A friend in another forum periodically organizes speakers to address on a variety of subjects a group of interested participants. Not long ago, a reporter from the New York Times, Mark Mazetti, spoke to the group. Here below are the organizer’s summary notes on Mr. Mazetti’s remarks:
“Mark discussed the impact of the October 7th attacks on American politics and Israel's long-term support, noting that the Israeli response is shaping American politics in ways that are not yet fully understood. He suggested that Biden's unflinching support for Israel after the attacks hurt him within his own party and may affect future U.S. policy towards Israel. Mark also mentioned a generational shift among American Jews, with younger generations being less comfortable with Israel's actions.”
My response:
IMHO, anyone - Jewish or otherwise - who is "less comfortable with Israel's actions" or opposes what Israel has done in response to the monstrous, inhuman, bloody Hamas attack on October 7th is hardly better, hardly more enlightened than the murderous satanic Hamas demons who perpetrated that attack - ripping open the bellies of pregnant women, roasting babies in microwaves and raping and slaughtering unbounded by any remotely civilized standard of behavior - even wartime behavior.
Under the circumstances, no rational person in the shoes of the Israelis would take any other position or approach than the one the Israelis have taken:
NEVER AGAIN!
While it is easy to moralize and pontificate from an easy chair in front of the TV, I'm willing to bet that no reader - or at least the great majority of readers who are intellectually, morally and spiritually sound - were they themselves and their families on the receiving end of such Godless brutality as the Israelis were on 7 October, would advocate for any other response than one ensuring these hellish demons are either permanently reduced to impotency, incapable of repeating such a heinous act, or, alternatively, exterminated from the face of the earth.
(I'm reminded here of a participant in another forum who refused to answer my challenge years ago on the subject of waterboarding. He had been superciliously, self-righteously condemning the practice as "torture" when in fact the tactic is entirely psychological and inflicts no physical injury on the subject. I asked this fellow, if he knew someone had information that would save the life of his wife or child, would he come down from his virtue-signally high horse and approve waterboarding for that person in order to save the life of his loved one? Of course, he knew he would, but he didn’t have the guts or the integrity to admit the truth.)
Anyone who thinks the Israeli response in Gaza is inhuman or excessive is no student of relatively recent history - World War II. War is hell. In the face of the merciless horrors the Nazis perpetrated against surrounding nations, and the inhuman brutalities of the Japanese in their conquest of much of Southeast Asia, the Allies were uncompromising in their demand that these enemies surrender unconditionally and were prepared to bomb both countries and their civilian populations into oblivion in order to extract such a surrender.
Remember, by the way, that, as is true with the fanatical Islamic population of Gaza, both the German and Japanese regimes had the overwhelming and fanatical support of their citizens who were prepared to - and in the case of the Nazis did - fight to the last ditch before surrendering.
In a very real sense, because of that fanatical support, the populations of those two nations were not distinct from their militaries. It was their support that enabled their soldiers to continue to resist and kill Allied soldiers. At that point, in the face of that kind of fanaticism, losing even one more Allied life was foolhardy when there was an alternative available. In Europe there was not, but in Japan there was. Only our two atomic bombs saved the lives of the unnumbered thousands of Allied soldiers and perhaps millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians that would have been lost had a traditional land invasion been necessary there.
In summary, contemplating the horrors of October 7th, the Israelis, measured by any rational, fair-minded moral standard - the sort of standard, tragically, that is in short supply in today's corrupt world - have every right to smash Hamas into the same sort of submission the Allies forced upon the Nazis and the Japanese in WW II - and decent people around the world should support them in that effort.
Torquemada