Putting a Gun to Everyone's Head

Stop Crying and Start Thinking

The pro-Hamas people justify October 7th by citing a freedom fight. I will never align with them, but it’s important to understand that their position emerges from a clusterfuck of information—true Palestinian suffering mixed with fake news and propaganda. A crucial feature of this concoction is what has not been included in the recipe—Palestinian terror and their multiple rejections of statehood, etc. But I don’t want to address any of these details today.

What I want to zoom in on is the strategy of Hamas and the Islamic Republic.

Even before Israel invaded Gaza, I told everyone that Hamas had already upped their advantage in the real war. People called me crazy. But Israel has the military strength! If they really wanted to commit genocide, they actually could!

Gaza is a pawn. While real blood spills on actual soil there, the larger goal of eradicating Israel and killing all Jews living there and around the world, is served. This is why Hamas took hostages. Hostage taking ensured physical war with Israel.

Without hostages, one could make a strong argument against any invasion of Gaza. Retribution is a weak moral position. (Of course, going into Gaza revealed a terror network far worse than anyone could’ve anticipated, including tunnels leading into Egypt, but it’s the hostage crisis that necessitated a military response.)

No country can abandon its hostages. I’ve heard Americans argue they would, but I think they’re living in fantasyland. I hope they never get the opportunity to prove their pacifism.

Moving on: Why would Gazan leadership ensure a bloody battle in a densely populated urban area that would inevitably bring death and human suffering? Anyone familiar with the ideology of Islamist jihad knows why. Apparently, many Americans and other global citizens remain unfamiliar with this ideology.

The New York Times published an opinion piece by a medical doctor who recently dedicated time in Gaza. Quotes from other such physicians are included in the piece, which I will link to below. Any accounting of a war zone is going to inspire our empathy and a desire to make the bleeding stop. (Although this doesn’t seem to apply to the Israeli deaths, including the Druze children who died by way of Hezbollah in the north.)

The challenge of a piece that triggers our tears is that it also shuts our minds. While everyone is crying, is anyone thinking?

The doctor claims that Gazan children were shot in the head. People are outraged. But does anyone wonder: Who shot them?

It’s a good question, especially when we remember that Hamas lured Israel into a battle that would inevitably kill members of its population.

With permission of writer Emily Kaplan, I’m going to share what she has written in response to the NYT opinion piece. Note that Kaplan’s area of expertise as a journalist is not the I/P conflict, but please do check out her past work featured across a plethora of the most highly acclaimed news outlets.

That most of the clearest critical thinking I find nowadays when it pertains to Israel comes from smart writers who are not employed/hired by mainstream media outlets as I/P journalists is perhaps a testament to the entropy our democracy faces here.

Click this for the link to the NYT opinion piece, which is still being debated in the news cycle. Here is Kaplan’s response to the op ed:

I’m so fucking exhausted.

The fact that the NYT published this is a massive failure of journalistic ethics and likely amounts to propaganda for Hamas, a genocidal terror group that tortures its own people, steals billions in aid while leaving its people to starve, and uses women and children as human shields to maximize civilian death in its only goal: eliminating all "infidels" across the globe in a quest that starts with, but certainly does not end with, the Jews.

The piece describes in shocking, gruesome detail the fact that many many children in Gaza have been killed by being shot in the head, which is unspeakable and 100% unjustifiable.

What this piece does NOT answer is *who did the shooting.* (And this is, along with the fact that it wasn’t fact-checked, explains why it was published as an op-ed—there is no world in which this passes muster as reporting.) This CAN and MUST be investigated.

The fact is that Hamas’s strategy has been to maximize civilian casualties from day 1, relying on Western humanitarian outrage—along with profound ignorance of geopolitics and near-universal antisemitic bias— to win the war of global public opinion. (What else would be its strategy in starting a war it knew full well it could not possibly win militarily?)

Hamas has been documented shooting Gazan civilians trying to evacuate and recover stolen aid. It murders political dissidents (which is also why there is no freedom of the press in Gaza, which means that any Gaza-based journalist is at the very least approved by Hamas, if not—as has been uncovered in multiple instances—an active member of the terrorist group.) Unlike in every other recent conflict—Syria, Ukraine, and now Lebanon—Gazans (except the most wealthy and well-connected, who can pay the $10K-per-person bribe to the Egyptian government) cannot become refugees; Hamas has trapped them above ground (while its leaders hide themselves and the Israeli hostages they are torturing) in underground tunnels. And all this while refusing to sign a ceasefire agreement.

To put is simply: Every death is a PR victory for Hamas, which Hamas knows extremely well and uses to its monstrous ends.

In other words: shooting children in the head—or putting them in harm’s way so that they are—is 100% consistent with Hamas’s strategy and conduct; it has every incentive to do so, and knows full well that Westerners have not fully gotten into their heads that this is an organization that *celebrates* and *aims for* death.

It is also true that, even aside from the obvious moral obligation to minimize civilian death—which the IDF has been remarkably successful at in this war, especially in light of Hamas’s strategy—the IDF has every incentive *not* to kill Gazan children, especially in this brutal—and discoverable—way. These incentives include not revealing soldiers’ positions to, of course, legal penalties and international censure.

The writer of this op-ed, who has published factually inaccurate pro-Hamas and anti-Israel statements elsewhere and regularly elevates the voices of lunatics like Briahna Joy Gray, knows full well that readers will assume that the IDF committed these crimes—because what group does this to its own people?

While it has been documented there have been rogue IDF officers committing war crimes—and that Netanyahu is extending this war for his own cynical and demented reasons— there is simply no evidence that the IDF is executing children routinely, or certainly as a matter of policy. It is an outrageous, baseless implication with zero evidence—and there IS much to suggest the alternative. Publishing this is an outrage.

Thanks for reading.

xoxo Jen xoxo