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.

Too Much Trust To Ask

 

One of these days I heard the woman on the tv news talking about Gaza.

“Another massacre in the hunger line”, she sad.

According to her, Israeli Forces had simply shot people who were waiting for the aid distribution.

I went to Internet to see what that was about.

 

Here’s what I’ve seen by Reuters.

 

 

And this is by BBC

But first of all, if you read – I believe most people don’t, not to mention do it attentively – didn’t happen in the “line for food”, but some good half a mile away, somewhere else.

 

[npr]

 

[Wikipedia]

Note: the numbers, as you can see, are provided by Hamas. Some people believe an army would lie but a Terrorist group never would…

 

In the Khan Younis case, according to the Idf, it seems a truck got stuck near the aid distribution area – and was mobbed by a group of people. There were casualties.

The Idf says the number of casualties presented by the press is an exaggeration.

Also, in a BBC article, they put on top of it a picture of a child crying. The subtitle doesn’t say the picture is from the situation in question. In fact, nobody says that children were even involved.

This is the kind of thing that we must be attentive to, to start to see how people can be exaggerating, manipulating and sometimes simply lying.

By the way, now they admit the numbers are provide by Hamas-run ministry of Health, which they didn’t say in the beginning, but were forced to by pressure of some honest people.

 

Even the incidents being not in the aid distribution and the events not clarified yet, all journalists of the quoted articles come to this conclusion, that they want to make us think is the only thing possible: it was people desperately trying to get to food centers.

They quote “witnesses”.

The sources of information from inside Gaza are in three categories: people who identify with Hamas, people who are afraid of Hamas and people who are part of Hamas.

Oh, is it impossible that everybody is afraid?

Well, there was, for a brief period earlier this year, some protests against Hamas inside Gaza. The World decided to simply ignore it, then Hamas violently repressed them, and total fear settled again.

 

The Idf denies ever having aimed at innocent civilians. These incidents happened in very different circumstances from what the articles want to make people think, not necessarily “in the food line”, there must be people inciting violence against the troops, the numbers are surely exaggerated and the whole information manipulated.

I am sure it has nothing to do with the Israeli Force simply deciding to shoot indiscriminately at innocent people at the smallest sign of” misbehavior” in the “food line”, as the press seems so determined to make it look like.

How am I sure, you ask? Because sometimes they are so determined to tell the story that fits their goals, that their exaggeration is precisely what makes us see it must not be as they say.

I repeat the Reuters quotation at the beginning of this text:

 

This is the pattern of what they are trying to make us believe: there were thousands of people gathered to obtain food, the Idf simply fired, a lot where killed and there are many eyewitnesses to confirm this.

Sure. If there was thousands, obviously there are hundred of eye witnesses.

Too bad they all forget their cell phones at home every time, right?

Yes, they have cell phones.

Yes, there are videos of suffering inside hospitals. Bad situations happened in hospitals and these images can be reused for different purposes. Nobody is denying there is a war happening.

But friends, there is no video of the Israeli Forces committing deeds that they deny. How? There are Gazan journalists who would immediately share them with CNN or such...

It’s hard to be in the 19^th century and have to trust in word of mouth, right?

By the way, one article I found said there were videos confirming.

Here is the link so you can see for yourself if the curious video presented is a proof of a massacre. I refuse to comment.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/04/middleeast/israel-military-gaza-aid-shooting-intl-invs

 

 

Some journalists complain Israel is very careful about which and how journalists can enter the war zone. There are many reasons, I myself think that well, if journalists show this disposition to spread lies at a distance, some of them may try to do some super production there.

You may ask why then, why would the press lie?

I had I friend long time ago who would believe the weirdest things people told him. He would say, “why would they lie? For what reason?” We can’t give this level of extreme faith to the press. Freedom of press is important but the other side is accountability. Society must watch if they are being responsible.

Because, well, there are always reasons to lie. I’m not talking about conspiracy theories, but there are forces of power and money in the World.

 

Seems the world don’t like certain changes. Most leaders in the world seem to be taking a more convenient stance. They would like to go back to before October 7^th  and keep all business as usual. They don’t want people to be more concerned then before with the differences between the various types of political regimens in the world.

With the realization that Israel needs to fight this war – as I have no doubt they do, because they didn’t start it, their annihilation is the stated goal of their enemies and they are not just talking, as you should know – so, with this realization comes a new way of looking at authoritarian regimes. It can make people see they need to have discernment, that there are worst and better forms of power, there are evil actors in powerful positions that act against humanity.

