Try No Terror

 I was hearing in my mind academic voices saying things like “You pro-Israel people are denying the Historic Processes of Oppression and their endurance, you deny that, if not fought back somehow, these things persist in time, because of the System.”

Then I realized: they are the ones who are saying that a people that has been persecuted through centuries until 6 million were finally thrown into gas chambers, became the contrary in last than one hundred years. They seem to be saying that those “Historic Structures of Oppression” are very easily changed very quickly, right?

But wait, aren’t the Muslin Arabs historically oppressed? Where? Let’s take Palestine then, for instance. When they were historically oppressed there? In the centuries they lived under the caliphs or the five hundred years they lived under the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, or the 28 years under Britain?

It was Muslins living under the rule of Muslins.

Unless you consider the Sultans part of the oppressed. And the sheiks. But don’t you realize you will be calling men who smoke fancy cigars and have collections of luxury cars, and rivers of petroleum, an oppressed group? Don’t you see how crazy this is?

This is the story of a people who were outcast and persecuted everywhere, and another people who, if oppressed, were being oppressed by their own leaders. Then finally the Ottoman Empire was over, and less than one percent of the Middle East was given to the Jews after the genocide they suffered. That less than one percent was in their Holy Land, the place they prayed to return to, generation after generation.

In that map redefinition, Jews had to flee Arab countries in a hurry not to be killed, Jews had to leave Europe, some after their family had just been exterminated, and a group of Arabs had to flee the part of Palestine that was given to the Jews. The number of displaced Jews in the Middle East is at least as big as the Arabs.

A lot of sad aspects to it, but still a deal that was fair enough, and the Jews were right to accept. They were right to not step back when the Arabs said “no, we want to rule one hundred percent of the Middle East, not ninety-nine and something”. Those Jews didn’t want to be forever without a land of their own, and they had very good reasons for that. In their tradition, and in their past and recent History.

They then had to fight for it, because Arab countries attacked, seven nations against one, and the Jews miraculously won. And they were attacked again, and again. After some time, the modus operandi of their enemies was not so much open war anymore, but the funding of Terror Groups, so these groups can attack and Israel supposedly can’t fight back, because these group “are not” the countries, even when they rule a region like Gaza or a piece of Lebanon.

Of course some people think, why armies? Why soldiers? Why guns? I wish things were so simple that anytime you “spoke with someone with open heart” you could completely avoid violence. But if that was the case, we wouldn’t have so much violence all over the World. All over the World countries need police, countries need armies.

Doesn’t the existence of this ideology that says “Death to Israel” – in their own words, read the Hamas charter, listen to the interviews of their leaders – doesn’t the existence of this ideology change the reality? Doesn’t it make us think, well, Israel needs to take precautions, there were thousands of Terror attacks, they need security measures, they need to arrest people that throw stones – stones can kill, and that’s the intention of the throwing. They need to check people who cross borders.

Isn’t it insane to be complaining about that instead of thinking of how could the Palestinian people move away from this ideology?

How can anyone say Israel doesn’t want peace if their enemies didn’t try peace yet even once?

Couldn’t they ever have tried nothing different? Didn’t money get in there somehow? How much do a maze of large tunnels under cities cost? Could it have been spent on something else?

Now, after the horrible massacre of October 7^th, Israel had to go to war. Imagine if the rulers of your neighbor country commanded October 7^th in your country. Imagine it happened closed to your home. Wouldn’t you want to go after that group of people? Wouldn’t you have to?

Now don’t use numbers to invert the logic. All that happened later was war, and wars are not beautiful. Israel proves it don’t target civilians. Israel offered peace many times through decades. The images from Gaza, that’s what wars look like.

There is an evil campaign against Israel everywhere, but the question we should be asking is simple: who should ask for the end of this war?

Television showed people from Gaza say they don’t want bombings. Of course. I wish, and I am being sincere, that people in Gaza would say, “We don’t want any war with Israel, now or ever”. 

Isn’t it a good first step for the changes people say they want, for the better of Palestinian people? They can’t say that because of that ideology. Because of Hamas.

It’s time for the World to show we don’t want to miss the opportunity of seeing a Terror Group gone.

Television is mostly believing Hamas claims that they didn’t break the ceasefire when Israel strikes, even when Israel shows videos of Hamas violating the deal, but most journalist are “forgetting” to remind people that Hamas agreed to put down their weapons. Isn’t this crucial for peace?

