I wanna hear the News Girl say Dilemma

The war of Israel against Hamas goes on, and a lot of important people in the World keep saying “just stop”, “just stop”, because they say they are too concerned with the Gazans.

Since the beginning, I could not take this people very seriously. Because it all seems like political speech, that is, you don’t really look for solutions, you just erase the part of the story that is not interesting for the image you are trying to create for yourself. That’s how it works.

The question that needs to be asked is “Okay, nobody likes war, but then what?” What should Israel do when hordes of armed men invaded their country, killed, burned, raped, and kidnapped? These men come from Gaza, they are the members and sympathizers of the organization that rules Gaza, that is, Hamas. What should any country do in face of such an obvious declaration of war?

Israel didn’t wake up one morning and decided to go to war. There was this declaration of war from Hamas, in form of a diabolically cruel massacre. Which means, War was there, calling Israel in. Then what to do?

Think, there is a regional power – not some random solitary bandits that just happen to be there in Gaza, but a regional power, that is, they are the ones in power there – again, there is a regional power, right at your border, that started this war against your country, now will your country fight it or just watch it? How can someone just watch a war that was started against them?

What are you giving up, when you give up your right to strike back at someone who is attacking you? You would be giving up all your strength to defend yourself, giving up the defense you built through almost 80 years, that allowed your country to survive, to keep existing, after so many countries and terror groups declared war and attacked. You built strength to defend your family in a dangerous place, now people want you to just throw it away.

Giving up this strength is not a good idea, specially in the Middle East. It would mean you would be trusting your fate to someone else, someone who would come and fix the situation. Who would that be?

The International Community doesn’t even want to admit the questions are hard and painful. They don’t have a different solution for the problem of the power that Terror gained in Middle East, they are acting as if the problem doesn’t even exist. It is easier for their political game to make it look like everything is very simple, the answer is simple, “Just stop the war”.

They take advantage of the fact that most of us, who live in Western Cities, take the absence of war we have here, as the “normal”. War for us means an aberration, if someone is making a war, just “stop”, and everything falls back to “normality”, that is, a peaceful state. But in the Middle East there is not this “peaceful normality” to fall back to. Since Israel was founded, less than a hundred years ago, so many countries started wars against them, and terrorist attacks never seem to end.

Who will come to help them guarantee the peace if the International Community don’t even want to name Terrorism as the bigger problem and source of pain in the Middle East?

With a past and a present so full of threats, Israel needs to fight for their future. There is a bigger power against them: Hamas is actually backed by Iran, who is also behind Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen. There is a bigger plan for the destruction of Israel, and the leaders of the Terror group speak openly about it, and so do the leaders in Iran. Iran, which recently Israel had to prevent from having nuclear bombs.

October 7^th was not one crazy guy that killed one Israeli. It was a big invasion and more than a thousand people died. It was carefully planned, the cruelty, the rapes, were part of the strategy. It was meant to be cruel, they had gear, information, and the kidnapping was also part of plan – there are still kidnapped Israelis being tortured in Gaza, you know. And Hamas and their supporters only had to go back to Gaza because the Israeli Forces fought them back. And they kept launching missiles.

Later, when fighting Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, the Israelis found everything practically ready for what Hezbollah called “Operation Conquer the Galilee”. They would invade Israel from the North and try to do even worse than October 7^th .

If you were told that Israel is this super powerful rich white country and could so easily guarantee a decent level of safety without fighting so much, then just imagine if, during October 7^th, or “Operation Conquer the Galilee”, the Terrorists managed to take a small Israeli city. The Idf fought and sent them back, but imagine if for some reason they were able to take control of one small city or town. They would certainly love that, maybe that was precisely the next step in their terror escalade.

Imagine the horrible choices the Israeli government and the military would be forced to make if that happened, with thousands of their own people under the power of the Terrorists. That would be an unconceivable nightmare, even worse than the nightmare that already happened, and in a certain sense is still happening, for there are so many hostages not yet returned.

