Where We Are This Week
Israel-Palestine, consequences, and aftermath.
This week has been a strange one. While plenty of things are going on in United States politics (the Republican party is, yet again, in utter disarray) my thoughts have been dominated by the specter of the slaughter of Jews in Israel.
Saturday morning, my family was heading back from our trip to South Carolina. I learned of the attacks moments before we buckled our girl into her car seat. For the next nine hours or so, I wondered what the extent of the attacks were.
I incorrectly assumed that Saturday’s assault would be about as deadly as the missile barrages Israel faced in May of 2021. It wasn’t until I got home that I understood the severity of the situation, and on Sunday, the news continued to get worse.
This entire week has kept with that theme as each new day has produced a development worse than the last. Just when I thought that the cruelty and barbarism of Hamas had reached its unconscionable limit, I was proved wrong.
Reports of mass burning of families, rapes of women, and the beheading of children have been confirmed by media and Israeli government sources over the last 48 hours. Yet, somehow, the debates from those online who have been reluctant to accept that this is not a conflict between moral equals have been reduced to doubting the number of children who were brutalized.
In the 40th year of the Jews' journey through the desert, the Israelites were afflicted with an infestation of venomous snakes. Increasingly distraught and desperate for a solution, they pleaded with Moses to help assuage their condition. Moses consulted with God and was instructed to wrap a copper snake around his staff; those who were able to look at the metal serpent in the eyes would be healed of their affliction.
Those who were able to confront the root of their problems would then have the power and resolve to do so. Exposure therapy wasn’t popularized in the field of psychology until the mid-20th century, but here it is being applied thousands of years prior.
It may be easier to change the channel. It may be more comfortable to quit talking about the unfathomable horrors our fellow man can produce, but only by squarely addressing the evil with which we’re confronted can we begin to find a solution.
Restrained Response
You may have heard the axiom before that you shouldn’t attribute to malevolence what could be explained by incompetence - or ignorance. Or something like that.
I tend to afford a generous allotment for other people’s incompetence or ignorance - especially when we’re dealing with complex, foreign issues - but my goodwill when it comes to Israel-Palestine has just about run out.
Israel is routinely asked by the international community to respond to the frequent and regular terrorist attacks committed by Hamas or other Islamic extremist groups with proportionality or restraint. When footage is then released of the IDF strategically bombing sites in Gaza, the Jewish state is quickly vilified by Western media outlets.
Already, arguments of moral equivalence have been levied against Israel for bombing residential areas inside Gaza. What they don’t tell you, however, is that Hamas purposefully embeds itself within its citizenry - women and children included. So, that when Israel strikes, innocent lives are taken. If I punched you, then, as you retaliated I held my little girl up so that she took the blow, who’s responsible for her pain?
The IDF has sent countless messages to the denizens of Gaza, imploring them to move to the South and evacuate from the heaviest populated areas of Gaza City but Hamas has commanded its citizens to disregard that request. This action is only explicable once you realize that Hamas only views its people’s deaths as meaningful, not their lives. A Hamas representative said as much on Russian television this week.
Israel has now cut off electricity and water supplies to the Gaza Strip as a result of the war. For years, Gazans have struggled to secure clean drinking water, and consistent sources of energy; Israel’s detractors have labeled the move as ‘collective punishment’. Of course, what they’re not telling you is that Israel has been providing free electricity and water to the Gaza Strip for the last twenty years.
So far, Western leaders have taken the correct position in standing by Israel’s right to defend itself. But for how long? United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken advocated for a ceasefire on X (Twitter) on Sunday. On Sunday. President Biden, despite saying mostly the right things, asked for Israel’s response to Hamas to be proportional to the damage they inflicted.
Who determines what the ratio is in that scenario? How much is the life of an innocent child worth? If it were your son or daughter who had been subjected to the inhumanity of Hamas, how much restraint would you be asking your government to exhibit?
Consequences
I picked up the Sunday edition of the New York Times from my local coffee shop. The headline read ‘Palestinian Militants Invade Israel.’ This is how the West is lost, this is how truth becomes an abstraction from reality, and this is how we inevitably lose touch with what is right and what is wrong.
The word choice is an incredible instance of intentionally crafting the narrative the Times - the paper of record - would like to purport. Not ‘Hamas invades Israel’, no mention of terror, or the amount that was found dead by the end of Shabbat - just a whitewashing of the devastating events that transpired on Saturday.
This type of willful ignorance, or deliberate omission, has deleterious consequences. Because so many of our sense-making institutions have been unwilling to call out the obvious, it has given rise to the antisemitic sophistry of the left, and the perception that support for a terroristic regime is a tolerable position for one to take as a United States citizen.
In the last 72 hours, at least ten major US colleges have held anti-Israel demonstrations on their campuses. A coalition of Harvard student organizations released a statement holding Israel culpable for all violence over the weekend. BLM’s Chicago branch tweeted an image of a hang-glider with the words ‘We Stand with Palestine’ underneath it. In Dearborn, Michigan, a pro-Palestine rally was held in which there were calls for the eradication of the Jewish state and claims that Hamas was not, in fact, a terrorist organization.
