The Mist And The Machine - Volume 3

 

How Great You Think You Are At Creating Peace?

 

People talk a lot about peace. It is ok, there is obviously nothing wrong in wanting peace. But if you have a reality where there is war, then bringing peace requires some effort. If you go around acting as if it is enough to say “just stop”, then it seems that you are saying it is all very easy and simple, “just stop”. Looks like you are saying that people are at war just because they want.

Not that words aren’t important. Obviously they are an undeniably important front in any war. But if you want to change things, I don’t think it is enough to say “war” and “peace” as if these were magic words. You must respect people as human beings and discuss the concepts that brought us all to this point in History.

There has always been war in the world, and now that the West seems to be enjoying a time of relative peace, it is not fair to just treat people that live far as people who just “likes war”.

When it comes to discussing ideas, concepts and History, there is a whole  group of people whose job should be to throw light on concepts. You know, the academical World. But it’s been notorious that they are only seeing one side of what is happening right now, in the Middle East.

If you turn the television on, you will see the portrait of a war that somebody is waging apparently only because they want. If you turn to the Academical World – with few exceptions – you will only find the description of the Israeli State as oppressive, and Israel itself as stolen land.

Think of the end of the 19^th century, it was, all over the World, a bit like and “old west” thing. There was a lot of small pieces of land that weren’t being used by nobody, and people were moving around, finding land, building small villages and such. It was like that in the British Mandate of Palestine, it was like that in the World.

People of different ethnicity sometimes established close to each other and conflicts happened. In the British Mandate of Palestine there were more Arabs, but also a lot of Jews, and even more Jews dreaming to go there to escape the horrors of Europe and return to their ancestral homeland.

When the modern age came, and it came in different years in different places, and the countries we now know were formed in the map, people were displaced, a lot of people in the World.

After the War that came as consequence of Arab refusal to accept the Jewish State, Arabs were displaced from Israel, and Jews from Arab countries. Sad, but not unique, and it shouldn’t have necessarily lead people to think they couldn’t go on with their lives.

Gaza is not a prison, Israel protects Israeli borders because there is terrorism and a country protect their borders. A prison? What about looking in any of the other directions?

But instead of talking about the specific realities, the Academical World has a ready formula to explain everything. You find the one who seems to be poorer economically, then the other is the “oppressor”. They say they defend minorities, don’t they say it all the time? So if there were more Arabs in Palestine and there are still more Arabs in the region – almost four hundred million people in the middle east, which has some pretty rich countries, and less than ten million are Jews – are the Jews not a minority?

And if someone says the terms of the division of the mandate of Palestine were the problem, then why so many Arab leaders said their people shouldn’t accept a Jewish Sovereign land “in the size of a postage stamp”? Their words. A minority with no right at all…

To bring peace we must discuss some things. Try to understand even when someone says something we disagree. Sometimes we must say, “hey, there is an honest guy saying this, I should try to listen”. Lately, I’ve been hearing people that I respect use the word “victimhood” to describe the mentality of people who give themselves the right to go around destroying things instead of building because they blame all their problems on someone else.

I always had a problem with the word “victimhood”, because I’ve seen it used in contexts where I disagreed with it and by people who were really too aggressive against any kind of awareness for the difficulties that certain groups faced more than the others. But I started seeing that there is some truth in the word, when the awareness of the pain of people is used not to create solidarity and union, but to engender hatred.

The key to me is in losing or not your moral center. The moral center is a clear vision of what a right life is, that don’t depend on data. “Some people were marginalized in History” is not something wrong to say, but taking away people’s responsibility for their own acts is.

To me, this is not a paradox at all. You can’t exempt people from acting morally, you would be in fact depriving them of something. “Man can’t live by bread alone”. By excusing someone out of the moral world you are not helping them. We can see that it doesn’t help. It doesn’t bring them the things a good life offers.

As an illustration, having a public lawyer for everybody is good, total impunity is bad. By using our good principles of caring for people who had less chances, to relativize absolutely all of our ethical principles, we are eroding all our chances of finding common ground.

In the context of October7th, a lot of intellectuals used this idea that if you call someone “oppressed”, then this person doesn’t need any morals anymore to justify an attack that not just gone beyond every moral restraint you can imagine, but exploded in open cruelty, with people laughing while doing all other horrors they did.

It is interesting to note how the incoherences of the Academical World fit with the interests of dictators around the World. Does it sound like conspiracy? Well, in this World we usually can’t know exactly how much of the system works by explicit agreement and how much is “coincidence”, but in order to understand why some things seem to be mysteriously pointing in the same direction, it helps to understand what is represented by this “thing” they “coincidentally” oppose.

            Somehow, Israel and also America, and actually the Jewish people too, seem to incarnate what they fight against. And when you look at this “thing” they are fighting against, you see what they have in common. Both a socialist teacher, and an extremist dictator, want to be seen as someone who holds the key to another dimension.

