Discover more from Martin Hackworth - Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I
Last fall, just after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, I wrote the following:
On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist terrorist group, Hamas, brutally attacked civilian targets in Israel from the Gaza Strip. This was a barbaric action with no justification, notable more for its cruelty than the achievement of any military or political victory. It seemed designed specifically to cause indiscriminate suffering for political purposes. In that, at least, it has succeeded.
I am not a die-hard, security-at-all-costs supporter of Israel. I think that there are many legitimate grievances in the Middle East involving many parties spanning at least two millennia. It’s a complex situation. But the correct response to a political grievance isn’t to murder teens at a music concert, rape women, and kidnap or kill infants.
What happened in Israel on October 7 is a reminder that evil does, in fact, exist. Deliberately killing, maiming, and kidnapping innocent civilians for the offense of merely existing is unambiguously evil and wrong. I’m pretty much against all of that in every conceivable circumstance. I think that most decent people are.
There is little that’s particularly difficult to discern about the facts at hand here. There was nothing in the political situation between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza that warranted such savagery. This attack was designed to create a narrative that Hamas knew they could eventually control, given the current worldwide fascination with the oppressor vs. victim paradigm.
Hamas knew that Israel would respond with an overwhelming show of force to their attack. In fact, they were counting on it. Their reckoning was that they’d suffer an initial hit in terms of both publicity and tactical standing in the Gaza Strip, but that the long game would benefit them thanks to the status of victimhood granted to them by much of the media, the UN, and their supporters, who’ve gained sway in liberal democracies around the world.
Hamas understood that memories are short, that news cycles have a never-ending appetite for new controversy, and that their supporters would be vociferous, if not particularly well-informed (see the protests on many college campuses). By upping the ante with the original strike and then using civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields for military targets, they knew that they’d be able to create outrage over the collateral damage that was bound to occur when Israel attacked.
The last thing that one hears about any controversy is often the most persuasive. Hamas was counting on the fact that long after the headlines about the initial attack had faded, they’d be able to exploit daily images of suffering and death among ordinary Palestinians in Gaza to bolster their cause. This despite the fact that they and they alone were responsible for the current suffering in Gaza through their own actions.
Hamas cynically (and cruelly) judged that martyring their own innocent civilians was a reasonable price to pay for sticking it to Israel.
Gen-you-wine Cassandra stuff, that. Also from last fall.
This week, Israel began their long-anticipated invasion of Gaza after Hamas murdered over 1000 people in Israel on October 7 in a barbaric act of terrorism.
Despite the fact that I see this horror as a clear act of terrorism, I’m almost positive that Israel’s stated objective in their current response, to eradicate Hamas, is folly. Don’t get me wrong, I get the desire for retribution, but I think that there’s room for some reason in how to go about it.
Using the current tactics, for every person the Israelis kill as they level Gaza, ten more terrorists will rise to replace them. It might feel good to turn Gaza into a parking lot, but it’s an ineffective response if stopping future acts of terrorism is what the Israelis are actually after.
I’m also concerned that this may be the beginning of a wider conflict that has its roots in the Middle East but may spread rapidly around the world. There is a reason that the United States has not one but two carrier battle groups in the eastern Mediterranean, bracketing Israel.
For what it’s worth, I think that a better solution would be for the Israelis to flood the tunnels that Hamas has been using, something that would be easy given the proximity to the Mediterranean and Israel’s expertise in moving water around, depriving Hamas of much of their military capability, and then quietly use special forces to eradicate everyone who had anything to do with October 7.
There is a precedent for this. Following the attacks in Mumbai, India, on November 26, 2008, by Lashkar-e-Taiba militants operating out of Pakistan, India's leaders, including prime minister Manmohan Singh, took few overt revengeful actions, instead using special forces to quietly eliminate the terrorists. This restraint ensured that world and domestic opinion in Pakistan turned against the terrorists and their sponsors. Singh took a temporary hit in popularity at home, but his decision proved to be correct.
Now, one might think that I should invoke the curse of Cassandra more for the latter prediction than for the former, but that’s not so. You see, somewhat like the pompous, lawfare-toting Joe Biden flunkies using angst about the rule of law to trample the rule of law have forced me to defend Donald Trump, those assaulting Jewish students and faculty at Ivy League schools and across the United States are forcing me to get off the fence and express my full-throated support for Israel.
Also, a mea culpa. I no longer think that using special forces to surgically target Hamas or flooding the tunnels in Gaza would have worked. Hamas is clearly focused on using the conflict on the ground in Gaza not for military gain but to ignite a clash for hearts and minds (if you can call them that) around the world. Hamas would have adapted to Israel’s every attempt to keep the conflict low-key, as they proved by constructing military facilities under a hospital, and we’d still be where we are today without the current degradation of Hamas’ military capability.
Hamas’ PR strategy appears, at least for the moment, to be working, but I think that the veneer of success will ultimately prove pretty thin. In the fullness of time, I think that Israel will succeed in rendering Hamas inert as either a significant military or political force. I also think that news cycles, being short and fickle, will move along after a time to the next manufactured outrage. In the end, Hamas will actually be hoisted on their own petard and Israel’s strategy will be vindicated.