So many people spent this entire time saying they “differentiate the people of Gaza from Hamas”. Yes, let’s do this differentiation, this separation, but not only in our little hearts, but in reality. Free the people of Gaza from Hamas. What better opportunity than now?

This war is not what I wanted for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza. But as I said, we need to get the people of Gaza to say, “We want peace. Now and in the future. Gaza just wants to mind its business”.

 

Choices

 

People that fight for values X People who distort values to look good

( this is kind of a reminder to myself, for whenever I fail to recognize the masks that Evil uses, and start to give importance to things that are not worth nothing to the good people of the World )

Rivers of Power

I spoke, in an earlier essay, about the power I believe the Academic World has. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t go for those kind of weird theories that say someone have some Godly power, by which they control all the events in the World like a perfect chess game, I just think that there are groups and institutions that fight for influence.

I’m also not saying all the teachers in the World are the same, obviously, or that we don’t need schools – we need – but if there is one completely dominant line of thought, then the growth of the Academy and the growth of this ideology will mean exactly the same.

It is natural that groups fight to gain more influence, but Academy should be the arena, a battlefield for different lines of thought to compete, not the headquarters of one.

The way we have things now makes it extremely easy for ideological groups that have influence, to completely obliterate other people, to point to an opinion that someone has, deem it evil, deem the person evil, then justify the complete shutting of all the doors to that person, to the point of making impossible for someone to keep earning a living in their field of work, even having committed no crime that can be proven. This is a big power.

Of course, when we speak about power of the Academy, it may sound contradictory to the vision many people have, that it is capitalism that rules the World, and if the Academy says they are against Capitalism, then Academy must to be the rebels, not part of the system, right?

Yes, money has a big power in the World, huge power. Harvard, for instance, have been receiving a billion dollars in donations every year, recently. Things are not so simple, so bidimensional, as some think.

Follow me here: If the system of capitalism is so closed and controlling everything, and the mainstream Academy is so rebellious and dangerous to it, why this “omnipotent” system allowed the Academy to be there, and be so prestigious? Why didn’t they built another Academy, more aligned with their thought, with all the money and power they have?

The Academy still benefits from the prestige they received due to the many advances that the Scientific Thinking brought to the World, the advances that physics brought to engineering, and chemistry and biology brought to medicine, and more. Why wouldn’t the powerful super rich want in on their side? Why wouldn’t they do anything to get that legitimacy to their side?

At some point in my life, I couldn’t help but start thinking that maybe the mainstream Academical thought is not so bad for the money World, or at least to a big part of it. International commerce is a huge thing, and I think a lot of people don’t want to see this business being affected by considerations about the level of democracy of countries, or even respects for human rights. There is a lot of people that deal with big money, that don’t want to displease leaders of rich authoritarian countries in the Middle East, for instance.

Our mainstream intellectuals don’t challenge these people. On the contrary, they somehow made it wrong to say too much bad things about someone who is “not white”, even if it is a bloodthirsty dictator, he can’t be the real big villain. The Marxists have their explanations for why you can’t really place blame on those people.

When you have a “logic” system of thought, with intellectual credentials printed on it, that says that a group of super rich dictators can’t be the real bad guys, a lot of greedy people will be happy with it.

Let’s think about all this logic, once again. The prestige of the Academic World, the success it showed in many areas, came from simplifying the situations to a few variables, which allows us to make predictions using plain mathematics. This works fine for phenomena of the physical World, but some thinkers hitchhiked on this success of Science to propose simplistic schemes of how Society works as a whole.

Karl Marx simplified all the process through which people produce things to very few elements, to say that a person can’t be a profiting business owner without stealing his employees. He reasoned that, if someone buys a set of things, then sells a transformed version of those things for a higher price, it means he paid less than the value of something when he bought. Then he said it can’t be the technology or the raw material, so it’s got to be the work of the employee that was underpaid  - that’s a simplified version, but the reasoning is basically this.

He didn’t say employees should be paid better, but that wherever there was profit, there was stealth, as if Civilization itself had not started and grown precisely because of the fact that the Earth can give to man more than he puts in it, and creativity has the power of multiplying things.

To be honest, the left wing economists evolved, in their language and mathematical approach, from that ultra simplistic vision Marx had of Economy, but that simplistic original Marxist thought planted a seed that is still defining the general view these people have of the Universe. The idea of a very limited World where everything that is gained creates a vacuum somewhere else, and peace cannot be built without a total rebellion.