I’ll explain. What is more disgusting, both to a European Mainstream Intellectual and to a Islamic Theocratic Ruler, than people who believe that, once you live in freedom and follow basic moral principles, happiness is within your reach? Both the European Mainstream Intellectual – American Academia seem to be mostly European in it’s Marxist soul – and the Islamic Theocratic ruler have a need to be seen as a special kind of people, selected people, who can see beyond our reality, who know that living and doing your thing “is not enough”, that acting according to simple moral principles “will not be enough”, that happiness lies beyond a veil that only they can see through, because they are special people, and to get there we may even have to do things that look ugly to the “shallow perception” of not-super-enlightened simple people with more down-to-earth common-good moral values. In other words, those two guys are fascists.

You may think I am tripping, but what we are seeing happening in various levels seems to be pointing in the same direction. Press too, obviously, never giving kids any tool to question what a lot of their teachers might be saying, never giving nobody information that might make them see that peace is not just an absence of something bad they are seeing in the news, but something that must be built with some effort in a complex World.

            And there are the social medias with their quick dives into extreme emotions and self-congratulatory virtue feelings without much reasoning about more complex causes and effects. I don’t want to scare any family, but what I can say is that my 8 years old son don’t have any social media and he already knows that Tic Toc is the Chinese Communist Party trying to make us less rational.

So you have an intellectual world largely contaminated by vengeance-based bias that is pushing radical people to the streets, a social media that helps them and a press who portraits these manifestations as just spontaneous feelings of concern from normal people, which makes more people buy the “movement”, closing some kind of a circle that feeds itself.

            Then you have this wave happening in various levels. The very intentional bias of what unfortunately seems like the majority of Social Sciences being echoed in social media, denied by television – because if they don’t talk about it, maybe it’s not important – all of that surrounding the common people to make them feel obliged to make a stand, or else they will feel guilty. “Don’t you want to take the streets and be a real pacifist?”

            Well, you prefer peace to war, that’s good, but you should consider you are not the only one. But what peace is this that only sees one side? You only see the suffering of the Palestinians. Well, that’s real, Hamas provoked a war that is causing a lot of pain to the people in Gaza.

But how can you speak of peace to the Israelis if your message is “I don’t see you”, “I don’t care if they still have a hundred of you as hostages”, “I don’t think it’s worth mentioning that your girls were raped”, “I think the death toll in October 7^th was small”, “I don’t see nothing specially abominating in the methods of October 7^th”, “I don’t care if tens of thousands had to leave their homes”, “I don’t see the missiles fired against you”, “I think your soldiers are dying because they chose to”?

            If you have a reality of War, then, if you want to get to peace, there is work to be done. How is Israel going to trust the World to conduct this process of peace if everybody just turned a blind eye while an ideology of pure hatred was dominating big portions of the World, and extremist governments started funding terror groups, and the International Organizations, that were there to protect these people, did nothing against the radicalization and the militarization of the people?

            How is Israel going to trust a World that accuses them of genocide, without caring for the actual meaning of the word, because supposedly these everybody cares infinitely for people dying in wars, but didn’t have ten percent of the anger in bigger and worst situations in the World?

            The conflict in Syria caused more than two hundred thousand deaths and fourteen millions displaced since 2014. China has been keeping millions of Uyghur muslins in concentration camps, with silence from the “brothers” from Iran, for instance. The Russian invasion of Ukraine have caused more than a hundred thousand deaths. The Somali War caused more deaths than all of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And there is more.

This is not to say that deaths somewhere else simply justify killing here, I’m saying all this just to point that there is a total lack of evidence to show that people care so desperately about deaths in wars as they are screaming now. And the World really have to start making a better work if we want people to see us as efficient peace makers, if we want to say, “trust us, we will help this peace to happen”.

            I know the words “just stop” sound very appealing, as if you were talking to a couple of neighbors who got in a stupid fight that is getting worst, and you know that if they “just stop” both will live longer and happier lives. Did you check the facts to make this simplification?

You say human lives is what matters, and I agree it is, but how can you guarantee your desired outcomes? The future is unknown. Everybody knows what the best imaginable outcome of a ceasefire is, but what about the possibility of a giant war that might already have started being prepared, a war that could destroy countries, force the World into a huge disastrous fight, with much bigger losses on all sides?

            From our comfortable sits in the West, such a thing may be unimaginable, and I pray it never happens. I have no problem admitting I don’t know the future, but I am able to at least imagine how things must look like for a country whose soldiers have gone into neighbor territories and found Kilometers of highly equipped tunnels, guns and ammunition and military gears literally everywhere, tons of explosives, Information Technology, along with propaganda that commands people to a total war with anything that is different from them. Their leaders did state their goals of escalation.

            I hope none of that happens, but Israel is the one in the most vulnerable position, and even if we don’t have a bigger war, leaving terror groups and attacks unresponded can increase, by the year, the danger for human lives, both Israeli and Palestinian.

            There was no reality of perfect peace that was broken by Israel suddenly invading your television. There is a situation of conflict. And the words that sound “better” in an echo chamber are not necessarily the ones that will bring the best outcome.

