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ALPERN AT LARGE - One can despise, deplore, and decry Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu alike, and with many excellent reasons to feel that way, but neither of those two are placing Jews throughout the world in harm’s way.
That’s the province of the Left, who are now becoming glaringly obvious as the truest danger to Jews throughout this nation and throughout this world. And the Left does it with everything from educational malpractice to K-12 and college students, and it also does it with a gaslighting campaign of revisionist history that’s breathtaking in scope.
The United Nations, despite all of their lip service, suffers from many if not most of their leaders to favor the end to Israel—and too often a “two state solution” and “free Palestine” is just code for “From the River to the Sea, Israel shall cease to be.”
Myriad votes against Israel, while giving its violent enemy neighbors a free pass (even putting them on human rights committees!), in the United Nations proves this.
UNICEF? What we all grew up with (I was a big fan of donating as a kid and young adult) with those cute cardboard orange Halloween boxes we used during trick or treating? Laden with antisemites and Jew-haters and foaming-at-the-mouth Israel opponents (and, by extension, Israel’s Western allies).
The hand in hand involvement of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) with the 10/7/2023 massacre, for which much if not most of Gaza remains defiant and unyielding in its support?
Apparently, despite all the news-spinning and gaslighting, it does appear that enough UNRWA employees were involved with planning (if not carrying out) the 10/7/2023 violence, that the UNRWA, UNICEF, and virtually all of the United Nations have as much credibility as Al-Jazeera as a thoroughly unreliable source of information.
Ditto for Academia, where universities are fighting tooth and nail to keep and bring in more Jew-hating, violence-promoting foreign students and professors who clearly are thinly veiled, if not openly speaking, advocates of violence against Jews here and abroad.
And if the citizenry of U.S. and Europe tells its government and universities to rein in the violence (which goes hand in hand with a white-hot, seething hatred of Western nations, influence, and culture), then THEY (the citizenry) are the haters.
Do the United Nations, Ivy League schools, the usual majority of Legacy Media, and even our own local University of California academic institutions demand every Hamas-held hostage be released, and condemn those Gazans who still support Hamas?
Of course, not—because such a condemnation would imply that Gaza and Hamas brought the Israeli response on themselves, and that the repeated lost opportunities to create a Palestine have led to self-destruction and terrorist pariah status of those who identify with being Palestinian since Israel’s creation in 1948.
There’s a reason or ten why those of us who EXPERIENCED the nightmares of intifadas, constant terrorist attacks on Israeli and Western civilians, the disruption of the Munich Olympics, the failed Oslo Accords, etc. are DONE with not only Hamas but their supporters.
Why don’t Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia want to take in those who identify with being Palestinian from Gaza? Ditto for Lebanon and most of the rest of the region—it’s not just resources, it’s the violent Leftist attitudes (similar to the ruthless Leftist regimes of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Un, and Fidel Castro) of too many Gazans that terrify them.
But to win a war—and especially a war laden with UN-supported media misrepresentation of the facts, and a savvy Hamas social media/You Tubing of terrorists acting as innocents—one has to recognize that:
WAR…IS…HELL, and that ISRAEL…DIDN’T…START…THIS.
Did Netanyahu let Hamas do this on his watch? Is Netanyahu corrupt? I daresay it’s hard to say no to either question, based on what I’ve read and seen about Netanyahu over the past ten or more years. But even his enemies recognize Netanyahu as the one leader who will unleash the war we’ve not wanted for decades.
Former Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could be accurately accused as all sorts of human rights violations (some of you who remember the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon), but he pulled kicking and screaming Israeli settlers out of Gaza to create a proto-Palestine.
Then Gaza became a left-wing, ruthless, oppressive, terrorist state, and it’s hardly unreasonable to question if a fully independent West Bank would become another such terrorist state.
Hence the Labor Party, which once dominated Israel’s moderate center, has declined dramatically while the “right wing” Likud Party now dominates Israeli politics.