In the Marxist World, people still see any kind of success or comfort that someone may have in Society as something gained necessarily at expense of someone else. The algorithm in the head of most people in the Academic World who say they are concerned with social causes is still very simplistic, and the main focus, that once was about workers and bosses now is about race, and a concept of race hiper simplified by the tone of color of the skin.

They take abominable facts of the past, like slavery, which is real and must not be forgotten, and say it is still the base of all that we have in the present. The past does have consequences in the present, we can’t deny, but there are always factors that they downplay, when it comes to explain the stagnation of some sectors of our society, like the pervasiveness of mass culture, and drugs, and so on. They also often disregard the many aspects in which our society already evolved in human terms, so they create a World View that justifies rebellion against absolutely anything, even violence, to no gain at all.

All this to keep the Marxist view that Society won’t evolve, won’t fix the problems that are still there without big mass movements as the main – or sometimes only – possibility of redemption. And in the end, of course, instead of giving people the tools they need as individuals to grow and do better for their families and communities, they create a World where all that matters is politics. Yes, in the end, they make political and ideological leaders our only saviors.

And they extend their view to the Global situation, oversimplifying the very complex History and present of the World to that same tone-of-color scheme. For instance, they are always kind of blind to the fact that Arabian countries are not “poor victims” of History, that those countries we always very smart players. They made huge fortunes in the time of land trade of spices and other things the Europeans wanted from the East, when they controlled the land routes and intermediated everything.

They lost their protagonism in that matter when Europe braved the sea routes, but kept making money, including with slavery. Yes, they made money with slavery of black people, and not just a little. Research it. Then, of course, when petroleum became a super powerful thing and they found they were sit on the biggest reserve of it, they gained protagonism again. And they have an interesting partnership with Russia, which has very big reserves of a lot of natural resources.

All this don’t fit the simplistic view of the World that mainstream intellectuals want us to swallow, where tone of color defines oppressed and oppressors. That’s the problem with start reducing the complex History of Humanity more and more to simple equations.

To be fair, much of the capitalist world also subscribes to a simplistic logic. Adam Smith simplified all the processes through which people trade things to very few elements, to say that the fact that, in the world of trade, each person seeks his own benefit, will bring a mathematical equilibrium that automatically will lead us always to a better place, as if the constant difference of urgency that a particular transaction has for each part didn’t require that men keep consulting the old richness of wisdom and morals that humanity gained through centuries, and is still our biggest treasure.

Of course, more and more people in the world of work and production are realizing that supply and demand don’t give us all we need for people to have satisfaction in their lives. More and more people are bringing human values to the world of work.

Think about “meritocracy”. I don’t believe in it in a Darwinist way, like, “let the non-adapted perish”, there’s no reason why not to lend a hand for people who haven’t reach their full potential yet, but in the simple sense of rewarding people who maximized their creative contribution, yes, it is necessary. But more and more people are coming to see that just saying “no to Stalin” and “yes to profit” is not enough to bring real meritocracy, there are a lot of human tendencies to cheapness that need to be overcome, and we always have more to learn about ethics. And I hope more people are realizing that the same applies to “Fair Competition”.

But the people who deal with huge scale international commerce, still seem to be guided solely by immediate numbers. It seems that these people, generally speaking, won’t do nothing to raise awareness about how some of the biggest players in International Commerce disregard democracy and even human rights.

All this may be good for “business as usual” but if we don’t make clear that we don’t approve dictators that disrespect basic freedom, and if we don’t denounce – and some of us even support – ideologies that teach people to place all the blame for all their problems on someone else, some other people, then we are encouraging the growth of armed hate groups. Terror groups, that can be used by wicked political leaders to destabilize regions and bring fear to the World, always with some pretext for refusing peace when it is offered to them.

We should be doing all our efforts to urge the Middle East countries that want to be seen as peaceful to condemn all murderous ideologies that propose the extermination of someone else as the solution. But sometimes we do the exact opposite, giving wicked leaders, that don’t care for their own people, not to mention about the other people, special sits in our “Conventions”.

So, this is how Academy can grow in power, because they are not a natural enemy of all the greedy, they are just a group that learned an algorithm, that they can increase their influence with a simplistic ideology that allows them to pose as rebels while not really setting anybody free.

I definitely don’t know the future, and sometimes it seems that these Rivers of Power have a mind of their own. I hope they don’t take us to a World where money flows freely but thought is more and more controlled. It can create a World where anyone can be banned – which feels like death – at any time, arbitrarily. It won’t do any good for our human relations, it will take us in the opposite direction of happiness.

