…previous post in this series, Catastrophe: an Interlude, a Valentine to hope.

I write to archive my own experience, trying to process a world that has shape-shifted radically away from the vision I had of what the Age of Aquarius had promised to be. The opinions expressed here are strictly my own. This is not intended as a balanced portrayal. I have no expectations that you will agree with me. I am compiling a list of sources and news outlets I have relied on to give me the best semblance of the ‘truth’ about what I am living. It keeps evolving. 

Catastrophe: Part 2 (October 132rd)

Bad actors have played loose and free with the facts these last years. Our trusted news sources often lie (knowingly or not) because they are sourcing their information from those who lie. Early in the war the ‘reliable’ New York Times reported that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza. This mis-information came from the Gaza ‘Health Department’ (ie Hamas). When the paper finally printed a retraction, admitting it had been a Hamas missile that struck the hospital, there had already been 3 days of large scale protests in the streets of Amman, do you think anyone believed it, if they even saw the retraction?  Apparently, there is an Al Jazeera journalist who is also a Hamas commander. And why not, this is not a ‘fair’ fight. The rules-based order of international warfare since WWII is no longer in place. The ‘army’ that is Hamas does not identify themselves by wearing uniforms, and the Geneva convention’s treaties for the treatment of hostages are not honored.

You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.  -Daniel Patrick Moynihan

To me the tendency for equivalency around the crisis is not adequate to the dimensions of the atrocities of Oct 7th, and the ideology that drives them. Yes #alllivesmatter. I am not for one minute missing the tragedy that is unfolding in Gaza, however, when you say to an Israeli/Jew “…but the poor Palestinians”, without first acknowledging the horrors of Oct 7th, it is like answering #blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter, after the unconscionable murder of George Floyd. But perhaps this comparison too will be upended, as suggested by Coleman Hughes in his new book ‘The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America’. I’m trying to keep up.

… ‘not all Palestinians are Hamas’ I hear you insisting. Maybe. Probably. However, Roi Yanovsky, recently returning from Reserve Duty in Gaza, wrote an opinion piece for the Jerusalem Post titled ‘We all were lied to: Gaza was a modern, developed city before October 7th’. We have believed that “if only Gazans had the chance for a better life, they would not be fighting Israel,” but it is irrelevant for Gaza. Many of them had everything a normal person in the West strives for, yet Hamas still executed their October 7th massacre. The most common thing I saw inside the houses was a map of the State of Israel, with the heading ‘Map of Palestine.’ There is no mention of the internationally recognized borders of Israel, or any Israeli city or kibbutz. The goal of eradicating the only Jewish State was not hidden or played down, it was everywhere”. 

FYI, that hashtag, #FreePalestine, is a blood curtling battle cry. It is intended as such. It is a call for the total destruction of the Jewish State. The war of propaganda has masterfully ensured that we will hear it, a hashtag for Gd’s sake, not only in Israel and the Arab World, but in the universities, high schools, in the streets, and in cafes in cities across the globe. Imagine what a young Jewish woman, 8 months pregnant with 2 children, feels when she sees the hashtag on the wrist of her obstetrician in an American hospital. This campaign was decades in the planning. No one knows better how to ‘educate’/re-educate a population than UNWRA, the UN organization, tasked with educating Palestinian children for years. A large number of UNWRA employees have turned out to have ties to Hamas. Some members of UNWRA took part in the Oct 7^th pogrom …social workers!

I met a friend at a favorite coffee shop a week or so ago. I was thinking wow this is a hip place I wonder how long it will be before I’d see a Palestinian flag in here. A young woman at the end of the table got up, there she had been quiet, shy, on her laptop at the end of table. She was wearing an ‘ugly Christmas’ style sweater with a map of the State of Israel on it in red, black, and green. Wishing makes it so Hamas imagines. Subliminal marketing. Master marketing. Cunning.

Progressives who divide the world into ‘oppressors’ and ‘the oppressed’ are not our allies. -Natan Sharansky

Using a template that has only two options: aggressor and victim, many left-wing ‘intellectuals’, at least here in America, immediately cast Israel as the aggressor. The hideous details of Oct 7^th in Israel, having dropped into some great shadowy abyss of the collective unconscious. Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO). This manipulative tactic is used by abusers to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. To shift the blame onto their victims. How is it possible that so many have unwittingly joined this cult of destruction? Tearing down posters of hostages? Seriously.

At every opportunity for Palestinian statehood, our neighbors have chosen war. At every opportunity for peace, their fierce determination not to recognize the State of Israel ends by bringing more destruction and loss down on their heads. All or nothing. #FromtheRivertotheSea (…for anyone still failing this quiz at rallies the answer is the Jordan River, and the Mediterranean Sea). Every war, beginning with the War of Independence, (depending on what you call a war there have been 8-18 of them) have all been started by the countries that surround Israel. We have all lost, but none more than the Palestinians who have forfeited land and opportunity over and over with this strategy. 

In 2005, Israel returned the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians (after yet another war), dismantling 4 established Jewish settlements. It has been ruled by the Palestinians since then. They have chosen (or other entities have chosen for them) organizations and leaders who put their own personal glory and gain above that of their own people. Their mission by their own admission was and still is the destruction of the State of Israel. They are a death cult. Rewarding martyrs. Blaming. Without Israel to destroy what would they stand for?

TRIGGER WARNING!

I have to ask, is it fair, honorable even to continually ask Israel to protect the Palestinians? There’s the fact that they want to destroy us first of all. And then there’s the fact that they do not want our help. Yet there is always the expectation of it being given. The price of peace. One of Israel’s greatest believers in peace with the Palestinians, was specifically targeted on Oct 7^th, her remains were so decimated that for weeks, everyone assumed, until DNA evidence revealed otherwise, that she had been abducted.

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice. -Jill Stauffer

…next Catastrophe: Part 3 women and universities