Stated Motivations Have Effects

 

I have read the Hamas Charter, both the one from 1988 and the one from 2017 – supposedly the most civilized one. I believe that knowing their declarations, their principles, is a way to shed a light on the History of the region, a History that sometimes is shown to us in a confuse and superficial way, to say the least. If we see that their way of seeing the World is one of aggression and violence you can have a better idea of who is provoking the painful situation in the Middle East. I will focus on the one from 2017, since it is the “current” one.

It starts talking about the land of Palestine, defining its limits as absolutely all the territory “from the river to the sea”, with absolutely no space anywhere in the Middle East for Israel, and how it all belongs to the Palestinian people. It pledges absolute loyalty to Islam, and puts the “right to return” to the “occupied land” as a priority for this religion.

It describes the “Zionist project” as a racist, colonialist, aggressive, and expansionist project, opposed to the “national project” for the Palestinians, that is, their legitimate “right to return” to where is now Israel, and states that there never should be any recognition of the “Zionist project” – that is, what the World calls Israel – Article 19 – and rejects any possible “alternative” solution or compensation – article 13. It does use the words “from the River to the Sea” and states that nothing must come in the way of the “resistance” against “occupation”. The “national project” must be the goal of all institutions that exist or might come to exist in Palestine

You see a lot of use of some nice words, like “peace”, “institutions”, and even “democracy” and “tolerance”, but they put these words in service of their fight goals, not their fight in service of those concepts. For instance, let’s take article 25. It states that “resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.” Note, it uses the nice words “international laws”, but just to say that their fight is protected by those laws, not, in any point, that the fight will be guided by these laws. They don’t have to follow the laws, it’s the laws that give them all the right.

And notice the use of the expression “with all means and methods”. That is, anything, absolute anything they ever do to “resist the occupation” is lawful. To have a military group ruling a country, a group whose charter says it will use “all means and methods” without even once submitting to any other convention or even mentioning any limits should be considered against Internation Law.

Article 28 says that Hamas adheres to managing the Palestinian relations in basis of “pluralism”, “democracy”, “partnership”, even “acceptance of the other”, but followed by the words “to fulfill the goals and aspirations of the Palestinian people”.

The whole charter is like a funnel, where a lot of things are thrown in, like “justice”, “freedom”, “human rights”, “basic principles”, and it all goes to a bottle’s neck, which is “national identity, national project and national goals”, and falls in the bottle, with is “resistance”. The goal of everybody, individuals and institutions in Palestine must be to serve the National Project, which is defined in the beginning of the Charter ss taking “back” the whole land and “resistance” is the most important form of serving this “project”.

Article 23 says that Jihad is a totally legitimate form of “resistance”, not forgetting that “resistance” is the most important thing of all and so Jihad is a “honor and a duty” for all Muslims. We know that their interpretation of Jihad means that their military actions are a duty toward God, and everything they do in that context is blessed. In fact, there were people in Gaza, right after October 7^th, shouting words of praise to God to celebrate the attack, that included cold blood murder of infants and rape of young woman.

In the end, it is clear that no law, convention or norm ever limits their religious interpretation of their “fighting duty”, which we know is absolutely radical. Where in the charter there is room for compromise or agreement? Where in the charter they speak of “resistance” as subjected or limited by any universal norm?

In article 9, Hamas states that Islam upholds the higher values of freedom, indignity and is the true enemy of discrimination, but this is a way of saying that Islam is the higher authority that should rule above all. Islam is above the international norms, and it is going to be someone’s interpretation of Islam of course. I think religion is good, but it definitely shouldn’t be the sole guide of military actions. Otherwise, their religious leaders always “know best” than anyone who comes to speak about international laws and norms.

It is clear that they place the right of the Palestinians to “return to their land” ss a duty above any other obligation. That is the justification for their total commitment to do everything possible against Israel, as long as anything called Israel exists.

And what can I say about this whole land issue? Well, Israel triplicated its size as a result of Wars that were started by Seven Nations against them. They gave back part of it – including Gaza – but not all. And when they gave back Gaza it became a home for Terrorism aimed toward Israel. Why? Because they wanted Israel to go back to its original size? Why don’t we read the Hamas Chart? They clearly state “nothing at all to the Zionist”.

By the way, you can be a Muslin in Israel. And instead of thinking just on the British mandate of Palestine, we can think of the Arab World. The Arabs have more than 7 million square kilometers in the middle east, and were asked to give 10 thousand to the Jews after World War II, and they didn’t accept. And the Israelis defended from their attacks and ended up with 22 thousand. How terribly colonialist, Imperialist are the Jews right? Who is surrounded by who?