People may even start to wonder about if it is moral for business people to do “legal” business with people from other parts of the World that do things that are illegal here but not there, or the law just doesn’t work the same there, and so on…

But for “business as usual” it is better if we all keep thinking that everything is relative, that there are some “cultural differences” between countries but we are all walking slowly towards a better place, and this will just happen naturally. The Jews and a lot of other people are realizing that not everything happens so naturally. And some people don’t want this realization to spread.

 

Isn’t it interesting how all this horrible polemic is happening right when Israel is destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities and Iran is attacking Israel cities at random? When people could start thinking if they want a nuclear Iran, people could start connecting the dots between Iran and it’s Terrorist proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis?

Some leaders of the World may be secretly relieved that there will be no nuclear Iran, but everybody wants to go back to “normal”, where dictatorships are not the real problem.

People of the press, we need facts, but not only with news we form our knowledge. We have discernment, we know History, we see patterns. Patterns can change with new facts coming in, but if you want to make such a drastic change as to make the whole World believe that a democratic country threatened to death, a country with free society and press, is the monster, and Terror Kingdoms are peaceful places just being attacked without reason, you need to show more.

In fact, at this point, you would definitely have much more to show, if it was true.

[cnn]

The Fence

 

I can understand why people want wars to end, want people to start suffering and dying. I cannot understand people carrying flags of Terrorist groups who hate women, hate gays, hate people of other religions and races, that I cannot understand – maybe they just found a flag that nobody else will carry, so it is the only chance of lazy people to be the big heroes – but I can understand why people don’t want wars.

I don’t like wars either. But if you are going to think about the World, and you want your empathy to, somehow, work in the direction of better things for people in the World, it is not enough to close your eyes and say, “I value every individual life in the World”. I mean, of course it is not wrong to do that, but you also have to think on how the world works, what the people in power in each region are doing, so you can see what exactly is in the way between the people you care for and the life you would want them to have.

Looking at the television, the current war between Israel and Hamas is being portrayed, by most channels, as a war between a big and rich Israel and a country that only has poor people. Israel portrayed was the big one fighting a small enemy.

It is not so. How could Hamas break into Israel and carry out a horrible mass slaughter full of cruelty? They had guns, vehicles, equipment. Hamas is the organization in power and Gaza, with an equipped army. Hezbollah control a part of Lebanon and have one hundred thousand armed men, and means to wage war. The Houthis in Yemen, also with tens of thousands of men. They have plans to attack, they didn’t stop launching rockets at Israel, and they have the support of the radicalized muslins.

And these groups have ideological, financial and strategic support from Iran. The news don’t think this connection – that can be proved – is worthy to talk about, just as they don’t seem to care when powerful people in places like Qatar are shown to have connections with illegal groups.

Friday night, the news said the tensions between Israel and Iran escalated to a conflict. In reality Iran had already launched missiles at Israel in April and October 2024. The news said Iran was responding to attacks by Israel.

The question is that early last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed that Iran had lots of Uranium enriched far beyond the necessary to generate electricity and dangerously close to the necessary to be used in atomic bombs.

Israel stroke military personal and military and nuclear installations. Iran “responded” attacking Israeli civilian areas at random.

Iran is not secret that they consider the very existence of Israel wrong. They called it a cancer, they support all Israeli enemies and they attacked before. What will be their limit? Would the World be ready to stand with Israel if the worst happen? Should Israelis count with that, considering the many times various European leaders turned their back on them and the somehow volatile politics in America?

The Jews know that hate towards a group is not something abstract, it can acquire very concrete forms. Not a hundred years has passed since World War II.

Why do we say the nazis were evil, and that a neonazi can’t be ever right? It’s mostly because they consider that the lives of a group of people have less value, in fact, no value at all. They made a strange mix of Social Darwinism, religious prejudice and other weird philosophies, but what is more important is their conclusion: that it is not wrong, in fact it is a duty, to overcome “these people” and their evil influence, even killing them if necessary. And what is more, the German nazis acted on it, they carried out and executed a plan to annihilate those people. The Jews. And they murdered 6 million.

What the muslin extremists nowadays mostly use to turn people again Israel – the only Jewish State – is “resistance by any means necessary”. That is, they are teaching people that the presence of Jews, the existence of a Jewish State is something so evil, that nothing, absolutely nothing, that ever may be done against those Jews and anyone who support them will ever be wrong.

