notions of "peace" and so on.
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time talking with and getting to know bikers, neo-Nazis, Russian mafia, hardcore militia types, etc. I was curious, I suppose because I had told been of the evils of these things and wanted to see what made it all tick. I came away realizing that the media had vastly overstated the reality, that it sold a lot of press to treat these things all as dragons lurking behind the horizon. I won’t deny that violence happened, but it was a weird combination of being inherent to the culture and part of doing business. Entitlement to violence was never really something I found. By this, I mean being able to incorporate violence into a moral framework that blessed it as inherent to the lifestyle or existence. Justifications for it almost always came from an atmosphere of circumstance, not an inherent justification that the act was acceptable because of the status of each person involved. In other words, a person might be beaten or killed, but it was because that person acted in a way that made it necessary in the beater or killer’s mind. This justification on a personal or individual level made it possible to commit violence and maintain position within that in-group, because it was seen as essential to the survival of the group.
I also spent time talking with others, including the various leftist racial supremacists of the day. Black supremacists in particular. It was harder talking with them, because they would converse for a while, then they remembered they hated whites, and that would end the dialog for a while. The contrast was that the justification of violence did not exist in the same sense, if at all. It meant that violence did not need to be restrained, as it wasn’t seen as a threat to the survival of the in-group.
In other words, white-descended cultures, where violence permeates the culture, still have the idea that the existence of the group depends on interactions that are rational in an external framework. An external framework in this sense is a moral origin external to the in-group. In non-white cultures, the need to justify doesn’t exist, that there is no need because the morality of an action is separate from the action, and justification, if it occurs, happens externally.
A stark example of this years ago was when I was at a chain grocery store in the ‘hood. A black woman was being detained by two white security guards. She didn’t go quietly, and a crowd of thirty or so blacks had gathered and were shouting things like “let her go, she didn’t do nothing!” So, the in-group morality overrode a larger framework, because the in-group did not see this as a crime and did not need to justify it to the out-group.
There is a lot more to it, and I could fill a book if all this hadn’t happened a long time ago and anyone was willing to publish anything connected to reality, but I think it explains an awful lot. Cruelty, as it occurs in such vivid tones, can do so because of self-justification. Restraint doesn’t exist, because restraint is a product of a moral framework. If you have no moral framework - because the in-group threat doesn’t exist - then anything is possible.
When reading about the Holocaust some time back, three things stood out to me at the time and I did not understand them. The first was why the Nazis started using gas chambers, when bullets were simpler, easier, and safer than trying to use mass quantities of poison gases to kill. The second was why corrupt camp guards and administrators were themselves punished at times. And the third was why Oskar Dirlewanger found himself on the outs with a regime that was itself notorious for cruelty. Fourth, I suppose, was why the murder of Jews and others, was not public and widely celebrated. Obviously, it was because Nazi cruelty didn’t happen, but because there was a need for justification. Restraint, however weak and superficial, was still necessary to maintain in-group integrity.
The left has spent decades tearing down the frameworks which supported justification. If it feels good, do it. A motto also adopted by the Church of Satan, if you want to raise an eyebrow. Restraint forced by constraint doesn’t happen. It is a reversion to barbarism, because an uncivilized culture lacks frameworks and survival is emphasized above all other things. God and natural law doesn’t enter the mind at all, only the optimal path for the in-group. Anything is justified, because the framework itself does not exist.
In the eyes of Hamas, smashing a baby’s skull may happen, but without greater meaning. Likewise, it could not happen, and there would be no more meaning then, either. This is the psychopathy of culture. It is satanic in a very literal sense. The brutality of communism in the last century was the same kind of thinking on a large scale, where out-group justification did not exist, only in-group. It was perfectly fine to commit any form of violence against anyone seen as part of the out-group, because there was no external framework.
This really should terrify anyone who is paying any attention. What the left is doing here - and I think covers both of Rod’s idea of summoning demons and of an apocalypse - is simply abrogating millennia of trying to form the framework of civilization. The pick-mes in the crowd will happily point to all the failings of civilization, while ignoring the reality of the statement. In-group integrity no longer depends on demonstrating a thing as a threat, but simply it can be dealt with as people want. By not condemning this, the left has opened the gates of hell, perhaps quite literally.
What then is the appropriate response? Islam itself does not appeal to a higher moral framework, which is why a thing like 9/11 can happen and why terrorism is a regular tool. The left believes that it cannot condemn, but condemnation is the building block of restraint and civilization. Without it, justification becomes internal again, the psychopathy of barbarism.
I am not sure where this ends up, but I do not think that it was inaccurate for people in 2001 and before to describe this as the clash of civilizations. Or, really, the clash of civilization with barbarism. The problem now is defining what that means and what it means to be living in a time when people with the loudest voices rush all over themselves to proclaim sympathy for the devil.
Interesting discussion yesterday with Aaron Mate and Katie Halpern with Norman Finkelstein describing the baby killing etc. during Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
Rod, please don't apologize for continuing to talk about the Hamas atrocities. You're doing a noble work. Also, I've been reading Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews": it couldn't be more apposite right now. So many themes seem to be repeating themselves today. But in this case, it's amazing to read how many did not want to know (or admit) what was happening. If the Jews had left rectification of the injustices they suffered (or even their very survival) to others, they would be only a memory by now. Also, both in "A History of the Jews" and his masterwork, "Modern Times", Johnson targets again and again as the central theme that moral proportionalism of *doing evil for the sake of good* undermining whatever good had been sought, as well as paving the way for more wicked actors to do worse things (colonialism is the classic case here). He also shows how the Israelis own willingness at times to descend to this moral equivalency engendered the same kind of cruel calculous in their antagonists. Worth checking out, if it's been a while since you've read them.
No disagreement with a word in here, but up to and including "Israel will rightly work to minimize the deaths of innocents, but it cannot allow Hamas to get away with what it did, period" you lose me. "Get away with"? Not going to argue the case, but let's just hope I don't get to say "I told you so" on the other side of World War III. Col. Macgregor told Tucker yesterday that if Israel wants to destroy Hamas, it has to destroy Gaza.
Yet and still, can we agree that the story is NOT Bari Weiss turning right?
Not sure how we as common citizens can do much of anything in the face of this hatred. Vote? Please. When you get down to it, isn’t “doing something about ‘it’ “ i.e., the current importation of violent Islamicists” really about stopping immigration of Muslims? Didn’t the last administration get excoriated for even the most limited suggestion of that?? If that is not what is being suggested here, albeit perhaps cloaked in the interest of civil discourse, what does “doing something” mean? Anyone?
