The World's One-Note Violin

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

At mid-week, our war with Iran shows no sign of waning; in fact, it seems to be quickly engulfing the whole region as Iran has struck targets in and/or belonging to Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Cyprus, Oman, Jordan and even the UK, France and Germany.

Why attack the Gulf monarchies and even part of Europe, we might ask, and indeed most of us have asked?

One explanation is posited by renowned military analyst Dr. Lynette Nusbacher in her own invaluable substack, General Offensive! General Uprising!

Though each of them has a different perspective on this war, she and the brilliant Haviv Rettig Gur seem to agree on one overarching point:

Two separate wars are being fought by Israel and the U.S., despite their alliance.

Two different geopolitical chessboards are in play here.

I included Haviv’s in-depth explanation of this in Monday’s newsletter, but for those unfamiliar with it, he presents a very persuasive case that the U.S.’s motive in going to war with Iran has to do with the latter’s role on the international chessboard in which superpowers China and America are struggling for dominance.

Russia and Iran are in China’s corner. Indeed, Iran is cravenly dependent on China for its survival at this moment, because Iran is the sole buyer of the export that represents its lifeblood: oil. And because Iran can be trusted to slavishly do its bidding, China has been fortifying it lavishly as a military base so that, working in concert, they can eventually strangle U.S. trade within the Strait of Hormuz (the narrow waterway through which 60% of the world’s oil passes every day) by allowing only Chinese ships to avail itself of the corridor.

In the clip above, Lynette posits that Iran has made the counterintuitive move of attacking the assets of so many different countries in order to drive home to said countries that the U.S. is putting them at risk and refusing to protect them. In her view, Iran is trying to reel these countries into China’s corner.

Of course, you’d never have an inkling about any of this while wading through the cesspool of public discourse on social media and in comment sections all over the internet.

Nearly everywhere you turn, you hear the same tiresome drumbeat of blame the Jews.

The consensus is that Netanyahu jerked Trump, with a short leash, into Israel’s war of expansion and wanton aggression.

The popular slogan on the far left right now is Hands Off Iran.

Here’s a taste of the absolutely typical drivel you can find on sites devoted to this topic:

It’s been 300 years since we’ve seen any instance of Iranian aggression, fam. She’s been innocently and peacefully minding her own business the entire time. She didn’t wage a war for Israel’s annihilation via her amply funded, trained and armed proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis. That was a figment of our imagination.

She hasn’t sought Death to America and Death to Israel above all other aims for 47 years. She never took American hostages; she never underwrote the murder of U.S. service members, she didn’t finance and orchestrate October 7th.

It’s all been the fever dream of Western and Zionist hyenas.

The propaganda and groupthink dominating the left is in some ways even more insidious than the same on the right.

It reminds me of something I’ve heard Black Americans say about racism from the Republican south vs. the Democratic coasts.

I’ll never forget something a Black poet living in Portland, Oregon said at a reading I attended. She said, “Portland is the most aggressively white supremacist place I’ve ever been, and I’ve lived in the deep south.”

I’ve thought about that remark for years, along with other similar sentiments I’ve heard many times. The general idea is that deep southern racism, or far right racism, is straightforward and overt, without pretensions of being otherwise.

Whereas progressives are fanatically devoted to cloaking themselves in virtue, and their racism is covert, genteel, and sublimated — availing itself of liberal camouflage and plausible deniability.

The comment sections beneath Fox News are riddled with misspellings and the crudest of commentary. Trump’s base is proud to be his cult and they don’t pretend to peruse news sources outside their savior’s designated ones, his State TV.

Whereas the left and the Academy are eloquent. They talk a great game. They throw around pseudo-intellectual buzzwords, tout their own extensive scholarship, and sound knowledgeable. Generally speaking, their view of the Middle East is laughably shallow and overwhelmingly steeped in falsehood.

But they present well. They fill the comment sections of respectable and prestigious outlets with their own grammatically correct and coherently-written propaganda.

Beneath an article about the war in the NYT yesterday, I skimmed the first 30 or so comments and literally 8 out of 10 of them expressed opinions like these:

All Israel’s fault, as usual. The Jews are why Americans “go without healthcare, cannot buy a home, pay their rent or get food stamps”.

All that has nothing to do with billionaires evading taxes. Nothing to do with an American oligarchy stacking the deck in favor of their own undreamed-of wealth at the expense of everyone else’s survival. Nothing to do with Citizens United allowing corporations to rewrite the rules of our economy in their own favor, or ten thousand other factors.

It’s the dastardly Jews.

On another note, and as a quick aside:

After Monday’s newsletter, some readers were left with the impression that I wholeheartedly approve of this war, even though I explicitly said my feelings about it were complicated and I knew there was nothing noble or “liberation-minded” about Trump’s motives for undertaking it.

So let me reiterate: my feelings are complicated.

I see all too clearly how this situation is like fuel poured onto the antisemitic dumpster fires all around us.

I’m inexpressibly proud of the way Israel has decimated so many terrifying enemies threatening her with annihilation, but I live in terror of the Jewish nation overplaying her hand, flying too close to the sun.

I despair — just as much as any other sentient creature with a heart and a soul — over the horrors of war: the innocents killed, the lives destroyed, the disastrous effects on the planet.

My response can’t be distilled into anything remotely as simple and serviceable as “approval”.

I was only making the point, again, that most of our cohort on the left are having an uncomplicated response to this war — and I don’t know many Jews who aren’t grappling with all the facets of it in a very different way.

Okay, fam.

I’ll be back with you on Friday on a more uplifting note, or at least that’s the plan.

Much love and fortitude in the meantime. Take care of yourself out there.

Am Yisrael Chai.