Meanwhile on the International front....

You really just compared what Israel is doing (in the wake of a terrorist attack and continued aggression against it) to Saddam Hussein and Bashar Assad.

OK.

In any case, war is ugly. There is a segment of people in this country that are absurd and living in la la land. "Israel has the right to defend itself. But not if it means violence and people dying!"

That is what war is. Nobody likes war. you try to avoid war. Sometimes you have no choice. Like when your country gets invaded, women are raped, more than a thousand people get killed and they drag hostages away and threaten to keep doing it.

Gaza is densely populated, it has a population that strongly supports Hamas, and has intesnse hatred for Jews and Israel. There were widespread celebrations of the terrorist acts on 10/7. Hamas hides among that population, and is aided by them. It launches rockets from schools and hospitals and from residential neighborhoods, essentially using people as human shields. It then feeds the external hatred of Israel by pointing to the deaths from Israel's responses. It's razy. There is no way for Israel to have prosecuted a war without at least SOME level of civilian death, but the minute the first explosion happened in Gaza, there were people externally shouting, "Murderers!"

In WWII, at least several hundred thousand German civilians, possibly more than a million, were killed by allied bombs. Nobody would have thought to suggest that the allies somehow fight a war without killing people. Wars are ugly. People die. Militaries are not inflalible. They make mistakes, they miss targets, they miscalculate in the heat of battle. It is horrible.

It's certainly fair to push Israel to try to prosecute its war with as little civilian death as possible and question whether they are doing a good enough job. But that was never what we got. Anything Israel did -- from day 1 -- was criticized as barbaric, genocidal, etc. by some people who are just nuts (or whose moral compases are whacked). Any bullshit a propaganda purveyer in Gaza released about deaths was accepted as gospel. Anything Israel says is a lie. No regard for any objective reality if it doesn't comport with what the person wants to believe.

Nobody likes war. But the focus should have been way more on what precipitated the war and WHY Israel is doing what it it is doing.

 

Those are some steel-ass balls to pull that off.

Bomb Smuggled Into Tehran Guesthouse Months Ago Killed Hamas Leader

 

Self-styled Jewish comedian who has a production company decides to go into the West Bank and do man on the street interviews. It's edited, but he says this was every single person he spoke to. It's frankly frightening.

Here are some interviews I just found with him. He says he was threatened, had to get the hell out of there and that he couldn't find anyone to denounce Hamas.

 

Iran Arrests Dozens in Search for Suspects in Killing of Hamas Leader