Shabbat shalom!
Despite the insane headlines spinning our heads this week like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist, I am choosing to ignore the national embarrassment of the petulant children in the Presidential playpen as well as the threat of Bibi’s coalition collapsing under the weight of 50,000 IDF draft notices sent this week to eligible Haredim. Instead, I want to talk about the war in Gaza.
Anyone who follows this blog understands my deep and profound dislike of Nut-and-Yahoo and his radical right sycophants who are willing to sacrifice the soul of the country for, among other things, using food and aid as leverage and a tactic to get their hostages back and to defeat the existential threat posed by the Hamas jihadists.
This week, the anti-Israel lame stream and social media have been piling on incessant reports that there were three successive days of the IDF “massacring” Gazans queuing for food provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the new aid distribution center operated by the US and backed by Israel.
Most of those claims have been debunked by the available evidence which is tricky since there is no real reporting by independent journalists coming out of Gaza. Most western news organizations rely upon Hamas as their sole source of information, hence they become a willing platform for the Hamas propaganda machine that spews out more lies than the orange turd.
Think about it: It is in Israel’s best interests to make the GHF aid delivery process as successful as possible, as not only will it ultimately be more efficient in delivering aid directly to those in need but, more importantly, it bypasses the Hamas middlemen and prevents them from reselling the aid at inflated prices and using the proceeds to finance their war machine as well as control the Gazan population. Clearly, whoever controls the aid distribution process, will ultimately control Gaza. Hence, Hamas is desperate to stop Gazans from obtaining this newly organized aid because it has the capacity to destroy its power over the population. Desperate to avoid losing that control, Hamas has been provoking gun battles with the IDF and then claiming these are massacres by Israel of those queuing for food. These reports have been uncritically regurgitated by the Western press, who, lacking other sources, continue to channel Hamas propaganda out of pure laziness, and/or anti-Israel bias, which has been on continuous display since October 7. You don’t need any more evidence of Hamas culpability and lies on this matter than what Hamas political leader, Osama Hamdan, said just the other day, “We trust that our people will endure hunger and not extend their hands to the occupier asking for aid.” Not that we needed it, but more evidence of Hamas using the civilian population merely and only as fodder in achieving their jihadist goals.
But I don’t want to get into the weeds on who did what to whom in this ongoing saga of horror and inhumanity. And, I have no illusions regarding the morality of Israel’s defensive war against a death cult that states outright real genocide intentions to eliminate the Jewish homeland and exterminate Jews. For those like Pierce Morgan who react emotionally to the current Israeli surge in Gaza and it’s sad and horrifying impact on civilians with “not this”, we should recall leading urban warfare specialist John Spencer’s comment that “even if we were to take Hamas’s casualty numbers at face value—which we should not—Israel would still have one of the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in any comparable war or urban battle in modern history.” And, “to judge wars solely by casualty ratios is to hand a blueprint to every terrorist organization on earth: embed within civilians, provoke a response, inflate the death toll, and let the world do the rest. It would make lawful self-defense functionally impossible—especially for democracies.”
That doesn’t excuse the way Israel and the US have botched the rollout of the new GHF aid delivery center, a move I believe is strategically important for Israel to achieve its war goals. As any systems person will tell you, a best practice in the roll-out strategy for any new and complex system is to pilot them in a smaller representative part of the organization, make whatever adjustments are required, then roll out the system to the rest of the organization either in a “big bang” approach, or in phases geographically or functionally. This is considered a “best practice” for managing the risk in large system implementations.
Clearly, Israel has not incorporated any of that thinking in their roll-out of the new GHF aid distribution process. Maybe they were too rushed. Maybe they didn’t think about or care enough about the risks. Whatever the reasons, the plan and its execution was a bust. As an experienced systems guy, I would have advised them to maintain the existing delivery system while piloting the new process in parallel, then converted the old process in a planned phased approach. Instead, Israel rushed a big bang approach without a pilot program and the consequences for Gazans and Israelis has been nothing short of disastrous. Two million hungry Gazans are forced to travel long distances in dangerous territory to just four centers located in the South, and are subjected to Hamas harassment leading to avoidable deaths of civilians. Other fallout from this boneheaded rollout plan includes: continued condemnation of Israel by the global community, one of the GHF leaders quitting, the consulting firm, BCG, who advised them on the new process pulling out, and now, a pause in the delivery of ANY aid until the GHF can make adjustments and get their shit in order. Even worse, the outcome has helped ignite an atmosphere of hysteria and incitement in which the cause of “Free Palestine” and “End Zionists” — the slogans shouted by an Islamist who last Sunday tried to burn Jews alive when he firebombed a weekly march in Boulder, Colorado supporting the Israeli hostages — has led directly to murderous attacks against Jews across the US and poured gasoline on the burning anti-semitic fires raging around the world. It feels to me like Diaspora Jews now constitute the eighth war front in this horrifying never-ending nightmare.