            Ceasefire should be demanded from the side who started the conflict and is admittedly trying to completely destroy the opponent, demanded from the side that has been proven to not give a damn for their own population. And in the case of a terror organization that only exist for that – read their charter – I think surrender would be the perfect ceasefire.

            It’s that, or accusing a nation that, after suffering their worst attack, had to go to war with tears in their eyes. At least, they didn’t see happy to me that day.

               

 

 

Evil is Alive, Unfortunately

           The question I am asking is this: Can a country be responsible for the death of it’s own people during a war? Because if we say a country can’t be responsible for the death of it’s own people, then a government can declare war against a neighbor and just sit and watch the number of deaths that increase among it’s people, making the world public turn against their enemy.

Because History showed that very evil people can ascend to power, yes, it is necessary that we check if nobody is using this kind of diabolic strategy. Using human shields is a crime. And if it is so, what are the signs that could tell us if somebody is doing precisely that?

Making an insanely cruel surprise attack against civilians, then launching rockets from inside cities, hiding among houses, having military equipment inside hospitals, and coercing their people to stay where they are even when the opponent announces where it is going to attack, is it all not a clear sign that we should condemn this as a crime, and ensure nobody is going to get away easily to do it over and over again?

But of course, this puts us in an uncomfortable position ff having to condemn the side where more people died. This seems to go against some basic intuition we have. In a World where wars are something that happen far away, it is easy to imagine that everybody that takes part in a war is doing it for bad reasons, and the side who had more people killed during the recent conflicts is the less bad.

This idea makes it easier for us to find the “right” reaction. All we have to do is say “just stop”, and we’ve done our part, and can go back to our lives. Any other state of things is too painful for us.

We live in a new world in the western societies, a world with no war, thank God. But when we look at the past we have no problems to understand that not everybody holding a gun was bad. I tend to use the example of War World II because I believe most people understand that there was an Evil side, and for the other side, it was necessary to fight. We have no problems putting the responsibility for all the horror in the evil side, in the provoking side.

From our homes in the modern west, living a peaceful life, working, watching tv, etc it is getting harder for us to believe that evil giants still exist, but they do. Some things that we call simply “governments” of foreign countries, work very differently from what we call a “government” here. The “ideological” disputes there are not like here ( and I pray our disputes don’t become like theirs ). The reality in the Middle East, for instance, is very different from here.

            When Israel was established as a modern state, after the division – remember, division, between two peoples in a land that had space for that – of the British mandate of Palestine, seven Arab countries declared war against her and attacked. Those countries simply wanted to destroy Israel. The war was of a country defending itself from elimination. Israel won, and that’s the reason it wasn’t destroyed. It had to fight against a group of nations that attacked as a block. Unfortunately, this reality is not just in the past for them, there are still many nations wanting Israel to cease to exist.

What people are saying against Israel, in the end amounts to this: “You can’t attack countries that are attacking you because people will die”. Someone may say that countries are not attacking Israel, just “organizations”, but this is just a trick, a strategy.  Hamas has been ruling over Gaza for a long time, just like Hezbollah rules over South Lebanon. With the complacence of everyone around, they attack with the power of small countries – that have not so small allies by the way.

A country, like Israel, can’t neglect to consider attacks on it’s population as crimes that must be responded. The giant quantity of weapons, bombs and military structure that Israel is destroying right now, was all there for the sole reason of one day being used against Israel. There are International Organizations present in these places that definitely should not have allowed all that to be set there, but they did nothing, it seems. And now who is wrong?

Of course, the press don’t ever seem to have the time to give us nothing that helps us to see the big picture, the power and the intentions of the leaders that Israel is eliminating, and how they make everything they can to make the price of their life the higher possible for their own population. Those leaders say openly what their goals are, they say openly that their population must be martyrs.

But all the press does is publish numbers of deaths, which seems to be the only thing those groups have in their favor. And if it is the only thing they have – what else they have? What service for the happiness of their people? What is happiness for them besides destroying someone else? – if it’s the only thing they have, we must think on the question in the beginning of this chapter.

The press won’t even have a word to say about how the societies in some places are becoming more radical, more people are engaging with terrorist organizations, the governments accept to live side by side with these groups ( when government and the groups are not the same ), and the normal man is more and more believing that the western freedoms are the reason of all the evil in the world.

There are still leaders who see absolutely no problem in the total dominion of man over man, they believe there is nothing to discuss, no philosophical or ethical development needed all truths are already defined, and some men are naturally entitled to impose them, as infallible leaders. Moreover, they believe that any other form of society is evil, too liberal, too open, and the right thing to do is to conquer those societies, using any amount of violence necessary. They definitely don’t give value to human life individually speaking.

If regimes like that exist, and we have a set of laws in our countries, freedoms we want to preserve, naturally some clash will occur one day. They would really like to destroy the West, banish anything resembling women’s rights, respect for sexuality and things like that from the face of the earth. But for now, it’s Israel who is paying the price.

