The war in Israel has officially begun its second phase, which includes ground incursions into Gaza.  This is happening amid pro-Palestinian protest in Europe and even at American college football games.  In America these protests are largely from fools, simply too stupid to know right from wrong.  Americans are largely recognizing it for what it is and the consequences are most likely a major restructuring of our university system.  But in Europe they involve the large Muslim and Arab populations that Europe has imported over the last few decades to make up for its own declining birth rate and that is a little scary.  In Russia, full blown pogroms are being attempted.  Within such a situation are the ingredients for a widening war.

This has way, way too rapidly descended into ethnic/religious conflict.   People have already forgotten or are purposefully ignoring the atrocities that occurred October 7.  (Watch this and tell me if you can ever forget.)  There are now unconfirmed reports, albeit from reliable sources, that amongst the rubble in southern Israel, first responders found a baby, baked to death in an oven.  This is deeply evocative of the concentration camps of WWII, likely purposefully so.

That in the face of atrocity and rumors of atrocity this has become of conflict of identity is the most frightening development possible.  A world void of morality, with conflict defined wholly by identity, is a world of constant, unresolvable war.  If there is no right and wrong, if there is only my side and your side, conflict may wax and wane but there can be no clear-cut victor or vanquished, only conquerors and conquered.  The conquered will always be seeking to become unconquered.

But leaving aside issues of morality and looking purely at geo-politics, Erdogan in Turkey (A NATO ally?) is starting to make pro-Palestinian hints, if not full noises.  Netanyahu’s speech linked at open makes plain that Iranian involvement is real and confrontation is not outside the realm of possibility.

Even without the Ukraine/Russia conflict, and the continuing Taiwan threats, we are in a precarious circumstance wherein regional conflict could quite easily erupt into world war.

In both the world wars we learned that the horrors of industrialized war.  I truly hate to contemplate such a war energized not by geo-political conflict or morality, but by ethnicity and religion, for such is the energy that turns the horrors of war into the atrocities of concentration camps and attacks like October 7 on a far more massive scale than we have already witnessed.  The thought of nuclear weapons in ethnic conflict is something I deeply wish I could banish from my mind.

This is so easy.  There is right and there is wrong.  There is no point-of-view that can justify the atrocities we have witnessed in southern Israel, there is only hate, or madness, to motivate them.  This makes “choosing sides” easy in this one.  Otherwise, you side with evil and large-scale destruction becomes a very real possibility.  Even if you hate Israel, surely you do not want to be evil or encourage such destruction.  Unless you are just an animal, like these people.