I came to see that in these most unfortunate circumstances, Israel needs to fight to end Hamas, to eliminate this source of threat. There is nothing about Hamas that is not Evil, aimed at destruction of Israel, destabilizing of the West, and oppression of their own people. Of course Israel needs to fight with ethics, needs to avoid harm to civilians as much as possible. And they do, warning about future strikes, telling people to evacuate areas, with leaflets, phone calls and social media. And in general, going much slower than they could if they didn’t care. But Hamas is everywhere in Gaza, without uniforms, operating from inside cities, mixed with civilian life as much as they can, precisely to make the cost in terms of suffering in Gaza as high as they can, to manipulate international opinion.

Try to see from Israel’s point of view. They have communities, families, loved ones to protect from a Horror that already showed its face. They built resources to fight back threats, and they can’t throw it away, if they really want to protect what they love. Israel is not God. They can’t invent a way of fighting where you can just defend and totally avoid the risk for civilians on the other side, especially if the leaders on the other side openly praise martyrdom of their people. They can’t magically create a World where people in democracies and people under Terror regimes are all equally safe at the same time.

Yes, it is not beautiful, it does sound like a terrible dilemma. But the World is not proposing a different solution, they prefer to just act as if the dilemma wasn’t there. It is easier for them to just throw all the onus on Israel, so they can go back to their normal.

The UN seems to have forgotten what started this war. Now they are focused on accusing Israel of causing famine, using partial sources from within Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, and just ignoring all that Israel is showing the World in terms of tenth of thousands of trucks entering with aid, a lot of times even waiting for international organizations to pick up.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press amplifies it, sometimes simply spreading fake news, like showing and old image of a child with a genetic disorder, and which Israel already helped, as if he was a starving child.

The role of the press – and the Internation Community – should be, first of all, admit that there is no neutral informaaltion coming from Gaza. It’s from one side or the other. What they have to do is put both narratives side by side, and then start a work to find who is presenting more evidence, who is being more transparent. And even trust that people in the World are not completely stupid and can come to their own conclusions. But they choose to pretend that one narrative comes from neutral sources, and the other, they literally ignore. The mainstream press is being anything but transparent.

So, with all this bias in the World, where will the cavalry come from, to establish a state of peace, if Israel “just stop”? Is the International Community this cavalry? How could they be, if they’ve been so focused in only see the bad in Israel?

Israel can’t lay down and say “okay, you can attack us as cruelly as you want and we will not strike back with all our fighting resources, because of the losses that will be caused by your lack of care for people’s safety”.

So, Israel has no guarantees that everything will be fine. I think they have no option but fight, ff they want to protect their loved ones. Still, as I said, there is indeed a dilemma. Put in its most horrible form it sounds like this: “Would you kill civilians for the safety of your people”?

But first of all, Israel does not target civilians, there is a clear strategy on the other side, to make it impossible for Israel to fight without loss of Gazan civilian lives, and the danger for Israel is not a danger of maybe losing a bit of safety. It’s a danger of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and it already happened. Also a danger of getting to a point where they start losing more and more of the advantage they have in their own territory. So a most accurate formulation of the dilemma would be: “Would you take action to save your people, even if the other side will make sure that this conflict will cause death of their civilians?”

Still, of course, it doesn’t cease to be a dilemma, and a very cruel one. But we need to face this fact: God doesn’t give us this kind of cruel dilemma. Or the Universe. Or anyway, whatever your cosmological view is, this dilemma didn’t “just happen”, “naturally”. There are people of flesh and bones, walking this Earth, who created this dilemma and imposed it on Israel.

What could be the appropriate answer to such a monster? He can slow us, that’s inevitable, but can we let him totally stop us? Can we give him all he wants? We can’t talk about this whole subject, of an army fighting for its people, and people on the other side suffering the tragic consequences of a war, without including this “third character”, the monster who imposed the dilemma.

