Nightmares Unfolding

So it’s hard to write or think about anything other than the ongoing nightmare unfolding in Israel. My heart aches. The Israelis are in for a necessary fight and I hope we can not be stupid about it and start whining about “proportionality” in the coming weeks…months. Many more Israelis and Palestinian civilians will die. Simply awful. It can’t be ignored that the Biden administration recently gave $6 billion to Tehran on the condition that the regime only use it for humanitarian purposes. Yeah, that’s working out. (No, I am NOT blaming Biden. The only people to blame for this are those in the regime in Tehran and the barbarians in Hamas.) Yes, Tehran/Hamas is trying to scuttle the anticipated Saudi-Israel peace deal, hoping to provoke Israel to react so harshly that MBS will cower. I really hope he won’t.

We are already hearing the “both sides” nonsense and the moral equivalence crowd and the “this is a nuanced conflict” morons. This claptrap sickens me. I wrote about an unfortunate conversation with my priest over on my Substack (please subscribe and pay, if you can) – unfortunate, but he showed me who he was, and it wasn’t pretty. This situation has left me feeling immensely disillusioned. I recall the same feeling after Charlie Hebdo when a relative suggested there were “nuances” in the slaughter of cartoonists who had drawn things to which the slaughterers objected. Seriously? 

Am Yisrael Chai.

Anniversary of 7/7

Last week saw the 18th (!!!) anniversary of the London bombings. I remember that day well – I was about to leave for Israel for ten days and wondered if my trip would be affected (it wasn’t). I also remember having a long discussion with my oldest brother about Ken Livingstone’s speech that day. On the surface, it sounded appropriate, but there was one paragraph that we both found revealing:

I want to say one thing specifically to the world today. This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. 

Given Livingstone’s ideology, one couldn’t help but feel that had the attack indeed been aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers, at the rich and the powerful, he would not have minded as much. (There were reports that his staff celebrated 9/11.) It reminded me a bit of what I wrote here, about the envy that seems to consume so many of us, making us forget empathy and take delight in certain people’s suffering.