My dear friend, professional colleague, and soul brother Rabbi Steven Pruzansky recently published an article that “beat me to the punch” on themes I express below, so I have to share some credit here with him for what I am about to write. But I wuz gonna write on it, and I of course will say it my way.
Imagine you are about to seek high office, and a sprightly 100-year-old guy applies to be your campaign manager. You ask for his credentials, and he shares his resumé. It is quite impressive: He was chief presidential campaign manager twice for Adlai Stevenson, years later for George McGovern, ran Gary Hart’s primary campaigns in 1984 and 1988, then guided Michael Dukakis, and finally moved to the GOP, where he was presidential campaign manager first for John McCain and then for Mitt Romney. He also took on a smaller campaign once, guiding his client to a landslide victory as Chief Dog Catcher of Anytown, Delaware.
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Well, you might think, this guy really has been around the block in the big time. A lifetime of experience on the highest level. And then it might occur to you: But this guy has not won a single race in the past 80 years, except that one Caninite conquest.
Would you take campaign advice from this guy, even if he still had the comparative youthful exuberance of a quinquagenarian?
I think of that analogy as the likes of Joseph R. Biden (D-Burisma) and Antony Blinken consult daily with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, offering Israel their American ideas on how to conduct the war against Hamas-ISIS in Gaza.
Consider that America has not won a single war (except Grenada) these past 80 years. We did not win the Korean War. Nor the Vietnam War. We made an absolute mess of Iraq, after saving Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Amid George W. Bush’s idiotic belief that America could imbue an Arab Muslim society with Western values of democracy and fundamental freedoms, America destroyed a Dream Conflagration that saw Saddam and the ayatollahs embroiled in a potentially Eternal War. For eight glorious years, from 1980–1988, 500,000 Iraqis and Iranians killed each other at a combined cost of $1 trillion (and that was when a trillion dollars was worth a trillion dollars). And then Bush ruined it, leaving both warring sides focused on hating us instead.
We have made a mess of practically everything we have touched the past 80 years, culminating in our recent disgraceful exit from Afghanistan and now our eternal stalemate in Ukraine. America, once great, simply does not know how to win a war anymore.
George Washington knew war demanded total surrender, and he got it from Cornwallis. Actually, Cornwallis was so humiliated that he did not show up on the day of surrender, leaving it to Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara to give up, while Cornwallis claimed to be home with a cold. Our George snubbed the Brit right back, having his second in command, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, accept Cornwallis’ sword. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant knew what it took to win the Civil War. Teddy Roosevelt knew. Harry Truman knew. You bomb the daylights, smithereens, and oxygen out of the enemy if nothing else does it, and you do not stop until you have them begging to give you total victory.
You pay lip service to the “rules of war” and the Geneva Convention, but you do as your opponents do: You disregard the rules if they do — and they always do — even as you officially claim to honor them, and you fight to win. Your goal is victory, not a “humanitarian pause” or a “ceasefire.” You do not make your boys, who are willing to give their lives for your flag, crazy.
How many “innocent German civilians” did we kill in World War II? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
How about 2 million?
And how many “innocent Germans” did we expel from their homes and leave as homeless refugees?
That is how we beat the Nazi Germans. Not by Geneva Convention rules. We flattened Dresden and other German cities. And how much did that hurt us with the survivors, the future generations of Germans?
They emerged grateful to America and adopted American-style democracy. They have been our allies ever since, for nearly a century.
Ditto the Japanese — on steroids: Hiroshima. Nagasaki. What does the Geneva Convention say about that? “Do you think, Mr. President, if we drop those bombs on the Japs [the contemptuous language spoken in those years at that time amid war], we might accidentally also hurt mothers and children?”
Did anyone ask that of Harry Truman? And if they did, who doubts what he would have responded — and probably did? A six-letter word that starts with “F” and ends with “m.”
And how much did the Japanese eternally condemn us for it? Japan adopted American-style democracy and became our tightest of Asian allies, going on a century.
That is how you win friends and influence people: by bombing them to smithereens when they dare lift a finger against you and draw first blood. That is how America became great the first time around: not by worrying about Geneva Conventions or United Nations Human Rights Councils led by the likes of Iran and Cuba, but by never drawing first blood — and pulverizing anyone who does.
The Geneva Conventions and Protocols in place today were reached after World War II in 1949. And what else happened after World War II in 1949?
America stopped winning wars.
It is not righteous to play by rules that the enemy does not honor. It is evil to sacrifice one’s own boys’ lives on an altar to a fake morality that does not exist, a “global morality” that is neither global nor moral. The enemy hides behind civilians, leveraging them cynically as human shields. For example, the headquarters of Hamas-ISIS are located in Gaza tunnels under a hospital. They figure Israel never would strike deliberately at a hospital.
Biden and Blinken are counseling Bibi and his military staff with the wisdom of a country that has not won a single serious war in 80 years.
In the biblical Book of Genesis, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam begged G-d Almig-ty to spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah if 10 righteous people could be found there. Notably, he did not ask G-d to spare those cities for the sake of the children and women, but for the 10 righteous. And there were not even 10 righteous to be found. Can you name a Mother Teresa who has emerged in Gaza? A Father Damien of Molokai? A Thomas More?
It is false morality to cry for the children of Gaza killed inadvertently while Israel targets Hamas-ISIS murderers and, as collateral damage, unavoidably kills Hamas’ human shields. A war must be won. Hamas-ISIS never ever will rest until it eradicates Israel and drives the Jews into the Mediterranean, fulfilling the murderous mantra of Rashida Tlaib, censured by the House of Representatives: “From the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, [fictitious] ‘Palestine’ Must Be Free.”
In six wars since Israel handed Gaza to the Arabs scot-free in 2005, allowing them to build a heaven and haven if only they so had desired, Hamas-ISIS repeatedly has reminded Israel that Gaza concrete and steel will be devoted to building rockets and grenades, missiles and attack drones, and a national underground tunnel network aimed at destroying Israel. The billions in cash they have received from Qatar, the European Union, and America over the past two decades has gone to financing their terror network and employing some 40,000 full-time murderers living in those tunnels, all training to murder Jews and destroy Israel. In 18 years, they never built their own electric grid or water system.
It is a corrupt and perverted mindset to encourage allowing one’s own boys to die so that “the world” may “admire” that a country fights with tohar ha-neshek (“clean armaments”), in accord with Geneva, while the enemy slaughters peace activists at trance dance raves, rapes girls both living and murdered, butchers babies, cuts off heads, and cuts open living pregnant women to tear out and stab their fetuses and then burn both fetus and women, even while alive.
Any body count that emerges in Gaza is moral — whether 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 — as long as Israel does not wantonly target civilians. But if civilians fall as human shields to a Hamas-ISIS that hides behind hospitals, schools, residential apartment buildings, ambulances, and such, so be it.
Back during the Holocaust, as emigrating European Jews desperately tried finding haven in the Americas, a Canadian immigration agent was asked how many Jewish refugees his country would be willing to admit. His response: “Even none is too many.”
That’s how many of her own boys Israel should sacrifice on the altar of the Geneva Accords and Protocols of 1949 while exterminating Hamas-ISIS.
Rav Fischer’s memorable two televised debates with a national leader of CAIR, the leading anti-Semitic Arab Muslim body in the United States, can be found here and here.