So, what the Israelis have ahead of them is an axis of enemies that are attacking and trying to create conditions to attack even strongly. And with Iran in the scene – and it is in the scene – it is not a small enemy, that you can neutralize so easily and magically bring peace.

Considered as a whole, there is a big, strong and extremely bellicose political movement, with a big structure, that does everything to bring the worst in its adepts – appealing to instincts that have nothing to do with politics. And the leaders of this movement have dreams of World domination, and their first and favorite target is Israel. And they are attacking. How can Israel not target the sources of the threats?

 The civilian casualties in Gaza come from the strategy of Hamas of not caring at all for their own people. Since the beginning, and even far before this war, Israel has been claiming that Hamas uses their own people as human shields. This is not an abstract thing. The use of people as human shields is something considered real in conventions about war, and considered a crime of war.

The Israeli Forces have been shown images of tunnels under hospitals, under residential areas. Entrances to this underground infrastructure were found under beds in civilian residences. Why don’t the press show all these findings, and let the people have a chance to judge if the human shields claim is true or not?

I find it very unlikely to show it is not true, especially if you show the leaders of Hamas speaking openly, in public interviews, that it is not a bad thing when their people die – that it is a “people of martyrs”. They don’t open exceptions even for their children.

Of course, someone may say, even with the human shield thing, it doesn’t make the deaths of people “okay”. Sure, nobody is saying it is not a bad thing. It’s damn tragic. But here is the main point of this essay: the fact that these people that we are trying to show empathy for live in the other side of some kind of fence. It’s sad, but it is true if you think.

Some people seem to feel guilty because other people live in regions where they don’t have a lot of the good things we have here. It is true, but it is not just about material things. Much more important than that is freedom, is living under a government that don’t act as if they have the right to do whatever they want with their people.

True, we have a lot of problems here in the countries of the World that we call democratic – and I do believe that they are at least much more democratic than in those other places – we had slavery, we abolished slavery, some problems remained from that, we have a lot of greed, but also, we have laws that say that the individual has a space where the government cannot intrude, and we have mechanisms to fight against leaders who try to trespass the line. Sure, only this will not make everybody happy automatically, but at least we have a good degree of freedom to build that happiness if we truly care for each other.

There are a lot of things, historical processes, that brought us here, and it wasn’t the same in all the World. In some places they jumped from rural life to industrial communism by a bloody revolution. In some places, the separation between religion and government was never deeply ingrained in people’s mind, so, even after some periods of liberalism, they went back to theocracies.

And in these theocracies, the people in the government also hold the “power of God”, in their vision of course, and there are not much limits on how they can control people. These leaders profit by being in war against the “infidels” of the World and in their societies there is nothing that says that it is wrong to use their people as tools in their “holy wars”.

If you do a little research, if you think about the World, if you try to see what is happening in different places, you will see that there is more than one reality existing at the same time in the same Planet.

And these people, that we want, and should, have empathy for, live on the other side of the fence. It’s a side where individual lives have less value. If we are just watching from our side, we can’t avoid homosexuals to be thrown from the roofs of high buildings, we can’t avoid political dissidents to be tortured, we can’t avoid misogynist crimes. We can’t avoid people being used as tools and human shields, and dying in wars that their leaders create.

Because their reality is one of fire and iron, and it will clash with other realities sometimes, and people in democratic places will have to defend their homes, their people. So, what can we do?

We must defend the things we value, the principles of freedom we believe. When a regime somewhere gets too powerful and aggressive, there may be no other way but neutralize the source of the threat by force, but it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Just by standing up for what we believe, and making a clear differentiation, that there are better and worse forms of government, we already take some of their power. “Better” and “worse” cannot be forbidden words, otherwise why international organizations even exist? Why do we even care to follow international politics?

Democratic countries cannot really be friends of dictators. They must not be accepted, or given places of honor in international organizations, like the UN gave to Iran two times in 2023.

And if the democratic countries state clearly that anyone threatening one of them will be an enemy of the democratic World as a whole, it will make it more costly for them to make wars and put their own people at risk.

Sometimes it feels like the World is doing precisely the opposite. Reports from terrorist regimes are taken quickly and spread by the press. The press says “according to” as if it excused them of any responsibility. And they never show the tons of images and videos that the Israeli forces have of terrorist infrastructure in civilian areas and so on. If these images were fake, you would know. But nobody acknowledges the existence of these evidences.

