And So It Goes
This is a little dense, perhaps, but I hope you’ll find it worth the reading. Also, if you have any feedback - comments, suggestions and so on, I’d appreciate reading what you think.
Perhaps you once become “unstuck in time,” traveling with Billy Bishop (not to be confused with the famous Canadian war ace for whom the Island Airport is named) to the planet Tralfamadore and then back to earth, just in time to be caught in Germany during WWII, when he was held in captivity in Dresden, a beautiful German city, a center of the arts, with no strategic war value whatsoever.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, maybe back in high school you read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a novel which attained cult status for its combination of imaginative science fiction and anti-war message.
When the main character, the afore-mentioned Billy Bishop, is abducted to Tralfamadore, he learns their ways and their saying about death, “And so it goes,” which Vonnegut frequently and laconically uses to comment on the atrocities of war and the death it causes back here on earth.
Billy Bishop’s character is a stand-in for Kurt Vonnegut, who, as a captured American soldier, actually did spend the night safely underground in a Dresden slaughterhouse, while above at street level, Dresden was relentlessly bombed by the Allied forces for three days, just three months before the war ended. The irony is that Bishop/Vonnegut survives within the slaughterhouse, while in actuality the real slaughterhouse is above ground, where allied bombs almost completely leveled the city, creating a firestorm which burned everything and anyone in its path.
“And so it goes.”
Today, the world gathers to inform Israel that it must not be “consumed with rage,” as said by European Union foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell, who should have seen firsthand why Israel might be feeling just a touch of rage when he visited the burnt offerings of Jewish lives to appease the Hamas bloodlust, when he saw the villages and dwellings that Hamas torched after destroying 1400 lives in the most up front and personal way, beheading, torturing, raping and butchering. Now that’s a slaughterhouse far beyond the one that sheltered Vonnegut.
But still, they should not give into rage, these Israelis. Hamas can rage, but Israel is obliged to forgo an eye for an eye. Actually, they have done exactly that: there are no stories of IDF troops raping Gazan women or pillaging and butchering. Not one anywhere, not even from the hate-fests that weekly march through American, Canadian, English and European cities calling for the annihilation of Israel and Jews everywhere. It is in those marches, Mr. Borrel, where you hear and see rage. Israel, not so much. But Israel does want to defeat its enemies, that it might live to see another day.
No matter that Israeli soldiers have taken videos of the Hamas tunnels where they made warfare, held captive the 240 innocents and committed war crimes by hiding beneath hospitals, mosques, schools and other non-combatant structures, exposing Gazans to the destruction of the war they started. As one Hamas official brazenly said, it is not their job to protect their fellow citizens, it is the world’s job.
And the world has delegated that responsibility to Israel, to protect Gazans from the danger caused to them by Hamas. That’s irony richer even than in Vonnegut’s novel. Meanwhile, Israel, putting aside its rage, has given time for Gazans to move south, to flee the bombing so that, as much as possible, only infrastructure is destroyed, has acceded to “humanitarian pauses,” yet another invention by a hypocritical world, and it has brought equipment into the Al Shifra hospital to help save Gazan children, even offering fuel, which according to a phone recording of a doctor at the hospital, a Hamas official told them to refuse.
“And so it goes.”
Still the world rages as hundreds of thousands of marchers, some home brewed in our postmodern institutions of higher learning, others imported from the middle eastern countries who have been taught to hate Jews so that it is now part of the very fabric of their being, both threatening Jews and the fabric of democracy itself. This becomes more apparent as these groups gain confidence that they can reveal their hatred towards their host country with impunity. And of course, no one any longer even pretends to hold Hamas to account.
Perhaps that’s partially because Hamas seems to excel in propaganda. Here are some statistics happily parroted by legacy media, that, when carefully considered, might give readers a different perspective:
As of the week of November 8, the UN estimated that 15,000 Gazans had fled south. This is used to accuse Israel of creating a humanitarian crisis with all those homeless, hungry people having nowhere to go, especially since Egypt only occasionally and briefly opens its Rafah border. Neither Egypt nor Jordan will take any in any of these refugees, nor will the rest of the Arab countries, thus perpetuating the crisis.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, which is not exactly a pro-Israel bastion of fair reportage, 125,000 Jews have left their homes in northern Israel because of Hezbollah’s rocket bombing of Israeli villages. As well, 60,000 Israelis have evacuated their homes bordering Gaza, being relocated in the Sinai. They have all been resettled as best as possible in this tiny nation. But apparently 185,000 Israelis dislocated, as compared to about 50,000 Gazans is not considered a humanitarian crisis. True, Israel’s infrastructure isn’t destroyed, thanks to its defensive capabilities such as the Iron Dome, which it invested in while Hamas invested in its terror/attack tunnels and rockets. Nevertheless, that is almost 2.5 more displaced Israelis than Gazans.
If and when Hezbollah launches more rockets and possibly a ground attack and reaches Tel Aviv, a mere 228 km away from the Lebanonese border and therefore a distance doable in a day by tank, maybe 30 to 60 seconds by rocket, and begins destroying this third incarnation of Israeli civilization, perhaps then it might be considered to be a humanitarian crisis. Or maybe it’ll be a case of, “You deserved it.”
According to the Gaza Health authority, eleven thousand Gazans have died in the forty days of war. This is the same organization which lied about the nine hundred people being killed when Israel destroyed a hospital. Except that it was the hospital parking lot, not the hospital; except that much fewer people died, and they were not patients, and except that it was a misfired rocket by Gazan fighter groups that did the damage, not Israel.
Yet the world is all too ready to accept those Hamas statistics as gospel. This from a world that managed to kill at least 25,000 residents of Dresden in not much more than a day or two. Even if the Hamas number of 11,000 killed is accurate, it has been forty days since Israel engaged in the war. Compared to the allies, then, Israel is a rank amateur to have killed less than half the Germans killed by the Allies who accomplished that in a mere tenth of the time. Still, highly moral people like PM Trudeau have warned Israel that the world is watching, adding that Israel should practice restraint and stop killing women, children and babies. With apologies to Joseph Borrell, our Prime Minister wins the gold medal for absurd, fatuous remarks.
And while we’re playing with numbers and the hateful killing of women, children and babies (do men not count at all in such statistics?) if Hamas were able to kill 1400 Israelis every day for forty days, they would have killed 56,000 people, the thought of which will likely bring happiness at its mere suggestion, to the hearts of those who cannot find it within their moral compass to blame Hamas. Compared to the alleged 11,000 Gazans killed by Israel in forty days, this is amateur night in Gaza.
And now that Gaza is paying for the world’s neglect that allowed, even encouraged, a genocidal impulse like Hamas to terrorize its own people and dedicate itself to the destruction of another people and an entire nation; now that Hamas might actually be destroyed and Gaza reconstituted for the betterment of all, once again come the calls for a ceasefire screamed from the U.N., from western countries, and from all those marching with Palestinian flags.
No matter that there have been three ceasefires before, all broken by Hamas. No matter that all the aid pouring in would go to rebuilding Hamas for another run at destroying Israel. Too many of the people screaming or diplomatically pressuring Israel intend just that, so that at one point in the future, Hamas can succeed in its plans to destroy Israel and lay waste to Jews “from the river to the sea.” No matter. The world will have what it wants, and it doesn’t seem to want Israel as much as it wants Gaza. Really?
“And so it goes.”