Thomas Wictor

Whenever Israel is forced into a war, a well-oiled machine whirs into life. The first time I became aware of it was in 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon after the Abu Nidal Organization tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom. Although the Lebanese had been slaughtering each other for seven years at that point and would continue to do so for another eight, it was Israel’s actions that suddenly upset everyone. Despite accusations of Jews controlling the media, for some reason Israel is never depicted accurately. And now we’re getting propaganda from space.

German astronaut Alexander Gerst tweeted an image from the International Space Station (ISS). He captioned it “My saddest photo yet.” It shows Israel and the Gaza Strip at night.

Gerst also made this claim.

From #ISS we can actually see explosions and rockets flying over #Gaza & #Israel.

No you can’t. Here’s a video of Hamas rockets being intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

They’re barely visible to people right under them.

Both the Hamas rockets and the Israeli Tamir interceptor missiles are about ten feet (three meters) long. You can’t see them from orbit. Those explosions are only forty to sixty feet (twelve to eighteen meters) in diameter, invisible from orbit.

Here’s Gerst’s photo with annotations provided by Yahoo.

No, those aren’t flares or explosions. They’re a third the size of Gaza City. The Israelis aren’t nuking the Palestinians. Why didn’t anyone include a scale on this photo? Could it be that they want to mislead you into thinking you that each of those lights is an explosion? It took me five minutes to make my own scale. The red line on the left is roughly ten miles (16.1 km) long. Tel Aviv is 43.4 miles (70 km) from Gaza City, so you can see that my scale is accurate.

Therefore those are not flares or explosions. If they were, they’d be over a mile (1.6 km) in diameter.

Google Images is your friend. Put in “cities from space” and you’ll get all you need to debunk this latest derangement.

Look at this war-torn municipality, blanketed with explosions and flares.

It’s New Delhi, India. In reality nobody’s bombarding it. Is there even the slightest difference between that photo and the images of Gaza? How about this picture?

ARMAGEDDON! The entire continent is aflame!

No, it’s the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal. No war, no rockets, no missiles, no mass death. What;s happening is that they’re making whoopee the way only the Spanish and Portuguese can.

Here’s Liege, Belgium.

Nothing happens there. Ever. They all just sit around eating waffles, but from orbit their city still looks like a war zone.

That’s is, if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Once more people are trying to make thing worse than they are, and the only possible reason is that Israel is involved. And what is it about Israel that makes people hate her?

On July 21 I posted a bunch of meaningless jabber. It included a couple of exchanges with a woman who tweeted under the handle Life-loving Zo.

She wasn’t all that lovable, referring to Jews as “big-noses.” For days she’d been tweeting me, calling me old, ugly, grimy, stupid—the usual debating style of the anti-Israel crowd. So just for fun, I used my knowledge of photo enhancement to create a pretty decent portrait of her.

“I just wrote a post about you!” I tweeted her, including the link.

Guess what?

She immediately deleted her Twitter account. See? That’s how you deal with these people. Expose them and they run like cockroaches from the light.

All the angst about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is based on one thing and one thing only: Jews. It’s not inherently antisemitic to oppose Israel’s actions, but for some strange reason, it seems that everybody who opposes Israel’s actions also hates Jews. What an odd coincidence!

Years ago I watched a Travel Channel TV show called No Reservations, hosted by chef and charmer Anthony Bourdain.

Bourdain would travel the world, getting getting drunk, eating, and swearing. He was filming “Beruit,” Episode 14 of Season Two, when the Second Lebanon War (July 12 to August 14, 2023) began.

This war was entirely the responsibility of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, which wanted to kidnap Israeli soldiers. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah fired rockets at several Israeli towns as a diversion. While the Israelis were thus distracted, Hezbollah ambushed two Humvees with an antitank missile. The Humvees were inside Israel, or course, so this was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation. Three Israeli soldiers were killed and two were kidnapped and taken to Lebanon.

The Israelis responded with a full-fledged invasion. They blew the hell out Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed over 500 Hezbollah fighters. In the process of fighting the war, the Israelis also killed 1191 Lebanese civilians.

Well, here’s what Hassan Nasrallah—the leader of Hezbollah—said after the war.

We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.

There. Right from the horse’s mouth. Massive retaliation works. It’s the only thing terrorists respect. Hezbollah hasn’t done much at all to Israel since 2006.

Since then the Israelis have completely retrained their military, built new weapons and technologies, and created bomb shelters for their entire population. The Israeli Defense Forces of today have about ten times the capabilities that they had in 2006. By being so heavily armed, Israel saves lives. Hamas still pulls the tiger’s tail, but maybe after this war, the Palestinians will have had enough.

At the end of No Reservations Episode 14, Season Two, Anthony Bourdain blubbered out a truly offensive yet moronic statement. I can’t remember it precisely, so I have to paraphrase it.

This war has finally made me lose my faith in humanity.

Really? In the Second Lebanon War, the civilian death toll was 1191. Here are just SOME of the conflicts Anthony Bourdain has lived through, followed by the number of people killed.

Vietnam War (1.7 million)
Ethiopian civil wars (2 million)
Biafran war (1 million)
Bangladesh Liberation War (1.3 million)
Khmer Rouge subjugation of Cambodia (1.6 million)
Mozambique civil war (1 million)
Angolan civil war (500,000)
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1.8 million)
Iran-Iraq War (1 million)
Yugoslav Wars (140,000)
1994 Rwandan genocide (1 million)
Sudanese civil war (1.9 million)
Somali wars (500,000)
Congolese wars (3.8 million)

Somehow the deaths of all those millions didn’t shake Bourdain’s faith in humanity, but the Second Lebanon War made him lose it. What could be the reason?

It starts with a “J,” ends with an “S,” and has an “E” and a “W” in the middle. When “those people” are allowed to defend themselves, it makes a guy lose his faith in humanity, huh?

And for astronaut Alexander Gerst, here’s a much sadder photo than the one you tweeted.

That’s South Korea on the right. The black mass with one dot is North Korea. That dot is Pyongyang, where the dictator Kim Jong-Un lives in his palaces. He has at least thirty-three like this one.

There are actual, genuine, Nazi-style death camps in North Korea. When the citizens aren’t being starved by their piggish dictator—may he die soon of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—they’re being murdered. A favorite method of “execution” is to fill the person’s mouth with rocks, tape it shut, and then beat the victim with a rifle butt, breaking teeth and bones until the condemned drowns in his or her own blood.

And yet you people care only about Israel. You need psychiatric help.