Like the Hamas men shooting people in a center for aid distribution that Israel had set in Gaza. There is a video, that unfortunately was not widespread. It seems that the celebrity Greta Thunberg in a ship to “bring food” was more interesting – a totally unnecessary super production, since hundreds of trucks were entering with aid, some waiting for international organizations to distribute it.

Well, the news don’t even show the leaders of extremist groups when they publicly declare their ideology. These are not philosophical or sociological discussions. When a leader preaches hate ideologies, they are stating their goals for the future.

When the press talks about the conflicts and don’t use any time at all to speak about the radicalization in the Middle East, it is as if someone was just “narrating” the battles in the beginning of World War II but just not mentioning what the nazi ideology even was. Just saying that “some countries were having a conflict somewhere”. People can’t be informed at all, this way. They don’t have the knowledge needed to decide for themselves what is the right thing.

Most of the world’s intellectuals will point “the oppression of the west” as a cause for radicalization, but it is not true. There is a lot of petroleum money, the leaders of these regions are ridiculously rich, they can count with commercial – and a lot of times political – partners like Russia and China. The leaderships of these regions made a choice. After the fall of the Ottoman and the British Empires, they could have directed the newly independent countries to the pursuit of general prosperity, freedom and happiness.

Instead, they used the fact that, in the middle of the new Middle East, there was a tiny strip that was given to the Jews, who came from all over the Middle East – where they weren’t really welcome – and from the disaster that happened to them in Europe, to their small ancestral homeland. A tiny strip for a minority, fair enough. But those leaders used this fact to bring their people to rage, to make them see the “necessity” of fighting the western world. Instead of the path of building things, they chose the easiest – for them – path of war against an external enemy. Nothing suits a tyrant better.

And that is what puts the civilians of these countries in another side of a fence.

Of course we must have empathy for the suffering of these people, but we can’t do this by refusing to see things as they are. I, too, dream of a World where everybody is free from danger of violence, but think: How the existence of these Giants will not affect the lives of people under their power?

How will that people not suffer, not only from war, but also deadly political and religious persecution, sexist tyranny, racist massacres of neighbor inside the same country?

Let’s pray that not everything have to be about war, but when a country like Israel is deadly threatened like they are now, there is no option but fight against the sources of the danger.

Yes, it is all tragic, and nothing exempts us from acting the most ethical way possible, but the consolation is that fighting those Giants is the right thing, the necessary thing. Because they won’t decide for themselves to stop making everything worst for everybody. These angry Forces will not decide, by themselves, to stop starting fires wherever they can.

We have to admit. Some forms of power, even if far from perfect, are better than others. The result of we all just admitting it can be surprisingly good, for everybody.

On the other side, think of what would be the consequences of a defeated Israel and a nuclear Iran, with their “death to Israel, death to America, death to all infidels” ideology? What would be the result for the whole World?

Mr Good Vibes

 

77 years of the IDF

 Yes, I learned to believe this Institution. Because what happens if we become such a bunch of cynicals that we don’t believe in nobody's values anymore?

Time of What

 I am a person who believes we must always think about what is needed to make things better, what values we must nurture, and so on. But now in our culture, starting from school, another way of seeing things is prevailing, a way focused not on “it’s time of what”, but on “it’s time of who”.

I mean, they say it is the time of the oppressed, those ethnic groups who suffered injustice in the past must now be given preference. I hope all those groups thrive, achieve prosperity and happiness, and we have a duty to avoid oppression – but we must be careful with this idea of “preference”. It can mean, and for a lot of people it certainly does, that the idea of “impartiality” in judging particular disputes should be set aside, in favor of some groups.

The concept of Justice, through History, has always evolved in direction of “fair judgement”, and that means impartiality. To judge a situation between two people starting from a clean slate, not taking in consideration who they are or what position they have in Society. The word “iniquity”, an ancient word used so much to describe the worst side of mankind, means precisely the “lack of equity”, that is, to measure two people by different standards.

And this vision of impartiality as the goal, is the vision that allowed people to prove that slavery was wrong, allowed black people in America and other places to gain Civil Rights, allowed women to demand equal salaries for equal jobs and so on. All this was about the idea of justice as an even scale, it was not about trying to tip the scale to any side.

I think what they are doing today is mixing the concepts of “awareness” with the concept of “judgement”. It is right, and necessary, to bring awareness to the problems that people face because of racism, sexism, and so on. But it is insane, and contrary to the principles that made we evolve so far, to say that a group of people should be subject to different laws than other. It should be about denouncing when the scale is uneven, not tipping the scale.

