Chamblee54

This is a repost from May, 2024. The Israel story keeps getting worse, in practically every way. … I knew two things after Al-Aqsa Flood. One, Israel would exponentially retaliate, and alienate much of the world. Two, there were going to some some incredibly toxic discussions about the matter. This feature is going to focus on number two.
If you listen to the conversations about the war, you will hear a lot of misused logic. Distraction, derailment, false equivalence, two-wrongs-that-make-a-right, forgotten details, and outright lies. You are either on one side or another, and proceed accordingly. FWIW, I am on team Palestine.
There is an easy test. Do they say Hamas, or do they say Palestinian? Hamas is the boogeyman of today’s rhetoric, and anything less than total demonization is considered support. The fact that thousands of unarmed Palestinians have died is a pesky detail.
One thing I did not know on October 7 was the role the IDF played. Many of the Israelis who died were killed by their own army. This fact is often overlooked in angry sermons about AAF.
I also did not know that Israel created, and supported Hamas. Before AAF, Hamas was seen as a way to degrade the Palestinian Authority, and keep Palestinians divided. The ultimate goal was to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. This is part of Israel’s longtime strategy of interfering in the internal affairs of her neighbors, for Israel’s benefit.
In 1987, I had a workplace frenemy. Steve was the son of Holocaust survivors, and a staunch supporter of Israel. I mentioned that the Iran-Iraq war was being kept going, to distract the combatants from fighting Israel. Steve got very angry. “Yes, and it’s for your benefit. We need to fight terrorism.” This policy was also seen in the Syrian civil war.
This feature will be brief. If the reader wants to know more, Google is at your service. A question could be raised about how neutral Google is in this conflict. There are numerous other commentaries. Let the buyer beware. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Russell Lee took the facebook photograph in March 1939. “Negro boy drinking “milk” made of flour and water. He was sick and his mother, the wife of a sharecropper, had given him this as a delicacy. Near Marshall, Texas”