People should realize that “big quantity” capitalism is not always opposed to social control, the “all in name of the people” kind, as you can see in China. I hope we are not going in a direction where, instead of, little by little, bringing more democracy to authoritarian countries, we end up flattening down the whole planet. Some people may not care, but people who know the meaning of joy and personal freedom have the right to be against that.

I do have faith, faith that people can make different lines of thought visible again, and to learn that things are not so black and white. That money can coexist with moral and moral can’t be replaced with the latest ideological trend.

I believe that in the future we can have a World where a person has a right to relate to a peoplehood, but also the individual has all the opportunity to grow in freedom.

I believe in the power of though. Not only logic, which requires a reduction of language, and is so many times necessary, but also the broader Reason, that dwells in all the richness of human language and sometimes even beyond.

Some people, for their immediate convenience, pretend not to see what doesn’t fit their narrative, even when it risks leading us all to a worst place. But as I always say, almost nobody wants to look in the mirror and say “I’m bad”. People like to think of themselves as good.

Let’s expand on it.

A very strange kind of dilemma

 

2 Years

It's not like I told them what's happening here. They told me.

Hamas and the Growth of Aggressive Power

During this war between Israel and Hamas, people wanted ceasefire. At the time of this writing, there is ceasefire. Now we should talk about Hamas, we should talk about Terrorism. Of course, so many people are still focused on Israel, as if Israel was the “villain”.

Some people in press are saying Israel made strikes again, during the ceasefire, “claiming” that Hamas broke the ceasefire. Israel is not simply claiming, they showed evidence, and they reacted according to the terms of the ceasefire.

During the war, people acted as if they were so worried about the tragic consequences of the war for Gaza, that they couldn’t put Hamas as priority. What about now? How can now not be the time to talk about Terrorism? The dismantling of Hamas is the only thing that can bring peace. Do you want peace, or is your main goal to inflict some kind of punishment to Israel?

It should be easy to remember what started this war, in October 7^th. A country has borders, and an army to defend the land from foreign enemies. You look at History and you see why this is necessary. And there are things that start wars.

Like a horde of men from the neighboring region, men belonging to or sympathizers of a Terrorist group, invading the south of a country, killing civilians at random, mutilating, beheading, abusing women violently, in a real life nightmare that ended with one thousand and two hundred dead plus two hundred and fifty kidnapped.

Is this action, planned by the leadership in power of this neighboring region, a declaration of war or what? Could Israel just say, “well, they went back to their region, so we can’t go after these men, all we will do is try to improve the security”? It would be like saying, “this is the game: We do our best to improve our security, but whenever you manage to break in, no matter what you do to our people, after you go back to your region you’re free”. A State that is sworn to defend its citizens obviously can’t act like this.

Now, after the Israeli Forces fought with intelligence and sacrifice – more than nine hundred soldiers lost their lives – they were able to eliminate Terrorist infrastructure and many of their leaders, pressuring Hamas to a point where they accepted a ceasefire deal that was brought by the United States. The living hostages are back home – of the 250, 168 ended up being brought back alive in throughout these two years, and there are no more living hostages in Hamas’s power. And, as I said, there is a ceasefire.

When October 7^th happened, so many people in the World were horrified by the cruelty of that attack. But when Israel fought back, that initial feeling seemed to have been drawn by numbers. Because the civilian casualties in Gaza were many times more. But this is not about mathematics. There is a timeline here, a story with causes and consequences. Hamas, the tyrant leadership of Gaza, caused a war, and the people of Gaza unfortunately suffered consequences.

I know that many say, “most of the dead were not members of Hamas, and it includes children”. Yes, although the real numbers are probably very different than the numbers the press got from “Gaza ministry of Health” – run by Hamas, yes, the war was very tragic in that aspect.

But again, how could Israel avoid it, if they want to give the necessary safety for their people? October 7^th was the cause of the war, and 1200 people is not a small number. Read about October 7^th and imagine it was your country, if you live in a small one. If you live in a country that is many times bigger than Israel, imagine it happened in your state or province. Wasn’t there the necessity to go after the ones responsible for that?