But now a lot of people say that Justice should be about “Reparation”, like fixing the bad things we have today that are consequences of the wrong deeds in the past, so it is okay to be partial when judging, because you are on the side of the “oppressed”. But then you are assigning an “original sin” to people who don’t come, or that you think don’t come, from oppressed backgrounds.

It is not fair, by the old core notions of Justice, that a person who did nothing wrong in a situation, be judged as if she owed something. I say this because there are actually people in the academic World, in schools of law – and they are not fringe – that say things like “burn the constitution, reparation is the thing”, and that say that a crime, even a violent crime, committed by a member of an “oppressed” group should be less punished, or even not be punished, because of the social differences in the World. This and other more subtle attacks on the old idea of Justice.

We must fight for a World where nobody is in a situation where he or she has no chance of living a good life and prosper, where nobody is left without opportunity. Not for a World where nobody has less chances of make money “in comparison” with someone else.

When people talk about “system” or “structures” in Society, we must differentiate if he is talking about structures that deny people freedom and opportunities, which is bad, or “structures” that simply put people in different positions, which is something not avoidable in the existence of the human being - and the better life we must desire for everybody has to do with work and respect, not with comparisons. Are we going in the direction of giving everybody respect or of simply comparing people? This comparison is the root of a lot of wrong deeds and needless suffering.

Honestly, will the son of a richer man receive better birthday gifts? Probably. And if he is the son of a rich man, he will have better connections in the city, too. It is life - and we must try to not let that people in better positions use it against other people, to take way their right, but to completely "flatten the universe" - even if it was desirable - we would have to create a system that totally controls everything and everybody. And then the people that are higher in that system will make everybody else’s life horrible, because that is what always happens.

Also, it’s the same as saying that human happiness only derives from the material World. You are not being fair to the other, who can’t be labeled as a “non-sufferer” because he is not in a certain group – even rich people suffer. You are not being fair to yourself and your loved ones because you may be blind to opportunities that would bring you good things. You are not being fair with Life, because maybe, if you stop the comparison, you could even be happier than someone who has more material things and connections.

This replacement of the basic ideas of Justice for a simplistic social comparison goes against the basic morals of humanity, and we can see this clearly by the fact that it just can’t bring good. When someone from a historically oppressed group robs a car at gunpoint, some Law student from a magnificent University may say he must be punished with less rigor, or even not punished at all, for the sake of “social justice”.

But, despite the student’s and the professor’s trip, a person doesn’t rob cars at gunpoint to bring peace and happiness to their people. They do it for drugs and for money to show off to his “friends”. It’s just the facts, and crime continues to be something that brings nothing good to nobody. Just as all these attacks on the old idea of Justice can’t bring nothing good.

Now, moving somewhat abruptly – but I believe you’ll see the connections – to the most talked about geopolitical event of the moment – and the main theme of this book, the war Israel is waging against Hamas – I would like to bring up again the massacre of October 7^th, that started it.

There was a music festival, where suddenly armed men came in motor paragliders and started shooting indiscriminately, killing people while abusing young women. Not only there, but all through the south of Israel, rape was committed alongside with murder.

Now, how can this be about anything other than perversion? A guy that can be sexually excited while a young woman is screaming is perverted enough, then what about someone who does that while shooting at random? The impulse to do something like that can only come from a total woman hater, someone whose frustrated sexual desire is only matched by his hatred.

 A man doesn’t rape while killing people because he is not allowed to live where his great grandfather lived. This act is not about land. It’s not about politics. Punitive rape can only be committed by men who hate themselves and viscerally envies the freedom of someone else. How can some people turn this into something that is part of a “political issue”? And how can this “contextualization” come from people who call themselves “feminists”?

Well, I think it is done by defining, beforehand, immutable roles of victim and villain. You “find” something in the past that makes this always the “good side” and that always the “bad”. Then there is no need, there is no sense, in applying any universal moral rules to any event that might happen.

In fact, with this idea of “reparation”, they already emptied the concept of Justice of any universal moral values. They reduced it to this: “Justice is undoing the injustices of the past”. Oh, thank you very much, teacher.

The evidence that this circular thought is unfruitful to say the least, is that every judgement will therefore depend heavily on History, but the study of History itself becomes less trustable.

If we have a set of basic universal moral rules, we can study how these rules were broken in the past, and think how we can avoid that those things – slavery, the Holocaust – ever happen again.