Netanyahu's narrative might have had some credence before Joan Peters' work was exposed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and others who are actual scholars of the history there. He also might have a shred of credibility if we were still ignorant of the DNA studies of ancient Canaanites, Arab-speaking Palestinians, Jewish people, and other Arab-speaking people (spoiler alert: Arab-speaking Palestinians and Jewish people are both descended from the ancient Canaanites, and Arab-speaking Palestinians are genetically closer to Jewish people than any other Arab-speaking population...and Ashkenazi Jews have a fair amount of European DNA mixed in, mostly on the matralinial side).
What slightly surprises me is how Jordan Peterson, a fairly smart person, just accepts the lies without challenge (despite his statement on how he'll attempt to "push back"). But Peterson's proved to ultimately be a disappointment to many of us, after aligning himself with the Daily Wire.
Well it looks like we're shaping up for WW3 and no adults appear to be in the room. I assume the people who are beating the war drums are fine for their sons to go off and fight and die for Israel.
Instead of fuelling the hysteria we need to try to walk this back, because when it escalates into a global conflict the current death toll of 1400 Israelis and 5000 Palestinians will look small in comparison.
See Tucker Carlson's interview with Colonel Macgregor:
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1716574971206500570
Has it ever occurred to these geniuses that Israel may have walked into a trap?
Hamas certainly would have anticipated Israel's reaction.
Personally I am still pondering how the intelligence failure happened. If the Israeli army are really that incompetent then it doesn't bode well.
I exchange messages on X with a woman, I only know her through that platform. She's a Jewish New Yorker, passionately Zionist, with zero tolerance for what Dreher calls buttery. She's convinced that the Israelis--she loathes Bibi--had to know something was up and let it rip thinking it could be contained and turned to their advantage. How did they cross the border, execute the horrors, and then make it back with hundreds of hostages. How did it happen?
I have watched several Tiktoks of Israeli people, many with experience of military intelligence work, asking the same questions.
Good God, the Jews are so bad that they let their own babies be slaughtered so they could slaughter Palestinian babies.
Read N.S. Lyons' piece on it. I'll write about it in tomorrow's newsletter. It's a classic case of smart people becoming over-confident in technology.
OK, OK, I'm no expert. But I'm also weary of getting accused of making "telling" remarks when I imply that the Israelis' motives and purposes are on a level lower than Paul Newman's in Exodus. You know? The woman I've been discussing this with is a Jew, a Zionist, and a conservative.
Not just technology. In its early days, Netanyahu funded and encouraged Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.
This also fuels a lot of conspiracy theories in the Muslim world about Hamas -- that they are secretly in bed with Israel. (I'm not saying I believe it, but you'd be amazed at how often I hear it from intelligent people.)
That was my first thought too. They weren’t expecting old school tactics.
The allowed in theory does not make sense to me. Bibi has not benefited politically. The Israelies were caught napping on one of their big holidays combined with the complacency that "technology" on the wall would keep them safe.
Look, I have no facts. It's remarkable that it happened the way it did. I'll look for the Lyons piece.
Their complacency, Bush Hermit, may well have been compounded by Jake Sullivan's characteristic hubris and ignorance just 2 weeks earlier, when he boasted that the Middle East hadn't known such peace in 20 years...
How did it happen? Here is a good explanation … https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/hard-lessons-from-israels-high-tech?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=138207552&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=c1ru1&utm_medium=email
I think this attack in some ways is like Israel's Uvalde. How did Hamas break through the border undetected (that itself raises questions) and had a free reign of terror for *seven hours* before a military response?
Either gross incompetence or a corrupt desire to justify "mowing the lawn". Either one is bad for the Israeli govenrment.
https://open.substack.com/pub/theupheaval/p/hard-lessons-from-israels-high-tech?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Thanks for the link--a great analysis.
Ultimately, though, this still leaves egg on the face of the Israeli government that depended on these highly complex, non-robust systems...and that they had no adequate backup to send in troops where and when needed.
It may not be a conspiracy, but this kind of "failure of imagination", like 9/11, was unforseen but not unforeseeable, and the Israeli government failed on its most basic function--keeping its citizens safe.
Alas, even though the article offers solutions (generally very low-tech) what this failure will likely result in will be pretty much what our 9/11 did: disproportionate military response and probably even more high-tech gadgetry purchased to try to plug the hole of the former system, when hiring a few more armed soldiers would work far better. Ah, but the Israeli and American arms manufacturers wouldn't get nearly as much money for that, would they?
Just like the Americans did. One reason that the offensive into Gaza has not started is that the American commander from Fallujah is advising the Israeli generals. Gaza will be a physical and political meat grinder if they do go in.
The young who are supporting the Palestinians will not fight in the next Great War. Canada will see a huge influx in the number of border crossers. No way will they fight.
I would ask the young Woke why Canada and not Mexico?
Plenty of people thought 9-11 would be the beginning of WWIII too. Didn't happen, though a lot of bad stuff did come of it, A direct confrontation between the US and Russia (the only WWIII I care about since nukes are in the equation) is possible in Ukraine, but in the Middle East? Not very possible at all, given that Russia is bogged down badly in Ukraine which is much closer to home and has only rhetoric and maybe some extra weapons to offer outside that theater.
On the larger issue, the question is not "Was Hamas justified in all it did"? Of course it wasn't. The question is, What should Israel do? And while I support Israel taking down Hamas, that does not entail a blank check for Israel to commit atrocities of its own.
I think MacGregor's point is that a lot has changed in the past 20 years. Other countries are stronger and the US is perceived as weaker. This could be an opportunity for other countries to try to break the hegemony.
I don't see anyone rushing into to try that. Russia is completely engaged closer to home. The Chinese are certainly offering themselves as an alternative hegemon to the US but they are not about to send troops to the Middle East. And Israel is still Israel: able to take on its neighbors as needed.
Yeah but I think all bets are off if the US takes a direct swing at Iran. And after the foreign policy blundering of the past 20+ years, I've no confidence we'll show restraint
What do you mean by "direct swing"? Trump had an Iranian general assassinated, which is certainly a causus belli (and unusual even in actual wartime).
So far the the evidence for any intent-- even on Israel's part-- to engage Iran militarily in fairly void. Are there warmongers, in the US, the UK and Israel, who would like to so? Absolutely yes. But there are no signs pointing to their being able to get their way.
Recall that in the First Gulf War Saddam Hussein fired off missiles at Israel although Israel had nothing to do with the conflict itself; yet the US held to its mission in Kuwait and did not use that as reason to go after Saddam after his army was expelled from Kuwait. And given the current disorder (polite word used) in the House right now, it's hard to see how the US could be rallied to such an effort at the moment (Yes, Congress would have to sign off on such a war with some sort of vote or other).