People who want to “defend” extremely radicalized countries, because they think these countries are “just poor countries” and all their problems come because of the western “oppressor”, are faced with the incoherence of defending regimes that go against all that they defend, all freedoms, all rights, all respects for minorities, everything. They usually come up with the excuse that all this radicalization is to blame on the “oppressor”, “these societies were oppressed so they radicalized”. But what about rich Arab countries that are getting more and more radicalized? Who is oppressing Iran, the Emirates, so on? Nobody.

Anyway, the press, with their simplistic facts, don’t help us to see what each side defends.  Isn’t there more to talk about, when it comes to Middle East, then wars after they explode? The radicalization of the people makes very sad stories. Women subjugated, people with no dreams…

Of course, after some time, they don’t even see their own lack of freedom. But it is not wrong, and it is not racism or religious discrimination, to wish they had more dignity and self-respect. Isn’t teaching praise for terrorism in schools a form of child abuse? Isn’t praising suicide attacks an international crime?

The History of the anti-Jewish hatred – and if you hate everybody who supports Israel, then I’m sorry, but you’re hating like ninety percent of the Jews – is old and still hard to totally explain, still hard to fully understand, but I think I can see some of the reasons why imposing some defeat on Israel, even if not totally destroying it right now, would be good for those giant tyrants. It would encourage losers to enlist in terror groups, it would encourage people in the middle east and the world to buy more and more radical visions. In the meantime, the sacrifice of civil people is used to turn people Western against Israel, and push an ideological agenda that turns the West against itself, turns democracy, that those leaders hate, against itself.

            Being for peace is different from shaking hand with tyrants. We don’t like war, that’s ok, but how come those dictators are our friends? It makes no sense. How come our Internation Organizations fully accept well known dictators that hardly pretend to care for human rights as perfect members, honorable members?

Why don’t we ever try to see from Israel’s perspective, they are not protecting a government or any other convention, they have a people to protect, a people who comes from a long history of slaughter and persecution. Israel is fighting back strongly, yes, because what is happening against them is very large scale, too, if you didn’t notice. Through the history of the world, the giants of the Earth don’t seem to like Jews, but now they have a chance to defend themselves

Now, if you think that what I said in the beginning of this chapter, that bringing peace to the World is more complex than doing third grade maths with numbers of deaths you see in superficial news, is a form relativizing human deaths, I tell you, it is not. Because I am not making their deaths a less sad thing. It is still tragic.

I am just saying we must make an effort to see the truth, find the real responsible people and find what is the right thing to do. if we really want to extend our goodwill and care to people on far places, on different societies, I don’t think we can do much in the real world, if we don’t give up the illusion that we can protect people that live under evil regimes if we don’t oppose those regimes somehow.

The fact that we need to oppose tyrannies to try to protect people, brings some pain and some complexities, but think with me, we could be worst. Imagine if we lived in a Universe where we had to support tyrannies to help people. I think that would be worst.

Social Studies Magic Mirror

 

Get your Social Studies Magic Mirror now!

No, it’s not the same stupidity mirror that’s been making people incoherent since time immemorial, no, it’s… it’s a new one, it’s Transdimensional!

 

Not Just What You Hate, Please

 

There are some traps in this life, And I think one of them Is to define everything only negatively. Like, sometimes we spend too much time thinking only on what something is not, and not what it is. Like thinking about what is not cool, and never about what is cool.

As an example of defining things negatively, let’s think of how we define “play”, in the sense of children playing. It seems easier to say what it is not: we tend to say “just playing”, like, as if play is something that is “not working”, “not studying”, “not quite real”, “not immediately useful” and etc. But children understand what “play” means before they understand concepts like working, studying, useful, real, etc.

If we avoid this “not this”, “not that” and then try to define “play” for what it “is”, we go to a much more interesting line of thought, don’t we? If we only think of negatve, we may end up living our life with the sole intent of “not being like those losers” and end up not really adding nothing to nobody.

Of course it influences our vision of the world at large. Think about those American students who are defending Hamas and Hezbollah, and totally overlooking the power and influence of Iran. They shouldn’t be marching for homophobic misogynist criminals.

When you really want something, the first natural thing to do is to find the best place to start it. If people care for woman rights, gay rights, workers rights, the best place to start building this new world is where in fact it already started: in the western culture, in countries like America and Israel. These seeds will not grow in fundamentalist extremist Islamic authoritarian regimes.

But as I say, people a lot of times think too little about what they really want, and too much about what they hate, so they can’t accept that a better world starts in western countries, because these Western countries have some sins in their back, are “Imperialist” countries.

Not being able to see that both good and bad things happened in the “West” leads only to hate and to some blind allegiance to any form of “negation of Western culture”, even when they have nothing positive to bring. The state of mind of the people who brought Africans as slaves to America and the state of mind of the people who fought against slavery were not the same state of mind, were not branches of the same tree.

And these stereotypes, against the West as a whole, against Israel, that make some people so complacent with extremists, turn these people against themselves. In the end, these students are defending the opposite of what they claim to defend.

