The Weight of the Tower of Babel

I’m restricting commenting to paid subscribers on this one, though it is open to read for anyone. Why? This topic reliably brings out the ugliest and most bloodthirsty fights in the comments, and I won’t host that level of vitriol. It’s not “disagreement,” it’s straight-up viciousness.

If the comments tend in that direction even with only paid subscribers, I will close the comments.

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Unhappily, it seems impossible to me right now, given the state of public discourse, to find answers to questions I really need answers to.

The topic is the war between Israel and Hamas. To my surprise, the level of hateful, over-the-top verbal fire (and friendly fire) this topic evokes goes beyond even abortion, perennially one of the most emotive subjects in American discourse.

Let me lay out my prior assumptions to you, followed by the questions beyond those:

1. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and I believe it is fundamentally psychopathic. I mean that literally and clinically. Be sure to stop, catch your breath, and read carefully for my meaning instead of what your feelings tell you my meaning is, please. Hamas is a psychopathic organization. Not Gazans, and not Palestinians.

I’ve made that clear, and I expect everyone commenting to take that on board. I’m playing fair with my cards on the table, and readers will reciprocate or they will be shown the door. That goes for behavior toward other commenters, too.

2. Israel has a right to defend itself. What Hamas did on October 7 was depraved, and something that came straight out of hell. October 7 was not self-defense. It was gleeful psychopathic rape and murder for the sheer psychopathic joy of being able to rape and murder and stream it on TikTok. Hamas as an organization should be destroyed for the good of every single human affected by them, inside, and outside, of Gaza.

3. Israel is a state. All states will have narcissistic and psychopathic actors. I am not morally elevating Israel to some higher or more Godly plane. I accept that, like any nation-state, Israel is capable of doing bad and unjustifiable things.

Now, the further questions.

1. How can I evaluate the morality and proportionality of the Israeli military response to the Hamas attack? I ask this because I do not know what numbers, what claims, what death figures, to believe.

Is the Palestinian Health Authority ever honest? Or, do they always lie and claim that the Israeli Defense Force has killed innocent civilians when that is not the case?

We see claims from them that 30,000, or 50,000, or some other number, of Palestinians have been killed. The accusation is that Israel is doing this indiscriminately, and that most casualties are civilians.

How can I know if this is true or false?

2. How can I know whether Israel’s claims—that they take great care to shield civilians, that Hamas is deliberately embedding in hospitals and civilian areas in order to force Israel to kill the innocent to get terrorists—are true?

3. How can I know whether it’s true that Israel is depriving Gaza of water and food? How can I know whether psychopathic elements in Israel are, indeed, taking advantage and committing atrocities as is claimed, OR if these claims are psychopathic lies by Hamas that leave out material facts that would put Israel’s actions in a more understandable light?

There are many other questions like this I could list, but that’s more than enough for now.

As I have contemplated these, and as I write this, I have a sick feeling in my gut. I’m feeling defensive and fearful of the reaction. In other words, these are the same fears I had as a child standing in front of my personality disordered mother, stuttering and unable to speak because I could not determine which answer to give that would keep me safe from a tirade or a beating. How do I balance my need to ask honest questions and make honest statements with my self-preservation instinct? In what way, and from what heretofore-friendly person, will I be punished for asking something in transparent honesty?

I resent this quandary. It’s evil. We should not have to do this. It’s a demonstration that we are living in a Cluster B culture.

And no, I am not projecting my own individual-to-me-and-not-at-all-applicable-to-the-world-personal-trauma onto something that’s normal. This is not normal. I am not projecting, I am correct.

Anyone who asks these questions in public knows it. Everyone (save the most enlightened Buddha-like figure of perfect self-actualization) feels these fears around these questions. I know this because I know something about human nature, and I know what people whisper to me out of public sight.

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Post-script: I am not a Christian or a believer, but I am looking for truth, and yes, I think I’m looking for God. But agnostic though I may be, no secular language suffices for the questions I have today. This is why I increasingly use religious imagery and scriptural quotations in my writing and on my show. This is why I invoke Satan, why I talk about hell, why I say the devil is abroad among us.

What faces us today as humans is so profound and so big that nothing but religious terminology can convey its weight. Whether a particular religion is true or not, the language of scripture, of revelation, and of God and the way men talk to him is the only language that captures the moral gravitas of our current state.

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