Yeah but I'm not thinking the First Gulf War, I'm thinking Iraq. I'm thinking "regime change." And I'm sure the neocons have allllll sorts of plans to rally Americans to their never-changing cause.
Jon? You do know Israel has nukes, don't you? And if Iran gets them (whether home grown or somehow from Pakistan), WW III sounds possible.
There is zero evidence that Iran has nukes, or can obtain them.
Do you think it possible Israel would use nuclear weapons in a merely conventional war against, say Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah? That the US would green light such a thing? The world's nuclear powers have not been able to entirely prevent other nations developing nukes (India; Pakistan) but they have been united about tamping down any possibility of those nations using them (again, India and Pakistan).
The use of nuclear weapons in the particular geography of this conflict would also come with an extravagant amount of blowback due to fallout patterns. I can see some truly depraved terrorists not giving a hoot and so being willing to expend Arab lives too-- but would any remotely responsible government including Iran, do so?
Trees do not grow up to the sky.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
The idea that the Isrealis would blast off all their nukes against not just their immediate Arab neighbors but against most of the rest of the world, friend and foe alike, in a "burn it all down" scenario in the face of the loss of a conventional has it's own Wiki page.
Thinking that the US has the ability to convince the Isrealis not to do it if they thought they were out of options is pretty naive, IMO.
The US has the ability to turn Israel into a cauterized charnel. So does Russia, China, the UK and France. I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect there are unpublicized agreements out there which hang like the Sword of Damocles over every nation threatening destruction on any nation that uses nukes unprovoked. Hence the restraint shown by India and Pakistan too.
Sometimes I really like your posts.
I doubt North Korea is on that list.
It's an unwelcome truth when we're all so uncomfortable: that it's almost unbearable to think of things not changing, but even more awful to imagine what would come after. So as bad as things get there's a sustaining and enormous pressure in quiet corners to keep chugging along. It may make us mad but it's also something to be profoundly grateful for.
There's the Samson Option, though, as Dukeboy pointed out. That's the idea that, if Israel were to be eliminated, it would nuke a large number of Middle Eastern and European capitals first, to go out with a bang. This isn't some weird fantasy; in 2002, the LA Times published an article openly advocating this.
Presumably, however, in most Europe and Middle Eastern capitals, there must also be the foreseen Samson Option, i.e. that if Israel's existence is ever imperilled, it will be nuked so intensely that its forces cannot fire missiles.
There is no clean, sanitized war. There is no war without atrocities. There is no way to "take down Hamas" without a months/years long campaign that will result in hundreds of thousands of casualties. We also take great pains to avoid civilian deaths (I’ve heard the details of this from a retired colonel, and I guarantee few other militaries take the steps we take), but it doesn’t sway world opinion, and it won’t for Israel either. I don’t see that Israel has an alternative to taking down Hamas, either. It really is a rock-hard place situation.
Hamas has carefully structured things to *maximize* civilian casualties. They *want* the videos of bodies and screaming injured children for their world propaganda campaign, which they have very good reason to expect to be successful (it has been for years). I don’t know what "blank check" means here. What would you suggest they do? Symbolically take out a few targets and declare everything goes back to Oct 6? Not going to happen.
If this turns into some vast bloodbath Israel will lose badly in the long run. And yes, I would suggest taking out the Hamas leadership, by assassins if possible. The Old Testament says "An eye for an eye", but it does not say "fifty yeas for an eye." WShy play rigyht intop Hamas';s propaganda campaign? See also: the US response to 9-11. Not a model to be followed.
Well that was the bet the Arab countries took in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and they lost every time. Or do you just mean "lose badly" in "world opinion"? The problem with just taking out Hamas leadership is the decades of infrastructure built for war and terrorism sitting in Gaza, mostly underground. All Hamas leadership would be instantly replaced, either with other Palestinian nutters right there in Gaza or with outside "freedom fighters" supplied by Iran or whomever.
I think Israel is in a trap, and I don’t see any great options. They’re certainly not going to mimic the Bush wars, that’s not even an issue. They’re not about to go out nation building and convince the Iranians of the glories of LGBTQ. I imagine they’re well aware of how they are about to do what Hamas wants and play into their propaganda campaign, but they don’t see an alternative path.
Things are going to get very very bad.
Re: The problem with just taking out Hamas leadership is the decades of infrastructure built for war and terrorism sitting in Gaza, mostly underground
So what? That's just the real world-- no one is going to found the shangri-la. We took down Al Qaida and killed bin Laden but there are still Islamist radicals lusting for our blood too. If you seek a world with no enemies you're only option is genocide, and that will bring down not merely the opprobrium of the world, but the wrath of Heaven too. For all my life and then some we have lived with weapons of such lethal power trained on us that their wholesale use would render trivial every calamity of history added together. Put away millennialist dreams of a Peaceable Kingdom and learn to live with risk and danger, lest in seeking utopia you bring about the very things you fear worst, like some hero in Greek tragedy.
ΜΗΔΕΝ ΑΓΑΝ - Nothing in Excess.
If al-Qaeda had 500 miles of tunnels running through the DC suburbs filled with weapons and command centers, and then they attacked the city and did what they did in Israel on Oct 7, you'd best believe we'd be taking military action and not stopping until the tunnels were destroyed and every terrorist hiding within caught or killed.
The Israelis have learned to live with risk and danger in a much more real way than you or I and with pretty reasonable balance considering there have been multiple attempts to wipe them off the map - not abstractly, like idiot college students talk, but in real life. They thought they were managing the risk by forming partnerships with what seemed like "moderates" in Hamas and starting to loosen the Gaza restrictions a bit. They were repaid with Oct 7. I don't think very many Israelis think that Hamas in Gaza is a risk that can be managed any longer.
We're not talking about milennialist dreams, we're talking about how to survive on a tiny slice of the Middle East. The dream was that the Palestinians would ever accept a state that didn't involve wiping away the Jews. That dream is now dead.
And good grief this has nothing to do with our little domestic kerfluffles-- f*** all that LGBT crap and a plague on both thopse houses-- none of that matters at this level of things.
Things will not be good. But "very, very bad" is a purely matter of human choice-- and Heaven at least will judge those choices.
My only point with the LGBTQ comment was as an example of how very far our nation building efforts strayed from reason and reality. Unfortunately, just after we were finally recovering from Vietnam malaise, the Bush wars poisoned the well and have now left America full of eyes-covered isolationists. That will come back to bite us.
Actually, I think LGBT is relevant here.
The Israelis are deeply divided between religious Zionists, and hiloni atheists, and the latter, with their stronghold in the tech industry, are full-on with the whole Sexual Revolution show, not to mention transhumanism, AI, etc. - a sort of sci-fi version of Folsom Street.
If there were no Arab threat, there would probably be civil war. However, the one thing the two sides have in common is that they really, really hate Christians.