The way these students see Israel as a “colonial” state comes from a stereotype: People going from Europe – although they didn’t come all from Europe – to a third World place, well, it has to be “colonialism”. But this was a very different story, of a people who once had a home land and were exiled for almost two thousand years – and it was not their first exile – and lived as second class people, to say the least, in a lot of places, until they got their right to go back to the only real home they ever called their own.

You may say now that this story does not satisfy you, but it is wrong to stimulate terror because of this vision of yours. You have to remember that this is a country founded almost 80 years ago, after the slaughter of 6 million Jews, in a moment when all the countries in the UN agreed that this centuries old claim for the land was valid. You can’t go back in time. The land was divided in two, for two people, and the Jews built a country and now have millions of people living there. If you care for peace at all you have to accept that. It’s History.

            Now, it seems that even the people who don’t say they want to destroy Israel, don’t say they like terrorist groups, just say they want an immediate end of the War, “just stop right now”, not seeing difference between both sides, or evevn blaming Israel, maybe they too are thinking too much of what they hate, and too little about what they love.

            Of course everybody hates war, but to see if somebody is right or wrong, we must also think about our definition of peace. The definition of peace for Israel is people living their lives, being productive and happy, free of terrorism. The definition of peace for the extremists, doesn’t go much beyond this: a land, and someday a World, free of Jews.

            Yes, people are dying, and it is a tragedy. Because I care for life, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of the word “kill”. Put in a simplistic way, it must be “to cause the death of someone”. Well, I’ve been thinking about the factors that are involved in the death of Gazan civilians.

            Missiles have been fired against the North of Israel for months, and people had to evacuate from there. If they didn’t abandoned their homes – and they are tens of thousands –  so many of them would have died. Israel warns the people in around their enemies before striking against terrorists, but these people are encouraged by their “leaders” to stay home, not leave.

            So, when there is more than one actor involved in something that is causing death, we could say kill is “taking part in an action that causes death”. This action is War. Now, Why and with what intention is each side taking part on this action?

One side takes part because it wants a country to cease to exist, the other because it’s being attacked and suffered the worst and most heinous attack in its History by people who really want to destroy it. The stated goal of one of the sides is “end Israel”, killing most Jews as possible, no matter how many Palestinians die in the process. The other side’s stated goal is to destroy a terrorist organization doing their best to have less civilians killed. It’s easy, when we look from a world where war doesn’t exist, to judge a people for whom war is, unfortunately, something real

Imagine there is something coming in your direction, a giant missile loaded of pure hatred, with the intention of destroying you and everything that you love. The World could have stopped this missile, but the World didn’t. For instance, the terror organizations have their money in Qatari banks, is the world pressing Qatar to freeze this money?

A lot of people say we must “dissociate” the people of these places from the terror organizations. And I agree: Let’s dissociate them from the terrorists, but since the terrorist’s weapons are not abstract and the blood and bones of the Israelis are real too, I believe that it won’t be enough to just make this “dissociation” in our little hearts then go to sleep in peace.

 What the World does to save these people from brainwashing tyrants who do all they can to turn people into hate machines? The World War II, the 20^th century should have taught us about the danger of totalitarian regimes. We’re too complacent with bloodthirsty dictators as they take total control of the lives of their people, and one day they start attacking someone else.

I hope a third World War never happens, but these dictators are not our friends, they are not our partners. They are not just people who have a different culture and live “a little differently from us”. They will not be changed with handshakes. The World don’t seem to care that the people of certain countries are turned into thought slaves, only remembers them as they die in a war that their leaders provoked.

            Then we go march together with people who are using them to accuse  someone in a political game, using the death of people in a war to defend the groups who are oppressing this people. This only makes things worst and the situation harder to solve.

            To deal with situations, we must be honest about values, what is the society that each side is defending. We look at World War II and see clearly that the values the nazis defended make them the wrong side. Unfortunately, Germans died in the War, but we know who’s fault it is.     They killed 6 millions Jews, but would have it been wrong if the allies were able to step there earlier than they did, and defeated German before they killed 6 millions?

            Hezbollah had a plan called “Conquer the Galilee”, and a lot of things, weapons and gear and structure, were ready for them to invade Israel by the North and make a lot of October 7ths at once. The Idf is now dismantling this structure. Why does a country have an army, after all? To defend it from real threats, not just when total annihilation is too close.

            There is the dilemma of this people who live under extremist organizations – Hamas rules Gaza, like Hezbollah the South of Lebanon. If we keep distant, just talking about death, we can’t do much for them. To defend them from the consequences of the evil actions of their leaders we have to think about life, the life we want for the human being. I don’t ask people to change religion, but I feel free to say that nobody should live ruled by those extremist monsters.

            What is Israel defending? Life. The life of Israelis, while doing their best to act ethically. Ideally, yes, we should care for all human life. But then we would have to have the courage to advocate for the basic freedoms we want for people. Just saying we don’t like the result of wars won’t be enough.

            I hope life is protected the best way possible, and the responsibilities fall where it’s due.

