October 7

A year of horror!

[Author’s Note: you’re seeing more content over here because I’ve left Facebook; what I was dong there, I am not doing here. The reason is censorship, which I protested when the site removed a link to one of my articles in here … but a single writer living primarily on social security has no chance protesting a billionaire-owned Big Tech platform. All you can do is vote with your feet. Substack has never censored one of my posts or given me any reason to believe I’m not in full control of what I do on Navigating the New Normal.]

The Horror.

October 7, 2023, is a day etched in history, and should be, whether you’re a Christian like I am, a Jew, a Muslim, or a hard-boiled materialist. We’ve come to the first anniversary of the Hamas-led attack in southwestern Israel that killed over 1,100 people, with around 250 taken hostage and some 97 still being held in Gaza if they are still alive. Hamas targeted a music festival, small civilian towns, and a few Israeli border posts.

The most brutal war of the 21st century (so far!) ensued.

I’ve chosen not to link to photos or the occasional video here. They’re graphic and I think you’ll get the idea.

Truth be said, the attack was a boneheaded thing for Hamas to do. The Hamas leadership had to know that Israel would retaliate immediately and without mercy, and it’s an interesting question: did Israel allow the attack to occur, as it would offer the country a golden opportunity to deal with its “Palestinian problem”? Whatever else one says about the Israelis, they’re not stupid! There’s no way their intelligence could have failed to foresee an attack of that magnitude and severity.

For the record, I do not support Hamas. But then again, I don’t equate Hamas with Palestinians; nor Palestinians with Hamas. The desire to get rid of Hamas was understandable. But that’s not what ensued.

What ensued has been the often-brutal slaughter of, at last count, over 41,900 people not all of them Palestinians, and of those that were, surely not all of them were members of Hamas or necessarily Hamas supporters. Over 97,000 people have been injured. Around 2.3 million people lived in Gaza, one of the most densely populated regions in the world. Over 1.9 million have been displaced, as around 60 percent of houses and buildings have been partly or totally destroyed, including hospitals and clinics. Many tried to flee but found all the exits blocked. Those trapped in Gaza are facing starvation and disease, a result of shattered infrastructure.

The IDF did not distinguish militants from civilians. Many of those killed were women and children (at least 17,600 that we know of). Along with those killed wantonly were doctors, journalists, UN observers.

Israel’s justification for this carnage seems to boil down to, “We have a right to defend ourselves!” How does this translate into the slaughter of over 40,000 people, most of them noncombatants? True: rooting out Hamas would have proven extremely difficult. But does this justify targeting women and children, in some cases deliberately?

Iran-backed and Lebanon-based Hezbollah almost immediately began shooting missiles into northern Israel, also making Lebanon a target for retaliation. Whatever else one says, Israel has proven itself to be far superior technologically and strategically to its enemies in the region. The device cyberattacks killing some 1,400 people in Lebanon prove this. To the best of my knowledge Israel never claimed responsibility for those attacks, but I don’t think anyone has any other suspects in mind.

We’ve seen two launches of rockets from Iran into Israeli territory. The first, last April, was negligible in strength; the second was more substantial but still easily thwarted, killing only one person, as poor luck would have it, a Palestinian.

The Danger.

The possibility of a forceful retaliation by Israel against Iran remains a possibility nevertheless. Escalation into all-out war between backers of each would then be a grave danger. AIPAC practically owns the U.S. federal government (leading politicians in both political parties and in the war machine). So the U.S. would doubtless be dragged into any broader war.

Iran, Turkey, and Russia signed an agreement back in 2017. So there’s a good chance Turkey and Russia would come to Iran’s defense in the event of an all-out attack on Iranian soil.

This would bring nuclear powers into direct confrontation with one another no less than the reckless (American neocon-backed, but I repeat myself) launching of U.S.-supplied missiles deep into Russian territory from Ukraine.

In short, we’re closer to what would be history’s worst conflagration ever!

What flabbergasts me is how few people are talking about it, regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum! Paul Craig Roberts is talking about it. He’s a self-exiled outsider, though (as are many of us on Substack).

