What makes a washed-up child star like Alyssa Milano think that her analysis of the Hamas-Israel war should carry any special weight with the President of the United States? What makes any of the other acting Leftists who signed the statement—this predictable crew—
—think their letter should be taken any more seriously than, say, one signed by 60 or so dog-walkers or 7-11 clerks? It shouldn’t, you know. I know lots of actors; some of my best friends are actors, really and truly. But with notable exceptions, their political views are the product of working and socializing in a bubble where there are virtually mandatory political beliefs. Most of my acting friends–“artists”–would watch an hour of MSNBC and say, “Sounds good to me!” because they lack the historical perspective or depth of understanding to challenge the woke orthodoxy of their peers and employers.
Alyssa’s screed goes off the rails immediately. There is no “Palestine.” People who elect a terrorist group to represent them are responsible for the predictable consequences. As one wag neatly put it, Hamas “pearl-harbored” Israel: that’s a brutal act of war, and demands a response that will teach the lesson forever that you can’t do that, and if you do, the results will be dire. Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields, and that tactic must never be allowed to work. Calling for a cease fire when the piper is about to be paid makes Hamas’s intolerable conduct practical. Calling for Palestinians to benefit in any way as a result of the terror attack validates terrorism.
“Unbending stand for humanity,” “Freedom, justice, dignity, peace for all people”…why not just give us a choral rendition of “Imagine”? Are the actors who signed on to Alyssa’s blather aware that the position of Palestinians still is that Israel has no right to exist, and that it has been using violence and terrorism in support of that conviction for nearly 80 years?
If the performers I know live and form their political opinions in a bubble, Sarandon, Cross, Ruffalo, Cho, Stewart, Phoenix and the rest are pontificating from a bubble within a bubble within a bubble—the acting profession, Hollywood, and California…and they were not all that sharp to begin with. Presuming to tell even a mentally cratering President that he should heed their demands is exactly like the frequent declaration of their ilk when they seek special treatment: “Do you know who I am?”
Yeah, we know. You’re actors, and don’t know what you’re talking about. “History is watching”? You ignorant statement proves you haven’t studied history. This is hubris.
Look it up.
Ethics Alarms 
I am a numbers geek. One child killed every 15 minutes for 12 days?
Well, let’s see, that would 1080 children killed by Israeli bombs.
I am not a propagandist for Hamas, but if I were and there were even a hundred dead children (let along over a thousand), I’d be laying out their bodies in that hospital parking lot and inviting the world press to take pictures.
Color me skeptical of that claim. And whilst we’re being skeptical, what is the basis for the assertion that 4000 (do I have that number about right?) people have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli bombing? Oh yeah, Hamas, the well known beacon of truth and rectitude. Hmmm.
The comic and sci-fi/fantasy book author Peter David once wrote about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He reminded readers that Native Americans had their land stolen repeatedly by white settlers; yet, if Native Americans started blowing up school buses and businesses and firing rockets into residential neighborhoods, Americans wouldn’t be calling for understanding. They’d be demanding that the government do something to stop it.
The pro-Palestinian bubble these folks exist in is one in which they do not experience what it’s like to be the neighbors of such people. It’s easy to call for peace when you won’t suffer the consequences if one side refuses to make it.
“if Native Americans started blowing up school buses and businesses and firing rockets into residential neighborhoods, Americans wouldn’t be calling for understanding. They’d be demanding that the government do something to stop it.”
Another example that might resonate with these performers thereby reorganize their thinking:
Imagine that Alyssa Milano had neighbors right next door that for past decades had been lobbing grenades at Milano and her house resulting in multiple deaths and catastrophic wounding of children, animals, and adult friends. Milano tried every conceivable strategy to halt the devastation without any lasting success. Authorities did nothing to stop the violence and instead the neighborhood repeatedly condemned all retaliation by Milano and depicted her as the villain.
The bloody challenge for IDFs is finding the terrorists in their vast tunnel system. This will most likely require assistance from civilians.
Glamour Magazine relates that its “Woman of the Year,” Millie Bobby Brown, the now grown child star of “Stranger Things,” told the publication in her feature story that she became a feminist after talking to a psychic who told her that she was a feminist at heart. She says that after that encounter she went home and Googled, “How do I know if I’m a feminist?”
Admittedly, she’s just one idiot, but this is a fair example of what passes for analysis with the Alyssa Milanos out there.
Perhaps a bit of gang-rape Hamas style, or witnessing your kids being murdered would make these folks better understand and sympathize with whatever Israel does.
My guess is they are clueless regarding the very long history of the region and Hamas tactics. Plus, it is not like this is just an isolated incident. Hamas must be crushed just like ISIS because these people live to kill. It is glory for them. Modern contemporary brainwashed savages.