When I try to think of factions in the Holy Land who I do sympathise with, they're these: (1) Christians; (2) anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews; and (3) moderate, tolerant Muslims.
As in the Ukraine conflict, both sides are using extremely intense propaganda to further their ends. The drip, drip, drip of atrocity porn coming out of Israel is one version, as is the filming of the victims, especially children of Israeli bombing. I refuse to look at any of it because not only is it manipulative it is exploitative and dishonors the dead.
The sad thing is that this may be another wag the dog situation, just to keep Biden in office.
Stay away from Biden's dog!
I've told my study group that if they see a supposedly Christian leader engaging in moral equivalence or worse about this, they can know that leader is not to be listened to any more.
Sadly, I've seen two young woke (or woke adjacent) Christians I once thought highly of engage in sentimental moral equivalence. American evangelicals are prone to confuse sugary pious sentiment with truth, justice, and morality. Wokeness and idealism only makes that worse among the young.
The people who believe this stuff about national vs spiritual Israel don’t even realize that odd form of biblical criticism only surfaced in the 1830s.
The dispensationalists are a different flavor of evangelical than I am thinking about. I am thinking about woke and woke adjacent “Big Eva” and Co.
They also believe (hope) to be raptured so they can sit in heaven and watch the slaughter from their thrones. Seriously. I saw some posts on one of the local FB for the SD small town I used to live in, where they were just in ecstasy because the Rapture is coming, the Rapture is coming, and another which showed a large UFO with rays streaming from it with a meme that said:
"It wasn't aliens, it was Jesus! He called us home! HALLELUJAH! Thessalonians 4:16-17"
There is some seriously crazy stuff going on out here in fly-over country.
And they laugh at Farrakhan.
I only wish I could share what this guy posted, but since it's on FB, I can't.
I'm being told that Hagee is vieux jeu (there are other guys lined up right behind him), a crook (ditto), etc., etc. But the point of my posting him wasn't Hagee. It was Podhoretz,, University of Chicago, upper West Side intellectual blue blood. It's not just flyover country.
Sigh. As if it wasn't bad enough that they were ghouls, they had to be stone-cold stupid ghouls.
I believe you, Eve. It's so dumb it matches anything The Onion could come up with. Do you know what comes to mind for some reason? Slim Pickens' character ridin' that wild buckin' bronco nuke down, waving his cowboy hat, and yahooing in "Dr Strangelove."
I hadn't thought about that, but yes, Slim Picken's "Yahooo!!!!" That's where this guy's at.
I will directly and forthrightly declare my allegiance to and endorsement of another form of "yes- buttery:"
Yes, what Hamas did was an atrocity, but no, it is not an atrocity against me or one that should justify the intervention of my government into the conflict on my behalf. Especially since it seems clear from the very day that it happened that our blood thirsty neocon puppets like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley are prepping us to use it as an excuse to attack Iran.
Rod is correct that 10/7 is a lot like 9/11. It's being used as an excuse to move forces against a different target. They're trying to use our anger at atrocity to motivate us to attack a bigger target than a few Palestinians crammed into the open- air prison that makes up the Gaza strip. Just as the real target after 9/11 shifted from killing goatherders in the mountains of Afghanistan to rolling tanks into Iraq on the pretext of WMDs, they are running the exact playbook to get a wider war with Iran.
We fell for it once before. Rod admits that he did. I admit that I did. To the extent that the young people of 2023 who will be asked to do the fighting and dying in Tehran for the glory of the Great American Empire are saying "No," for whatever reason, I'm willing to support their decision.
The US will support Israel with rhetoric, Security Council vetoes, logistics and some money. I can't see the US committing its own forces to any combat, or indeed why there would be any need to do so. Israel has shown repeatedly it is capable of fighting off hostile neighbors even if it's been caught napping a couple of times.
This us the irony: Israel doesn't need our help to fight Hamas; and if it becomes a larger war, do we really want to defend Israel to the last American soldier?
There will be no draft. The army does not want thousands of the reluctant and the passive aggressive jammed into it's training system. We can purchase any bodies required from abroad either through direct cash incentives or promises of expedited US citizenship.
Do you remember Bush's advice to the American people after 9/11?
"Go shopping."
Precisely.
Unfortunately we're in up to our necks. The other side of that is we still can exercise some leverage on these people before the worst happens. Have you seen this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/23/state-department-quit-israel-arms/
He takes a narrow and legalistic line, but that strengthens his argument. HuffPost reported yesterday that there is a mini-rebellion at State over Biden's refusal to stand up to the Israelis. We could still stop this, if there was a will to.
Yes? How? I keep seeing that we need to prepare or stop it it before it’s too late but honestly I don’t think voting is going to get us out of it.
We've been bankrolling them for at least 50 years. Time the bill came due.
I think I lost the thread. Who should we be stopping? I was referring to temper tantrums from the squad and their sympathizers.
Oh. No. Voting is not going to get us out of that.
"...but no, it is not an atrocity against me or one that should justify the intervention of my government into the conflict on my behalf".
Neither is what went down in Nagorno-Karabakh (https://www.crisisgroup.org/content/nagorno-karabakh-conflict-visual-explainer). And the 101st Airborne is not in Georgia waiting to jump.
America should not intervene in the Middle East. Israel will deal with Hamas and hopefully that conflict can be contained to Gaza. If Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel will have to deal with them. I can see Israel being on a war footing for quite some time.
I support using Seal teams and Delta forces to assist it finding and taking back our American Hostages. I would hate to be sitting in some cell thinking my government wasn’t going to free me and kill my kidnappers and those Americans already slaughtered.
The only little wrinkle in that is the impolite question of how many of those American hostages also hold Israeli passports. Why should the United States have to spin up our resources and get into this mess when the other government that claims them is, you know, right there?
I know, I know. We're not supposed to think deeply about the ramifications of allowing people to call themselves citizens of the United States while they also hold legal citizenship in another land.
The WaPo is reporting that there are 600,000 "American citizens" in Israel this moment. That's what the Love Boat Flotilla is partly for.
Hey, @Dukeboy01:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EzLaDlIPos
https://nomadcapitalist.com/global-citizen/how-to-get-second-citizenship-israel-law-of-return/
600,000 "American citizens" - How many vote in US elections? That number of voters would have turned the last two Presidential elections.
I think it's a scandal, but that I do is probably "telling".
In the Mouth of Madness (1994) the book editor Linda Styles introduces what I can only describe as demonic logic to the main character, “reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority.”
Yes, the inmates have been running the asylum for quite some time now.
Move away from the sockets, kids; they're not for play.