Give him all he wants can’t be the morally right answer, because who says he will ever stop? What happens with the World if the good side can never strike back against the evil doers, even when Evil very literally declares war? Because that is precisely what the World is trying to impose on Israel’s World. It is too dangerous, too horrible, and morally wrong to give the monster all he wants. There is no reason to believe he will ever stop creating more and worst dilemmas.

It is easier for the rest of the World to forget this “little detail”, this “third character”, at least while it’s not at their door. But Israel has no option but fight. Again, they have the obligation to do it in the most ethical way possible, trying to preserve life as much as they can, but they need to fight this War that called them in.

Defend your loved ones is not evil, is not wrong, and sometimes it’s the best you can do, for your people and for the World, while the World don’t wake up to face the real problems.

Dad said make the best of your potential

 

I have respect

For people’s hardships

But too many people in the World

Suffer solely because they have to work

In places that suck

Because are made of people like them

I won’t be complacent with that

 

I won’t let nobody use their needless pain

To tyrannize me

I got my own real pain

And won’t even speak to anyone

Who is blind to that

 

I met people who allow me to become

What I was born to be

Everybody’s smart younger brother

And a jolly good fellow

Support

 

😉

ps: oh, we might have been naive here. Heard that Hamas actually applauded students protests. Can the teachers Union clarify if this is true, and if such, if it is welcome or not?

Worldly Forces and Basic Values

There are serious problems in the World, right now there is War. These things seem to demand that we have an opinion, to show we are human, but how to know exactly what is happening, with so much contradiction? Misinformation is a problem in itself, and what makes it even harder, is that we are realizing we can’t take the neutrality of people who claim to be neutral for granted. It is so with the press, it is so with United Nations…

I’ll tell you a few facts. A young Israeli man called Yonatan Samerano was murdered in October 7^th by a UNRWA worker who dragged his body– UNRWA is a leg of UN –  and this was captured on video as undeniable proof. A man named Mahmoud Bassal posed as “Gaza Civil Spokesperson” and most of the Western media quoted everything he said, until the Idf exposed documents that prove he was an active Hamas member. A guy named Hassan Mohammed Aslih was always in press vests, documenting the October 7^th and posting it online cheerfully. When he was eliminated, too many people in the West said that Israel “killed a journalist”. And there is so much more…

I am aware that nowadays everybody that is in a heated dispute about what is actually happening in the World, seem to say that the press is on the side of their enemies. There are even some journalists criticizing their bosses for not being as anti-Israel as “they should”.

For me, by not acknowledging that you have a democratic society in one side and a terrorist regime in the other, by not acknowledging that this difference matters, by “forgetting” that this is a war started with a diabolic attack against civilians by a group that didn’t surrender or even stop attacking yet, they are already opening the door for all kinds of anti-Israel propaganda.

We are in a moment of History of Humanity that most people agree war is bad. Aren’t we all civilized? If we consider that all nations are equally civilized, then war is just a horrible thing promoted by bad politicians. And the responsibility to “just stop it” will fall on the shoulders of the side that is winning.

As if “peace” was something that would obviously happen the next day after the war “just stop”.  But the situation Israel faces is not like that. This war is not a “misunderstanding”. Hamas is in power, controls Gaza, and their ideology is clear: any degree of acceptance of Israel is treason of their values.

They openly say they will totally destroy Israel as soon as they can, and in October 7^th, the day of that horrible massacre, they said: “This is the kind of thing we are able to do now, and we will do it whenever possible, at any chance we have we will do it”. How can Israel not act to defeat them? They are armed, they are very near, they say they will kill and they kill. How can the world be discussing peace and forgetting to even try to present a solution regarding Hamas? Maybe the world think they don’t need a solution for Hamas right now, but what about Israel, don’t they need?

I see a quartet, formed by United Nations, the mainstream press, and the social media, especially Tic Toc, and obviously, mainstream academia, influencing people to be against Israel. I know this goes against what so many people think about manipulation in general. They think a country like Israel and specially United States, represent “Imperialism”, and so they are the ones who dictate, who manipulate the World.