No one in the Asylum on the Potomac is talking about it.

Assuming we somehow escape this conflagration, whether it is possible to call Israel onto the carpet for war crimes is a very interesting question … because of how much of the Western political architecture the Israelis have bought and paid for. Sadly, this includes much of the Evangelical movement in Christianity some of whom have kicked me out because I don’t support Israel mindlessly. I’m looking for evidence that today’s Israel is indeed the legitimate descendant of the Biblical Israel (a central tenet of Christian Zionism). I’ve not seen any.

The Open Letter to the ICC by Brian Eno and Yanis Varoufakis.

This morning I ran across an open letter from Brian Eno and Yanis Varoufakis calling on the International Criminal Court to step in.

A Renaissance man of sorts, Brian Eno has always been one of my musical heroes; I have a whole shelf of vinyl records and music CDs he’s released under his own name and other artists or groups he’s worked with or produced; also books and collections to which he’s contributed illuminating essays on a variety of topics including opposition to war (he beat a drum against the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003). Yanis

Varoufakis came to my attention more recently. Back in 2015 I penned an essay (no longer available, unfortunately) on technofeudalism, in which I argued that this was the best term for the kind of political economy the globalist ruling class was trying to institute. Last year I discovered that Varoufakis whom I’d only vaguely heard of previously had written an illuminating book employing that term. He didn’t get the term from me, of course. He’s almost certainly never heard of me. His book is a rewarding read anyway.

Here’s a link to their open letter. I encourage readers to have a look at it.

Whether the ICC could do anything is an open question, but in a supposedly globalized world, the voice of such an organization might carry some weight. Cynics of whatever stripe will question whether the phrase international law has, or ever had, any meaning (someone already did when I posted the letter as a comment on Caitlin Johnstone’s October 7 piece.

Advisory: Caitlin’s article is far harder-hitting than this!

A Stoic Conclusion, a Christian Conclusion.

What can we do as persons of conscience to stop this?

Sadly, very little, beyond penning pieces like I’ve done here and distributing letters like those of Eno and Varoufakis if were fortunate enough to have run across them.

I’m aware that this article could cost me subscribers. But truths are what they are, and someone has to tell them!

I had a Palestinian “Facebook friend,” to whom I’d sent a little money a number of years back so he could buy himself a jacket. He reached out to me again last October, telling me he and his family were on the run from Israeli soldiers and struggling to get enough food to eat. My friend was not a Hamas supporter, just a guy stuck, with his family, in one of the most inhospitable places in the world. I tried to send him money again, but the system I’d been using blocked the effort. I sought a workaround of some kind when he stopped responding to my messages. I fear he may be among the dead!

There’s very little in this life we can control, including a lot of things that are done to us in a fallen world. Ultimately the only territory we can truly be justified in conquering is the little bit of territory between each of our ears: our thoughts, our beliefs, our subsequent actions; the good is to be found in saying what is true and doing good where possible. This is a Stoic response, and it’s harder than it sounds!

If God is Creator, then ultimately He is in charge. If all human beings were created in His image, than this includes Israelis and it includes Palestinians equally. This is a Christian response, and it, too, is harder than it sounds but for different reasons: so much of the past 200 years of intellectual culture has tried to destroy its credibility and remove it from the public conversation.

Here is the opinion toward which I’ve been moving over the past few years:

Unless and until we can create, develop, and promulgate a moral philosophy based on the Christian-rooted idea that all human beings have intrinsic value, value they possess by virtue of their humanity, and that therefore the initiation of aggression by some against others is always wrong, wars involving purposeful dehumanization of others and brutality against them are going to keep happening. In a nuclear age, wanton aggression threatens to escalate into total destruction!

Human persons are here understood as biological beings having complete human DNA. You don’t have to be a Christian to see the value of such a view (I hope!). Even absent war, which by its very nature turns human persons into expendable targets, a world in which human persons have no intrinsic value is a world ripe for the abortion death culture (nemeses of the right) and economic exploitation of the poor and middle class by the rich because they can (nemeses of the left).