War in the Holy Land

[00:00:16] Speaker A: The recent attack on Israel by Hamas has led many prominent voices in both the government and the media to call for a substantial response, including involving both America and Iran. How should Catholics judge this conflict and America's role in it? That's what we're going to talk about today on Cris Point Hall. I'm Eric Sam as your host and Aaron chief of Crisis magazine. Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to like this video to subscribe to the channel to let other people know about it. Also want to ask you to follow us on social media at crisis. Mag at all the various social media channels. Plus, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, email newsletter. You'll get links to all our new articles. You just go Crisismagazine.com for that. Also, I want to note a new feature that we're going to do going forward, and that is you can send us questions. Send me questions, really, that I'll answer on the podcast. Just send them to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. If you send questions to that, I will try to answer them in future episodes. You can ask about anything. Frankly, it has to do with the Catholic Church politics, whatever the case may be, I will try to answer it in the podcast. So just send it, like I said, to [email protected]. Okay, so today's topic is pretty heavy. Obviously, it involves the attack on Israel by Hamas and the response by Israel, basically the war that's going on over there in the Holy Land. This obviously has ramifications throughout the world the possibility of escalation, a possibility of destroying holy sites for Christians and other religions, and obviously the loss of a lot of innocent life. And so I will say, I know going into this that typically when I have podcasts or articles about what's happening in the church, I have about 90, 95% of my audience is probably with me. They're in general agreement with what I'm talking about. However, when I start talking about some political issues, particularly when it comes to foreign conflicts, I think I'm down to about maybe 40% of the audience is with me. So I understand that, but I really think this is an important issue. I think we need to talk about this. Also, I want to note something else, kind of preliminary comment. It seems like in today's environment, if you're going to give a take on something like this topic and you're not with the dominant narrative, that you will find on both CNN and Fox News, that you will find from both parties, political parties. Then you have to make a couple statements up front to make sure people know that. You really think so? I'm just going to state up front. The attack by Hamas on Israel was horrific. It was unjust. It's not something that any goodwilled person can support. Obviously, the loss of innocent life, the killing of women and children, these are horrific things. Secondly, I also want to make sure it's clear before I say anything else, that nations have a right and even a duty to defend themselves. I think that should go without saying. Now, I realize that once we get later on, I'm still going to be called an anti Semite. I'm still going to be told that I'm supporting Hamas or something like that. But just note that I do think that the attack was awful. Okay? The problem is that when these things happen, a lot of people give into war Fever. What do I mean by war fever? It's the emotional response, understandably, emotional response to something horrific like this, that we begin to become irrational. We begin to believe everything we hear, and we begin to demand not justice, but vengeance. We saw it after 911. We saw it after the Ukrainian invasion. We saw it actually in the first days of COVID the panic, the emotion that drives decisions. We've played this game before, and it almost always ends up the same way. 911 is actually a perfect example here. In fact, I've heard people call this the Israeli 911. It's actually a much better connection than people who are saying that might realize, because after 911, there was a deep I'm old enough. I remember it very well. I was living in the Washington, DC. Area. I remember seeing a fighter pilot fly over my office building, which was a very surreal situation because I knew this is not a training exercise. They were literally going in to start shooting down planes if they needed to. I remember very well the days after that and how there was a demand that we find justice, a demand that we get bin Laden, get al Qaeda, and destroy them. Now, what happened was, of course, from those demands, we got the 20 year war in Afghanistan, we got the war in Iraq, we got the patriarch. We got a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with 911. If the US had simply gone after bin Laden and his network, and only that, and destroyed it, we would not have destroyed, frankly, goodwill around the world. We would not have lost countless lives in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and including the lives of military members from us who came back and commit suicide because the whores in those locations, in those conflicts, we wouldn't have the removal of so many civil liberties of Americans in response to this. And so that was because the response was not legitimate to the attack. And that's what I think we often forget. And that's what we need to focus on here, is we need to not give into war fever like we did after 911 and after the Ukrainian invasion. The same thing happened. What's happening here, we need to step back, because what happens in War Fever is you demonize the enemy. You assume everything they do is wrong, and that they're doing it for evil reasons. I just saw minutes before I started this podcast, I saw Rod Dre tweet something about a pro Palestinian rally that's happening. I can't remember