Thomas Wictor

Iran expects that Israel will do nothing to defend itself. This is because abusers are as innocent as toddlers. Those who commit great acts of evil are never prepared for the inevitable day when their victims turn the tables on them. By being abusive, what you do is train the abused to respond with even greater violence than you inflicted on them. It’s easy to see why.

Being brutalized acculturates you to violence. And if you’ve experienced decades of attacks, the effect is cumulative. Each assault adds to your burden. Conversely, the abuser finds that the more he or she inflicts violence, the less pleasurable it becomes. Numbness sets in, so to get the same refreshing zing, the violence must be escalated. That adds to the load that the victim is carrying.

Victims of abuse have one great advantage over abusers.

Rage.

Abusers aren’t angry. They’re jolly, merry, happy, and rollicking. The abused, on the other hand, build up a reservoir of incomprehensible rage at the unjustness of it.

I speak from experience. Solving the murders of Ismail Bakr, Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, and Zakaria Bakr allowed me to finally remember the specifics of what I’d blocked out from my childhood. Last night I had the most detailed dream yet. I now remember where the crimes took place. These events were called “having a party.” All oil camps in Venezuela had vacant, furnished houses that sat empty for years at a time. In the dream I recognized my surroundings, and when I woke up, the memories came roaring back.

Several of the houses next to the dike on the left were guest houses. That’s where we had our parties.

One of the factors that prevented me from believing that my life’s experiences were real was that I couldn’t figure out where a mafia contract killer would carry out his work. Now I know. It was in the vacant guest houses. Here I am in 1966, at the age of four, sitting on the sofa where a party took place.

All my life I’ve hated parties. Birthday parties were a nightmare. The only reason I went to parties in college was to get drunk and high. I thought I was just an antisocial loser. Well, now I know why going to parties fills me with horror.

In mafia parlance a contract killer is called a “house painter.” This is because when he shoots the victim in the head, the blood and brains paint the walls of the house. The best book I’ve ever read on the mindset of a mob killer is “I Heard You Paint Houses”: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. After reading it, I’m convinced that Frank Sheeran killed Jimmy Hoffa.

Here’s Sheeran with his family.

Sheeran rationalized his many murders. He didn’t hate Jimmy Hoffa; in fact, they were close friends. As he was dying, Sheeran said that he’d made peace with God, and he’d meet his friend Jimmy Hoffa again in heaven.

Abusers always think they can get away with it. The worst abusers are organized criminal enterprises such as the mafia, Hamas, and the Iranian mullacracy. They rationalize, minimize, and deny their crimes. Sheeran had a speech pattern that I recognize from my experiences with “Hank,” the mafia contract killer who had parties with me. See if you can spot the “tell.”

I loaded my gun and had Augie drive me to the restaurant. Augie parked, and I got out and went inside. Joey the Flounder was sitting in the corner booth with his family. I walked up to him. Joey was shot five times in the head. Then I left the restaurant, got in the car with Augie, and he drove me to the club.

See how the killer didn’t say, “I shot Joey the Flounder five times in the head”? That’s because all members of organized criminal associations obfuscate their culpability. FBI wiretaps show that these bastards never admit to anything, even in private. They speak in riddles and euphemisms. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian mullahs are the same.

The problem for abusers is that when the abused have finally had enough, the eruption of rage tends to be annihilatory. People who’ve been abused all their lives don’t do things by half-measure. We go all in.

I have severe problems with rage. Although I’ve never been violent, I once came very close to murdering a man. He was my father, in fact.

I was helping him on one of his many home-improvement projects, and it became clear that his idea would fail. We’d have to redo the project, probably multiple times. So I was tying to get him to do something different.

My father couldn’t abide anything except unquestioning obedience. Although I was a man of thirty-eight, he spoke to me—scornfully and with hostility—as though I were a child. That was nothing new. I weathered it and explained that I wasn’t criticizing him. It was only that—

“WHY DON’T YOU JUST QUIT, TOM?” he shouted. He sneered my name, drawing it out into a girlish whine: TAAAAAAAAAAAM!

I was holding this long-handed shovel in my left hand.

Without knowing I was going to do it, I swung the shovel like a baseball bat into his face. It went P-TANG! and he fell over backwards, looking like this.

Actually, that didn’t happen. But I had such a realistic rage-vision of hitting him with the shovel that I thought I’d done it. For a few horrible, swirling, confused seconds, I thought I’d murdered my father.

Instead, I went down to Tim’s house and asked him if he could come help. Tim said my face was the color of a plum.

Apparently I was preternaturally witty at the time, but I have no memory of it. I blacked out for several minutes.

My father never knew how close he came to being murdered. It’s the same with my neighbors. As all the elderly, civilized people die, their houses are sold to entrepreneurs who rent them to blue-collar anthropoids who breed, drink, and shoot off illegal skyrockets. There were three massive explosions overhead yesterday and two today. Yesterday I went to check on my cats, and I couldn’t find Lyle for half an hour. I thought he’d gone into the wall and died, but I finally located him cowering under a bed.

Today he went and hid in the laundry room. Seeing my cats so afraid in their own house fills me with murderous rage. The blue-collar anthropoids are touchingly innocent. They think they’re badasses, with their big trucks, their skyrockets, and their workin’-class pound hugs.

They have no idea who their neighbor is and what he’s capable of doing to them in retaliation for their insistence on ruining his quality of life and tormenting his defenseless cats.

No, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll never snap. For one thing, I couldn’t bear to let down my brothers and sister. Besides, what would it solve? A new set of blue-collar, pound-hugging, skyrocket-shooting anthropoids would move in.

But geopolitics is different. When a state sponsor of terrorism is smashed flat, it stays that way. Thanks to the P5+1 deal, Israel and the Sunni Arab states will have to destroy not only the Iranian nuclear facilities but also Hezbollah and Iran’s offensive military capabilities.

Iran and the P5+1 nations thought they were really sticking it to Israel. Instead, the outcome will be that the abusers will have their ability to abuse taken away from them.

And don’t send me any more messages telling me how hard or scary or risky war with Iran will be. I’m sick of hearing it. Take your defeatism somewhere else.