I knew I would be writing my next newsletter on Syria even as I was finishing last week’s. I have now rewritten this intro (and title) four or five times. It is actually incredible the speed at which everything changed. I blinked and something happened, and I blinked again and something happened again. I’ll be honest: Assad’s regime collapsing in more or less ten days was not on my 2024 bingo card. It feels somewhat like the collapse of the Afghan government after the US withdrawal, or Desert Storm on the flipside. There are years in which weeks happen…

Moral panics are nothing new for humanity. Those of you a little older may recall when a bunch of unimaginative puritanical prudes decided fiction equals reality and caused an uproar against DnD and later WoW nerds for…playing a game. If anything, WoW’s cardinal sin is that it refuses to die and yield its playerbase to newer games not running on 20-year-old janky code. And who could forget the ‘Satanic Panic’ that ruined many an ordinary daycare with false accusations of “devil worship” (with prices and waitlists being what they are now, I’d bet more than a few would be fine with a little Satan on the side)…

I swear sometimes I actually do see the future. Who could have predicted that mere days after the globally-announced ‘ceasefire’ between Israel and Lebanon that Hezbollah terrorists would immediately violate said ceasefire by taking up offensive positions that had been previously used to fire rockets aimed directly at the Jewish state?

Oh wait, I already said that there’s zero chance the terrorist proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran honor any ‘ceasefire’ whatsoever. Last week I said that before the ceasefire was even announced, and probably many times in the past…

We’re back here. Again. To the worse-than-useless United Nations. If a localized earthquake could shatter that building and drop it into the Manhattan harbor, it would be a net benefit to humanity.

The hubris of the world truly knows no bounds. The audacity of Russia to insist on a “ceasefire” they know damn well their buddies in Iran and their terrorist proxies won’t honour. Not to mention their ongoing butchery of Ukraine. The ‘Axis of Evil’ is at it again, and unfortunately joined this time by the entire rest of the Security Council minus the USA. They have all already forgotten ‘Never Again’. I keep saying it, but eventually I will need to write a systematic rending of the UN and all its odious apparatus. By the time I finish, they would be lucky if they have a desk left in the building untouched by scandal and corruption. Shame on the world…

I have been at this for over a year now. From the very beginning I knew something felt off with the “free Palestine” movement. Why did it only explode in popularity AFTER the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? Why do its members fail to empathize with the victims of October 7th and the hostages Hamas STILL HOLDS EVEN TODAY? Why do they insist on gaslighting literally everything about their movement, claiming they are at varying times “pro-Palestine”, “anti-Zionist”, “anti-Israel”—but not “pro-Hamas” or “pro-Hezbollah”, even though those are the forces directly fighting against Israel and the “Zionist entity” as the charming Ayatollah Khamenei puts it. We have seen their flags flying proudly at “free Palestine” rallies. It is no secret that Sinwar, Haniyeh, and Nasrallah are “martyrs” to many of them. They proudly chant “from the river to the sea…”, which in the original Arabic is a direct call to ethnic cleansing and genocide of every single Jew in Israel: “from the water to water, Palestine will be Arab”…

Not even the President again yet and he’s already in every headline. I must say, as someone who has a literal news letter—the next four years are going to be many options to pick from. I will need to learn some additional languages though just to watch news that doesn’t involve Trump at any point, and even then it’s not a sure thing. This puts me in a predicament, because then it makes it seem like I’m becoming America-centric. Trump-centric even. No thank you. I have a keener eye for affairs outside our borders rather than within. Invariably though I will be tracking a lot of what the Trump administration does…to people and places outside our borders…

Congratulations, antisemites. You did it. An entire year of slandering the POTUS and Veep as “genocide supporters”, and this is the result. You get President Trump. Guess who doesn’t give a single capital-S-H-I-T about the Palestinians? Your (old) new President. The f——g hubris. The arrogance to think your coalition of deplorables could get away with it and still get what you secretly wanted: a Harris presidency. Now you get nothing. Let me serenade you with the sweet sounds of “I told you so”…

We are one year on from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and a targeted genocide of the Jewish people perpetrated by Hamas terrorists across southern Israel with the intent to drive the Jews out “from the river to the sea”. It is not for lack of trying that Hamas failed to achieve a ‘Judenfrei’ Israel for the first time in millennia on and after October 7th, 2023. Hamas and their ilk are genocidal antisemitic terrorists—this is simply an accurate portrayal of reality. Not a single living soul can in good faith deny what happened that day, that it left the equivalent in dead Jews of two dozen Chișinău pogroms; and it was recorded and live-streamed by the perpetrators in ecstatic blood-soaked bliss. The mindset of such monsters is impossible for us to comprehend in the relative safety of our distant liberal democracies…

There is an unbelievable amount of ignorance, misinformation, and just straight lies out there concerning the Jewish nation and people and hatred towards them both. Untangling the delusions of the masses is the great challenge for educators of our time; and they are failing. Catastrophically. So, it’s up to people like me…

Justice, thy name is Tzahal. The day of reckoning has arrived. Praise be to the IDF for finally sending (former) Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to meet his maker (which depending on your theology could very well be Satan himself). For every victim of October 7th and its aftermath, for Israelis and Palestinians both—justice has been done…

History is primary. It is the single most important factor to the understanding of existence, with the possible exception of the present. Because if you know the present, and you know the past, then based on those two factors you can predict the future.