where, maybe New York or in Europe somewhere. And he said, every single person there wants the elimination of all Israeli Jews because they're Jews. Now, there is absolutely no way Dreir can know this, and it's completely unfair to say that every single person there wants the destruction of all Israeli Jews. That's just ridiculous to say that. But that's what we do. We demonize the enemy. The same things on the other side, by the way. You'll see Palestinian supporters who will believe everything about the evils of Israel and how they want ethnic cleansing and all this. You cannot believe the two things that happen in war fever is, first of all, lies are said about the enemy and motives are given to the enemy, and you simply cannot believe them. Now, I want to make something clear. Maybe I should say at the beginning I actually think Islam is a violent religion, that its whole history is soaked in blood. It grew not like Christianity grew through evangelization and winning hearts and minds, but through the sword. And so I'm not under some illusion that Hamas is some peaceful organization of a peaceful religion, as George W. Bush would say. I'm not under the illusion that other Islamic forces in the Middle East are fully peaceful and only want to get along with everybody else or anything like that. Don't get me wrong. But that does not mean all the claims against Hamas and against Palestine and Muslims are all true. It doesn't mean every story you see on Twitter or on the news about some injustice, some terrible, horrific act of killing babies in the womb or beheading women, that they're all true, because they're not. This is the fog of war. You're going to say anything to demonize your enemy and to question their motives and to demonize their motives. That's just what you do after war. And conservatives cannot be trusted on this either. I mean, Ben Shapiro has gone insane. Ben Shapiro, who I have a lot of respect for, I think he's done some great work over the years. He's gone insane on this. He's completely gone irrational. He accuses anybody who's not 100% behind Israel as hating all Jews and destruction of all Jews. He's basically saying there's no way there's both sides of this. Well, in a conflict, there's always both sides. Another example of somebody terrible is Nikki Haley, of course, who I've never liked, and she's terrible. She immediately said that an attack on Israel is an attack on America no, it's not. And that we should finish them, meaning Iran, and of course, Lindsey Graham, who is literally evil. I mean, the guy is terrible. He wants to flatten, basically, Gaza. He wants to go to nuclear war with Iran to show our strength or something, while I guess we're really strong with all the dead bodies all around us, and there's been an open call for the killing of civilians in this conflict. I mean, just unapologetically. Both sides have supported the killing of innocence. And so here's the thing, though. What this does, this emotional response, this calling for demonizing or enemies of that, it sits perfectly for the war machine. What do I mean by the war machine? I mean the military industrial complex in Washington, DC. And in other countries that basically just want to have a forever war. They support the war in Ukraine. They support the war in Israel. They support just continuing the war, and they enrich themselves by it, and they get more power through it. And so they love this. When this happens and when everybody goes insane and loses their mind, this works perfectly for them. So what we need to do is we need to look at these things rationally and not emotionally. It's hard, because obviously, when you see women and children being killed, innocent people lives being lost, the destruction of property, refugees, all these things, it's very hard not to get emotional. But as people who are in another country, America, that's who I'm mostly talking to. But even Canada or United Kingdom or something like that, we do have to actually step back and look at this more rationally, because somebody needs to be the rational one in this to work for peace. Now, one of the main things that a problem that we have in all these conflicts, ukraine is a perfect example. 911 was an example, and this attack is an example, is we treat them as if they happened in a vacuum, as if everything was fine, everybody was getting along, there was no injustice anywhere. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, hamas just decided to attack Israel because they hate Jews. Or Putin just decided to attack Ukraine because he wanted to take over the world. Or Osama bin Laden just wanted to attack America because he hates our freedom. Nothing happened before that. Nothing at all. And here's where we get to the big distinction, the one that nobody seems to want to have. When you listen to the media, you listen to people, is the difference between provoked and justified. What do I mean by that? Okay, let me give an example. Let's say a person is walking down the street, minding his own business, and a stranger who has no contact with him, does not know him at all, hits him, just punches him in the face. That is an unprovoked and unjustified attack. There's nothing that provoked this person from doing it, and there's nothing that justifies him doing it. Now, let's say another example. Let's say somebody comes up to you on the street and he starts harassing you. He starts calling you names, he starts yelling at you, he gets in your face, and he's maybe even threatening you in some way. You get out a gun and you shoot him dead. In that case, your action was provoked. You wouldn't have done it if he hadn't come up to you and done all this, but it wasn't justified. It's not justified to kill somebody simply for harassing you or even threatening you. I'm assuming in this case, he's not saying, I'm