Hence the 10/7/2023 Hamas massacre was the first major pre-2024 campaign event that led to the dethroning of United States Democratic leaders who previously dominated Washington politics.
But the final major leader of Hamas is dead, and after months and months of nightmarish misery, and now the virtual certainty that terrorism and violence won’t put food on their tables (or wherever they now eat), Gazans are finally and increasingly done with violence and Hamas:
The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s poll reveals that most are opposed to Hamas disarmament, and do not believe that a full hostage release will end the Gaza War…but half support anti-Hamas demonstrations, and half want OUT of Gaza.
In other words, there is still support for a two-state solution, but support for armed struggle is DOWN among Gazans…which means that, as with all wars, violence is sometimes the only hellish option to convince a pro-war culture to stop being pro-war.
Just like in Germany, and just like in Japan, during World War II. We in the U.S. blame ourselves about the civilian bombings in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and as well we should…but the question of whether or not we had a better option, or if it was the right thing to do in the long run will eat away at our souls forever.
As it should. WAR…IS…HELL.
Israel and the U.S. are going alone, WITHOUT the U.N., to feed the Palestinians, and make sure that Hamas will NOT steal the food and allow the truly innocent (or surrendering) Gazans to eat and start the necessary and long-overdue rebuilding of Gaza.
President Trump—bloviating gasbag that he too often is, will take on Columbia, Harvard, and all the other Ivy League centers of Left-Wing antisemitism (including those strange Jewish academic leaders who think it’s just groovy to promote violence against Jews, and think it won’t affect them and their families).
And Trump’s efforts will very likely have a favorable outcome among Jewish (and non-Jewish) voters in the U.S. Ditto for taking on the media and fighting to kick out threatening foreign visitors who do NOT have the “right” to be here.
(Remember when the late President Jimmy Carter kicked out all the Iranian students because they were security threats in the 1970’s?)
It’s hard to believe that President Donald J. Trump was inaugurated less than six months ago, but he’s going nowhere, and ditto for his Cabinet.
This is War. The Left wanted War. The Left got War. The Left is acting stunned and shocked when it got the War they started and wanted so very bad.
But the Left sooner or later had to galvanize the rest of the nation and world, particularly so because the horrible events of 10/7/2023 in Israel, and more recently the slaying of Sarah Milgram and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, D.C. will NOT be the last of civilian-targeted acts by the Left against Jews (and Christians, to boot).
But just as the innocent and beautiful Sarah Milgram was shot dead by nearly 2 dozen shots fired at her as she crawled away, wounded by her assailant’s first fiery assault, those other Jewish civilians will find no mercy against the Leftists who are so irrational and seething with hate as they flee for their lives.
Yet Jews are, and will increasingly find, those “awful right-wingers” to be the one group who still care for their safety, and will find them to eschew violence while demanding defense.
We will all have to figure out, in our own time and at our own pace that the KKK-like and Nazi-esque figures threatening the peace and innocent lives come now from the Left (while we should despise and fear no less anyone who promotes violence and who claims to be from the Right).
At this time, the “alt-Right” is as moderate as it’s ever been, and “the new Left” is as radical/crazy as it’s ever been. This is not a truth I wanted or expected, and I suspect most honest liberals (including JFK Democrats) feel the same way.
But if this is a War we didn’t want—and we (“we” being conservatives, independents, moderate liberals, and centrists) really did NOT want it—it still remains a war we must survive…and WIN.
(Kenneth S. Alpern, M.D, is a dermatologist who has served in clinics in Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties, and is a proud husband and father. He was active for 20 years on the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC) as a Board Member focused on Planning and Transportation, and helped lead the grassroots efforts of the Expo Line as well as connecting LAX to MetroRail. His latest project is his fictional online book entitled The Unforgotten Tales of Middle-Earth, and can be reached at [email protected]. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Dr. Alpern.)