Hamas knows that they can’t simply talk about this issue in terms of square kilometers of land, or material property. Jews lost a lot of material property in the 20^th century, that they had in Europe and in Muslim Arab countries. Hamas knows that a total materialist view on “land” can’t convince people yo give everything – their safety, their basic needs, their lives and the lives of their children – to fight for it.

If I once had a land, that was just a piece of land, and because of a conflict I was removed from it, I would accept monetary compensation. Right now. Most people would. Hamas knows that to engage a whole group of people in fighting to “return” to a land it is not enough to speak about land as property. They need to put it as a “special place”, a “holy place”.

The Hamas charter itself is at least good at this point: it clearly shows us that the point of the conflict is not property itself, but the concept of a “special place” for the identity of a people. This is not something so strange to humanity, we don’t live in a World of only material things. We adhere to concepts, we are loyal to ideals. The Muslims have a right to see a land as Holy, just as the Jews have. But everybody knows the holiest land for the Muslims is Mecca, birthplace of their prophet.

So, Hamas just happens to be claiming total rights, with no compromise, over their “second holiest place”, that just happens to be other people’s one and only holy land, for thousands of years. Now who’s expansionist?

And why would the Jews dream with a land? In the twentieth century the whole thing may sound even a little weird to some, but I see it in other way. Reading the Old Testament / Tanakh, which, whether you are religious or not, is at least an ancient group of texts that show the concerns and aspirations of a people during a long period of History, I see the dream of the Jewish people ss a dream of Peace and Union. The Bible says, “I will gather you again in Israel”, do the land is not only land, it is the place where the Jews will be “gathered”.

And seeing through this lens, the whole land thing doesn’t sound so anachronical. How can you have peace and union if you don’t have safety? Considering that the Jews have real reasons to be preoccupied with the safety of their people and their children in this World, given to the many persecutions they faced and that even they good experience in America is not without a dose of insecurity and antisemitism, they need a place to call their own. They need to gather in a place that gives them all the legitimacy ss a sovereign people. Where they are sure that the laws, the institutions will not be suddenly turned against them.

The Jews have good reasons to believe it wouldn’t work in any other place, like, let’s give the Jews this place here in the middle of Europe or something as compensation to the horrors of World War II. At any moment the tide could turn against them as it did many times in History, and someone could claim the “right of return”, saying that the choice for that specific place was arbitrary. Israel is the only place where they can answer to any “right of return” claim with one of the oldest documents in History, that show their identity as a people was built precisely around that land, and nobody else has nothing older or more culturally solid than the Torah.

Countries are not made of paving stone. To keep existing, it is needed that the people see themselves as somehow “in the same boat”. A lot of countries invested resources in affirming a National Identity, in order to create some Unity among the people. Cultural movements even reinvented or changed a little of their countries History to have a solid National Identity. Israelis don’t even have to invent nothing, since the basis for their peoplehood were laid millennia ago, and point precisely to that land. In the uncertain and volatile world we live, and considering that Jews are a small minority, they need something solid and very legitimate to build their sovereignty upon.

Now, of course Arabs and Muslims have the right to have all that too. But they have many sovereign states and nobody is claiming their holiest place. There were many bad things that happened in the 20^th century, but shouldn’t we be glad that the Muslim Arabs didn’t lose what was most important for them, neither did the Jews? And then, start to build a new future…

Hamas insists that there is a Palestinian people with right to return to Palestine. But they are culturally Arab Muslims. Hamas itself, in the charter, insists in the unity of the Muslim people. Of course it is a right they have, but the Jews don’t subdivide their Unity in a lot of sub-peoples to claim different parts of the World as their special places.

That land is clearly singular, and Hamas knows that. We live in a secular world, but this doesn’t mean materialistic. We live in these abstract things called countries, which are mainly dreams we have and defend. Israel should keep existing for mainly two reasons: their documented cultural and religious tie to the land, that is older than any other documented tie, and the fact that they don’t have any other.

Now a war is raging, as an Israeli response to a brutal surprise attack directly aimed at their civilians, and intentionally cruel and depraved. Images of horror overtook the whole country.

And people in the World want it all to stop, they don’t like the pain and death that come with such a war. Of course, who does? So they want peace. Who doesn’t?