about to pull out a gun and kill you. He's just like, yelling things at you. Maybe he doesn't like your race or something like that, and you shoot him dead. That was provoked, but it wasn't justified. Now, a third example is somebody comes up to you and punches you, and you punch them back and knock them out. In that case, it was both provoked and it was justified because you met him in a justified way. He punched you, you had to defend yourself. You punched him back and knocked him flat. Let's say you're a lot stronger than I am, for example. In that case, it's both provoked and justified. So there's a difference between provoked and justified. You can have something that's provoked and not be justified. I would argue that Russia's invasion of Ukraine was provoked but not justified. Likewise, Osam bin Laden's attack of 911 was provoked but not justified. He didn't just do it out of the blue. And here, Hamas's attack on Israel was provoked, but it wasn't justified. Here's the thing. We don't want to admit blowback is real. The CIA has admitted this, and we need to admit this as well. Blowback is real. Our actions around the world, I'm talking about America here, have an impact on how people react to it. Likewise, the actions of Israel have an impact on those around them, and the actions of those around Israel have an impact on Israel. I mean, I'm not saying Israel is the only one provoking people. They're being provoked too. Clearly. This attack, for example, is a provocation. But I remember I just going around Twitter recently, there was a video of PAP Buchanan, the very wise PAP Buchanan, who really got it on these things. In 2009, there had been an attack by Israel in Gaza, and it killed a number of young Palestinian girls. And Papucannon said he predicted actually, he should say, he just said, what will happen to the brothers of these girls when they grow up? That was 14 years ago. Those boys have grown up. Papucan wasn't saying it's okay. In fact, I think there was a rabbi on the show with him, and he was asked, like, Are you justifying this? Of course he wasn't justifying. He was just saying, though, this is what happens. This is the cycle of violence. When violence is committed, it engenders more violence. And so we're seeing that Pepe Buchanan called it, and there is provocation in this case. The situation in Gaza is untenable for people to live in. It simply is not a situation that can just remain like that forever without some type of response, and in some case, unjustified violent responses like this. You could argue. Also, the situation in Israel is not tenable, long term. I'm going to talk about Israel more in a minute. But the point is that we can't create these cartoon versions of reality where you see it all the time. When Ukraine war started, they kept saying it was an unprovoked attack. Unprovoked attack. You saw it after 911, unprovoked attack. You see it now. Unprovoked attack. They use the word unprovoked, but that's not true. They might be right, and in these cases they are unjustified, but not unprovoked. And therefore we create this cartoon version of reality where there's just two sides, the all good side or the all bad side. But the reality is there's multiple views in this situation. One view could be the Hamas are freedom fighters and they're justified in their attacks. That's one view, and some people hold that another view is Israel is a completely peaceful nation that has done nothing wrong and suffered an unprovoked attack out of the blue for no reason. Another view is both sides have done wrong things and that both sides really have committed evils. Another view is that could fall into these other views is that even if this is true, let's say that Israel is completely innocent in this and has done nothing wrong, nothing to provoke anything, that America should have nothing to do with it, that we should not get involved. So there's multiple views we can have, but everything now has to be one or two views. If you say, I don't think America should be involved, you're an anti Semite. If you say America, I don't think America should get involved, clearly you support Hamas. That's not the case at all. It's not true that there's only two views. And so you see this among liberals and conservatives. In fact, what they try to do is they try to fit it into our political narrative. So I saw conservatives were immediately like, oh, look at these liberals. They support Hamas. And so they just simply react to that, and they just say, okay, we have to be completely 100% against any argument for Palestine at all, and we have to be for every argument for Israel. That's simply what ends up happening. So let's look at this specific instance. I've used examples of 911, the man walking down the street, Ukraine, things like that. But let's look at this. We need to address this as Catholics. I titled this war in the Holy Land because I think one thing we can escape is the fact that religion is part of this conflict. Obviously, you have the Jews on one side, you have Muslims on the other side, and you have Christians caught in the middle, and it's in an area that is considered holy to all three religions. So religion is part of this. The problem is a lot of Catholics today, they get confused when we talk about the modern state of Israel. The modern state of Israel is not Old Testament Israel. It's not the same thing. And a lot of times in America, particularly Catholics get kind of caught up in what's really some really bad evangelical Protestant theology. There is this idea among evangelicals particularly, but a lot of Protestants that basically the Second Coming, there needs to be a state of Israel and that will help bring about the Second Coming. And so America's duty should be to protect the state of Israel for these theological reasons, to help bring