Bingo, but when using the Native American analogy, which comes up a lot, its important to note that the Jews didn’t come to Israel from Mars—it was their territory before it wasn’t, unlike the Europeans in North America.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but the fact is that the area only became the Roman province of Palestine because the Romans got tired of dealing with rebellious Jews and forced them out. The Arabs, who later become the Palestinians, don’t even enter the picture for 600 more years. The idea of the restoration of the national Homeland for the Jewish people, where they would be the majority and would not live at the sufferance of others, is an idea that’s been around pretty much since that time. It even goes back to before that time to the Babylonian captivity.
The concept of Palestine as a nation, though, only goes back to 1948 and maybe a little later. You never heard of the Palestinians during the time that Jordan controlled the West Bank or Egypt controlled the Gaza strip. Suddenly Israel takes over, and hey presto, say hello to the Palestinians grieving their deep bond with their ancestral land. Palestine is pretty close to a myth. It’s not a kingdom that once existed but no longer does because it got absorbed into another entity, like the kingdom of Aragon. It’s not a nation that was great once that was later destroyed like Khwarezm. It’s just a myth attached to a name that isn’t even Arabic.
The people who put their signatures to this missive are what during the Cold War the Soviets used to call useful idiots who reflectively side with the bad guys abroad and with those who cry oppression wherever. Funny, though, we don’t see any of them leaving their comfortable Southern California bubble to go live with and aid these people they claim are such good, misunderstood people. I wonder if it’s just worthless Hollywood gaming, where it’s all about embracing the right cause so that you continue to get invited to all the right cocktail parties.
One thing is sure as hell, you won’t see any of these people ending up dead like Rachel Corrie, an American student who basically majored in leftist activism and ended up getting pressed flat because she stood in front of an Israeli armored bulldozer to protect a gang of terrorists.
The thing is, to the Israelis this isn’t all a game about who embraces the right cause or who can say what about who and receive that delays. It’s about life and death. What just happened to them was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor here, a deadly attack out of nowhere without a challenge sent. And a lot of ways it was worse, because the majority of those killed at Pearl Harbor were members of the military who could have been said to have accepted the risk. In fact close to half the military casualties or the destruction of the USS Arizona and to my knowledge, the only civilian casualties for a few Honolulu firemen who came in to render aid. This was a deliberate assault on civilians. It was a little more up close, personal, and dirty than 9/11, but whether you get incinerated in a moment or get your throat cut while lying in your bed, you’re just as dead.
I have at least some respect for principled peaceful people. For a long time a close friend of mine (until she discovered that her family was Jewish) was not just a strong advocate of the Palestinian cause but a believer that the world could achieve peace if we all just redirected military spending to problem solving and all meditated for at least an hour a day. The response to people like that is almost to dismiss them with a pat on the head and a remark that “that’s cute ” it’s nice to be an idea list, but idealism never achieved much. Maybe during the Cold War we could afford people like that since we were dealing in the launching of weapons that couldn’t be done in secret, but you really can’t afford anything like that if you know the enemy walks among you or is right over the border ready to strike anytime.
I can’t think of too many times but the United States was attacked from outside except for 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, but there are one or two others. Notably, before the United States enters into World War 1, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, what we would probably now call an “unlawful combatant,” murdered several Americans kidnapped from a train and then crossed the border and assaulted the town of Columbus New Mexico, killing 17 more Americans before the American cavalry drove him off with a loss of 100 men. Just as an interesting aside, this is the last time in history that the American cavalry would actually ride to the rescue on their horses, within a few years they would all be in tanks and trucks. We certainly didn’t let it go or call for peace, in fact we sent a rather large expedition into Mexico led by General John “Black Jack” Pershing to find Villa and punish him. Unfortunately, that expedition came to nothing, although Villa did later bite the dust.
Peace activism for its own sake really wasn’t a thing then, or, if it was, it was generally confined to rarefied types like academics and poets. Fairly soon after this Jeanette Rankin would cast her vote against entering World War 1 joined by a few other people in Congress, because she thought the first time a woman had a chance to say no to war she should, but that’s the extent of it and it would be for 50 more years. You didn’t see actors of the era speaking out against the war war popular singers of that era writing idealistic songs and doing concerts for peace.
What you did see a little bit after that was Americans sometimes joining causes they felt strongly about, like American liberals joining the Republic side in the Spanish Civil War. Some of them were or later became celebrities like Ernest Hemingway, although I’m not sure he’s someone we should aspire to be like, as good of a writer as he may have been. I think it’s a pretty good bet that we won’t see any celebrities joining the fight for palestine.. once in awhile you will see some idiots joining the fight on the wrong side like John Walker Lindh or getting involved in a fight that’s really not this country’s business, like those you who join the fight in Ukraine, but on the whole most americans, and especially most celebrities don’t stand behind their words with action.
That doesn’t apply just to war activism either, a lot of these are the same people telling us what to eat, how to travel, what we can and can’t do because it’s better for the planet, etc. Most of them don’t have a clue about any of those issues either, they are just parroting the liberal party line.
