The Hospital...

 

I don't want to talk about the hospital.

I don't want to talk about the ****ing hospital.

I don't want to talk about the )(*&%*&$&^%#&&^%)*)_(*&_(*% hospital and you can't make me.

I don't want to talk about the hospital because you all dont want to hear it. This issue slimes everyone, and if you're honest with yourself, you all know why. One side cries crocodile tears about their hospital while blowing sick people to kingdom come, the other cries crocodile tears about sick people getting blown up until the sick are Jewish. One side claims that attacking hospitals is necessary while doing no due diligence about whether their government might sometimes lie about it, the other side claims hospitals are hotbeds of innocent victims while never stopping to wonder: 1. why would you ever protest for a side whose government uses their sick as human shields? 2. Is the medical staff of these hospitals complicit? Are they deliberately using their patients as bait?

The Israel/Palestine conflict infallibly exposes the rot in every person's morality, present company very much included, and the more outraged we get, the more gullible demagogues will find us.

As awful as this hospital attack was, the moral questions tell us nothing that we didn't know already. If you're pro-Israel, you're seething at the hypocrisy today, if you're pro-Palestine, you're seething at the futility of opposing Israel no more than you were yesterday. What we can learn is what this attack indicates about Iran's capabilities.

Using language straight from a 1980 terrorism press conference, Iran promised a surprise that would be remembered for centuries. So clearly, this is the surprise they meant.

That means three things:

1. This is the most damage Iran is capable of doing. Don't misunderstand, they can do a lot more, but not without a response that can bring down an entire Iranian city. If these two sides had anything like military parity, Iran would be ass*ssinating similarly high up Israeli officials to the equivalent Iran officials and inflicting massive damage on Israel's weaponry. But they're not, and if they're not doing it now, they never could. Iran can't fight a war on equal terms to Israel. So instead, Iran does what they always do: they kill weak Israelis, knowing that Israel's response will likely be to kill weak Iranians. Israel kills the weak too--and you have a legitimate right to feel however you like about that, but in the case of hospitals, Israel generally kills the weak to get at the strong. In this particular case, Iranians killed the weak to avenge the strong.

2. Iran knew exactly where it needed to point its missiles in order to get the desired results: it set a target that was a hospital in Be'er Sheva, the big Israeli city furthest away from Iran, and hit the hospital with lethal accuracy. If Iran ever has a weapon of mass destruction, they could point it wherever they like and there would be no hiding behind 'we didn't mean to hit this target.'

3. In the future, Iran could hit Muslim areas of Israel/Palestine and claim it was Israel. If they do, a vast, vast segment of the globe would believe them. It could be anything from the dead center of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp to the Dome of the Rock, and the would could think Israel did it. Even if the make of missile came from Iran, people would say that Israel planted it there. So in that sense, this could be a trial run for a surprise so infamous it just might be remembered for centuries.

That's the last I'll say about this hospital business. Let's talk about happier things like global warming.