Anyone who responds to such empathy porn, as it appears a majority of U.S. progressives do, apparently just does not get that war thingy. See, when you put a government in charge that starts a war against a nation that it has pledged to wipe off the face of the earth and has been saying so for many generations, that nation tends not to be sympathetic regarding the fate of the people behind that attack. Nor should it be.

And yet, amazingly, I had to read through 21 letters to the editor to find a single response by a Times reader that even mentioned the reason Gaza is “rubble.” That one reads, “How different things could have been if Israel had not been attacked repeatedly by its neighbors, if the Palestinian Authority had made peace and accepted its right to exist, if Iran’s government had not funded Hezbollah, if Hezbollah did not repeatedly attack Israel, if Hezbollah had not just hidden a rocket launcher in a school just like Hamas, if readers of major newspapers actually knew the history of this region?”

Ya think? All the previous letters make it sound as if Israel and Netenyahu (“a monster,” says one) just decided to attack Gaza for the fun of it. Let’s see…after #22, where is the next letter to the editor showing any recognition that Gaza’s fate is the result of a war begun by Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, launching a surprise terrorist attack on October 7, 2023?

34! On the way to another comment not birthed in an alternate universe, I had to read John Lennon evocations, condemnations of President Trump, the usual claim that AIPAC owns Congress, more “genocide” smears, and lots of “thank-yous” to the Times for a “poor terrorists” weepy. Finally, after wading through all that, we get to a letter that says, simply,

“Do you know what happens when the government of one people invades another nation, massacres its people, and then hides its army among civilians and their infrastructure? That is generally called a war, and its consequences are brutal.”

Bingo. Yet much of an entire political party is unable to comprehend this basic truth thanks to indoctrination and historical ignorance seeded by our wreck of an education system, and years of ideological propaganda oozing into American brains from the New York Times and others.