Peace Don't Seem To Go Well With Certain Things

 

Is everything that exists in the Universe good, or does the Universe contains options, for us to choose between good and bad things, good and bad actions? I think we believe we must choose, right? That’s what life is about…

So, there is good and bad. Right and wrong. Some people seem to think that, if we believe solidly in right and wrong, we are lacking empathy, we are failing to see the other’s point of view. But why should we try to have empathy? Because it’s more fair than being blind to the other. “Fair”… or, in other words, “the right thing to do”.

So how to solve this paradox? Well, I think of empathy as seeing something of yourself in the other. Looking for familiar things, things that are common to all mankind. If you show me a picture of a muslin woman holding her baby child, that is familiar to me. But if you show me a terrorist invading a house to burn a family alive, sorry, that doesn’t belong to my world. I will not accept that. It’s not part of the common things we must see in all human beings.

Think. We have a right to believe in something. A right to believe certain things are wrong. We all have things we believe are wrong. And we have a right to talk about it. Of course we must always seek for the essential, avoiding cheap moralism, but yes, we can, and should, talk about right and wrong, otherwise we can’t use our vision of the world to build anything bigger than ourselves… How can we build things if we can’t convince other people of better ways to do things?

And when it comes to people with different cultural background? Do we have a right to talk with them about our vision of right and wrong? Well, if not, we must forget other countries, only try to do something good where we live and be indifferent to the pain in other places of the World.

But of course, if people protest in America and Europe about things that happen in the Middle East, for instance, if people in South America can join north American protests against racism, it’s because we believe all human beings must have something in common, so we can have an opinion about things that happen outside our country.

So why it’s so hard for so many people to have empathy with Israel? Why it’s so hard to look at dictatorships and see responsibility for wars and tragedies? Why is it so easier to blame a modern democracy? The extremist Islamic justification for their deeds come from the idea that Israel shouldn’t be there. I’m definitely not one to go defending everything England ever did along the centuries, but the division of the British Mandate of Palestine seems right. There were too people who claimed the land, both had their reasons, there was space for both, and the land was divided in half. And it was voted by the UN, and everybody voted yes.

So why so much bias against Israel? Some people say Israel is “Imperialist.” Well, obviously you can’t say that it is wrong for Israel to be there because they are Imperialists, and they are Imperialists because they are there wrongly, that would be a circular thought. You say Israel is there for Imperialist reasons, they say they are there because it’s their Historical Land, the only place they ever had a country. It is indeed a land historically connected to Israel, there are ancient documents that proved it, and they indeed were persecuted everywhere else and always prayed to go back there. You can study their prayers, they do say that.

As for the alleged “Imperialist reasons”, when did Israel ever had an Empire? When was Israel anything other than a small country that live by their own resources?

I think people label Israel “Imperialist” simply because they associate Israel with the “Western World”. Well, a lot of Jews went to America, where they prospered more than in any other place during their exile, and they obviously have ties with that country. Also, they try to have good relations with the Democratic World. Nothing strange or criminal in that.

And why would anybody consider all that is “Western” wrong? Mozart wasn’t the Fuhrer, Descartes wasn’t Napoleon. People in the Western World suffered under tyrants, and also found ways to seek freedom.

It seems that there is something in the “Western Culture”, as a whole, in all aspects, that a lot of people consider “Evil”, especially people in the Human Sciences. It’s as if all cultures that are “non-Western” were legitimate expressions of their people, and the Western ones were “artificial” greedy cultures. There is nothing artificial in the Bible, it’s an ancient religious book – good and bad things were done with different interpretations of it – as with all ancient texts – or are the modern aspects of Western Civilization that bother people?

But we are all in the modern world, aren't we? And anyway, no culture, nobody's religion, is a pure manifestation of primal instincts, they are all attempts to direct our energy towards something higher. Also, no culture had, five hundred years ago, ready easy answers to all our modern problems. The challenge is to connect to our essential principles and derive new answers.

Israel is a great example of a nation that respects the old and tries to get the best of the modern world, that respects the spiritual identity of the people at the same time that it builds a democratic and tolerant country.

We shouldn't be conniving with nations that try to impose an old World that can't change even in the smallest detail. That refuse to use reason to dialogue with other nations, to learn with other people's experiences. That will never be tolerant with their own people or consider other nations truly deserving of consideration. That always go in the opposite direction of peace.

The result of not considering those tyrannies wrong is that now we have dictatorships attacking a democracy and we can’t stand firmly on the side of the democracy, because we don’t want to accept the fact that in our modern world there is still a justifiable war to be fought.

Hamas made a diabolic attack on oct 7th killing more than a thousand people in the most horrific way and is still holding hostages. The Houthis attacked with missiles from Yemen, same as the Hezbollah from Lebanon. The world failed to eradicate this terror groups. And now their main financier, Iran, directly attacked Israel with 180 missiles in one day.

But because Israel built a defense system and collaborates with America to neutralize missiles, and built safe bunkers and shelters for their people, and evacuated their northernmost cities, they were able to protect themselves from the worst consequences of the last attacks.

