A Healthy Outrage

^{“It is important to be impatient with injustice and cruelty … There’s a healthy outrage that we should exhibit …” ~Barack Obama, The Connecticut Forum, 6/17/2025.}

My Risk

Since it appears that authoritarianism is here to stay for awhile in the USA and that writing anything in support of people needlessly suffering at the hands of another country, i.e., Israel’s retaliatory attack on Palestinians, is tantamount to asking to be targeted by Felon 47 himself, I am afraid. In spite of my American citizenship and because of my Jewish heritage, I say, like Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, I am afraid.

But, I am also brave, or so I’ve been told. Other brave souls encourage my own. One of my living heroes, for example, is Greta Thunberg, who started a worldwide movement that occurred earlier this year, the Global March to Gaza. It seems that if more young people were encouraged to do something for the world, or at least for their communities, before they enter the workforce, we’d have plenty more Thunbergs to help us regular folks out. She is a gem.

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Grounding the Issues

I am not anti-Israel. I am pro-people, pro-human beings, and a humanist. I am Pro-Palestinian.

For the most part, I don’t follow religious news. I believe that is why I picked up on this story about the conflict originating from Israeli’s relationships with Palestinians. What Israel is doing is not about religion. It’s about retaliation and, of course, violently forcing Hamas to release their hostages. To hell with diplomacy. To hell with targeting just Hamas. They want to get rid of everybody who is by happenstance in the way, Palestinian families to be exact. Their homes. Their properties. Their lives. Their very existence.

Not since the Holocaust has such a widescale attack on a specific race or ethnicity been exacted. Hamas committed the most horrifying atrocities that anyone could imagine on October 7, 2023. They did this to people, whose ancestors suffered more than any other group of humans on Earth. No one can deny that, well, maybe, except the Holocaust deniers. (Weirdos. But seriously.) The level of pain that Jews and many others must have felt to witness this denial of humanity en masse must have been excruciating.

However, what Israel is doing today to retaliate against Hamas is far beyond the pale. As teeny tiny as they are in our physical universe, they have involved themselves, and us, Felon’s America, in multiple wars. Israeli leaders and civilians need to get this warring to stop.

Before Israel’s attack on Iran, Israeli civilians were protesting their country’s decimation of its neighbors in Gaza. Not anymore. Now they are both fleeing and upping the visuals on their protests so they can get on TV. People worldwide recognize that what Israel is doing is more than just wrong. It’s criminally wrong.

The criminal in question, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s leader, and the people we know as settlers and Zionists are out of control in an area that is not Israel proper. Israeli “settlers” are not settlers at all, unless you believe that the settler’s job is to steal property. They are criminals, at least they would be in America, because squatters and thieves — folks who take over other people’s properties — are criminals here.

What Our Good Pope Opined

Pope Francis (1936-2025) was not a bad pope at all, working for peace, equity, and inclusion. According to TRTGlobal, “The Vatican … stood for a two-state solution since long before Francis assumed the papal authority … [who] was anything but reticent in expressing his sympathy towards the Palestinian cause.” Why is Israel against the logical, two-state solution?

To explain the answer to that Q, I’d have to go to the Way Back Machine and that ain’t happening here today! What I will explain is Israel’s attitude towards peace.

Polling by “the Pew Research Center in 2020 found that only one in three American Jews said they felt that the Israeli government was “sincere” in its pursuit of peace.” [Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 03/4/24.] Frankly, it is nice to read that. Non-American Jews in Israel are overall rejecting what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in their pursuit of the Hamas terrorists.

To ask, “Is Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians?” is not an anti-Semitic question. It is a rhetorical question. It is an incidence of a question being a fact, of being the truth.

Yes indeedy, Israel is in fact committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This is not their prime minister’s first crime either. It is imperative that Americans gain some understanding of Mideast politics and Netanyahu specifically. The sooner that more Americans recognize what he is doing, the sooner we can stop his criming.

His genocide in the name of Israel is horrific, so much so that it is already being prosecuted on an international level. The world needs to eliminate the leader of the scourge that is Israel’s prime minister. That is also what Israelis — who live in Israel — want. With his Gaza war in full force, there is no way that Israelis are going to get rid of him, though, unless, of course, he runs out of Palestinians to kill. Then, Felon 47 can repurpose the area for his wealthy friends and oligarchs in his goal for making this Palestinian country his Trump Gaza, where only the obscenely wealthy will tour.

As we in America know, in every crowd there is at least one idiot. You multiply that by the millions of folks here and what you’ll get are groups of idiots within stable and normal populations. That is Hamas. To be sure, they’re violent as hell, but they are nothing more. So why kill so many Palestinians just to get to a group of idiots within their population in the Gaza Strip? (Refer back to Trump Gaza.)