But imagine you make a perfect law that nobody can touch a hair of nobody in absolutely any circumstance. That’s beautiful, but in practice, if someone breaks that law, you can do nothing about it because you would be breaking the law too. The role of Law is not to depict how the World would look like in a perfect situation, but precisely to give society the right to use some force in cases where people’s actions go really out of hand, otherwise we can’t keep a common goal of peace.

Of course it is more complex and painful when it comes not to individuals but nations, but the hard truth is that, just as it happens with individuals, if the peaceful and democratic countries swear to never use any force in any situation, what will the bad leaders of the World do?

War is the last resource, after all alternatives have been exhausted, and you know that it is necessary for keeping the hope of peace, and that you are serving the dream of a safer World for everybody.

There needs to be some response to some kinds of aggression. Unfortunately, you can’t just pray it don’t happen again. As for the genocide accusation, to even start to have a case that a country is committing genocide, you either need to show that a country is attacking without being provoked – which is not true given the October 7^th massacre – or that the number of civil casualties is disproportionally high – which is definitely not the case, considering the successes of Israel in this War and the Terrorist leadership eliminated, especially in a war where the enemy is embedded among the civilians more than in any other war known.

Just as the charter sees no limits to “resistance”, it doesn’t see the death of their own people in the process as a bad thing, since Jihad is “honor and duty” of every Muslim, and in their interpretation it includes being ready to die. Considering that, the numbers show that the Idf is working with a high degree of care.

In the Hamas charter, “resistance” is the only thing that matters, and it is by “any means necessary”. So it clearly shows that “liberating” the land with the killing of all Israelis wouldn’t be considered a bad thing. That is, a genocide against Israel would not be a bad thing.

          And they did “a little” of that in October 7^th. You can’t let such attack be considered “successful” by an enemy who is still there, trying to destroy you. The only possible answer is to fight the Terrorists, destroying the enemies’ capabilities for aggression. You act in the most ethical way you can, and you fight until a ceasefire is reached.

And what is a ceasefire? A ceasefire is a cessation of attacks from all sides. There are missiles falling on Israel too, the difference is that Israel is extremely committed to protect the lives of civilians, evacuating people from areas of danger and providing shelters to protect from bombs. Hamas has tunnels too, but normal people can’t get in there to protect themselves.

And, how does it work, the Cessation of attacks from all sides, if your opponent is ruled by a charter that says the main goal is the destruction of your country – by the way, forgive me if I’m blind, but I didn’t really believe there was any other goal there – and this enemy don’t subject himself to any external norm, and surprise attacks and breaking ceasefires are obviously included in “every form of resistance is legitimate?”

Why is so hard to the World to agree that Terrorist groups should surrender? There is nothing in their bag to build peace with.

It is not a situation where both sides are equal. Israel would just have to stop fighting, once peace is achieved. It would not have to surrender its institutions, because they are not aimed at “eradicating any Arab Muslim project from the Middle East”. And this is something to think about: both the Arab Muslims and the Jews are peoples who have deep roots in the Middle East, there is no debate about that. It’s also a region where Jews always had presence. Then why would the Jews have absolutely no place in the Middle East?

I hope it was clear that this essay was not one against Muslims, but against Hamas and other Terror Groups, so I’d like to finish it hoping that the Muslims more and more realize, as the good Muslims already certainly know, that they already have what they need and they should invest in opening doors to each other, and to the World – which would require a good level of deradicalization of some of their people, so they can pursue and achieve peace, happiness, health and prosperity.

Of Confusion And Aerodynamics

 

Did you notice that when people talk about someone they think is smart, they always say, in one way or another, that the person challenges the “status quo”? Probably because we feel there is too much bullshit around, and nobody wants to be on the side of the total conformists

But conformism shouldn’t be something we think about in strict political terms. If you observe, you’ll see that people in any of the political extremes think the people in the other side are conformists. But is it that simple?

If you say to the right wing guy that socialism is the solution, or if you say to a left wing guy that capitalism is going to solve all the issues, you fit into their scheme of things, and they are going to love to pretend they hate you. In fact, you are enforcing the image they have of themselves. But if you say to a capitalist that you believe in free commerce and industry, but we are doing it wrong, without higher values, or you say to a left wing person that you do believe  that this World is indeed due to a good deed for the poor and oppressed, but stimulating their anger and vengeance feelings will just result in more misery, then they are  really going to hate you, because they are going to feel threatened in their positions.

