There is little doubt this has been the hardest week since the immediate aftermath of October 7th, 2023. The revelations that have come to light with the return of the bodies of Kfir, Ariel, Oded, and eventually Shiri are so shocking to the conscience that you would have to be a monster yourself to not be moved by them. We are living in a world where Hamas executed six Israeli hostages in cold blood after starving them near to death already; yet, somehow, Hamas has topped their unending capacity for evil yet again…

Another shorter letter today; I’m having car troubles of all things and need to take it into the shop relatively early. Five hundred days since October 7th, 2023. It may as well have been yesterday for all the time it’s felt like. At the same time, things are moving so quickly now that I genuinely cannot keep up anymore…

This may be the most controversial letter I’ve written yet—and that’s really saying something. Historical facts should not be controversial; but such are the times we live in. There is a man of history who was a close ally of Hitler. A despicable human being that wanted to achieve the extermination of Jews in the territory he came from. A man that led the Nazi propaganda campaign across the Middle East and North Africa to convince Arabs to side with the Axis and rise up to “slaughter the Jews”. And even after the Nazis were defeated, he never stopped trying to exterminate the Jews of Israel…

Well, that was certainly a week. There are years when weeks happen…this was a week where years happened. The title of this letter is somewhat ironic, but also a fairly accurate observation of history between any two randomly-chosen points in the timeline. The Middle East changes all the time, is what I’m saying. Some things, however, are here to stay. Israel is here to stay. Those who side with Israel are also likely here to stay: Bahrain and the UAE for example, courtesy of the Abraham Accords. I wonder who else would like to join about now…

I’m under a lot of stress right now so this will be a shorter letter than usual. It has been another week with little good news; however, that makes the little good shine all the brighter. Several more Israeli hostages have been released from Hamas captivity: Arbel Yehoud, Agam Berger, Gadi Moshe, Ofer Kalderon, Keith Siegel, and Yarden Bibas. Additionally, five of the eight Thai nationals in Hamas captivity were released: Thenna Pongsak, Sathian Suwannakham, Sriaoun Watchara, Seathao Bannawat, and Rumnao Surasak…

I have less optimism to offer today. The weight of it all is…well, you know. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably understand.

First, there is some tearfully good news. Four more girls and young women have returned home from Hamas captivity: Karina Ariev, Naama Levy, Daniella Gilboa, and Liri Albag. Their names and their faces are so familiar to me that it genuinely makes me cry to think that they are finally, finally home. The video of bloodied Naama being taken…but she is home. May they all know only peace for the rest of their lives…

I write in the early morning hours of January 20th, 2025. Inauguration day. By this afternoon, Trump will again be President and in the process of sending out a purported one hundred executive orders he has ready to go. A lot of things may be different by the time I write to you next. But as I’ve said before, domestic politics are not my wheelhouse…

They say that you can’t kill an idea. They have never met me before. Galileo ended millennia of geocentrism stemming from Aristotle’s work. The dogmatic Aristotelians of the middle ages—like the Catholic Church, for example—restricted heavily and persecuted free thinkers like Copernicus, Kepler, and most famously Galileo for daring to oppose the status quo. They turned all their considerable power against heliocentrism; yet, they eventually had to concede defeat…

Before October 7th, 2023, I often wondered how otherwise ordinary people—Germans, specifically—could get swept up in the monstrosity that was the NSDAP and eventually the Third Reich. The gradual process of dehumanization of the “other” was an incredibly devious play by Goebbels and Co; sometimes not immediately obvious. Surely, though, a good number of Germans must have seen through the lies pushed by ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ and ‘Der Stürmer’ and eventually the entire media empire of the Nazis. How did they end up goose-stepping along with the “true believers”?

For the first letter of the new year, I think it is worthwhile to reflect on what we are fighting for. Why are any of us here reading and writing and thinking on these issues? Why are we engaged in this discussion and arguing for the side we believe in, sometimes at great personal cost? Why does what we are doing here, now, matter?

A Dose of Sanity wouldn’t really be a newsletter if I didn’t do one of these. I kicked this weekly letter off on May 28th of this year. 33 editions (including some extras) later and I’m still here with no intention of slowing down. I have recorded death and I have recorded hope. Tragedy and loss mixed with what I hope has been inspiration and a little wisdom. My biting wit and anger at injustice in the world. My hopefully amusing anecdotes and sidetracks of random history.

But to take it from the top:

Has there ever been a point in human history where the trajectory of future events is more predictable? Given what we now know after witnessing the events of the 20th century, there should not be a single student of such that doesn’t understand the peril of our present catastrophic rise in antisemitism and hatred. The consequences of rising antisemitism are more than apparent in the mounds at Bergen-Belsen and the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. And it wasn’t just Jews and Roma that lost their lives to Nazi evil. Tens of millions of people died. Our entire world was fundamentally reshaped. And we did survive it to come out on top—but what if we hadn’t? It’s not a challenging thought experiment to imagine the tables turning the other way, like Man in the High Castle…

I’ve just been waiting for someone to comment on last week’s newsletter in which I went into detail on the situation in Syria and dropped a fairly controversial line: “...the leadership of the faction now controlling Syria—just across from the Golan Heights…”. Unfortunately, that edition did not get as much attention as some of my others. C’est la vie. If you don’t get why that statement is controversial, just wait…

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”…