"There are people who were more morally certain of denouncing people who went to the beach and to weddings and funerals in 2020 than are about the beheading of babies in 2023."
"Because people who believe that anything at all justifies these kinds of atrocities are people who can be convinced that it is good and necessary to do it to you, for the sake of a cause."
Could there have been some conditioning in the Covid panic to allow this latter response. People went to extremes to punish those who legitimately questioned mitigation efforts (and in large measure turned out to be right.). I even had doctors tell me that they would not treat anyone unvaccinated - something I have never seen even during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Non-personhood was accepted in the face of manufactured fear. It only takes one more step from there.
“The COVID response by big government was a psychological operation.”
This is unquestionably true. This book does an excellent job of laying out the case using official government documents:
https://www.amazon.com/State-Fear-Government-Weaponised-COVID-19/dp/B095L3WHXZ/
We were played big time during COVID. The first clue was "The Settled Science". Real science is never 'settled'. Newtonian physics was as settled as any field ever was until it wasn't.
COVID was all about a consensus of scientists not scientific consensus. I mentioned that to a masking and mandate fanatic, and he become indignant.
There is something to this.
Binary thinking has been promoted into every sphere of life. Every recent crisis has been reduced to 'good v evil' 'with us or against us'. No questioning is allowed, no nuance is allowed. We either go along with the accepted narrative or it means we're bad people.
Very true, but I think Americans have been this way for a long time. As a child in Canada fifty years ago I remember my dad watching the news and mocking the "excited states of America." It seems that kind of binary thinking has spread worldwide along side American culture.
I saw a joke somewhere to the effect that England is a relatively placid place because they sent their criminals to Australia and their zealots over here.
England had and has ferocious means of oppression when needed. People were beaten into submission by Cromwell, the assassins of King Charles 1 and their modern descendants etc.......Just ask the Irish.
Also makes me think of *V for Vendetta*.
Rod,
Thank you for this amazing column. You have said what needs to be said.
I want to be of a little help, if I can. My PhD is in Mathematics Education, so I hope I have credibility when discussing numbers here. The poll you reference, **quoted in the way it was**, does not appear overly credible. You are very credible, but regarding this, I don't want to give anyone an opening to fault you.
(1) The methodology of this poll is suspect. I drilled down and found the original source, linked below. Note the following from the source – quoted below - this means, for instance, that if pollsters believe more youth side with the left, they could “weight” those responses higher.
<<<”Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 2%.”
>>>
(2) Next, not the lack of care in presenting results. The word “blaming” appears to be omitted in the stating the poll question -
<<<”Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”>>>>
(3) Finally – and probably most important -this poll eliminates respondents who answered, “I don’t know”. Other polls have shown significant numbers who answer, “I don’t know”, of course, either because they truly do not know, or because they do not want the poll taker to know their opinion.
Most polls I see that break down numbers for youth and include "don't know" responses do not say a majority of youth agrees with Hamas. But you are so right to say that the number of youths supporting Hamas is heartbreakingly large. (It just does not appear to be a majority.)
(4) Strangely, here are the results of the same poll for the question <<<”Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature or not genocidal”>>> Ages 18-24 say genocidal 62%, not genocidal 38%. Those are not typos.
(5) And of course with a margin of error of +- 2 percent, it might not be 51-49 for Hamas. It might be 49-51 for Israel.
(6) Last - this was a survey of 2119 people. We are to "trust them" that their sample was normally distributed, and thus claims like "margin of error +/- 2%" are accurate (these claims fall apart if the distribution is not normal). But look how credible their "normally distributed" election surveys tend to be. Hmmmm.....
Link to the full poll:
https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP_Oct23_KeyResults.pdf
My recommendation: Look at a lot of polls, not just this one. The ones I see, that show "don't knows" do not say it is a majority of youth supporting Hamas, but again, yes, it is far too many.
Sounds like a good time for our borders to be wide open. You just can't make this stuff up......
"They" and their families are all future Democrat voters. Extended voting days and vote by mail will give the SEIU plenty of time to round them up. The border is functioning as desired.
If the migrants were perceived as probable Young Republicans, machine gun fire would flood the Rio Grand day and night.
It sounds like what you are proposing, Rod, is a clean war. One where people are killed without a lot of blood and gore and torture.
Snark aside, your incessant emphasis on the torture and gore plays right into the hands of the forces that are seeking to draw the US into war precisely by appealing to people's emotions. Is the burned body of a Gazan baby any less horrific than that of a Jewish baby? Of course not, but we are not being bombarded with pictures of those. Is the corpse of a Jewish mother mutilated by Hamas fighters any more awful than that of the corpse of a Gazan mother mutilated by an Israeli bomb? Of course not, but we are not seeing those images.
My plea is that you stop focusing on the images, which are designed to manipulate and evidently are succeeding.
I wish we could link or post memes in these comment boxes. Saw a cartoon the other day entitled "Dead Kid Battle!" On the left side of the box a man holds a dead toddler by the ankle and says "This dead kid proves my point!" On the right side of the panel, a woman waving a dead toddler over her head says "Oh yeah? Well THIS dead kid proves MY point!"
When it comes to the propaganda front in this conflict, both sides are definitely having a Dead Kid Battle.
It can be viewed here:
https://tinyurl.com/3pjxv4ke
When I was a boy we got the "Scholastic Magazine" or something with a similar title in school. About the 4th-9th grade or thereabouts. It came out periodically and was distributed to us in class. One year there was one issue (maybe more) devoted to WW I, and it had an article showing cartoons shown in British newspapers at the time of the war. These cartoons showed German soldiers bayonetting Belgian babies. Several cartoons. The accompanying article made the point that both sides in a war will use propaganda to demonize the other side and for their own purposes in general. It's a point to remember, and I have. Over the years I’ve come to see that it is not only in wartime that the authorities will do so. There is very little accurate reporting about any crisis; e.g., Hurricane Katrina. It seems there is a political or ideological point in all of it.
1914 German soldiers shooting canary's in cages!!!
Because intentions matter as well as actions, yes, the burned body of a Gazan baby is less horrific than that of a Jewish baby: both are terrible, but if there was no intent to kill the former, it's morally less blameworthy. I'm not saying that there's no blame attached, mind you. A drunken driver who has an accident in which someone is killed is still quite rightly punished by the law because he should have known before he got into his car that there was such a risk. But his term of imprisonment won't be as long as that awarded to the man who hires a lorry and deliberately mows down pedestrians.
Are you arguing that there is no intent to kill in the act of carpet bombing one of the most densely populated places on the planet?
5000 people are dead. Half of them children.
No, the purpose of the bombing mission was not to kill children. The purpose was to destroy a military target. Which is how you win wars.
If I throw grenades at a criminal in a playground and wipe out all the children is that ok?
