Evil Never Keeps Its End of the Bargain

Really, I’ve had enough. Haven’t you?

Where to start.

Both Hezbollah and Iran keep bombing Israel, aiming especially for civilian sites. But the mass media in the West and Iran only blame Israel for fighting back. In fact, as part of their tried-and-true playbook, Iran immediately tried to blame their refusal to open the strait of Hormuz on Israel’s self-defensive actions for this very reason.

Only Trump is accused of “making it up as he goes along.” Iran? They keep changing, no doubt lying about what was agreed to at the proverbial midnight hour, as well as reneging on every promise--but this is not widely enough, or ever, called out for what it is.

Shia Iran’s mullahs are duplicitous, devious, far beyond heartless.

However, only Israel is being accused of committing “war crimes” in “occupied” Lebanon, and both America and Israel have been accused of such “war crimes” in Iran. However, Iran’s forcing their own civilian population to act as human shields on bridges, etc., to fend off further bombings and as shaming propaganda. This is not being widely described as a “war crime.”

Iran’s proxy army in Gaza, Hamas, has been using civilians as human shields for decades. Doing so has not been considered a “war crime.” No. Like 10/7, it is framed as an act of “resistance.” Only Israel’s attempts to dismantle Hamas’s heavily fortified and weapons-stashing tunnels are viewed as “war crimes” and, more famously, as alleged “genocide.”

What do I know? I read every site I can lay my hands on, watch every channel from far right to far left, read and consult with my superiors in the military arts and sciences and in counterterrorism, draw on my own experiences and on considerable research and writing--and yet, I still am not absolutely sure about what’s going on in rooms where war and peace are being decided.

Anyone who insists that they “know” is, at best, poorly informed or something of a Party Line fool.

I know something about double standards. (See above.) I know something about psychology and about brainwashing and a few things about the Muslim world.

What I published yesterday drew some ire. Good! That’s when you know that you’re over your target--yes? But a writer cannot please everyone. Lord, how well I know that.

For example, an Iranian woman, with whom I’ve worked, was shocked--shocked!--that I, of all people, would dare to generalize about the Iranian “character.” But so I did. Psychologists Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm, Nuremberg psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, and psychoanalyst Alice Miller all led the way as did anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, whom I was proud to call my friend. In doing so, I am standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yesterday, a kind and selfless American feminist from back in the day was deeply disappointed by my apparent support for America and Israel’s war against Iran. Am I just another war-monger? She asked me to reconsider my position.

I have long held that women cannot genuinely be “pacifists”--at least, not until they have mastered the martial arts and have been trained in both weapons use and in combat. Then, and only then, if they refuse to defend themselves--as both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. chose to do--as a public, political strategy I might respect their demands to oppose even a just war in self-defense. I would not join them, but I’d recognize their position as valid--for them.

But I wonder if most women who are mothers would refuse to fight a predator who is in the midst of kidnapping or assaulting their child. I rather think not.

As I’ve written before: One cannot trust “deals” with fundamentalist, fanatic Jihadists. They have been trained to fight, kill, and die as martyrs for the sake of Allah and in order to survive and even prosper in rigid, sadistic, and totalitarian regimes.

They have also been trained to make a temporary peace deal but only in order to rearm so that they can live to fight again.

Israel has been learning this lesson for many decades--long before America finally decided to fight back in the war that Iran has been waging against America (“The Big Satan”) and Israel (”The Little Satan”).

Last night, I watched a haunting short film up on Chai Flicks about the hidden Jews in Mashhad. Did my disappointed-in-me Iranian colleague know that in 1839, after Muslims stormed the Jewish ghetto, burned synagogues, and murdered Jews, they forced the surviving Iranian Jews to convert to Islam, who were then known as “Jadidol-eslam.” However, Jews had to live in a ghetto, practice Judaism secretly, were not allowed to pay for something with coins that their Jewish hands had touched--no, they first had to drop the coins into water to cleanse it from their Jewish flesh. When it rained, Jews were not allowed out because the Muslim Iranians believed that if the rain had first touched a Jewish body, it would contaminate their pure Muslim bodies. But matters worsened in Mashhad, and Iran’s Jews fled to Herat in Afghanistan, where they could practice Judaism more openly.

However, alas, Herat was only a temporary haven, and many Iranian Jews fled back to Mashhad and on to Turkmenistan, Russia, Palestine, and America. By the 1920s, the Afghan King Nadir Shah held Herat’s remaining Jews hostage and took over their (and the Afghan Hindu’s) enormously successful businesses as traders and bankers. (I know this because my Afghan then-father-in-law became one of the three principals in the new National Bank--for Muslims only.)

The Mashhadi Jews of Herat were reduced to lives of squalor. Jewish women had to be veiled when and if they left home. Even the emancipator King Amanullah, and after him, Nadir Shah, and his son, Zahir Shah, were all pro-German; by the 1930s, Afghanistan was in league with the Nazis. In fact, Afghanistan sheltered Nazi fugitives after the war. Eventually, Afghanistan’s Jews managed to get out/were allowed to leave.

Please allow me to recommend Sara Aharon’s most excellent book titled From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States. Well, you might as well also read one of my books, An American Bride in Kabul, in which I also discuss this subject.

Our Jewish hero Esther in Shushan, ancient Persia--who saved the Jews by winning the King’s favor--has been long gone, and for at least the last three centuries, Iranians have been Islamic supremacists and deeply, deeply anti-infidel, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh. Please also allow me to recommend Manda Zand Ervin’s book The Ladies Secret Society: History of the Courageous Women of Iran.

Once, there were 80,000–100,000 Jews in Iran, living mostly in Teheran, Isfahan, and Shiraz. After the Islamic revolution in 1979, about 10,000–15,000 Jews remained. They keep a very low profile. I wonder what their lives are really like now. Unsafe at any speed, I’d suggest--but that was true for Iranian Jews before America and Israel finally fought back in Iran’s 47–48-year War against the West.

As we say: It starts with the Jews--but never, ever ends with us. Now, all Iranian civilians, all Middle Eastern Arab civilians, all American citizens, diplomats, humanitarians, and soldiers in the region are also under a pitiless Iranian siege.

I wish that the Western media would focus on the use of civilian hostages for fodder/propaganda purposes as the war crime that it is.

I wish that more people would understand that both good and evil really do exist in this world of ours and that appeasing evil only makes the price of freedom from evil that much higher.