Simple physics, right? Cause and effect. Initial position plus the force applied will result in the final position. It applies just as much to creatures such as us, complicated as we are. It applies to all of reality…

This Monday’s newsletter falls on October 7th. I have felt conflicted about writing today. It doesn’t feel right to make jokes, references to fiction or personal anecdotes as I usually do. But I will I think briefly talk about my own experience of October 7th, 2023. It changed the course of my life, which seems entirely strange as I am not Jewish nor Israeli. I didn’t lose family or loved ones on that day. I wasn’t at the Nova music festival-turned-hell on Earth. I was an entirely ordinary grad student with no intention of doing anything of great importance with my life…

“I know, you know, we believe in a land of love…”

—New Order, “The Perfect Kiss”

Rejoice, oh Humanity, for the butcher of Syria and Lebanon—Hassan Nasrallah—is no more. No longer shall he terrorize the innocents of the world at the command of his overlord Ayatollah Khamenei. Though I personally would have liked to see him tried and hanged for his many crimes against humanity, one thing is certain: he absolutely had it coming…

It’s old news by now (of course it would break the day after my newsletter), but considering that the Hezbollah pager and walkie-talkie explosions last week constituted probably the most effective singular counterterrorism operation in history, I think it’s worth contemplating how and why for anyone that may not be aware or may have even fallen for misinformation surrounding the just stunning and magnificent ‘Operation Beep Beep Motherf——’. Fog of war being what it is, I can’t tell you nearly as much as future historians will detail or probably even the Hollywood blockbuster that will follow in a decade or two. But I can tell you some…

It occurred to me after the million-and-oneth artist I know did their silly little “free Palestine” performative act, this time in song and dance. What exactly do these 21st-century clowns think they’re doing?

They live off the pop culture phenomenon of the moment. It’s not surprising to see them trying to cash in on the wave of Jew hate sweeping the world. Probably most of them are utterly clueless even as to its true nature. But the fact remains that they are siding with genocidal terrorists and fascists against the Jewish people, an unforgivable act in the eyes of history…

It was a realization I had not long after October 7th. In all the suffering, sorrow, and unimaginable tragedy of that day, not a single human being with a soul looked on without being moved to tears at the great injustice of it all. The things I saw just in the immediate aftermath will forever haunt my dreams. How could I ever forget Shani Louk…monsters among humanity took her life and the lives of so many others far before their time. They just wanted to dance at Nova; they just wanted to live peaceful lives in Kibbutz Be’eri or Nir Oz. I have such deep sadness for the suffering they endured; and such immeasurable rage…

An American is dead. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, son of Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, has been murdered by Hamas terrorists while in their captivity for over 300 days since October 7th, 2023. A victim of kidnapping, torture, and forced amputation, we cannot begin to imagine the suffering Hersh endured before he was slaughtered by the most brutal and barbarous terrorists our world has ever seen. And all for the fact that he happened to be Jewish. Words will never be adequate to express my emotion at the news, knowing how utterly devastating it must be to Hersh’s family after hoping all this time to see their son alive again. I am so angry it feels like a small star is burning in my chest. Where is justice in this life? How can something like this happen?…

There is a light at the end of the tunnel; metaphorically speaking, anyway. I make no metaphysical claims to an afterlife, much less a “good” one. But in our present reality, things will get better; so much so that the trials and tribulations of our modern catastrophe will seem like no more than troubled dreams of a past almost unthinkable. A new world and a new paradigm is just on the horizon; a world of decency and democracy, a world with strong checks on hate, warmongering, and terrorism. A world where all are if not accepted at least tolerated and allowed to live freely as themselves in an open society without fear of violence or threat. A world without dictators or despots and the wars they wage for the sake of their smallminded fantasies and compensating-for-something egos. All of these things and more are in humanity’s future; we just have to get there…

It is no accident of history that the development of systems of formal logic coincided with the development of rhetoric. Aristotle’s treatises on both subjects stood as the primary authorities in their respective fields for millennia, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with ‘The Philosopher’. While Plato (and Socrates before him) showed great disdain for the milquetoast rhetorical tricks of the Sophists, in Phaedrus Plato recognized that rhetoric in the hands of a proper student of philosophy can be a potent force for good in the world, or ‘The Good’ rather. Aristotle being Aristotle, ‘The First Teacher’ greatly expanded on what he had learned at Plato’s Academy and gave it a distinctly Aristotelian twist (peripatetic, if you will). In the field of rhetoric, he developed the familiar tripartite relationship of pathos, ethos, and logos: the three essential components of a proper rhetorical argument, and a tried and true method of persuasion through to the present day…

It is no secret that antisemitism is rising across the planet. Virtually every poll and metric available suggests a sharp increase in Jew hatred and antisemitic attacks worldwide following the October 7th massacre of 1,200 Jews and residents of the Jewish nation. Jew haters got a taste of blood that day, and they have not stopped calling for more. There are unfortunately far more antisemites in our world than I think any sane, rational person thought possible. If you had asked me on October 6th if I believed Jew hate was still a serious problem globally, my answer would have been far different from today…