Tag: peace

A Time for War

Thousands of years ago, Israel’s King Solomon wrote that there is a time for peace and a time for war. The wise king understood that, while unpleasant, war is not always wrong. In fact, not making war at the right time is a grievous injustice. In the millennia since the Jewish monarch wrote, religious figures and philosophical traditions have grappled with the question of military conflict, and it is generally understood that there are just wars.

The events of October 7, 2023, make it perfectly clear: Now is the time for war.

Only a person completely devoid of morality – and sadly there are many, including many Western so-called “progressives” – could watch the events that transpired that morning in southern Israel and not realize that an unprecedented response was necessary, for both strategic and moral reasons.

Even now, the number of dead in Israel is still unknown; so far we are aware that about 1,200 innocents were murdered. We still don’t know how many people the savages of Hamas stole into captivity, except that the number is somewhere over 100 people. But numbers only tell part of the story.

The Barbarity

The pure savagery unleashed by Hamas after its fighters stormed into Israel by air, land, and sea continues to horrify all who are decent. Hundreds of young people were murdered simply because they happened to be at a desert music festival. The thugs raped many women and, while in the process, used the their victim’s cellphones to call their parents so that they could hear the sounds of their child being violated. They filmed themselves murdering an elderly woman and then used her phone to upload it to her own Facebook account so that her family could see.

Babies were dismembered. Initial reports were that 40 were found beheaded, but now the army can’t verify that this is the case. A friend in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) told me that the reason for the uncertainty is that the infants are literally in pieces; they’d been blown apart by machine guns, and it’s not possible to determine whether the heads came off first. Other babies were burned alive.

Under interrogation, a Hamas member was asked why women and children were captured. His answer, in Arabic: “To rape them.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu eloquently described the evil, saying, “We saw the beasts of prey. We saw the barbarians that we are facing. We saw a cruel enemy. An enemy worse than ISIS. We saw boys and girls, bound, shot in the head. Men and women burned alive. Young women raped and slaughtered. Fighters decapitated… In one place, they set fire to tires around them, and burned them alive.”

These evildoers were so unencumbered by feelings of guilt as they slaughtered hundreds of Jews – more than had been murdered in any single day since the Holocaust – that they gleefully filmed their acts and posted them to social media, providing the world evidence of their crimes against humanity.

Anyone who reads the news reads accounts of brutality on a daily basis. Someone, somewhere does something ghastly to their family or their friend or their neighbor all too often. But this was different. What happened on October 7 was not some individual losing their mind. Instead, it was a well planned out, orchestrated campaign of terror directed by the governing entity of Gaza, Hamas.

Despite what progressives and those who style themselves as urbane sophisticates might tell you, the context does not matter. Whatever you think of Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine, whatever you think of their building settlements (apartment blocks) far away from Gaza in Area C of the West Bank, whatever you think of any of that simply doesn’t matter. There is no excuse, no context, nothing at all that could justify what the terrorists did.

The only option

After this, Hamas can no longer be allowed to govern Gaza. For years, Israel thought that they could live with Hamas next door, periodically “mowing the lawn,” their term for using rockets to destroy Hamas’s rocket launchers when they came too close to threatening Israel. October 7 made it clear that Israel cannot live with Hamas. The civilized world cannot live with Hamas. Thousands already do not live because of Hamas.

The Israel Defense Force has started what is likely to be a long, brutal fight against Hamas in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have been mobilized. The war against Hamas is going to be ugly. Horrible images will fill television screens and other news media. Israel will be accused of atrocities.

Netanyahu stated clearly the intent of his government, saying, “Every Hamas member is a dead man.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Hamas “will be wiped from the face of the Earth. It will not continue to exist.” And Israel cannot simply kill Hamas; there needs to be some sort of government. It’s likely that Israel will need to retake control of the Gaza Strip, which they gave up nearly two decades ago in the interest of peace.

As always, the IDF will do its utmost to protect civilian lives. Well before fighting began, Netanyahu warned the civilians of Gaza to get out. But where should they go? The IDF has produced videos and maps warning people where bombs are likely to fall and where to go for safety. The IDF’s leaders know that Hamas will exploit this information and use it against Israeli soldiers, but protecting innocent life is part of the ethical DNA of Israel’s defense force.