But with this idea of nothing but “reparation”, History becomes a battlefield where you look not for wisdom, but for justifications for deeds that would otherwise be considered simply wrong or evil. The human being, flawed as we are, will study History with greed, looking for “credits” for his political side to bend more moral rules.

There are interests, in villainizing Israel. The extremist Islamic groups use it to help them push further the radicalization of the Arab World, and the western mainstream intellectuals use it to help them in their strange war against any solution that doesn’t mean turning everything upside down.

And then they look at History with these interests. And in fact, with this thing of “reparation”, with these social and racial stereotypes, they already have people in the right mindset to be against Israel. The students are already used to justify crimes committed by individuals of groups they consider oppressed, they are already thinking of themselves as a weird kind of “humanist” hero, bolder, smarter and better than the “normal” people.

So, all the teachers have to do is to present some “justification” in the past. The students are already in the right mindset for this kind of things, so it doesn’t have to be a verifiable truth.

They say it’s “stolen land”. Well, in 1948, with the agreement of the UN, half of the British Mandate of Palestine was given to the Jews, an exilic and persecuted people who had just been subject to the Holocaust in nazi German.

And the solution was pretty fair: the Jews were always present in the Middle East, but a minority, and also a minority in Europe, and they didn't have their own country for two thousand years.  The British mandate of Palestine previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. The Jews were a minority, so they didn’t get a big part of the previous Ottoman Empire, they didn’t get a big share of the British Empire. They got a tiny strip of land, their Holy Land, and the others – mainly muslin Arabs – got all the rest.

“Oh, but they were also a minority in that little strip of land”. Well, by this logic, it is absolutely impossible for an exilic people to ever have an official home, right? Even if the total population of that tiny strip of land when the division happened, was a third of only the Jews who were killed in Holocaust!

Some might want to “remind me” that not everybody that is asking for Israel to stop fighting is subscribed to these radical views of ending Israel and killing all the Jews. Well, okay, but there is all this academical established “vision”, so anyone trying to bring out the differences between the societies in Israel and Gaza, is immediately discredited.

So what we get is, at best, a vision of the two societies as morally equivalent. But they’re not. Obviously I don’t mean to say that the life of a Palestinian has no value, I just mean that the official leadership in Gaza is a terrorist, extremist, authoritarian theocracy, that is focused – publicly focused – in the destruction of Israel, based on this lie of “stolen land”. While Israel is focused on building and defending their own nation, and subscribes to International Law and conventions.

What is served to us is the image of two regions, one of them poor and being bombed. Israel is being bombed too, all the time, but they shield their people, don’t use them as shields as Hamas does. And the Israeli Forces are committed to avoid civilian harm as far as they can, while Hamas is committed to see every Israeli as an enemy, literally no exceptions. As I mentioned, even rape is put as “resistance”, as absurd as it is.

 Some “news” make it look like Gaza is just a place where people were living normal lives, and then it started being bombed.

But there is something happening there that is far from “normal”. The growth of radicalism, of a cult of death, a perverted version of their religion, that says the greater aspiration of a true religious man should be to exterminate any Jewish presence in the Middle East, and someday the World. And this thing is growing in the Middle East, backed by powerful countries and people.

The Jews know perfectly what can happen when the growth of this type of mentality is not stopped. Some may say it is alarmism, and I pray that nothing as terrible as October 7^th ever happens again, but time is crucial when it comes to stop these “movements”. Between Hitler’s ascension to power and the extermination of 6 million Jews only 12 years passed.

And the leaders of the World, that should know that too, just say “stop the war” without any serious position on the complex matters that lead to the war, as if it was simply wrong to fight bloodthirsty dictatorships with insane global “dreams”.

My point with this essay is that this replacement of basic principles for a simplistic war of identity and race, to the point where horrible crimes are relativized or politized, clearly benefits people who want violence more than the people who really want freedom and peace. It blurs our vision of the past and the present.

Horror And Danger Are Not Independent

Israel is not safe with Hamas there.

Yes, there is pain and death in Gaza, just as Israel is still being attacked by rockets, and Israeli soldiers still fall in combat with Hamas, that didn’t put their guns down. Also, the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas have not all been returned yet. A lot of them were killed, including babies. All because of a war that Hamas started in October 7^th.

Some people talk of Israel as if it was a powerful country that just decided to create a war where there was peace. But there was no peace.