Bad analogy. Military planners will pick the tool for the scenario. For that, you use a sniper. Or gas him out.
Bombers are used for an entirely different mission.
And unless you, with your clearly superior military understanding, can come up with a better approach that actually gets the mission done...
"The mission" is good.
You're misunderstanding the analogy. If there's intent to kill babies, then yes, that's equally bad on both sides. But Israel's intent (given that it sends warnings to the inhabitants of the buildings, which are, at least in theory, Hamas military targets) is to destroy military installations and to kill Hamas leaders rather than civilians. I'm not defending Israel's actions here, merely drawing a distinction between the moral weight of the different motivations.
Throwing a grenade at a criminal in a playground is still immoral even if I say I was aiming at the criminal and never intended to kill all the children.
Being able to predict the fact that throwing a grenade in a playground would result in the deaths of the children but still going ahead and doing it makes me morally culpable.
The UN agrees that what Israel are doing amounts to collective punishment. It is against international law and a war crime.
Would it change the calculus if the criminal in question had already killed children and you knew that by letting him escape, he would kill more? If not, why not?
Oh the UN says it? The UN that spends 90% of its time passing resolutions to condemn Israel while saying not a word about all the atrocities that the rest of its members commit?
"The UN agrees" is just an appeal to authority, anyway.
The UN is a worthless organization that should have been disbanded long ago.
I don't think "carpet bombing" is a fair or accurate term to describe it. Israel hasn't lined B-52's up and said, "destroy these grid squares." It would be easy enough for them to do this if that's actually what they intended.
I don't think you can have seen the footage that I've seen.
In fact here, have a look https://x.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1716483597366882506?s=20
Yeah, I don't think that is "carpet-bombing" or else the rubble would have extended to the horizon. There are intact buildings, trees, and green spaces just beyond those two destroyed city blocks, which tells me the buildings in those two city blocks were precisely targeted, which is the opposite of "carpet bombing." I do not know if those buildings were legitimate military targets. Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren't. But they were clearly destroyed with precise intention rather than with carpet-bombing, which essentially means "everything south of this latitude is gone." I'm not trying to be pedantic.
Half the population have been bombed out of their homes.
There is no way to engage in war without killing. Are you arguing that only some people should engage in war, and the rest should submit? Should Israel just hand the loving and mostly peaceful Palestinians a state and then flee back into the diaspora (where the rest of the world is busy proving they won’t be safe there)?
Hamas has carefully positioned all their resources to maximize civilian deaths when Israel attacks. They want the deaths because they know they’re winning the information war, and their hope is to inspire enough outrage to start a full scale regional war, which they are hoping to finally win this time - Jews be gone, Palestine "free from the river to the sea" as they shout on college campuses and in European city centers.
What is it you think Israel should do exactly?
I've been reliably informed by my friends on the left that there's not such thing as a "civilian" in this conflict and, in a larger sense, that collective punishment is acceptable in matters of (cough) "justice." I'm not knocking you as one of those people, but their arguments over the past 15 to 20 years make it a lot harder for well-intentioned folks like yourself to argue and persuade from principle.
Are you accusing me of being 'on the left'?
No.
Your "5000 people are dead - half of them children" line comes straight from the mouth of Hamas, an Islamo-facist, Jew-hating, pro-genocide, murderous terrorist government. And there is no 'carpet bombing' happening in Gaza. Only precision-targeted strikes on Hamas military targets. It is not Israel's fault that Hamas uses - and has used - its civilians as human shields. Civilian deaths in Gaza are the fault of Hamas, Iran, and the wider Arab world, because the 'Palestinian cause' is and has always been a ruse to drive the Jews out of Israel.
Intentions matter, certainly. But on the road to war--especially one in which the United States may be drawn--there never was a more apt analogy than "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
And with "collateral damage", it gets really messy. "Human shields" can be involuntary or voluntary, and even "proximate"--meaning, unless the bombing is ultra-precise, any bombing will have *inevitable* "collateral damage" in tightly packed situations--and exactly what caused those tightly packed conditions? Perhaps refusing 700,000 Arab-speaking Palestinians--and their descendents--from returning to their homes after fleeing violence in 1948 in what is now Israel had a bit to do with it. And fears of not allowing back again--due to their previous experience--is convincing many Gazans to not flee the violence now.
I've said this before, but after Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Murrah building in 1995, a "militia" man came in and crowed about how this was a blow against government tyranny. I asked what about the 19 children in the day care center there and he said, and I have never forgotten it, "War has been declared. There are no innocent victims!" (I knew this guy well - He was, of course, "Christian" and "pro-life.")
Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was... Same as it ever was...
He was morally insane.
Yes, he was. But he believed he made perfect sense.
Yes he did. He had lost his humanity in that he could not feel sorrow for the deaths of innocent children. Madeline Albright had lost her humanity when she said something to the effect that thousands of Iraqi deaths, including children, was worthwhile.
What I'm not sure about is what to do about an enemy like Hamas. The Gazan civilians are primarily in danger because Hamas wants it that way, right? If Hamas didn't weave itself in among the civilians like it does, then the civilians wouldn't be in such danger. But then is that supposed to mean that terrorists are safe and untouchable as long as they behave like Hamas does? Israel can't hit Hamas without hitting civilians (because that's how Hamas has set it up), but Israel also can't just let Hamas sit there in safety, thereby almost rewarding them for pursuing this sort of dishonorable strategy. The whole situation just seems morally impossible.
That's the hell of it, isn't it? The world often doesn't offer us a clear path. I think sometimes you're given what just seems as bad choices.
You don't think Israelis purposefully attack civilian centers in Gaza?
This sort of reasoning seems to boil down to "atrocities are okay when US allies do them"
In principle, they do attack civilian centres in Gaza when those centres are used as civilian shields for Hamas installations, and they warn the residents before the attack. I say 'in principle', because we have no way of knowing either how accurate their information is, or whether in fact they do adhere to these guidelines. And I don't see what my reasoning has to do with the US or its allies - I'm British.
I have a strong aversion to "snuff film" journalism of any sort in any cause. Graphic imagery may be needed in medical and legal contexts, but beyond that it's just a form of sensationalism that sheds heat but no light, appealing to passions not reason-- and when it comes to questions involving life and death reason and not wrath needs to be in the drivers seat. Also, we should allow the dead their dignity in death and not plaster the images of their deaths all over.
While your attitude is understandable, and I'd probably agree in most situations, in this particular case it's necessary because there are many, many people who are simply denying that these atrocities happened. I've read Tweets which claim that the pictures of burnt bodies and decapitated soldiers were generated by AI. Body camera videos are more difficult (though not, of course, absolutely impossible) to forge.