These are only a handful of the events that took place Stateside. This is to say nothing of the chants heard outside of the Sydney Opera House that said ‘gas the Jews’ or the ‘f*** the Jews’ in Germany, or the pro-Hamas protests-turned-riots in Paris, France that took place on Thursday.
These things do not happen in a vacuum and have no place in the civilized West. Yet, the pseudo sophisticate elites that wield the largest bullhorns on this side of the hemisphere appear as if they have no desire to condemn these types of behaviors.
Hamas has declared that October 13th, today, be a day of ‘global jihad’ and has called for violent demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian movement. Have you heard the alarm bells?
The buck, however, does not stop at the media apparatus. The developed countries of the West have thrown obscene amounts of money at Hamas (lest we forget that they are the elected governing body of the Gaza Strip), Palestine, and their terror sponsor, Iran in hopes the problem will just go away.
Remember when I told you that the people of Gaza faced challenges securing food and water? United Nations agencies spent a total of $4.5 billion on foreign aid packages for Gaza from 2014 to 2020.
The UN previously estimated that world hunger could be eliminated for an entire year for a mere $6 billion. Seeing as how Gaza is home to just over two million people, one would think that $4.5 billion would be plenty to set up the infrastructure necessary to feed and water that size of a population for a few years. But not if the organization responsible for administering such services decided to use the funds to build weapons and ammo manufacturing plants.
Hamas promotional videos show them digging up concrete tubes that were intended to be used for plumbing and sewage to create makeshift rocket launchers out of the material. Their people can drink later, I suppose.
In 2021, President Biden sought to resume sending foreign aid to Palestinians. When members of his State Department explicitly stated that they were concerned that “Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza”, the President was unmoved and approved the $360 million payment.
As a reward for their awful record on human rights and their role in funding terrorism worldwide, President Biden approved the unfreezing of $6 billion of Iranian funds. The amount of cash would be transferred from South Korea to the Islamic Republic via a Qatari bank. (Iran is the principal sponsor of Hamas.) After the attacks on Saturday, the Iranian Parliament gave Hamas a standing ovation amid chants of “Death to Israel.”
Apparently, only now recognizing it as a bad decision, American officials were able to convince Qatar to hold off on transferring the $6 billion - though Iran claims the full amount of cash is at their disposal. American foreign policy is a mix of Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick ideology and global appeasement - with a heavy emphasis on the latter.
It’s only after a known terror organization does the thing they’re famous for doing does America assume an intimidating posture. Meanwhile, intermediaries like Turkey and Qatar are allowed to play both sides of every major global conflict. Hamas officials confirmed that the Turks, a NATO country, were updated on its plans in the early hours of the attacks now being called Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
Qatar, on the other hand, has allowed the politburo of Hamas to reside and operate from within Doha, the nation’s capital, while millions of dollars flow from Qatar to the terrorist organization. If America could scrabble together some semblance of a coherent foreign policy, we may not be able to entirely stop the state sponsorship that Hamas enjoys but we could avoid empowering those who do so.
Final thoughts and the role of sport.
As I was writing Monday’s piece on the initial assault on Israel, I had the weekend’s Formula 1 Grand Prix playing in the background.
It wasn’t until the late stages of the race that I realized the sad irony of the race. The world’s premier motorsport competition’s host for the weekend was Doha, Qatar. F1 first visited the Middle Eastern nation in 2021, and this year, they reentered the racing calendar with a renewed 10-year contract.
Of course, F1 isn’t the only sporting organization to legitimize the country. The 2022 FIFA World Cup was hosted by Qatar despite tepid criticism of their human rights record. The Iranian team was allowed to participate in the tournament even while its government was busy killing protesters and threatening the families of its players in case they were brave enough to speak out against the regime.
In a move that seems prescient now, Qatari officials made an effort to keep fans’ attendance from being ‘political’. Israeli flags were confiscated from supporters and were banned from flying inside stadiums, however, you can turn on almost any game from last fall and count several Palestinian flags flying high. Neither nation was competing in the World Cup.
The bare minimum the most beloved sporting institutions of the West could do is to stop granting credulity to these regimes by allowing their participation. Or to stop letting them purchase football clubs or entire golf organizations.
The West is as equally full of self-hatred as it is greed. It’s a recipe for disaster as it capitulates to the consternation and sympathies of far inferior civilizations - if you could even call the barbarism that is Hamas a civilization - or prostrates itself at the mere mention of the riches these despotic rulers have to offer. We ought to do better.
Already today, the day of global jihad, reports have come in have multiple stabbings made in the name of Allah in Beijing and Paris and I’m not entirely optimistic that this will be the high water mark of violence today.
The BBC has already announced they will refuse to call Hamas operatives terrorists because the term has “significant political overtones.” We will never defeat evil if we’re unable to meet its gaze.
So, that’s it for this week. No song, no cartoon. Just silence as we stare directly in the face of the very thing that seeks to tear us down.
To a better next week.
~FDA