This is bigger than Gaza
The war in Gaza is a theater of profound human suffering. The images are searing: bombed-out buildings, children pulled from rubble, aid trucks stalled at border crossings, mothers cradling lifeless bodies, and entire neighborhoods turned to dust. There is no just war without tragedy, and Gaza today is tragedy at scale.
But to understand this suffering in a vacuum is to misunderstand it entirely. The devastation in Gaza is not an accidental byproduct of Israeli aggression. It is the result of a brutal and cynical calculus made by Hamas—a jihadist organization that embeds its fighters in civilian areas, uses hospitals as command centers, and schools as weapons depots, all while launching attacks that deliberately provoke overwhelming retaliation. Hamas has no intention of building a peaceful, prosperous Gaza. It thrives on martyrdom, misery, and manipulation. It has hijacked an entire population and turned it into both a shield and a weapon.
Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre—where Hamas militants murdered 1,200 people, raped women, mutilated corpses, and kidnapped babies and Holocaust survivors—must be seen not just as retaliation, but as an existential necessity. No country on earth would tolerate such an atrocity, nor could it survive if such acts were repeated. For Israel, surrounded by hostile actors and isolated on the world stage, allowing Hamas to persist would be a death sentence.
But this war is not just about Israel.
Jihadism, of the sort practiced by Hamas, is a global phenomenon. It is not merely a reaction to poverty or occupation; it is an ideology—fueled by hatred, empowered by religious fanaticism, and committed to the destruction of Western values. It is the same ideology that brought down the Twin Towers, that tortured Yazidi girls in Iraq, that butchered concertgoers in Paris, and that executes gay men in Iran. Hamas is part of that same ideological hydra. It doesn’t just seek to liberate Palestine; it seeks to annihilate Jews, eliminate Israel, and expand a theocratic caliphate.
That’s why it’s especially chilling to hear activists in the West—many self-described progressives—chanting for a “global intifada.” This isn’t a call for peace or justice; it’s a call for violent uprising. Intifada, as history has shown, is not a metaphor. It is a real-world campaign of terror—bus bombings, stabbings, shootings, and suicide attacks. For people who pride themselves on being anti-racist, anti-fascist, and pro-human rights, the embrace of such language reflects a moral inversion so severe it borders on parody.
Meanwhile, a growing list of nations—including Spain, Ireland, Norway, and most recently South Africa—have thrown their weight behind demands for an immediate ceasefire. Some are doing so out of humanitarian concern. Others may be driven by geopolitical calculation, or domestic political pressure. What unites them is the belief that ending the war is more urgent than defeating Hamas.
The desire for peace is noble. But peace without the disarmament of Hamas is a pause, not a resolution. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power is a promise of future wars, more civilian casualties, and the further entrenchment of an ideology that glorifies death.
To defeat Hamas is not merely to restore Israeli security. It is to strike a blow against a broader jihadist threat that endangers not only Jews in Tel Aviv, but metro riders in London, theatergoers in Moscow, and cartoonists in Paris. This is not a war of choice; it is a war of survival—against a death cult that has mastered the art of weaponizing civilian suffering for Western outrage and diplomatic pressure.
It is also a war for civilization itself—against a worldview that pits religious conquest against secular pluralism, death against life, oppression against freedom. That Israel is asked to fight this war while observing a moral code its enemies deride as weakness is a tragic irony—but a necessary one. Because if Israel abandons that moral code, it loses what it is fighting to defend.
The moral challenge, then, is not to end the war at any cost. It is to end it in a way that ensures this war does not need to be fought again. That means Hamas cannot survive. And if Gaza is ever to know peace, it must be freed not only from Israeli bombs—but from the tyrants who invite those bombs in the first place.
No decent person wishes for the horrors we now witness daily. But no decent civilization can survive by surrendering to those who commit them deliberately.
Be safe out there everyone.
Brad out.
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