And if you think about the fact that sometimes authoritarian left wing governments rise in countries that were terrorized by extreme right in the past like some places in Latin America, and far right governments rise in places that were terrorized by extreme left like East Europe, and that the allyships between countries don’t follow a black and white “right with right”, “left with left” scheme – which is something you can see when you analyze the allies of the people in power in Russia, for instance – it really makes you doubt that picking one of the opposites really means nonconformity. Aren’t people in both the extremes playing by some rule?

Does this sound too conspiratory? Well, for my own sanity’s sake, I’ll assume that nobody is so powerful as to be able to control everything, like, year 14 this will happen, year 17 that, like a perfect plan where all the individual events in the World fall in place. No, I really don’t think that way, but there are definitely people who have too much to lose if they don’t find out what is the most advantageous moves they can make in the present, to guarantee their influence in the next years. What is best for their influence right now, what will be the leaders more willing to have their help? And if they want to gain more and more influence over people, there is no law that obliges them to go in a straight ideological line.

Democracy has a system of resources that shouldn’t allow things to get too “locked”, so nothing that the people in power do becomes irreversible, if we realize it wasn’t right. We may all have some strong beliefs, but if we are pursuing the truth, we must know that truth can only gain in a climate of freedom and serenity. Democracy is not God, neither does it bring us all we want automatically, it’s just the best arena we found to fight for what we believe, with fair play. Also, it is always good to listen to the opinion of others to the extent possible, and adjust our methods and even our goals according to things we learn, since nobody knows everything.

Because we don’t want to be nonconformists just for the sake of not conforming, right? In this World, there is more than one or two ways of being wrong, so not conforming to something is not a guarantee that you will be right.

People want to go against the “status quo” because they believe what is being offered to us is not the best, is not leading us to a better world. It’s important to note that all the sides say they want to bring “good”, “peace”, so what is a problem to us is that they are not coherent, and what will threaten their status quo is not simply that people desire good, is that we become more coherent.

Again, I know this idea seem too conspiratory if we imagine a little group in a small lit room saying “let’s make them less coherent”. But think of the algorithm of a machine instead. The programmer told it to raise the X, X being the current value of something. The algorithm realizes that when the system does A, X increases, and when it does B, X decreases. So the algorithm tries to push the system to do more A and less B.

In fact, this is a simplification of how human mind works, at least the side of our minds that is worried with quantitative results – and some people have that side of their minds totally prevalent. So, if for a group of powerful people, it is important to influence the people in a country, and they want to do it with money, they are going to evaluate, for themselves and now with the use of technology, what kind of investment brought the better result. That is, what type of propaganda makes people more influenceable.

Back to algorithms, let’s think about Internet. They feed us with the things that the algorithm found we tend to react more to, not the things we would consciously like to be seeing. Like a guy who would like, if asked, to be more cultured, but has a weakness for, let’s say, soft porn or very dark humor. He still can’t read ten posts about poetry in a row. On the other hand, he sometimes goes very far with soft porn and very dark humor. He feels a little guilty, but the algorithm is satisfied with his higher “engagement”

We all have two sides, and obviously politics, especially the big scale politics, will have to be in that game of talking to our more impulsive selves, otherwise their opponents will win. It’s all about numbers, and they believe they can’t afford to be too “goody-goody”. I think we must remember that the real righteous ethical behavior is a tree that is growing slowly since the beginnings and it is still not fully represented in real big scale politics.

Big scale politics have their place, of course, it is necessary, but to do our part in a Democracy, that is, to choose the candidate we think is better for that moment in History, and to behave much better than them in our lives, we need the very thing that our content sources won’t give us by themselves: coherence.

I do believe that searching hard for real coherence in your life is about the most nonconformist thing you can do. If you think, it is much easier to “satisfy” the people if they have a mind that is separated into pieces that don’t speak to each other. You just have to satisfy each piece, each “department” of that mind, with some pill, and the whole of what you are selling don’t have to make sense.

If we allow, they might just “satisfy” our need for God with some very homeopathic spiritual sugar, and at the same time satisfy our need for sex with pornography. (Yes, I’ve been there, and I still have nothing against masturbation, but pornography involves other people, and it’s mean and getting meaner). We will feel a little guilty, but maybe comforted by the fact that people on the other political side “are far worst”, and then we move on.

And I have not been really following the trends, but I imagine they must have some really good pills to satisfy a person’s desire for being solidary with some “gay right, woman right” pill and the person’s desire for Justice Between Nations with some “Islamic Extremists are not the worst” pill. The sugar rush is so good you don’t even remember to try to put those pieces together, which would be impossible.