The Israeli Forces showed the World that they try their best to warn people to evacuate areas before strikes – and how Hamas tries to prevent people from doing so. The Israeli Forces showed their efforts to mitigate civilian harm, and also undeniable evidence that Hamas built a long maze of tunnels, secret passages, an immense underground infrastructure for their Terrorist operation, embedding it with civilian life as much as they can, using Hospitals, Mosques, Schools, Residential Buildings, also operating dressed as civilians, all to make it harder for Israel to separate them from the civilians.

In World War II, many Germans died who were not active in the Nazi army. We know there was the necessity to fight that horrible expansionist power.

This is the kind of tragedy that happens when Aggressive Power is allowed to grow. When the people in power somewhere are not devoted to the wellbeing of their own people, they tyrannize their people and not only that, but also dream of destroying others. Because the Nazis grew as they grew, World War II was necessary.

Then the UN was created. I believe its goal should be to make the best not to let aggressive tyrants prosper, because that is what endangers the World. But now they make tyranny “relative” and just say the word “peace”, without solutions, when real problems happen.

To prevent aggressive power to grow, you need a set of values, everything can’t be relative. If you can’t say some forms of government are better than others – which has nothing to do with a people’s religion of ethnicity – how can you work for World’s peace?

Instead of being firm about what is acceptable and what is not in terms of the exercise of power, the UN just makes everything relative. They have bought the Academic vision of the World.

When the old Empires ended in the end of the 19^th and beginning of 20^th centuries, and the map of the whole World was redefined, the Jews legally got the small land of Israel, their Ancient Holy Land where they prayed to return to for two thousand years, with the approval of the UN. Now intellectuals want everybody to believe that Muslin Arabs  -with all respect for the decent ones - are oppressed because they "only" have 99 percent of the Middle East, the richest land in petroleum of the World. This doesn't help the honest Muslins, it helps only Terrorism.

Because, mostly, their leaders don’t give them the freedom that Israelis have, so much frustration has grown in some countries, and the same leaders canalize this anger against the Israelis, because it would be glorious for them to conquer the Holy Land of the Jews.

So this hatred against Israel have grown, more and more people became radicals, Terror has gained infrastructure, financing, equipment. Iran is behind not only Hamas, but also Hezbollah, the Houthis.

Israelis have been trying to warn the World about this for so long, but the World was too busy to be concerned with that “unsolvable part of the World”.

Then when Israel suffered a massacre – 1200 people is a massacre – and fought back, everybody got focused on asking them to stop fighting.

Now there is a ceasefire. Will the World focus on what now?

There is still so much anti-Israeli propaganda going on. Some are even talking of humanitarian aid “finally getting to Gaza”, as if Israel has not shown that there were thousands of tons of aid going in during the majority of the time of the war.

All this to avoid the simple question: “Isn’t Hamas Terrorist? Didn’t they cause this war? What should the World think about the future with Hamas there?”

I know that many leadership figures – the ones that surfed the wave of indignation against war, not even making clear with they made any difference between people who said they were just concerned with the suffering of war and the people who openly supported intifada – will say the focus should be on “repairing” things for Palestinians. But as long as Hamas is there, any resource given, any “compensation” given, will be a compensation for Hamas, because they are an absolutist power over Gaza.

Hamas existence can’t ever be dissociated of Terrorism, can’t be dissociated of aggression. Their charter says explicitly that their goal is the complete end of Israel “by any means necessary”. Israelis saw what “any means necessary” means. And they also make it clear that, because for them martyrdom is a good thing, the fighting goals are more important – much more important – than the safety of their people.

This poses to Israel a deadly question. The more a group like Hamas grows, the bigger will be the cost, in terms of lives, to defeat them when it becomes necessary. The more time passes, more the people became shields, more people will die when it becomes inevitable to fight to defeat them.

It’s definitely such a hard question. What is the right moment, then? It’s a question so complex and hard, that Israel didn’t fully attack them before October 7^th, the moment that signaled that this couldn’t go on any longer.

And let’s not forget that over this past two years, Israel also had to fight other groups with the same characteristics: the Houthis and Hezbollah – this one had all prepared for their “Operation Conquer The Galilee”, an invasion of the North of Israel bigger than October 7^th. And, of course, Israel had to destroy the nuclear program in Iran, that was undeniable on the verge of making an atomic bomb.

Now there is a ceasefire – that so many people asked for – but the time is still passing. When will come the time for the World to admit we must do something about Terrorism, put it as a priority?

Are we going to let Hamas grow again, an increase the cost of their defeat again?

 

Yom Kippur

 Wishing a meaningful holy day for jewish friends including you who always seems to be working. 💙