I wanna hear the News Girl say Dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad said make the best of your potential

 

I have respect

For people’s hardships

But too many people in the World

Suffer solely because they have to work

In places that suck

Because are made of people like them

I won’t be complacent with that

 

I won’t let nobody use their needless pain

To tyrannize me

I got my own real pain

And won’t even speak to anyone

Who is blind to that

 

I met people who allow me to become

What I was born to be

Everybody’s smart younger brother

And a jolly good fellow

Support

 

😉

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

Worldly Forces and Basic Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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