My question is, when is America going to wake up and start actually thinking things through rather than listening to what some vacuous, silicone enhanced starlet who is basically famous for being famous says? When are we going to start getting into serious analysis and thought and stop taking our cues from someone to whom it’s all a big joke until he decides it isn’t? We are getting there. Violence enablers like Chris Cuomo and whiners like Don Lemon are history. However, we’ve still got a long way to go, and we can take a step in that direction by ignoring this stupid and uninformed missive for what it is.
It was their territory 2000 years ago before it wasn’t. I’m all for the cause of Israel, but I don’t like the “ancient ancestors” argument because it opens up a dozen thousand impossible ethnic claims on “lands of ancestors” whatever that even means given that no modern ethnicity / culture group even remotely resembles whatever it thinks its ancestors were even 500 years ago….let alone 2000.
Now, admittedly, of all the world’s ethnic groups, the modern Jews come probably the closest to making the claim – and doubly so that of all modern ethnic /culture groups that have done their absolute best to live and let live in their host societies only to be rejected at every turn (violently in many cases) – the Jews *needed a homeland*.
But the arrivals of Jewish immigrants to Palestine during the Ottoman Empire was just another set of immigrants.
Palestine was a desert place of little productivity and little value. The locals were all mostly tenant farmers for other land holders.
The first Jewish immigrants there did the only they they could do – because ancient claims made no sense (as they make no sense NOW – for Jew or Arab). They *bought* land fair and square. As more Jews arrived more land was *bought*. Make no mistake – Arab land owners were willingly selling the land to the arrivals.
Now an argument can be made about the fairness of the landless Arab tenants who worked those purchased lands that were now being turned out to be worked by newly arrived immigrants. But there were already economic and modernizing forces at work drawing many of those Arab serfs to the cities anyway.
Funny thing that the Jews did with the land also – they actually got it to such a decent level of productivity and economic success that not only did more Jews immigrate to that area of the Ottoman Empire – but more neighboring Arabs moved to Palestine. Strange. They lived peacefully together.
Which is a complicating note that NO one on the Pro-Hamas side of the argument wants to discuss – there was no concept of borders among Arab peoples – Arabs living in what is today Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Iraq – all generally were free to up stakes and go somewhere else. So there’s no concept of a “Palestinian people” or a “country of Palestine”.
Sidebar – to be 100% clear – there is a Palestinian people *now*. Certainly at a minimum to differentiate themselves from “Arab Israelis” – that is, the 1/3 of Israel’s population that consists of Arabs who have integrated into Israeli society, kept their culture, and simply decided that having terroristic and murderous attitudes towards Israeli Jews was counterproductive (to say the least).
Now, Arabs and Jews alike weren’t fond of being ruled by a Turkish dynasty up north – and when along came World War 1, both culture groups assisted the British in fighting against the Ottomans, and the British made promises to both groups that Palestine would be an independent homeland for them after the Ottomans were ousted and the British were comfortable with their establishment of governing institutions.
Here’s where you start seeing the seeds of friction between the two groups – the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the Palestinian Mandate and British custodianship of the land. Two culture groups – one of which was a 2nd class citizenship in an Islamic land (the Jews) and one of which was only slightly better because they were Muslims, but still they weren’t Turks – they were people ruled by Turks. Both now stood a chance to be 1st class citizens in their own land.
And here’s where you really need to begin a real analysis of the the root causes of the current conflict. Everything that came before doesn’t really matter to the analysis.
The 2nd phase of events from the end of WW1 to the start of Israel is filled full of reasons for both sides to claim the other side behaved badly.
The 3rd phase after that consists of Israel’s birth, the initial rejection (by the local and neighboring Arabs) of a two state solution, decades of wars started by Israel’s neighbors with the goal of eliminating the fledgling state up until very recently when Israel had essentially been viewed by its neighbors as just another geo-political player in the middle east to be afforded attention and diplomacy.
This is key phase – in this phase, there no REASONABLE adult in the room who can even remotely view Israel as a bad actor or in the wrong. All nations make mistakes, sure, and all nations have to make hard and ugly decisions. But overall, Israel’s decisions were made in defense of itself.
However, there can be a great deal of reaching back into the 2nd phase to find reasons for why Israel’s Arab neighbors claim grievances. I don’t attach much weight to those connections, but I can see the claims being made – I just don’t see their validity.
During this phase we also have the aggravating factors of the US – USSR competition – which didn’t help divisions within the middle east and Israel.
We’re currently in the 4th phase (a very new phase) that doesn’t seem too distinct from the previous phase other than Israel’s place inside the middle east has been fairly normalized by all the other actors there.
Greta wants sustainable weaponry:
https://x.com/AnnLesbyPhD/status/1716614474344411530?s=20
jvb
Good lord.
Like… if you’re going to go the route of the radical environmentalist religion – then you may as well go ahead and stick with the equally stupid belief that war can just be made illegal.
I mean really – you’re espousing the batty headed idea that mankind is destroying the planet and that mankind can also save the planet – why on earth are you now espousing something that tangentially supports war when batty headedness compels you to believe war can just end!