The history of Israel is the History of a country which many of its neighbor say that it shouldn’t even exist, and for some reason the mainstream intellectuals of the World agree that it shouldn’t exist. And this have caused, and still causes, so much death and blood. Even if the circumstances of its birth didn’t involve displacement of Arabs, but also Jews, even if displacements were not rare in the forming of the modern map of the World. Even if there was always Jews in the Middle East, and now they only have Israel, their Holy Land.

So why should Israel be the only country whose birth should be reverted? And why should the Palestinian people be taught that they can’t move forward and seek their own happiness, that their fate depend on destroying their neighbor?

Just because Israel is modern and prosper – modern and prosper enough to make it difficult to believe that their people really desire war, by the way – doesn’t mean they are a super powerful agent in the Middle East. Search for a map of the whole Arab World with little Israel in the middle, highlighting we all the countries that have once been in war with Israel in its less than a century of existence, and the countries that still don’t recognize Israel as a legitimate Nation.

That gives us more perspective. So many countries have fought Israel, Iran is a powerful dictatorship, and they support the terrorists. Very rich Qatar never recognized Israel either.

The growth of radicalism, extremism, in the Muslin World is not a philosophical matter. We know that, when you are a dictator, giving the people a “big villain” to hate makes them direct all their frustration, about their own lives, towards that enemy. Making people believe that their time is coming, that soon they will revert the game and conquer the big enemies, make the most violent ones euphoric.

The big villains for the Islamic extremists are Israel and America, that represent all the liberties that they hate, liberties that the Western people enjoy but so many “forget” to recognize it’s a good thing.

Anyway, I don’t know how far Iran and their friends are really disposed to go in their holy war against America in the near future, I really don’t know that, but Israel is very close to them, alone, geographically surrounded by non-friends. Having victories against Israel is the best thing that radical leaders can use to attract radical followers, give them a teste of “glory”.

If you think about the disgrace of World War II, Hitler didn’t devastate half of Europe just with money and equipment. He needed people to do that. People that were getting more and more radicalized, hating their “big villains”, and at every victory getting more pumped up, believing that they were oppressed in the past but their time had come.

The radicalization of muslin people in the Middle East means the raising of a totalitarian army. More people willing to join the Terrorist armies, and more civilians willing to help them in their attacks. It will give power to their tyrants, power over their own people and power to threaten their enemies more and more.

So, what would be more glorious for those extremist leaders then destroying Israel? If they could achieve this, it would make the hate-filled ones so confident, that those tyrants would have momentum enough to dominate, and enlist people in their anti-Western agenda, for decades.

Of course for us, in the Western World, it is almost impossible to even imagine a solid country like Israel being wiped out of the map. It seems just impossible. But think, things like that don’t happen in a day. What the enemies of Israel would really like first of all is to, God forbid, gain some terrain. Taking some small cities, to start.

They could use the people of those places as human shields. So many western intellectuals would welcome that, and a lot of people would be ready to show Israel as violent if they wanted to take it back. God forbid it ever happens, but that would probably be the path those groups would want to take to weaken Israel slowly.

And what would the World say in that case? Would the World be ready to finally say a loud “no” to an ideology based on the dream of destruction of a country? Would the governments with socialist tendences be ready to defy the mainstream intellectuals? Would the World see it as a criminal invasion that have to be responded, or just one of those things that happen in the Middle East, too complex for us to judge, when it is executed by the extremist Arabs?

The reality for the Israelis is that they don’t have few enemies, and those people would like to destroy their country. And it is not philosophical, the guns stored by their enemies, the rockets being produced – and launched – the terrorist soldiers being trained, none of that is abstract. A terrorist group like Hamas is not a gang of small bandits in rags, they have thousands of soldiers, training centers, infrastructure, a whole region like Gaza under their command.

Horror and Danger are not independent from each other. October 7^th is not only a horrible event that happened in the past and must be dealt with emotionally. Israelis have all the reason to see it as a signal of big danger, something they thought their enemies were not capable of doing but did, not only they broke in, in numbers that couldn’t be predicted, but acted in a way that shows they have no limits for cruelty. Israelis have all the reason to think about that unprecedent event as something that speaks not only of the past, but also of the future. How would they not see it as a sign of danger?

Someone who was born in Israel in the beginning of the 21^st century already saw the violence of the Second Intifada, and so many terror attacks, and now the Horror of October 7^th.