Since the October Massacre over 56,259 Palestinians have been killed in a densely populated area of just over two million. How many of those killed belonged to Hamas? We will likely never know, but Hamas hasn’t been the majority of the folks who’ve been killed by Israelis in what amounts to excessive retaliation or, in Israel’s case, genocide.

It has to be said that “protesters, including some Jewish groups, say that the [Felon 47] administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and support for Hamas.” (Reuters, Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Allen, 3/25/25.) That would be about right. Americans are almost daily hearing the term anti-Semitism and it all seems to be coming from, who else but, the leader of the MAGAs. Keep in mind however that this administration does this to bolster his “illegal aliens” crusade. He does it as part of his performative marketing campaign, his specialty.

Mahmoud Khalil, the protestor at Columbia University, who is finally free for good (we hope), is the epitome of what DEI stands for. He is also not pro-Hamas, as Felon 47 wants us to think. Khalil is pro-Palestinian, which is not the same at all.

Hamas is a terrorist group. Palestinians on the other hand are people marching against Hamas, getting killed over Hamas, and — unless Americans step up — will be wiped off this planet, not by Hamas, but by Israel, which is backed up by America, and by association, American citizens.

Anti-Speech USA

The United States in on an authoritarian bent these days and, with that, comes censorship of a lot more than just books. Speech is also being censored. Take, for instance, the words diversity, equity, and inclusivity, DEI. They are not illegal words but try using any of those words to apply for a grant from any government body and you’ll get nada. Likewise, Florida’s governor is actively attacking private attorneys practicing ESG, which translates to environmental, social and governance (not government but governance, by which they mean corporate governance).

How many more words will our politicians try to make culturally illegal? The answer is that the end of their attacks on language is nowhere near within sight.

Republicans are unable and veritably afraid to say any of those words. That’s why you only hear them saying the acronyms. MAGA leaders are all falling in line, yet are unable to articulate why they are falling in line with someone who called himself a “dictator.” (Felon 47 said in a videotaped interview with Sean Hannity that he’d be “a dictator on Day One” and because we all know that dictatorships don’t last for only one day, we have to call him our de facto dictator.)

Given their authoritarian personalities, they also want the rest of us to stop using words that Felon 47 deems bad. That’s language censorship.

What they are trying to do is make these good words in our language into bad. They’re doing the same with Palestinians in trying to make all of them the bad guys instead of recognizing that Hamas is only a fraction of their population, and that Hamas is truly the bad player here, not entirety of the people who call themselves Palestinians.

Israel Kills Innocents

Yes, Israel is attacking and killing innocent people in Gaza, a lot of them. That has been documented for all to see, but the USA, specifically MAGA Americans, don’t seem to be noticing any of this.

Netanyahu is a right-wing extremist by any measure; he is gung-ho on his hatred for the people of Gaza. That’s why he allows the Israeli “settlers,” as they are called, to steal land owned by Palestinian families, which of course makes Palestinians very angry, thus the rise of Hamas in their region. (Of course, it’s way more complicated than that, but this is part of the guts of the problem.) When you read the word settlers, read Israelis. In this part of the world, that is what they are.

Just last month (March 2025), a “Palestinian filmmaker named Hamdan Ballal was released … from Israeli detention after being brutally attacked … first by a mob of masked Israeli settlers and then by Israeli soldiers.” If you haven’t heard this news before, I assure you, it is happening more often to other innocents than is reported in the United States.

Exactly like Felon 47 in America, Netanyahu is apparently a criminal, who maintains his office of prime minister essentially to stay out of prison. Recently, Palestinians themselves began scouring for their courage to fight Hamas too, and have done so with increasingly public protests. MAGA Americans are not seeing that either and, thus, continue to believe nothing about the genocide going on in Gaza.

Recently, Israeli soldiers killed an American teenager. If you hadn’t heard about it, don’t be surprised. Felon 47, and therefore Fox and their ilk have not talked about it. Apparently the teenager was an American of Palestinian decent. But that’s not all.

Even children are being targeted and shot dead by Israeli snipers. Apparently the rule is two shots per child, one through their hearts and the second through their heads.

Humanity Gone

Satellite images analyzed by Al Jazeera’s digital investigation team, Sanad, show that more than half (60 percent) of Gaza’s farmland has been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks. crucial for feeding the war-ravaged territory’s hungry population. Genocide always includes the cruelty and pain of starving the victims regardless of sex and age. According to The Ledger (4/9/2025), United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “As the occupying power, Israel has unequivocal obligations under international law – including international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” … That means Israel should facilitate relief programs and ensure food, medical care, hygiene and public-health standards in Gaza … “None of that is happening today.”

The conclusion is that the USA needs to do something progressive about the genocide. Save the Palestinians.

Don’t sit back in the face of all of this information. Do your part. Show support for Palestinian civilians in any way that you can do it. I have done my part, here, in this post. Exhibit your healthy outrage. This genocide must be stopped.