So, the Internet bosses have their commercial algorithm that don’t have a side in itself, but for mathematical reasons privileges the content that speaks to our lower selves. And then we have a lot of agents, commercial, industrial, political, ideological, fighting for numbers in that jungle, each speaking to a particular desire we may have, and never worrying if our ends meet.

I used to be dismayed by incoherence, like, how can these people say those words and do these things? But then I realized that incoherence is the “normal” of mankind, ever since the words “peace” and “good” got into fashion but the giants didn’t fall.

It’s coherence that must be hardly pursued and it is coherence that ends up being the most subversive of all, in the good sense. Because as our mind gets more and more coherent, that is, our different goals become more compatible, we find out that it takes effort, it takes creativity, to live a coherent, a whole life, in a fragmented World. A lot of time we will have to be the ones that do things “a little different”, in school, in the work, etc. That’s why being a nonconformist is not all about politics, it’s about trying to be yourself as much as you can in all areas of your life.

Of course, this road brings some pain, because so many people instinctively react in a negative way to what is different. Not being accepted is painful. A lot of people dismiss the psychological and emotional hardships that badmouthing and exclusion, even persecution, cause. It’s as if people totally forgot that most official conventions against torture define it as cruelly inflicting pain be it physical or psychological. People turn a blind eye to that and say things like “you look healthy, nobody is beating you, you’re eating, you have nothing to complain”.

I saw a video of some Jewish young people inside a school library, while there were people outside punching the doors and windows and screaming against them. People tried to dismiss the ones who were protesting again this aggression, mentioning that the police later said, “there was no actual danger of physical harm”. Really? Even if it is so, isn’t this kind of injury, offense, this attempt of demoralizing, bad enough? Is this what we should say for young people who are persecuted? “Well, nobody broke any bones…”

 Usually, the people who are unable to see the pain of someone who “didn’t break any bones” are people who never even once tried to swim against the tide. There is a lot of conformity that starts in school, a lot of “I’m like the hot ones, the different are the losers”, which just teaches people who gather in groups even without sharing real values. Obviously, there is a lot of “content” in the Internet that enforces this kind of behavior. I do believe people can change, but the fact is that a lot of people don’t. A lot of people go to college, or to work, and while they pledge allegiance to more noble values, their mind is still in the “I’m like the hot ones, the different are losers” mode. Peer pressure and humiliation are strong weapons of conformity since always, and we can still see it at play everywhere, in the virtual and the real World.

I know that the violence in this World goes far beyond “just” psychological, including the violence against Jews, but I am writing this to say that I know that times are not very easy for people who want to go against the waves, be it in politics, their jobs or any other scale.

Well, I have never been the kind of guy who says “never give up on nothing”. Sometimes people give up things, nobody was born with the perfect plan on their heads. But wherever you go, and I hope you go to the places you know are right for your trajectory, you may find hard times. I hope you are not alone, but if you are alone at some moment, I have something I always think.

Imagine a person that is doing something that he knows to be the right thing, but no one else knows it. Well, he knows it, so it is like a reality that only exist towards him. But since nothing in this Universe can have only one side, then there must be a pair of “eyes” in the other side, right? That’s a way to connect to something higher, I believe.

Where I was?  Oh, yes, the necessity and the hardships of going a little against the tide, be it by doing things differently, taking a stand for what you believe, or simply saying no to the algorithms.

I need a bit of “content” in my life like everybody else, but more and more I am taking care not to become a walking Babel Tower. You won’t get a better vision of the World consuming “everything” that’s around. You need space to let things you learned long ago to give its fruits.

Being a little inside your own mind is how you conciliate new information with the essence of who you are. Like an artist that will not be at his creative best if he is so worried with the trends that he doesn’t have time to remember things that moved him in his childhood. And I think being ourselves – which doesn’t mean following all impulses, which are reactions to external things, but on the contrary, finding your true essence – is the only way you can be something different than what “they” want you to be. And maybe “they” just want us to fit in any of the stereotypes offered. Which are obviouslly not coherent.

 

The Mist And The Machine - Volume 3

 

How Great You Think You Are At Creating Peace?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

               

 

 

Evil is Alive, Unfortunately

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Studies Magic Mirror

 

Get your Social Studies Magic Mirror now!

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

 

Not Just What You Hate, Please

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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