Gosh … Do You Think This is Deliberate?

I had long approved of Israel’s disproportionate responses to challenges. Basically they said, if you punch me once, I will punch you ten times.

I have to question what the Current Extremist Government of Israel is now doing. For example:
This photo appeared in The Guardian newspaper, 26/07/2025. That child is clearly a Hamas fighter and deserves to starve to death.

Credit for Photo Muhammed Zakariya Ayyub al-Matouk, 18 months, is one of thousands of children suffering from hunger and malnutrition in Gaza. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Another Hamas fighter who deserves to die.

Estimates are now that over 20,000 Gazan children have been killed or starved by Israeli forces. This is in response to 1200 Israelis being killed (half of whom were active duty military) in the surprise attack by Hamas. Has the goal of a “disproportionate response” been met or are their still children to kill?

Oh, and if you think this is “their” problem, Israel not only would not act this way but could not act this way without approval and military support from the U.S. and other countries (U.K., etc.) So our fingerprints are all over these atrocities.

And, these photos are circulating amongst myriad others, being an ongoing recruitment tool for all who oppose Israel. The Israeli government is hardly being self-serving, quite the opposite.

Some Blogger Labeled Me a “Hater of Israel” and I am Steamed

This is how I responded:

I do not hate Israel. I do detest the current slate of fundamentalist, ultraconservative leaders of your country. They insist that the Bible is a land grant giving them the “right to exist” which it does not. Israel exists because of the right of conquest, just like all other countries. But that means if they are conquered, no more Israel, so they have to be on guard. I rooted for Israel for decades as the little “David” conquered the “Goliaths” set against it. But I no longer support Israel. They treated Gaza as if it were a doormat, starving Gazans for energy, water, and food … for decades, declaring them to be second or maybe third class “citizens.” What did you expect them to do? So, in their mostly symbolic attack, they killed 1200 Israelis, the majority of whom were active duty military. They then responded by killing ten times that number of Gazans, mostly civilians. When will this body count be enough to show that Israel will return 10 times the woe it was treated to? Or is it to be 100 times? We don’t know because Israel made a pact with the devil to only list kills confirmed by both sides, so possibly tens of thousands of others are dead and uncounted.

Israel has lost the respect of people like me, who have never “hated” Israel, by supporting leaders who are perpetrating a genocide, while still eliciting support for the genocides directed at them. It is a bad look, very bad, and has lost the support of people like me, who do not appreciate being listed by fools as “haters of Israel.” This smacks of the typical “you are either with me or against me.” If you present me with that choice, as you have, then I am against you.

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This is how authoritarians behave. They slap labels upon people, e.g. Enemy of the State, so they will be perceived based upon the label rather than their arguments or other statements. This is Donald Trump strategy. I wonder if the Donald learned it from Bibi or Bibi learned it from the Donald. At this point I almost wish Hell existed so there would be a place to send both of them

Netanyahu’s Chutzpah

The prisoner exchange as part of the Gaza Incursion cease fire has lead Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, to denounce the state of the prisoners Hamas had. Netanyahu called the images of the released prisoners “shocking.”

Did anyone point out to the Israeli PM that his forces were bombing the shit out of any place those prisoners could have been kept? That his forces were preventing food, water, electricity, and medicine from reaching anyone in Gaza? Does anyone think that if Hamas had declared a building a safe zone because the hostages were being held there, that that building would have been safe from bombing?

Simultaneously the situation of detained Palestinians by Israeli security forces in Gaza and the West Bank has been decried for decades. Palestinians are maimed in custody, many die in custody. And Netanyahu has the audacity to whine about the treatment of Israeli prisoners?

Amazing. An honest man would have admitted that he could have expected no less because of his administration’s horrid history of detentions without trial, torture, and murder and the merciless bombing of every building in the entire Strip; that it was time to turn over a new leaf and live according to the highest morals of his religion. I guess he wouldn’t say such things as he doesn’t want Hell to freeze over.

How Many Hamas Leaders Are There?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined three prerequisites to achieving peace in its war with Hamas: the destruction of the group, the demilitarization of Gaza and for Palestinian society to be “deradicalized.” (Source: ArcaMax Current News 12/25/2023)

So, the goal is the eradication of Hamas, the ostensible government of Gaza.

So far, millions of Gazans have been displaced, and going on 20,000 killed and even more wounded, of which there are more children having been killed than Israelis claimed to have died on October 7^th.

So, how many of the 2.5 million Gazans are Hamas government officials or functionaries of any kind? Maybe a few thousand politicians, but that is probably an overestimate. And how about several thousand soldiers, maybe as many as ten thousand? Of course, some Israeli functionaries are claiming that all 2.5 million Gazans are “terrorists,” which seems to be a blank check for killing them all. One functionary responded to the body count of Gazan children with “They brought it upon themselves.” Yeah, those damned children, always starting wars.