It is interesting that these people, who think like that, put all the responsibility for manipulation on countries that, imperfect as they are, at least have democratic institutions, at least have a good degree of individual freedom. Countries that have free press, that have to present accounts of their spending of the budget, that don’t arrest and torture dissent journalists, don’t shoot at their people for just protesting.

I know that Academic people tend to see the rights that people have in these democratic countries as an “illusion”, some kind of fake thing that is used to “distract” people so they don’t see the real oppressive society they live in.

But then, how can evolution be possible? If there is a process, a path that mankind has to walk from absolutism to a degree of consensus that gives opportunity for everybody to be happy and prosper, then naturally some things, some changes, are going to come before others. But if you make imperfection a crime, then at any point you can throw away what that already has evolved, using as excuse what didn’t. It’s like saying you only accept a big perfect change that happens all at once.

What would that be? A big sudden revolution? Even then you would need a process that would make people able of having that kind of power that comes with it, without abusing it. I think this is much less likely than imagine the change in temperament spreading while institutions get better.

And of course Academic people actually believe in processes, believe in paths – otherwise, why Universities exist? In fact, they seem very confident that societies evolve – when they are extremely complacent with tyrannic theocracies, they seem confident that these societies have more chance to evolve than America. How can these tyrannic theocracies be in a good position in the path between absolutism and freedom, if they are openly absolutist?

Let’s face the true. The real big reason why these radical Academic people say that anyone is better than the “Imperialists” is because the United States are the richer. Money. Yes. The United States have the biggest Gdp and the biggest bank account. And these numbers certainly mean something, but let’s not get too crazy about it, thinking they express everything that is real.

After all, where is all this money? Are they going from the bank account of someone in Argentina buying a product made in China straight to the account of an American guy married to a Russian girl so they can spend it in Maldivas with a friend from God knows where that they met in Paris? I don’t know, man. Where is it?

Is it even real? Don’t take me wrong, if money is a fiction, it is a fiction we need. I agree that we need to agree that money is real, so we can make commerce and so on. And this definitely gives a good degree of “reality” to money. But do you know what is even more real? Human lives.

It is when you have total control over people’s lives that you can guarantee more efficiently that all the money will belong to the same group of few people, and these people will be one with the government. And they will spend it the way they want. And dissidents can’t prosper in any way.

 It’s by controlling people that you can put your country into wars and other forms of expansionist actions without being criticized from inside. You can guarantee that your friends will never be caught if they do something wrong. There is corruption in democratic countries, but in absolutist places there is simply no chance of even trying to fight it.

People say that money buys power, and sometimes it does, but what exactly is the price of power? In terms of cost-benefit? I’ll explain like this: imagine a bad guy who is an absolutist king somewhere and extremely rich. Would he sell his rights to be a little more rich and not a king anymore? I don’t think so.

I used this illustration to provoke this reflection: is all the power in the East available for American money to buy?

This is the kind of reflection we must make before going out saying that the power that people and groups of people have to influence lives is always exactly proportional to the Gdp. Things are far from being that simple.

Asia and Africa, together, have the vast majority of the World’s population, and by far. If these places get totally taken by a group of dictators – and doubt not that a lot of people dream of that – then imagine the power they would have. Even to threaten the rest of the World. Considering that even in wars, dictators care much less for their own people than democratic countries, where is the omnipotence of the bigger Gdp?

I don’t mean, by saying this, that we should consider the majority of the World’s population as our enemies, we definitely shouldn’t, or even less to desire any global war. I’m just saying that this ideology of saying that all the manipulation comes from America, that the rights that people have in democratic countries is an illusion, that there is more hope for humanity in being complacent with dictators than to cherish the values of freedom and the rights that people already conquered in the democratic World – all this is a lie that serves no good purpose.

Mainstream academic people don’t always say “we like those dictators”, but they consistently oppose anything that could defeat or weaken them. And besides giving these academic people the chance of living the dream of seeing themselves as great rebels against everything while still climbing the ladder of success of solid and rich institutions, what good this ideology brings?