The other side is not so worried, they will not build shelters for their population, only for the leaders. They will not evacuate the areas that will be attacked. In fact, Israel sent thousands of messages telling the population of Lebanon to leave the South because they were going to attack the terrorist bases in the area, but the leaders of those places encourage the people not to leave. Then, obviously, the civil casualties will be higher than we would like, no matter how ethically Israel works.

But most of the press doesn’t seem to be seeing all that is happening, they just count the dead. And people either blame Israel for existing and say that they deserve all the horror, or just want it all to stop, want the world to go back to a peace that never really existed in the middle east, a peace that they never bother to check if it’s really there, and don’t actively work for.

Because we should defend freedom. As I said before, of course I don’t want any third World War, but we must state clearly that we consider dictatorships, tyrannies, simply wrong. Otherwise we are just letting the evil grow, and crying for an easy imaginary peace when it all explodes.

We should face the truth, there are countries that are directing their energy and resources to the destruction of others , that always say No to peace.

I wish we lived in an universe where the civil population of countries ruled by violent leaders was safe from harm, but obviously, in reality, this is very hard to achieve, especially if the World turns a blind eye.

Why is it so hard to take a stand against these tyrants? Well, some of the people bought an ideology sold by teachers who spend all the times seeing only the bad things in Western Society.

Some other people seem to like to imagine that the peace we have in the Western world is the “normal”, and the wars in other parts of the world are aberrations, and it would be very easy for everybody to just have the peace we have here, in an instant.

These people don’t give the proper weight to the news of authoritarian theocrats gaining more and more power, or even to armies of terrorists growing. How come that after two World Wars in the beginning of the 20^th century, the Cold War, we so quickly forgot that this world is dangerous, at least while we have violent tyrants with power?

Even seeing all that happened to the Jews in world war II, and seeing antisemitism gaining force in the Arab World, how did we slipped so fast to a kind of a dream where all we have to do for peace is say “I don’t like War”? Sometimes it seems this people just want the “bad news” to stop so they can go back to sleep…

And the fact that now these two groups of people, the ones that hate the Western World and especially Israel, and the ones that just want all to “just stop”, a lot of times seem to be marching together, signals that something strange is happening. Like “peace” marching side by side with the ones that hate peace the most.

I too want peace, I pray it comes as soon as possible. But if we want peace, leaders that swear death to other countries, government that finance terrorist groups, must be our bigger enemies. There is nothing wrong in being their enemy, you are not harming the population of those countries. On the contrary, you should wish for them the same freedom you enjoy. The freedom that those leaders will not give, now or ever.

We cannot use “empathy” as an excuse to be silent about what we know is good, and what we know is bad, what we wish for ourselves and others, that should be the same, and what we don’t. Tyranny is bad, and there is nothing wrong in having a clear vision of right and wrong, good and bad. That’s what we need the most.

 

 

 

 

 

One-sided Peace and Fingerpointing

 

I think all journalists, when start talking about the war Israel is in, should start by “the war, that was started by Hamas, who didn’t surrender yet… etc etc” Isn’t this phrase right?

If you have a war happening somewhere, how to decide where do you stand? Obviously nobody in sane mind “likes” wars, but are wars never justifiable? Like world war II, to which we look back and see clearly that someone needed to be defeated… So, if someone attacks you, should you just say “please, stop”? Or if you strike back, should you stop when you start winning, because then obviously the enemy has more losses? Even if the enemy doesn’t give the slightest signal that he will stop attacking you? Even if he is still attacking you? Even if you still have soldiers dying every week?

But how can I say Hamas attacked first? Because Israel wasn’t attacking in October 6^th. But some people will not accept that, because they say Israel was wrong to defend it’s borders, to watch if someone was coming in with guns… That is, in the end, that Israel shouldn’t even be there… Because if we consider that Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, and we read a little about what happened on October 7^th, we wouldn’t be so shocked that a war started that day.

What happened in October 7^th is the kind of thing we obviously must say “it just can’t keep going, it just can’t happen anymore”. But is war the only solution? Well, who is stepping up to find another way to make Hamas definitely stop?

The press only shows the attacks that come from Israel, most people don’t even know how many rockets were fired by the Hezbollah from Lebanon, don’t even know tenths of thousands of Israelis that live in the North of the country had to leave their homes because of the rockets. But the other side don’t evacuate their civilians – on the contrary, they keep them right in the fire line.

There are still Israeli hostages in Gaza. There was a negotiation for the release of the hostages a few weeks ago and the world didn’t stop to see, didn’t seem to care. Maybe because they would have to face the fact that Hamas is real, and active.

The press speaks a lot about “proportion” and not about “necessity”. What is “proportion”? If someone invades your house with a gun swearing to kill your family, and already killed a loved one, and there is only one cop in your city you can call, will you tell him, “please don’t come with a better gun than his, for the sake of proportion”?

Yes, Palestinian and Lebanese civilians dying is something extremely tragic, but can the world at least open the mouth to say “things like Hamas just can’t exist anymore”? Can the press show the Hamas leaders saying that when their people die is a good thing, because they become martyrs? How can the world find a solution, if it cares, without facing the facts?

