Optical Illusions

I remember when I was growing up….my mom’s National Geographic would come in the mail and I would pour over the photos. Over and over. I felt mature and intelligent and really felt like I got a whole story. Without reading any of the words. Without knowing any of the facts.

Today, even “grown ups” are mesmerized by the manipulative optics of a media machine fueled by terrorist lies and propaganda. “Context” (such a disturbing word since uttered by the three stooges of Harvard, Penn and MIT) and facts mean nothing.

And so we have a huge swath of the world obsessed with blaming Israel for Gaza, with a simple calculus of “war = evil” instead of reality which is “evil must be defeated by good…through war.”

You don’t have to like that basic human reality, you don’t have to support war, but that is how the world works, unfortunately.

Al Qaeda blows up NYC (evil). US goes to war (good). 440,000 civilian casualties inflicted by the United States in its War on Terror…but no one counted. Why? Because it was a war on terror.

But when Israel fights the same war, observers conveniently forget the terrorist rampage that sparked it all. And all eyes are fixated on one (inaccurate) number provided by Hamas itself. 34,000.

So, without any horrifying photos and videos of the unthinkable massacre and human atrocities that struck Southern Israel on 10/7, I want to present a tiny fraction of the optics I saw on Kibbutz Be’eri, seven months into the war and after every drop of blood was cleaned off the walls and floors.

Do not forget how all this started.

Thousands of Palestinian terrorists flooded Israel during a ceasefire with the sole intention of killing, kidnapping, raping, pillaging, terrorizing and destroying as many people and their homes as possible.

1200 savagely murdered in the most unfathomable ways, 250 kidnapped, 1000s left physical injured for life, a nation’s soul torn, an entire people broken.

Optics. These are the ashes. Don’t blame us for rising from them.