There is manipulation going on, and dictators are the masters of manipulation. They know, more than anyone, how efficient it can be.

I have nothing against honest people who produce content for Tic-Toc because that’s where people, especially young people, are, but the fact that the most successful social media nowadays is one that exists under the Chinese Communist Party, shows us that the non-democratic world is not amateur on the game of influencing people.

That, and the amazing connivence they get from Academia, show they are not playing, and they are not behind in this race. You see that, and then you can start seeing the “neutrality” of United Nations and the mainstream press with new eyes. There is a lot of people in the West that, for commercial reasons, don’t want that people here start to see that there are very bad regimens in the World, that not all countries are the same. A lot of people who want to keep doing “business as usual”, don’t want any change of perception. They are happy with how business is made nowadays, they don’t care so much about the future.

So, I told the reasons why I think there is a lot of manipulation, and why I think it doesn’t all come from the “American Imperialists” – as for Empires, there were Empires, including the British, and the Ottoman – have you heard of them? And again, what do you think China is? But anyway, I talked about manipulation, but what about the truth? There should be a way to search for truth, right? Shouldn’t Internet be useful for that?

You can be sure that most content that relates to politics is not amateur – not made by people who just want to express themselves – there is a big machine of producing political content. A lot of people accept doing this for a living, and the salary doesn’t even have to be big. In a lot of places in the World, that would certainly be a “dream job”. And now Artificial Intelligence entered the scene, being able even to produce images and even videos that look more and more real.

So, how to navigate all this mess in Internet? Well, I think we don’t necessarily have to navigate all the mess that is around. We must think about what Internet was supposedly meant for. I remember we all imagined that it was a great thing – and despite all the problems, I still think it is a great thing – because it would give everybody more access to things.

But we must think on what it means to have access to things, access to information. In the old times, all a person could know about Africa or Asia, for instance, was coming from people who traveled there and wrote chronicles. Some things were written by people who didn’t even go there, and there was a lot of misconceptions and stereotypes.

So, what it means to get closer to the sources of information? Nowadays people say they don’t need press so much, but they go straight to the kingdom of “random”, as if that would necessarily give them some good overall vision. What do you think you are getting closer to, when you dive your eyes and brains into the “random world”? Don’t you think you are actually adding more layers, infinite layers, between you and any possible reliable source of information?

With all this fake news and artificial intelligence, the discussion about sources is necessary. You can’t have information and not ask where it comes from. And the press, especially when it’s about polemical issues, can’t avoid this point anymore, and go throwing “pure facts” as if we have to believe them blindly. They should be speaking about sources way more than they do.

This war of Israel against Hamas is a good example where we can’t believe “neutral sources”. All information that comes to us, in fact comes from one side or the other. Even when the mainstream press in the West want to cover it, they hire journalists from the Arab World, and we can’t take their neutrality for granted.

We have to deal with this. And in fact, having a side is not a sin in itself. Instead of persuading people to believe you are neutral and “have no reason to lie”, you have to work hard to show evidences, and to show how your narrative makes sense in the broader historical context.

The Israel Defense Forces communication department have to work hard, because people see them in their uniforms and know they have a side. So they have to defend what they say, not expect others to believe just because they’re posing as “neutral”. There is a lot of information in their social media, and they can’t be accused of staging anything, or using artificial intelligence images saying it’s real, or showing real images in wrong contexts. Doing any of that would turn immediately against them. Which doesn’t happen to the random “sources” in Tic Toc etc.

For instance, people say Israel is starving Gaza and the Idf is showing the thousands of trucks of aid that they are facilitating to enter Gaza. Why you don’t hear news saying, “Idf shows fake images of trucks”? Because it’s true.

On the other hand, the other side said the Israeli Forces shot people in aid distribution centers. They don’t have any evidence of that. Hamas doesn’t care for the people of Gaza, but if the Israeli Forces were committing such atrocities they would love to film it. Civilians also have their phones. So, how come they have no evidence? Israel showed a video of Hamas members – without uniform – shooting people in an aid distribution center. This didn’t break into the news.