Still, there will be “collateral damage,” a horrific term, because it sanitizes the information it conveys: civilians in Gaza will die. Hamas will continue to launch their rockets and fighting force not from legitimate military bases, but from schools and hospitals and apartment buildings and mosques. Israel will be obliged to destroy them. They will put children where the bombs will fall, aiming to score a pile of bodies that they can parade across television in order to accuse Israel of war crimes.

None of the above should be taken to mean that the lives of Gazans don’t matter. Gazan civilians – not members of Hamas and their supporters – are as human as any of the rest of us. A Gazan child or baby is as precious as any other. The point, though, is that Israel (and perhaps allies – there are American hostages in Gaza as well) has been forced to act. Any blood shed will be on the hands of Hamas.

Americans should resist the urge to call for “peace” or a “peace process.” As alluded to above, it was a move for peace, Israeli disengagement from Gaza, that brought Hamas to power.

No to negotiations

War is a horror show. And yet it is necessary. Not going to war after such evil as was perpetrated against the Israeli people on October 7 will leave the perpetrators unpunished. It will advertise to the world that Israel is open to having its children murdered and burnt, its women raped, its elderly killed on Facebook, its music festivals turned into killing fields. A price tag would be on the head of every Israeli.

The lack of a devastating response by Israel would have reverberations across the Middle East.

As ugly images fill television screens and atrocities attributed to Israel’s soldiers are shown, the liberal West will find a familiar temptation, the temptation to call for negotiations. But with Hamas, there can be no negotiation. Their charter calls for the elimination not only of Israel, but of the Jewish people as a whole. Negotiating with them would be useless, because there is nothing that Israel can offer, short of national suicide, that would appease the terror organization.

In historical context, we understand that war and its accompanying horrors are in certain situations not only morally acceptable, but morally necessary. The Civil War devastated civilians in the South. Some consider Sherman’s March to be the first iteration of what is now called “total war.” No one says the Civil War shouldn’t have been fought, that the Union should have negotiated with the Confederacy. World War II, which liberated Europe and ended the Holocaust, was marked by ghastly actions the Allied Forces deemed necessary, including the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We don’t debate the morality of World War II.

Times have changed, and there are rules of war now. The IDF will follow those, as the U.S. did during the Gulf War. Even then, though, there was “collateral damage.”

Anyone who argues that now is not a time for war, that Israel should negotiate some kind of deal with Hamas instead of destroying them, has to either argue that Hamas is not as bad as the Nazis or the Confederacy or that America’s entrance into World War II and the Union’s entrance into the Civil War were grave injustices.

Does anyone want to make these arguments?

Our Duty

Our duty as Americans and others who support civilization over savagery is to push back against those who would call for the immorality of letting Hamas maintain its rule over Gaza. We cannot let the ugly pictures that will show up in the media in the coming days, weeks, and months cause us to demand Washington stay Israel’s hand as it roots out Hamas and its affiliates, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and, likely, retakes control of Gaza.

Already, people like Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., are already calling for the U.S. to use our power to restrain Israel. Even senators who clearly don’t hate Jews, like Massachusetts’ Ed Markey, have started calling for the injustice of a fake “peace” already. Thankfully, President Biden has more moral clarity than they do, but his co-partisans are likely to exert pressure on him to change course. The more the horrors of war appear on television, the more strength they will have. It is unlikely that Israel will allow itself to be restrained, given what they’ve just been through. Still, a supportive United States allows Israel a free hand to conduct the war as they see fit, within the confines of the IDF code of ethics. The world did not attempt to tell the U.S. how to respond after 9/11, and we should not do that to Israel. Instead, we should work to ensure that America leads the world in support for Israel, encouraging fickle European allies not to waver.

We have to maintain moral clarity. While it is fashionable now to engage in moral equivalence and to deny the existence of good and evil, doing so is wrong. Hamas is evil. Israel’s response, as they go to war against evil, is just.

And there is no alternative.

Thoughts on the North Korea situation

Watching the current situation unfold on the Korean peninsula, it’s hard not to think, “We’ve been here before,” or “Been there, done that..” While it’s always a dangerous idea on anyone’s behalf to ratchet up tensions in that corner of Asia, this seems particularly the case now, with Donald Trump in the White House. However qualified Mattis is, Trump has the final say on what happens, and he is dangerously inexperienced.

