A very strange kind of dilemma

 

2 Years

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

Hamas and the Growth of Aggressive Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Yom Kippur

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

Power, Credentials, Ideologies and Crimes

 As I always say, I know that there are a lot of things going wrong in the World, and a lot of things that should be working for the benefit of everybody but a lot of times just don’t. I think most of us feel that there are some forces at play, forces that serve goals that are very different from the best for all mankind.

So, some come with weird conspiracy theories, like old Antisemitic visions of Jews controlling the World. Well, what I think is that just because things like the theory of relativity turned out to be very useful in Science, it doesn’t mean that, in all aspects of our lives, the weirdest a “theory” is, the more we should feel it is true.

On the contrary, I think that when it comes to human power, we don’t need more and more strange and unverifiable information, I believe we must clear the dust from before our eyes, to just see clearly what is in front of us, probably the answers are more obvious than we think. We just have too much weird information in our heads to be able to just step back and look at things with clear eyes.

For instance, when it comes to who controls what, I see things in a simple way. I think that the most powerful people in Russia are Russian super rich guys and Russian politicians. The most influential people in Italy are some powerful Italians. The most powerful people in Muslin Arab countries are powerful Muslin Arabs. The most influential people in Israel are some Jews. In the United States, it’s super rich Americans and politicians.

There are more Jews in the high circles in America than there ever were anywhere – outside Israel, of course – because America gave them opportunities they never had – but I don’t think the majority of powerful people in America – that are not Jews – would let someone else control them, even if that was what the Jews wanted. And why would you consider that all Jews are taking part on a “plan” commanded by the few super rich Jews, if you don’t do that with any other people? There are so many reasons why these conspiracy theories about Jews controlling things make no sense at all…

Anyway, even knowing that there are powerful people – that is, people who have much more influence than the common man – acting violently is the worst thing you can do in a democracy, because it weakens the power of a set of rules that, even if not perfect, is meant to give our society other parameters that are not simply the law of the stronger. If there are no rules, the stronger will prevail, and this means precisely the most powerful ones.

And the structures of wrongful power are made not only of money, they are also made of notions that people in higher positions have more value as human beings than others, they are made of the power some institutions may have to tell people how much they are worth, or impose a unique vision of the World and silence all other ideas.

Academic people like to talk about power. They see all this cobwebs everywhere, that they call “structure”, “systemic” this, “systemic” that. I think it would be interesting for them to reason about the power that they have. Think, they are the ones who give credentials for people to work in the fields that people want to work.

They give the titles and the honors that people can use to promote a book that they want to sell, for instance. And how many of the people in International Organizations have beautiful academic credentials to increase their worth? Also,  I don’t know about the rest of the World, but here in Brazil it seems they want to forbid people without diplomas to work in more and more jobs that didn’t require it before.

And all this makes kind of a circle. Because the most influential people in Academia are also the ones who define the curriculum for Colleges and Schools, and think: when we hear someone make an analysis of a situation, most of us will give it more weight if it resounds with something we learned in school or college. It is a very big power.

I am not against the existence of Academia, obviously. I think we must have Academia. But I do think it is very bad when there is one line of thought imposing itself, silencing the voices of all other possible ideas and lines of thought, as if all the discussions already had been discussed and there were no more reasonable objections – this is not true.

And what is the vision of the World that the Academia has been pushing? Nowadays, it seems that they are looking at absolutely everything through the notion of “race”. I know that there has always been racial problems, but when they are talking about race, instead of thinking on what would be the solutions for the minorities to prosper more and more within our society, within the law, it seems that they are offering the idea that the “system” is so crooked that it is not enough to do your best and help each other.

When they say that an infraction, or even a crime, committed by someone of an oppressed minority should not be considered as such, the message is that people have a right to reject the peaceful way to happiness, even the peaceful way to fight for your rights. That crime is sometimes the only way.

Well, if the minorities need to break the law, need to commit crimes, then they will always need lawyers, then big political movements become the only big salvation. The individual dimension of life becomes insignificant compared to the importance of collective and organized struggle. The circle closes. The person who belongs to a minority should place all his bets in “movements”, nothing else. I think movements are important for some things, but they should never aim to create total dependency.

And when it comes to geopolitical issues, they extend this idea of race to everything, using concepts like “Imperialism”, to blame the Western World for absolutely everything that is wrong. It goes like this:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Because of this thought, people can’t place in the oppressive leaders of the “non-Western” World all the responsibility – and fault – that they deserve for their actions. Also, you see feminists overlooking the fact that some “non-Western” societies are the most oppressive to women. The same with queer movements, cheering people who literally murder homosexuals. Putting it shortly, people who say they want to free people from oppression becoming unable to put any real responsibility to real dictators. Because they may say “I don’t agree with this dictator necessarily”, but the big villain is always someone else – the imperialist – so in practice, nothing can be done against those dictators.

I will propose a thought experiment that I think is interesting: sometimes, when there is a lot of confusion in a line of thought, too many contradictions, it is interesting to notice if some specific assumption is the center of all that contradiction. Then, just for a moment, consider the possibility that this assumption is not true. Let’s do it with this assumption:

“The evil deeds that are done by people who we don’t consider as heirs of the Western prosperity, must not be treated as simple evil, because the Western oppression is directly or indirectly responsible for everything.”