I’m pretty sure that the reason that Hamas thought that all of this would work is that the rest of the world, especially our geopolitical foes, view us, based on our government, academic institutions, and media, as gullible and stupid. It’d be an easy impression to get.
Consider Katherine Maher, the controversial, newly-appointed CEO of our state-supported national radio. She’s a shameless walking advertisement for the conceited, brain dead sophistry and postmodern lunacy of the woke left. I’d be contemptuous of us if I thought that she represented us too.
Formerly reputable newspapers like The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal are, these days, more filled with tripe, like stories on celebrity tequila and how supermodels adapt to life after divorce than with fair, intelligent, and substantive discussions of conflicts in the Middle East. And when they put the Middle East events in the headlines, it’s as likely to sit atop an article full of blatant propaganda as actual news.
Our once-excellent system of higher education, not so long ago a source of international envy, is now as sorry as our media, perhaps even more so. You only need to look at the blatant, insufficiently challenged antisemitism that is currently on full display on Ivy League campuses to understand the extent of the rot wrought by DEI-obsessed, Marxist-inspired leftists in higher education. Not a single Ivy League president or administrator, allegedly the cream of the higher education crop, seems to possess the wherewithal or guts to be able to enforce existing rules governing conduct that’s clearly out of line.
Of course, wherewithal or courage aren’t actually the issues. The administrators at these institutions have made conscious choices to selectively police speech and the ideals they represent. I ask you to imagine what would happen if, instead of keffiyehs and anti-Semitic slogans directed against Jewish students and faculty, a group showed up at an Ivy League campus to confront the pro-Palestinian protesters with masks and anodyne “OK’ hand signs. They’d be labelled white supremacists, for sure, and probably end up in jail.
As anti-Semitic protests spread to campuses across the country, it’s instructive to understand the intellectual vacuousness that is propelling young people to shout slogans about things they know almost nothing about and physically confront fellow students. It’s relatively easy to be manipulated by charismatic snake oil merchants into a misguided cause when you are young, impressionable, and foolish. That’s why religious organizations and others of their ilk want to get to minds when they are young. If you give someone enough time to develop a mature ability to reason, they are less likely to end up in airports trying to entice others to embrace crazy shit after the gift of a flower.
In this case, the snake oil merchants are progressive faculty and administrators who have gotten away with steadfastly practicing free speech for me but not for thee for decades. College campuses, like many newsrooms, are no longer places where free and robust debate is prized as an important tool in the pursuit of truth. Instead, these places are now dominated by woke nonsense: assaults on merit, microaggressions, safe spaces, hurtful ideas, oppressor narratives, and enforced by cancel culture that’s almost exclusively weaponized at anyone not onboard with DEI and it’s Marxist ancillaries.
I direct your attention to the Statement of solidarity with Columbia University students from Princeton faculty and staff, an unintentionally funny screed that could almost be the script for a Monty Python routine were it not for the fact that it was drafted and signed by university types not generally known for any overabundance of humor. It’s an incredible read. My favorite part: “We vow to withhold our academic labor from Columbia and Barnard (emphasis mine), not to participate in conferences and other campus events, and not to collaborate with university institutions until such time as the administration has met these demands and demonstrated its commitments to upholding the well-established norms of unrestricted scholarly inquiry and academic freedom.”
Gee, can we get that commitment, all by itself, in writing?
Notice that the humanities and various “studies” programs are vastly overrepresented among the signatories to this piece of work. You could lower the high cost of college and productively address the student loan debt crisis by eliminating most of the academic units from which these intellectually unserious nimrods hail, and actually improve the quality of higher education in the process. It’s called addition by subtraction.
What Hamas and those of their ilk fail to understand about this country, a failing shared by large swaths of our own academics, government, and media, is that most of us are not like any of these idiots. The majority of Americans are reasonably bright, fair-minded, and hardworking people who embrace traditional American values. Those of us who did not come here from somewhere else in pursuit of the American Dream had ancestors who did. We want to make the world a better place, and we want to accomplish this through leading by example whenever possible.
Has our history been spotless? No, it has not. We are not at all unique in world history in that regard, either. But name me another country in the 11,000-year history of slavery that sacrificed more than half a million of its citizens to free slaves. Name me another country that sent generations of young men off to fight wars far from home to defend the liberty of other freedom-loving people around the world.
And when one of those generations of young men, the Greatest Generation, saw for themselves the ugliness of racism, fascism, and socialism through the lens of war and chaos, they came home and somehow managed to make the greatest experiment in democracy that’s ever graced the earth, our country, even better.
So yeah, Israel, I’m with you. You are us in your part of the world, minus the woke baggage. You are progressive (in a good way), welcoming, tolerant, peaceful when left alone, and devoted to the rule of law. Your military is ruthlessly competent, and I have little doubt that they are prosecuting the campaign in Gaza against Hamas as professionally as they can. Be steadfast in your cause and prevail.
It’s not your fault that Hamas decided to FAFO.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.