With that said, here are a few thoughts on the Korean situation.

1. As evil as the regime is, its collapse might be worse than its existence, at least currently. Reports of gulags that make Stalin’s look like Disney World, concentration camps, mind control practiced by the state, the mass rape of women and children; all of these things are of course horrifying, and should make any person of goodwill tremble with indignation. The regime, which has the Orwellian “Democratic People’s Republic” as its name, deserves to be destroyed, morally speaking. But thinking pragmatically, we have to ask what could replace it. Were the Pyongyang government to collapse, the meager system of public distribution still in place would disintegrate, probably causing even wider starvation than is currently being experienced. Collapse would mean that the few nuclear devices Pyongyang controls would likely vanish in the chaos, probably to be sold by whoever obtains them to the terror group offering the most hard cash.

Collapse would throw the region into chaos. A refugee crisis, potentially bigger than any other, would erupt. No one can predict what millions of fleeing North Koreans would be met with at China’s border, and South Korea would have no way to handle the flow.

2.The North Koreans will not start a war, at least not on purpose. The regime thrives off of confrontation and anti-Americanism, mixed with anti-Japanese rhetoric and outright racism against non-Koreans. The Kim family has long held itself up as the defenders of the Korean people against an evil outside world dominated by “American imperialists.” With the collapse in the 1990s of most public services, the diversion of nearly all wealth to the military under the state’s Songun policy, and the continued immiseration of the North Korean people, this claim is all the regime has to legitimize itself in its people’s eyes. Therefore, they will constantly issue threats and make dangerous provocations, but they will not do anything that they believe will cause a war, which they know they will lose handily.

Everything in North Korea is done for regime survival: the personality cult, the mass terror, the theatrics of the Mass Games, and more are all based on protecting the standing and privileges of Kim and his inner circle. Starting a war is simply not in their interest. However, there is the potential that the dangerously insulated regime could miscalculate and do something that provokes a war.

North Korea won’t, we can be sure, lob missiles at South Korea or Japan or the U.S. We should continue any covert operations to disrupt their missile testing, but it is a waste of time to install missile defense systems against them. It is up to the leaders in Washington, Beijing, Seoul, and to some extent, Tokyo and Moscow, to make sure war doesn’t break out.

3.War would make everything worse. In some instances and places, war is necessary, our Civil War and World War II being the most obvious examples, with George H.W. Bush’s first Gulf War being perhaps another. Intervention in Rwanda by someone could have helped prevent a genocide, or at least end it sooner. A no-fly zone in Syria, while not a war, would be a military action that could be a relief for hundreds of thousands of suffering civilians. The Korea situation, though, is not one of those instances.

If war breaks out there, it could lead to some sort of limited nuclear conflict. But the nukes are the least of the potential worries; a bigger threat is Pyongyang’s conventional army, which could destroy much of South Korea more quickly than we could neutralize them.

4. Peace will destroy the North Korean regime; the U.S. should give North Korea what they (say they) want, i.e. to hold bilateral talks, though not at the dangerously legitimizing head of state level, and figure out some way to sign a peace treaty with the rogue state. This is hard, because the U.S. was never technically at war with NK; it was a UN action. The armistice agreement was between several countries, and the UN maintains the UNMIK there. North Korea purposely tries to make it impossible for a peace treaty to end the war, because, as mentioned above, their only legitimacy comes from animosity towards the U.S. They demand that the U.S. sign a treaty, and refuse to sign with the UN or other disputants. Still, the U.S. should find a way to sign some sort of treaty with Pyongyang. This will remove any legitimacy the regime has, and make it impossible for them to continue their evil existence much longer.

5. Manage the transition. Once North Korea no longer has the U.S. as it’s bete noire, the regime’s control will begin to slip further and further, until transition becomes inevitable. That is good, but, like I was mentioning above, collapse would cause untold suffering.

Once the North Korean leadership “wins,” it will know it has lost, and the U.S. and, especially, China, can begin to make changes in North Korea behind the scenes. How this happens would have to be worked out, but it would require some mutual trust and understanding of benefits between the U.S. and China. There is a lot of common interest for stability in the region.