The Israeli Forces say they aren’t even there, on the aid distribution centers. It’s run by third parties. So, when you understand that there is no neutral information directly from Gaza, you can start to do some thinking, like the things I just said. And you can clearly see that they treated any confront that happened within a ray of more than a mile around the distribution centers – this is a war zone – as “people being shot while waiting for aid”. And then they augmented it as much as they could.

A lot of the Western Press is just reproducing Al Jazeera, and does anyone really believes Al Jazeera is a neutral news company?

One evidence that they are just ignoring anything that goes against their narrative, is that, here in the West, they don’t show words that the leaders of Hamas said, publicly, a lot of times in front of the camera, saying explicitly that the Palestinians are a people of martyrs, that it is a good thing when a Palestinian, including children, die “for the cause”.

Because that would show how they don’t care about human lives, including lives of their own people. If “the cause” is more important than any life, then sacrificing a child to protect the life of a soldier is the right thing, for them. It shows that this is not about “land”. Land for who, if they don’t even care if their people stay alive? If you don’t care for the people who are living here and now, how can you say you care for future generations? This is a war of hatred and pride, that’s all.

The Israelis are faced with a problem to solve, and the other side also has a goal. As for the rest of the World, it seems that all people want is to disassociate themselves from anything that is “ugly”.

And that’s what the industry of anti-Israel propaganda is using. They want to appeal people’s conscience – of course nobody wants to see people suffering – to push us to the easier path – easier to momentarily calm our conscience – of thinking that all peace and safety in the World is a handshake away.

Because a handshake is just a gesture. But what does it contain? What values should it express? It is easy for us, from the relative safety of the Western World, to think that, if these people in War just subtract something, what remains is naturally peace. Subtract what? Oh, greedy politicians, maybe. But think: we have greedy politicians here, but what brings us our relative peace is a set of values that we developed.

Not everything we want comes from just subtracting. There are things that bring us safety and peace, and it is not simply “absence of war”. The values we hold, the ethical principles, our morals, are things, not absence of things.

Israelis built their Society on values, on respect for both their millennial traditions and humanistic considerations. They built a society that values life – the safety of their people comes before the defeat of any particular rival, and the measures they take to mitigate harm to civilians on the other side, giving up even the surprise element, so important in military strategy, to warn people when and where they will attack, show that life is not disposable for them in any way – and they built a society of individual rights. Respect for diversity, human rights.

They don’t know just who they want to defeat, what matters for them is the life they want. You could see it if you made some research on Israeli Society not only in the context of War.

And they were able to build it even after centuries of persecution against Jews. A haven for their people. They have a right to defend what they built, the life they built. A right to dismantle the source of a horrible and unfair threat.

October 7^th – that started this war -shows how human beings can behave in the absence of principles that value human life, your life and the life of others – when instead you have only the easy path of blaming someone else for all that’s wrong in the Universe, instead of thinking on your own happiness you cultivate only hatred and revenge.

There should be no illusions that a totally peaceful World is an easy thing to achieve. We should look at all the conflicts – the one of Israel against Hamas is far from being the only current conflict, and think what it really takes to get us there. And clearly state that tyrannic theocracies and Terrorist groups are not our friends is one of the most basic things.

There are forces wanting to control all the Middle East with an iron hand, and subsequently more and more of the World. Israel, the tiny strip of the Middle East that was reserved for the Jews – all the other 99,7 percent of the area stayed with the Arabs – is an outpost of Democracy there, and destroying it would be a dream victory for those tyrants, and would make more and more people see in radicalism a possible path for glory, and an answer to all their problems.

In October 7^th, Hamas and their supporters said to Israel: “This is what we are able to do, because we have the means and no moral objection of any kind when it comes to harm you, and we can also make sure that you can’t fight back without causing harm to our civilians, because we just don’t care to protect anyone”. Unfortunately, this is a war that needs to be fought. For Israel and for the World.