Israel

Where Do I Stand?

We see it all over the internet, on people’s profiles and posts: “I stand with Israel!” “I stand with Ukraine!” Pick your champion; someone’s standing with them. Safely outside the line of fire, mind you, but still.

Don’t mistake me: It takes courage to make a moral stand, even online. You lose friends, families get torn apart. People like me, who use their internet accounts to promote their writing/art/business, get blocked and lose customers. As a result, it’s usually also a stupid thing to do, especially since your brave stand with Ukraine doesn’t kill a single Russian soldier.

The difference between courage and stupidity is often so fine a line as to be nonexistent.

And yet…

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Why Are You…?

People keep asking me (online, for the most part) why I’m on this side or that. I tell them I’m not, and do my best to explain, and they remain confused. It goes like this:

“Why are you defending Israel? They’re committing genocide!”
“I’m not talking about genocide. I’m talking about [insert abstract topic].”
“That doesn’t matter! Israel is evil!”

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White Phosphorus In Gaza

Every few months, the organization “Human Rights Watch” releases a report accusing a major anti-Iranian nation of using white phosphorus rounds against civilians. It’s consistent, well-documented, factually correct, and a flaming lie all at once.

“But how could that be? Is it white phosphorus or not? Is phosphorus illegal or not?”

Glad you asked. I’ll tell you.

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“When Will Israel End Its War?”

I read this question this morning, and it caught me off guard. I examined it, and the context in which it was posed. This was the premise of a thought piece in major media.

And it struck me: People, even those who really ought to know better, really have no idea what’s going on. Strange as that may seem to some of you — especially those with firm, settled opinions — it’s frighteningly, terrifyingly true.

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Aid To Israel: The Romeo

Lots of people disapprove of sending military aid to Israel, and there are a million different reasons. Some support Hamas, believe it or not. Others are anti-Hamas and pro-Palestine; they want to avoid civilian deaths, and who can blame them? And then there are a few who just don’t want to spend the money — and, again, that makes sense.

For those who just want to slaughter Jews, I have nothing for you. You’re a waste of human flesh and I sincerely hope bad things happen to you for the rest of your hopefully brief life.

For everyone else, I have a story.

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A Note On Gaza

EDITORIAL

The amount of propaganda being spread in this war is appalling. That people choose to believe it without confirmation just because it happens to agree with their own biases… arguably that’s worse.

There exists an anti-American propaganda account on TwiX today that generates millions of hits by celebrating military atrocities committed by Russia, acts of terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah, and civilian casualties of war. On it, corpse porn is reposted every fifteen minutes in order to generate profitable ad-share, subscriptions, and donations. It is too big to be toppled by the Community Notes mechanism.

Mind you, it’s unreasonable to blame the platform. Virtually every other social media organization permits the same thing in the name of free speech.

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Why We Fear Iran

The United States has the most powerful conventional military in the world by a factor of three; measured in terms of effectiveness, five.  We have state-of-the-art aircraft carriers, missile platforms, AEGIS anti-missile systems, and the M1 Abrams main line battle tank.  We’ve got stealth fighters, Hellfire-equipped drones, and some of the best-trained and best-equipped ground troops in the business.

So why exactly would we be worried about taking on Iran, a nation whose navy consists of speedboats with machine guns, whose air force dates from the 1970s, and whose top-performing battle tank is a slightly up-armored Russian T-72?  Their infrastructure is sub-par; their command-and-control systems have little to no redundancy, and their government is wildly unpopular (more…)