Then let them deny it. Those people are obviously having zero influence on US foreign policy (maybe it's different in Europe?) And Rod keeps doing this. Even if it's necessary to do so, once should suffice. Moreover how much denial of this sort are we finding right here in Rod's readership? There's a range of opinion on the larger questions involved, but no one here is saying "Oh, it didn't happen"-- and this is a fairly closed community with a paywall around it.
Going forward we are going to have to be very wary, in many, many different contexts, that we are not deceived by deep fakes in pictures and videos as the technology for that sort of thing improves. At some point we may need to require sworn depositions, on pain of perjury, as to the legitimacy of any such material before we can uncritically accept it.
The possibility of perjury charges is going to threaten people who are committed to dying for a cause, whatever cause that is?
I agree with Sue. It’s extremely important to get across to the people whose minds are not yet 100% sealed that what happened on Oct 7 was something new and quite different than the usual "this is what happens in the Middle East". If you get all your news from NPR, for example, you will have gotten a very sanitized version of what happened. Only a week or more later did they even deign to admit a few bits about attacks in kibbutz (whatever the plural is). Nothing about mass gang rape, baby killing, beheading, burning families alive, etc, etc.
The evil of humanity can be very hard to take, but sometimes it’s important not to look away. People need to see Shani's naked corpse in the truck and kids spitting on her body. They need to see the terrified girl being shoved in a Jeep with the seat of her pants covered in blood. People need to know what actually happened on Oct 7.
Assuming one's audience is not illiterate words suffice*-- well written, they can be exceedingly powerful. The urge to post pictures is at its base pornographic (in the larger sense) in nature.
My bias may be showing, but I am an admirer of classical minims in all such things. "The Trojan Women" is all the more horrifying in its depiction of atrocity (and my men the Greek saw as heroes) with its sparse, sharp but simple language than any quantity of superlatives heaped up like some Tower of Babel.
I understand your point and even somewhat appreciate it. And if our journalists still had that literary ability and were willing to use it to get across the gravity of what happened on Oct 7, that would be great. But instead they are doing everything they can to obscure and sanitize and "yes but" contextualize. That is why I think we need the brute force imagery response.
I'll agree with you on one thing: journalism is a pale shadow of what it used to be. Though I ascribe that mostly to the near-collapse of old-time media due to the internet not to the perfidy of individual journalists. We've always had hacks and propagandists in the business-- William Hearst's guys yellow-wrote us right into an imperialistic war. The media of Jefferson's day make James O'Keefe look like a choir boy. But today we have no room, or budget, for excellence. O tempora, O mores I guess.
On YouTube, there is the audio made with the phone of a murdered Israeli woman. A Hamas terrorist has used the phone to call his parents in Gaza and scream with delight that he has just killed ten Jews.
The exultation is beyond creepy. Even worse are the blessings his parents shout back to him.
Without "snuff film journalism" - as you call it ;) - the world would never have known about the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, etc. It is necessary to know the truth.
I am not suggesting we suppress information, only avoid exploiting, pornographic depictions. The written word is more than adequate for the purpose of disseminating news.
As you know, it's why Eisenhower ordered the films made. And still, we have Holocaust denial.
I have almost unequivocal admiration for Eisenhower as the greatest President of my lifetime. I'm constantly recommending a book about him here, and in case you haven't seen any of them, I recommend it to you: "Ike's Bluff," by Evan Thomas.
Cutting off breasts, gouging eyes, sawing limbs. You really trying to equate that with collateral bombings?
"Let’s do a thought experiment."
Try this one, which I mentioned in the comments of a previous post. In the Wasaw ghetto uprising, would the Jews there have been justified in, say, torturing their Nazi opponents, gouging out their eyes, disemboweling them in front of their children (right, I know, but just go with it).
The assassins who killed Reinhard Heydrich - rather than blasting him with a mine, would they have been justified in, say, crushing his testicles slowly beneath a jackboot or giving him the "secret brand?"
In other words, if you consider something to be monstrously evil, as our leftist friends apparently consider Israel - is it it morally legitimate to respond with atrocities and monstrosities? Some obviously think so. But then an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Actually, the equivalent would go further. That the Warsaw uprising did not kill only Nazi troops. They swept into an area where families and children were living and proceeded to torture to death as many of them as they could.
As gruesome as a way to kill enemy soldiers that is, all things considered, I would understand. Not like or be comfortable with, but get it. They are a legit target.
But the families? That is an out and out monstrous evil, specifically targeting them and visiting monstrous evil upon them. There just is no rationalizing it.
But let us also be clear. Gaza is not the equivalent of the camps the Jews were held at. It is not even the equivalent of Apartheid. There is no equivalent, all things considered.
Agreed, though partisans on the other side would probably disagree, and say we're parsing degrees of evil.
Probably, but most of those have some increasingly warped ideas of how those terms are even defined, as well as other terms, like "male', "female" and the list goes down the rabbit hole.
Yes it would be justified, though that doesn’t mean you should do it. As someone (Douglas Murray?) said, a "proportionate" response would be going into Gaza and gang raping exactly the same number of young women, killing exactly the same number of babies, and so on. And absolutely that would be perfectly justified.
But the Israelis are not savages like the Palestinians, so they won’t do that. They will, however, engage in war to face off what is clearly an existential threat, and that will necessarily involve the deaths of innocents (if one can call the kids that spit on girls' corpses "innocent") - the number of which Hamas fully intends to maximize. And the real moral question being argued is, does Israel have the right to do that?
I say yes, but apparently lots of people disagree, and hide behind abstract notions of "peace" and so on.
When I was younger, I spent a lot of time talking with and getting to know bikers, neo-Nazis, Russian mafia, hardcore militia types, etc. I was curious, I suppose because I had told been of the evils of these things and wanted to see what made it all tick. I came away realizing that the media had vastly overstated the reality, that it sold a lot of press to treat these things all as dragons lurking behind the horizon. I won’t deny that violence happened, but it was a weird combination of being inherent to the culture and part of doing business. Entitlement to violence was never really something I found. By this, I mean being able to incorporate violence into a moral framework that blessed it as inherent to the lifestyle or existence. Justifications for it almost always came from an atmosphere of circumstance, not an inherent justification that the act was acceptable because of the status of each person involved. In other words, a person might be beaten or killed, but it was because that person acted in a way that made it necessary in the beater or killer’s mind. This justification on a personal or individual level made it possible to commit violence and maintain position within that in-group, because it was seen as essential to the survival of the group.
I also spent time talking with others, including the various leftist racial supremacists of the day. Black supremacists in particular. It was harder talking with them, because they would converse for a while, then they remembered they hated whites, and that would end the dialog for a while. The contrast was that the justification of violence did not exist in the same sense, if at all. It meant that violence did not need to be restrained, as it wasn’t seen as a threat to the survival of the in-group.