China cares less about human rights than South Korea, Japan, or the U.S. (which, under the Trump administration, is also not that much). Still, during the transition, this is one of the things that these countries (pushed by NGOs like Human Rights watch, as well as the UN system) can begin to ensure. China has an interest in keeping the North Korean people fed, because they don’t want a refugee crisis at their border.

As I stated above, these are just a few disparate thoughts on the situation in North Korea. They are more about the general US/NK relationship than the specifics of what Trump and Tillerson are talking about, but I think they are germane. Any comments or criticism are welcome, of course.

Image: Kids searching for food in North Korea, via Wikimedia Commons.

Aisha points to a peace movement in malaise

Most people have now seen the cover of the August 9th issue of Time magazine, which depicts a portrait of Aisha, the 18-year-old Afghan girl who had her nose slashed off by Taliban butchers for the “crime” of fleeing her husband’s abusive family. But while the atrocities alluded to by the photo are repugnant, the response, or lack thereof, from much of the “peace movement” has been a close runner up in its wantonness.

What responses have been forthcoming seem to imply that much of the peace movement has morphed into a sickly, jaundiced figure; a sad shadow of what it once was.

For example, an article by Daisy Hernandez in Colorlines, through bizarre twists of logic, suggests that the picture “obscures the horror of war,” and “conforms to an aesthetic beauty we’re familiar with from women’s magazines.” Hernandez goes on to compare the article unfavorably to an exhibit on war photography at the World Erotic Art Museum and agreeably adds that critics “are accusing Time of exploiting Aisha to gather support for Obama’s futile war in Afghanistan.”

According to a letter co-signed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, the cover is “outrageous, pro-Afghanistan-War propaganda cover art” produced by a managing editor campaigning “for his outrageous pro-war spin campaign.” (Never mind that the managing editor said he was not explicitly in favor of the war, that he wanted only to add the plight of women into the conversation!)

Most of the rest of the left has been silent.

But really? You’ll have to excuse me if, when I see a terribly butchered woman on the cover of a magazine, my thoughts don’t immediately turn to hatred of some U.S. imperialist war machine or the western bias of women’s magazine aesthetics. You’ll have to excuse me further for taking a little while to feel a terrible awe that this monstrous cruelty could be inflicted on anyone, especially someone so young.

Is this what the left has been reduced to? The left, which purports to stand for the rights of the individual, for freedom from, among other things, the brutality of sexism? Let’s be clear: a woman only eighteen years of age—a young woman who, in different circumstances would be looking forward, maybe starting college—fled a forced marriage out of a fear for her life. When she was found, her in-laws cut off her ears and Taliban supporters slashed her nose from her face.

The left are opposed to the war. People get that; we are not dealing in rocket science when trying to figure out how the peace movement feels towards U.S. policy in Afghanistan. But what does become confused and muddled is whether or not anyone really cares about the fate of women like Aisha. It certainly doesn’t seem that they do when articles denounce the editor of Time before they denounce the Taliban.

There are good points valid to the national conversation on the war that the left can insert. Time’s editors were trying to get the conversation on women’s rights, and how the war affects them, going. Instead of calling the national newsweekly warrior filth, mightn’t it be better to jump into the conversation? Left organizations on the ground, like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, make these points all the time. To them, the religious fanatics and the U.S. occupation are twin evils, but the former won’t be destroyed before the latter leaves. But what would these heroic women fighters say to comfortable Americans who fret about how Aisha’s hair was styled?

It shouldn’t be hard for the left to make a clear and concise argument against the Afghan war, as RAWA does. But those “peace” forces—and you can’t really honestly call yourself a peace force if you don’t speak out against the mutilation and subjugation of women—who ignore the plight of Aisha; who after viewing her disfigurement very quickly move on to the subject, as Hernandez does, of whether or not her hair was put into a “western” style so as to curry favor with American men—are destroying the context in which the left can fight for peace—and be proud while doing it.

Put simply, if you’re going to oppose the war and be taken seriously (by people other than the racists who merely don’t want to spend money defending brown people), you need to answer the question posed by Time: what does happen after the U.S. leaves?

And you have to come up with a satisfactory answer.