We have to remember what happened in October 7^th. For two days, that was the big news. And it shouldn’t have been forgotten. If we think about that horrible event, it has all the elements of something that we should speak more about, try to analyze what makes human beings act in such a cruel way, what makes them desire the blood and pain of others so fervently. Why the sociologists are not so interested in talking about the deeds of the terrorists that day?

It was not a dozen victims, it was more than a thousand. People were killed with cruelty, in cold blood, including elderly and children, entire families. How can the fact that a peace music festival was invaded by men with machine guns that shot indiscriminately while abusing young women, killing more than three hundreds, not be a mark of terror for the whole humanity?

As I said before in other texts, the reason seems to be that, by seeing the horror and the danger, people, even disliking war, would have to ask themselves, then what? What is the solution? They would see that those leaders and celebrities of the World, while asking that Israel stop fighting, do nothing serious against Terrorism.

War is bad, that’s for sure. People dying is bad. But to achieve peace, there is thinking to be done, actions to be taken. It seems that a lot of people see “peace” as just the “absence of war”. But peace is not just an absence, peace is something mankind is trying to build. 

If there is an ideology of death banging at the door of the world we are trying to build, an ideology that considers the “other” so evil that you don’t even have to think about any of that people, who they are, that says that just for being the “other” there is nothing you can do against them that will be wrong – if a movement, a force like that is banging against the door of our home, then we need to think about the resources we have, the things that we hope will guarantee that the worst side of the human being don’t take over humanity.

We have to think, what happens when the armies of democratic countries cannot strike against a source of real and intentional threat, an extremely dangerous source of threat? And what happens when a group that dominates a region is not considered the guilty one for the death of their own people, people they left without any protection in the midst of a war they created, people they use as human shields?

The Israeli forces have no option but fight, in the most ethical way they can but fight. Defend what they swore to defend. It’s their obligation, because, truly, nobody knows the future, and the climate in the Middle East is far less calm than in the Western World, and leaders of dictatorships are far less predictable than they may appear when they occupy places of honor in International Organizations.

We sometimes may not think that the option of not fighting represents something terrible for the Israeli soldier, but what falls apart if they don’t fight? What falls is the foundations of how they kept their country so far. Yesterday was Israel Memorial Day, when they remember their more than 25 thousand fallen soldiers, without whom there would be no Israel.

It is not about politics. It’s about fighting against the biggest threaten to their families. Neither is this an abstract fear, an exaggeration about some “isolated cases” of terrorism. The Israeli Defense cannot allow the terrorists to create this situation where Israel is only allowed to fight them while they are inside of Israel. Like a horrible “game” where they enter, do horrible things, and go back to Gaza to hide, untouchable, until the day when they come in and manage to stay somewhere.

The Israeli forces do a lot to avoid civilian deaths, as no other army ever did – also, they help humanitarian aid to get into Gaza as no other army does for his enemy, because the war is against Hamas, not the people, but in the end of the day, the ways of the terrorists – installing themselves in hospitals, mosques, schools, residential areas, dressing as civilians to the confronts - makes it much more difficult to Israel to avoid civilian casualties, than it would be if they fought like a normal army, like the Israeli forces, always protecting their civilians.

They are not selfish for defending their own people, because when you live an honest life and someone gives you no option to protect your family but war, you know you are not fighting for your family only, but fighting against ideologies and regimes that want to destroy everything that brings peace to the World.

There are forces of death being raised in the World, with no leaven but tyranny, cowardice and radicalism.

Where there is horror, there is danger, and can anyone give Israel an option that does not imply in they giving up the right to defend themselves? International Organization don’t exist to be a moral judge living in the top of a beautiful mountain, but to propose solutions, I guess. The Israeli forces have to do what they can’t avoid anymore, in the best and most ethical possible way. But can the World say they are doing the best they can?

We have to think, what if? What if Israel can’t fight Hamas? On the other hand, what if a group that dominates a region is considered responsible for providing the minimal safety in a war, and held accountable for the lives they used as human shields? How this would affect terrorism, how this would make less advantageous to use this kind of strategy of human shields, in the future? What if the World, that say they care, start to think about solutions, which means start to admit that there are things worth defending, and things we need to strongly oppose?

What if everybody points their finger at countries that provide for Terrorism, like Iran? What would this do for the World in the future? For the human lives that inhabit the World?

And for the thousandth time, what is so hard about demanding a Terrorist group to surrender? How can you say, let’s achieve peace, then we will see if it is necessary to demand the end of terrorism…?