Just take this away. Consider for a minute that the things we see in the World are the result of a far more nuanced situation. A World where every deed counts, where people are always responsible for the use of any power that they have, no matter who they are or where they live. Think like this for a minute.

See the difference. Now, people who fight for gay rights can be enemy of the greater haters of the gays, feminists can denounce what happens in the societies in the World that most oppress women. People who are concerned with exploitation of the poor can oppose any political leaders in the World that get rich while keeping their population poor, not only in some places. If you are concerned with how powerful people can harm the common men, you can oppose tyrannic visions of Society wherever they appear.

That is, you are always in favor of what you say you are in favor, and always against what you say you are against. Wow. Wasn’t it kind of magical?

Also, now, when talking about a war, you can give the proper weight to the fact that a certain side started it, like, in the case of the current war between Israel and Hamas, it should be very simple to see that this war wasn’t there in October 6^th, that Hamas started it in October 7^th. And they didn’t surrender or stop fighting yet.

You can look at History and see that the war that the Terrorists create is not about land – the tiny strip that the Jews got of the Middle East when the Empires ended and the map of the whole World changed – it is a manifestation of a very old feeling that exists in the Middle East – a hatred against the Jews, that was and is encouraged by wicked and megalomaniac leaders.

If you were able to put responsibility on people who dominates regions – like Hamas dominates Gaza – you would not be talking about numbers of deaths as if the option of real and safe peace was there for Israel to easily reach. You would see the danger that would threaten Israel if an attack like that of October 7^th went unresponded. Like a city where that mayor says, “we will not punish crime anymore, we will just improve the security of buildings”. What happens?

Without all this bias and preconceptions against Israel, we can see the measures they take to mitigate civilian harm on the other side. They are fighting an enemy that is hidden among their own people, and that don’t care for their people. An enemy that uses their own people to create the most cruel dilemma they can for Israel and the World, making the cost of the war the higher they can.

The powerful people that created this dilemma – this is a war against Terrorist groups backed and financed by Iran and Qatar – can slow Israel, but totally stop to fight them would mean give them everything they want. It would be extremely dangerous to make the most cruel strategy ever conceived so successful. Violent aggressive political forces, that use cruelty as a weapon, will never be satisfied with one particular “victory”.

If the academic people and most of the press wasn’t turning a blind eye to this “other side”, if they were talking openly about the ones who created this cruel strategy of human shields, I think a lot of people in the World would see things differently.

This is a manifestation of how academic people do their “best” to show a vision of things that are happening that fits their general simplistic narrative about the whole World. With the “West” and Israel as the eternal villains, nothing can be done against the worst dictators of the World.

Usually people that have some power and influence don’t want to lose it, they want to amplify it.  If the influence and power that the Academic World has is related to some political agenda, then they will play it rough, to impose their vision of the World and to make people think that political ideologies are all that is really important in the World.

And with this idea that sometimes violent crimes are just an inevitable consequence of something else, they open the doors to a dangerous relativism, the idea that evil should not be seen as such, or that maybe there is nothing we can call evil.

In my opinion, there has been far too little attention to “how” October 7^th happened. People are just talking about numbers, as if one thousand and two hundred people slaughtered was too little to start a war – I don’t think it is. They don’t talk about the cruelty, as if “cruelty” was too subjective to be dealt with – only numbers matter.

But hordes of men coming and laughing while killing people at random and violating young women, burning families alive, killing children in cold blood – that matters.

We can’t let biased political visions prevent us from placing the blame of all the tragedy of war on the ones who caused it, the same ones who do nothing to make it less tragic – on the contrary. Why the World can’t answer: if not now, when Hamas will be dismantled?

I think it is very dangerous when political or social ideologies becomes infinitely more important than any rules or common sense that mankind has arrived to along our long History on this planet. And I don’t think a real peace will come if we consider half of the World as not really responsible for their deeds. Peace, I think, will not come if we don’t consider everybody responsible for the use they make of the power they have, wherever they are.

All those countries in UN recognize a Palestinian State

 This is the phrase that will be repeated in news. Not only the conditions - end of Terrorism - that the leaders say are necessary - come with no plans, but they will also not be spread by many newslets. The news that everybody recognizes a Palestinian State will get in people's ears a thousand times more than the word "terrorism".

It is just a coward way to try to make everybody in the World think: all those leaders think Palestine is absolutely the right side, no objections anymore. Without having to say it, and deal with the implications.

New stuff coming

 Hi. I'm just here to say that there is new stuff coming. Written word, for those who are interested in it.

I would hate to be called volatile, but...

I started this thing that was a book called "The Mist And The Machine" which I think is a cool name and so I was making this chapters, but didn't know I was going to have so much to say. The world just got crazier and I'm kind of trying to follow it - to some extent.

But before this numbers of volumes and chapters get too weird, I'll stop and my next things will just be essays, simply. Like, I posted a new essay, period.

Thank you

(picture of me thinking)