Thank you for your interest in my philosophy of childrearing, which I usually talk about in this weekly Substack. In this special edition, however, I’m going to talk about Israel and its sworn enemies in the world, including leftist college professors and their dumb-as-nails sycophants who are hoping to be photographed as they demonstrate against the only other country that is defined not so much by geography, but by an idea.
Full Disclosure Numero Uno: I spent most of my childhood in an observant Jewish household. My mother’s second marriage, when I was just shy of seven, was to a Jewish man who assumed full fatherly responsibility for me (given that my scalawag of a father assumed none). Julius Goldberg even paid my college bills until I was married and had the resources to pay them myself. My mother converted to Judaism. I did not, but then I wouldn’t have identified with any religion at that time in my life.
Full Disclosure Numero Dos: I was a dumb-as-nails college student once, and during that DAN period, I was a visible campus activist for any leftist cause that came across my radar. I led the march against the Vietnam War on my college campus, for example. I was one of the principals in the student takeover of the Administration Building. When I use the term “dumb-as-nails sycophants” I know what I’m talking about. Been there, done that.
As I write, Israel is purging Gaza of its inhabitants. Yesterday, a hospital in Gaza was demolished by bombs, killing hundreds of people, many of whom were women and children. The Left wants you to believe Israel did it. Every fact points to Hamas. Islamists do not care about human life. They invented strapping bombs to female and teenage family members and sending them into Israel on suicide missions. If it takes murdering hundreds of sick women and children OF THEIR OWN TRIBE in order to sway world opinion to their cause, so be it.
Israel has no choice but to level Gaza – the northern half of it, at least – to the ground, making it impossible for Hamas to ever launch an attack from there again. Israel is a sovereign nation, and like all sovereign nations, it has every right to do whatever is necessary to secure peace within its borders. Do you think for a moment that Hamas would warn Israeli civilians of an impending missile strike? Not a chance.
Hamas consists of individuals who may not qualify as human. Qualities that define “human” include compassion, charity, and compromise. Hamas and other Islamic entities lack even an iota of those qualities, especially when it comes to Jews and the state of Israel.
The college students at Harvard and other formerly great institutions of higher education in America who are signing declarations that identify Israel as the cause of Hamas’ inhuman butchery are nothing but dumb as nails. I was dumb as nails once. Never again.
It’s a difficult thing to recognize and repent of being dumb as nails. It’s very difficult, for example, for an individual who passed Harvard’s entrance requirements to think of himself as dumb as nails. Highly intelligent and dumb-as-nails seem antithetical to the young. When you’re young, your self-destructive tendency is to think you know it all, that even your elders are hopelessly behind the times. Progressivism is soporific. People in hypnotic states are easy to manipulate, especially when their hypnotists have convinced them they’re part of a grand scheme to solve all the world’s problems and bring about utopia.
The innate mental sopor of leftist progressives explains, to a
significant degree, why they care nothing for facts. Nevertheless, here goes…
Israel is not the villain. It is the victim. Israel has attempted to appease the Islamic crowd. Israel has even offered land to the Palestinians, but when Israel has offered to the Palestinians – what they say they want – they suddenly no longer want it. Playing the victim is addictive. Also, what the Islamists want is not land for the Palestinians. They want nothing less than the complete elimination of Israel by any means necessary. Compromise is not in their wheelhouse. Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Iran…their goal is to kill every Jew in Israel and claim the land God gave to the Jews as their own. They will use whatever means are expedient in the pursuit of that goal.
The civilized world must never allow that to happen. Period.
Please! Keep going!!!
How can we, as parents, ensure that our children never grow up to be “intelectual”/dum-as-nails?? How can we be of more influence than idiotic/leftist/messianic-complex college professors??
John, you and I are both Americans. My mother is born in Lebanon, and my husband is also born in Lebanon. My mother is a Maronite Catholic; this is a type of ancient Christian; not unlike the Chaldeans of Iraq or the Melkite Christians of Palestine.
My husband and children are Muslims.
I have shared your work with hundreds of American Muslims through our homeschool group.
I can not disagree more with you on this issue. As an American, Israel has endeared herself to us, I can see that. Israel is not a good friend. They steal from us. The righteous Arabs have resisted Western colonialism well. They don’t want our lgbtq issues. They don’t want to create gay families that buy children through disadvantaged women, through surrogacy and other reproductive technology. They don’t want our loose women, our broken families, our matriarchy. The people of Palestine have suffered enough. They have been illegally colonized.
Even if the hospital was bombed by Hamas, does that make resistance a crime? Nat Turned was an American slave who went on an evil rampage, killing white people. Does what Nat Turner did make slavery right?
Were slaves human? Would you at least say a Palestinian can be three-fifths of a human?
Your work is too important for you to be posting this. Please remove it. Your claims are Islamophobic and Zionist, and you are neither. You are a man who has principles, and because you have not met and befriended Muslims, and they have not endeared themselves to you, you are taking an emotional stand that has no basis in the reality of what really needs to be done. Please remove this post because it makes you looks like a religious fundamentalist, no better than any American protestant whose faith in Christ is based on a hatred for Catholics.
Islam took over the region where Christ is from more than a thousand years ago. Jesus was Palestinian, he spoke Aramaic. Today’s Jewish state of Israel is a colony. Hebrew is a dead language that was artificially revived for the sake of the colony. A lot of strange parenting has come out of that nation, where a people expelled from Europe tried to rebirth their ancient ancestry. It’s weird and strange, but I see how we can sometimes befriend weird and strange people, since Arabs have resisted our friendships- because they don’t want to be like us. They don’t need to die just because they resist. They are certainly 100% human beings.