There is a lot of pressure to be on the side of the “Palestinians”. Aren’t you on the side of the poor? Aren’t you on the side of the underdog? If we see on Tic Toc sad things, then you know yhere is trouble in the world, and you may start to think what could people do to make it better. Of course it’s easier to just point your finger against Israel, than seeing the whole complex situation.

Israel is a country, alone in the middle east among  Islamic countries that are getting more and more extreme in their ideology, as if that tiny country – Israel – was to blame for something, God knows what, since these Islamic countries have all they need to prosper, and their leaders are indeed very rich. But these leaders, especially the leaders of Iran, support attacks like October 7^th,  , and Israel needs to be able to tell their children that it won’t happen again. In fact, one of the reasons a lot of Jews went to Israel was to say that the Holocaust won’t happen again.

So Israel must defend somehow, diminish the power their enemies have to attack. The idea that Israel is an aggressor state by nature is a lie. And if you use a lie as foundation to build your thinking, your whole thinking will be a very strange building.

In fact, there are defenders of gay rights and woman rights supporting terrorists who kill gays and women because it’s “their culture”. So, the Palestinian and Israeli homosexual and women seem to owe something to a group of men who hate everybody except their racist, homophobic, misogynic and extremely rich leaders. Young people who obviously don’t want to be violently attacked in their homes are taught to pretend they wouldn’t mind, if it was for “justice”.

            Such a monstrous building, where nothing fits nothing, can only have been built upon lies. And they are big lies about how the world works. As if only white people have had empires – and by the way, the Jews never had an empire, and just started being considered “perfectly white Europeans” very recently in human history. Why don’t you get into your time machine and go tell the nazis that Jews are “white Europeans”?

And anyway, even if you could divide the world between rich countries as bad and poor countries as victims, you can’t say everybody in a rich country is bad – poor people there suffered too – and everybody in poor countries are victims – their powerful people are exploiters too.

If you say all your “rich” countries only have perpetrators and all your “poor” countries only have victims you silence all the normal men and women and protect all the powerful. Because the normal men in the rich countries can’t stand for their beliefs, because they are all bad, and the normal men in the poor countries won’t be defended from evil leaders because it is wrong to say their leaders are evil, because these countries only have victims. That’s a perfect way to defend all the power in the planet.

What if instead of pretending only “white” countries had empires – ever heard of the Ottoman Empire? And what is China? – we looked at ways of doing things, that can be right or wrong? What if we realize that all through History, and everywhere, there were people who just wanted to go to the top, just wanted to fulfill their own wishes, pleasing the ones who are on top and making it harder for possible competitors, and pretending they have nothing to do with it if something bad happens to someone. And there are people who are brave enough to do their best to live according to good principles. At least in a democracy, the brave people have more chances to try to change things.

Standing on the side of Israel is accepting there are no magical solutions, no “white countries” that should cease to exist and everything would be fine, no tyrannical governments who will stop mistreating people if we are “nice” to them, no terrorist organization who “just want to attack their oppressors”. No violent crimes that are “not really crimes”, no “alternative form of government”, no “revolution” that will magically change the World. No war that can be stopped by the side who was attacked, before the side that attacked at least stops to attack.

It’s accepting that this World that we have is the World we have to deal with, these are the countries that exist and they are not going anywhere, and there is no other way to solve things than holding people and governments accountable for their deeds. No way to change the World except doing our best to act more ethically in all spheres. No other form of Justice besides good old case-by-case impartiality.

But of course it is easier to point to someone and blame them for everything that is wrong, then all that people have to do is to say, “we are not them”. Then you don’t have to check your own life and decisions, your own actions, don’t have to really question if you are being ethical or just climbing to the top, on your job or your college. You don’t have to be creative and find new solutions, no, all you have to do is scream “We are not them”. It defines us as human beings.

I’m white but I am not like the “white oppressors” – and why? Because you really do your business in a different way? No, we didn’t really think about it, “we are not like them because we hate them”. I’m not like Israel or the Jews who defend it – the vast majority – and being “not them” makes me a good person.

Then people don’t have to think hard about a World that is complex, and obviously – and unfortunately – is not at peace, and will not magically be at peace if one, and only one of the sides stop fighting. Do you know any other way to make aggressors stop attacking that wasn’t tried? Peace proposals? Humanitarian aid? All that was tried. Do you need any proof that terrorists use their people as human shields? Have you made a research on that? Do you wonder why mainstream journalists never say “human shield”? It’s not a subjective term… But who cares about all that? “We are not them” so we are fine, we can scream it and go back to life as usual.

As if we fixed anything…

I see that there are different levels of “protesting this war”. On one end, there are people who literally support Hamas and Hezbollah and all that they do, I the other end people who just say they care for Palestinians and don’t want to see more suffering. But by marching together, they give a big sign to the Terrorist groups that they can continue, they will be protected.

Maybe this people who “just want it to stop” should talk to the people on the other end, the people who want Israel to be destroyed by any means. Maybe they should have a conversation about peace, maybe that would be a good start…