How will the IDF know that they will have eradicated all of these Hamas functionaries? Really?

Do they have lists?

How would Americans respond if, say, Mexico were to demand the demilitarization of the U.S.? And how the hell would anyone quantify a “deradicalization”? And this would be the cost of Mexico treating Americans as if they were actual human beings?

A pox on both their houses.

I pity the poor Israelis who didn’t want such a war. By pulling that trigger, metaphorically, Israel fell into a trap it may not be able to get out of. American young are increasingly becoming sympathetic to Palestinians and, well, they will grow up and possibly pull U.S. support of Israel’s war machine, which might well be the demise of Israel. Allowing Netanyahu’s crowd full control of Israel will prove to be a mistake in any case.

Israel . . . As Expected

UN secretary general, António Guterres, said that the 7 October attacks by Hamas had to be seen in the context of decades of occupation of the Palestinian people. He said: “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

Gosh, and the reaction to his speaking the truth?

Israeli and its propaganda machine went bonkers. Next, I suspect, will be Israeli air strikes on the UN building in New York.

All the Secretary General asked was “What did you expect to happen?”

This, of course, laid bare the strategy of Israel, to reduce the Gaza Strip to an ungovernable mess, while they use illegal “settlements” to decimate the land supposedly granted to the Palestinian authority, leaving a unified Israel, run by Jews for Jews. By having these dustups with Hamas or whoever, there is no pressure on Israel to participate in the fictional “peace process” and they can continue working on their long game without international interference. (Hey, they have admitted this in public. It is not a secret.)

Please notice that Hamas has continued to do what it does and with better and better tech involved. If Israel really wanted to do away with Hamas, they are either incredibly inept or they prefer to have Hamas around as an ongoing threat. And while Hamas has been accused on not caring about the deaths of Gaza citizens, not one peep has been heard about Israel’s acceptance of a few hundred deaths of Israeli citizens ever so often, to keep the pot boiling.

Postscript And, no, I do not condone “terrorism,” in any form, either that of Hamas or of Israel.

But . . .

While the armed conflict in Gaza/Israel is driving all of Trump’s free media coverage to near zero, there are a few things that now seem apparent. The coverage of the conflict seems hopelessly biased. The politics of the conflict seems hopelessly biased.

For example, a pro-Israel commentator stated that the “two state solution,” you know the one promised by the UN, wasn’t possible because the Palestinian territories weren’t even contiguous. She stated that from the United States in which one of the states so united has a major chunk of Canada between it and the other states and another has thousands of miles of ocean between it and the others.

Some points that I can state. This conflict is yet another episode stemming from the “Great Powers” carving up the Middle East as they saw fit after WW2. Israel wasn’t created by the peoples involved, it was created by the UN. Since it was created, Israel has fought several wars to continue to exist but since then it has behaved much like all of the other occupying powers around the globe.

The conditions in the Gaza Strip are truly horrific, only because of actions of Israel. Do a little research and check to see how it is almost impossible to get a normal stream of goods and supplies into and out of that region.

Why are the civilians being attacked always “innocent civilians” when they consistently vote into office troglodytes like Bibi Netanyahu, who promotes settlements in territory the Palestinians were supposedly granted and other draconian policies.

Why are the talking heads always saying things like Hamas has “signed its death warrant,” when this did not happen the last time Hamas did this, or the time before, or the time before that. Actually, Hamas’s weaponry has gotten ever more sophisticated over that time, so it seems they are thriving.

Hamas is also stated as “uncaring” of the people of Gaza as those “innocents” are being racked up as casualties of the Israeli counter moves. But if you look at the state of the people in Gaza they were dying, just not as rapidly as in a war, from lack of all essential services, job opportunities, etc. And when people are desperate, they predictably take desperate actions, even when they are not the official representatives of the people involved.

And, the Israeli army, which achieved such renown back when it actually fought wars is nowhere near its former abilities, having been reduced to an occupying army, much as the U.S. army experienced in the Iraq War, when it rolled up the opposition in days and then struggled for years when the enemy didn’t present itself for easy defeats.

It may seem that I am on the Palestinian side here, but actually I am not on either side. To do so would be like throwing starving rats into close quarters, which then battle to see who eats whom, and then taking bets on who wins and loses the battles.

I just wonder why my government has such unequivocal support for just one side in this conflict. We send a billion dollars of “economic aid” to Israel every day and a half! In other words we are propping up the existence of that state. We also send them over $3 billion dollars of military aid every year and the first comments of our politicians were to promise to replenish their ammunition stocks for all they are using on basically defenseless Gaza. Why?

The Palestinians get some “humanitarian aid” but not to the likes of the Israelis.

Gosh, do you think it could be that our politicians are pandering to Jewish-American voters and donors? If that is so, we are allowing another people to be slowly ground into dust for the political gain of our politicians and that is despicable. If you know why our support of Israel is so unequivocal, I would like to know why.