In other words, white-descended cultures, where violence permeates the culture, still have the idea that the existence of the group depends on interactions that are rational in an external framework. An external framework in this sense is a moral origin external to the in-group. In non-white cultures, the need to justify doesn’t exist, that there is no need because the morality of an action is separate from the action, and justification, if it occurs, happens externally.
A stark example of this years ago was when I was at a chain grocery store in the ‘hood. A black woman was being detained by two white security guards. She didn’t go quietly, and a crowd of thirty or so blacks had gathered and were shouting things like “let her go, she didn’t do nothing!” So, the in-group morality overrode a larger framework, because the in-group did not see this as a crime and did not need to justify it to the out-group.
There is a lot more to it, and I could fill a book if all this hadn’t happened a long time ago and anyone was willing to publish anything connected to reality, but I think it explains an awful lot. Cruelty, as it occurs in such vivid tones, can do so because of self-justification. Restraint doesn’t exist, because restraint is a product of a moral framework. If you have no moral framework - because the in-group threat doesn’t exist - then anything is possible.
When reading about the Holocaust some time back, three things stood out to me at the time and I did not understand them. The first was why the Nazis started using gas chambers, when bullets were simpler, easier, and safer than trying to use mass quantities of poison gases to kill. The second was why corrupt camp guards and administrators were themselves punished at times. And the third was why Oskar Dirlewanger found himself on the outs with a regime that was itself notorious for cruelty. Fourth, I suppose, was why the murder of Jews and others, was not public and widely celebrated. Obviously, it was because Nazi cruelty didn’t happen, but because there was a need for justification. Restraint, however weak and superficial, was still necessary to maintain in-group integrity.
The left has spent decades tearing down the frameworks which supported justification. If it feels good, do it. A motto also adopted by the Church of Satan, if you want to raise an eyebrow. Restraint forced by constraint doesn’t happen. It is a reversion to barbarism, because an uncivilized culture lacks frameworks and survival is emphasized above all other things. God and natural law doesn’t enter the mind at all, only the optimal path for the in-group. Anything is justified, because the framework itself does not exist.
In the eyes of Hamas, smashing a baby’s skull may happen, but without greater meaning. Likewise, it could not happen, and there would be no more meaning then, either. This is the psychopathy of culture. It is satanic in a very literal sense. The brutality of communism in the last century was the same kind of thinking on a large scale, where out-group justification did not exist, only in-group. It was perfectly fine to commit any form of violence against anyone seen as part of the out-group, because there was no external framework.
This really should terrify anyone who is paying any attention. What the left is doing here - and I think covers both of Rod’s idea of summoning demons and of an apocalypse - is simply abrogating millennia of trying to form the framework of civilization. The pick-mes in the crowd will happily point to all the failings of civilization, while ignoring the reality of the statement. In-group integrity no longer depends on demonstrating a thing as a threat, but simply it can be dealt with as people want. By not condemning this, the left has opened the gates of hell, perhaps quite literally.
What then is the appropriate response? Islam itself does not appeal to a higher moral framework, which is why a thing like 9/11 can happen and why terrorism is a regular tool. The left believes that it cannot condemn, but condemnation is the building block of restraint and civilization. Without it, justification becomes internal again, the psychopathy of barbarism.
I am not sure where this ends up, but I do not think that it was inaccurate for people in 2001 and before to describe this as the clash of civilizations. Or, really, the clash of civilization with barbarism. The problem now is defining what that means and what it means to be living in a time when people with the loudest voices rush all over themselves to proclaim sympathy for the devil.
Amen, Rod.
Interesting discussion yesterday with Aaron Mate and Katie Halpern with Norman Finkelstein describing the baby killing etc. during Nat Turner’s slave rebellion.
Rod, please don't apologize for continuing to talk about the Hamas atrocities. You're doing a noble work. Also, I've been reading Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews": it couldn't be more apposite right now. So many themes seem to be repeating themselves today. But in this case, it's amazing to read how many did not want to know (or admit) what was happening. If the Jews had left rectification of the injustices they suffered (or even their very survival) to others, they would be only a memory by now. Also, both in "A History of the Jews" and his masterwork, "Modern Times", Johnson targets again and again as the central theme that moral proportionalism of *doing evil for the sake of good* undermining whatever good had been sought, as well as paving the way for more wicked actors to do worse things (colonialism is the classic case here). He also shows how the Israelis own willingness at times to descend to this moral equivalency engendered the same kind of cruel calculous in their antagonists. Worth checking out, if it's been a while since you've read them.
Be careful, Father. Johnson was a publicist, not a historian, and he paints with a very broad brush.
No disagreement with a word in here, but up to and including "Israel will rightly work to minimize the deaths of innocents, but it cannot allow Hamas to get away with what it did, period" you lose me. "Get away with"? Not going to argue the case, but let's just hope I don't get to say "I told you so" on the other side of World War III. Col. Macgregor told Tucker yesterday that if Israel wants to destroy Hamas, it has to destroy Gaza.
Yet and still, can we agree that the story is NOT Bari Weiss turning right?
Not sure how we as common citizens can do much of anything in the face of this hatred. Vote? Please. When you get down to it, isn’t “doing something about ‘it’ “ i.e., the current importation of violent Islamicists” really about stopping immigration of Muslims? Didn’t the last administration get excoriated for even the most limited suggestion of that?? If that is not what is being suggested here, albeit perhaps cloaked in the interest of civil discourse, what does “doing something” mean? Anyone?
https://youtu.be/2xLkjvZDsIU?si=Ap6ZDsNOnYlpiS81
Talk about "The Biggest Lie". Wow. Breathtaking.
Netanyahu's narrative might have had some credence before Joan Peters' work was exposed as a fraud by Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, and others who are actual scholars of the history there. He also might have a shred of credibility if we were still ignorant of the DNA studies of ancient Canaanites, Arab-speaking Palestinians, Jewish people, and other Arab-speaking people (spoiler alert: Arab-speaking Palestinians and Jewish people are both descended from the ancient Canaanites, and Arab-speaking Palestinians are genetically closer to Jewish people than any other Arab-speaking population...and Ashkenazi Jews have a fair amount of European DNA mixed in, mostly on the matralinial side).
It doesn't surprise me that Bibi lies, he's done so repeatedly (remember these gems? https://youtu.be/rVPauUOVrmk?si=scehbZA6If7XVxoP )
What slightly surprises me is how Jordan Peterson, a fairly smart person, just accepts the lies without challenge (despite his statement on how he'll attempt to "push back"). But Peterson's proved to ultimately be a disappointment to many of us, after aligning himself with the Daily Wire.