about the Second Coming and to bring about maybe the rapture and all these other crazy things. None of that is Catholic theology, has never catholic teaching has never said that there needs to be a state of Israel before the Second Coming can happen. St. Paul does talk about the redemption of the Jews before the Second Coming. He alludes to that. There's a lot of debate, though, on what exactly he means. The point is, though, the modern state of Israel has no biblical support for it. Like it has to exist because any more than America does, or Germany or Britain, Israel, it has the name and it has the Jewish people there. But that's not the same thing. Now, I know saying these things will label me an anti Semite, but I'm not saying that this means that Israel shouldn't exist. What I'm saying is that there is no theological reason Israel should exist any more than America should. I mean, of course there are American Protestants particularly who think that America is some divine institution, that we were founded by God to be the city on the hill or something like that. That's not true either. And so we can't argue, we can't say that okay, we have to defend Israel simply because of some theological reasons as Catholics. That's just simply not true. And I see sometimes Catholics fall into this, especially ones who follow a lot of the unapproved marion apparitions they talk about that. It sounds very much like, frankly, my Protestant days when we talked know, people talked about the rapture and talked about the end times Second Coming and they thought Gorbachev was the antichrist in the state of Israel, need to be defended. All this stuff, you hear that sometimes in these unapproved prophecies as well, but none of it is accurate. We need to treat Israel like we do any other nation as simply it's no different than in fact, the only nation I'd say is different is the Vatican. That's the one nation, as Catholics, we should treat as different for obvious reasons. That what happens also is not only do we think of too many American Protestants think of Israel then as a nation that's kind of biblically based, they think it's now the immaculate nation, that it can do no wrong. But that's just simply not true either. In fact. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. He actually supported the funding of Hamas. He helped fund it because years ago, he saw it as a way to undermine the Palestinian forces. I think it was hezbollah was powerful, so he thought Hamas, he could support that and that would help destabilize the Muslim world, the Palestinian world, to help Israel. This sounds exactly what we did when we supported Osama bin Laden. We did the same thing because we thought it would help destabilize Russia in the Afghanistan war, and it did, but it ends up coming back to bite you, and the same thing happened. So and yes, it is true that Israel has committed injustices and even atrocities against Palestinians, just like Palestinians have committed atrocities and injustices against Israelis. It is simply not true that Israel is perfect and immaculate on this score. No nation is it's not anti Semitic to say this. That's just something you throw around in order to try to shut somebody up so they won't speak out the truth in this area. So the question becomes, if Israel does not have some biblical or divine mandate to exist as a nation that we have to support, what is the strategic interest to the US to support it, to be involved? That's what we have to ask ourselves. So now let's ask ourselves, because this is primarily where I come from, not I'm not arguing against Israel's right to defend itself. It can fight back against anything. I'm not saying that that's not allowed. But as an American with a mostly American audience, or even Western audience that's not living in Israel or in Gaza, what should be the US and the west involvement in this? I think we have to look at this objectively again, not because we don't have any mandate that we have to defend Israel as a biblical nation. It's not one we should ask ourselves as just any other nation. So a lot of times people say, oh, you're just being self centered, selfish. You're not defending the innocent. Innocent people are being killed. We have to come to their defense. Well, I want to ask you, what about all the other conflicts in the world? There's a war in Sudan going on right now and has for years, and over 11,000 people have died in it in just this year, in 2023. In Ethiopia, there's a civil war. Over 100,000 people have died in the past two years. In Syria, there's a civil war. Over 4700 fatalities this year alone. There is a border crisis going on between Armenia and Aberdeenbaijan, and over 600 fatalities this year alone, and almost 50,000 total since 1988. There's other conflicts going on throughout Africa and Asia. People are dying. People are being killed. Horrific things are happening. People being displaced. I mean, this conflict in Armenia is awful. Armenian Christians are being displaced, being killed. Why aren't we all having our Armenian flags on our Twitter profiles? Why isn't the news nonstop talking about this? Why aren't we talking about what's happening in Sudan, in Yemen, in Syria, all these places? We don't talk about that. There's not a big call like we have this moral obligation in America to go into those not it's because it's actually there's a good reason why not. Because we don't have a strategic interest there. The only reason politicians and other media figures bring up the fact that, okay, this terrible things are happening, injustice happening, we have to help fix it, is simply because they think there's a strategic interest. It's all for political reason. It has nothing to do with defending the innocent, because if it had to do with that, there's lots of innocents who are being killed throughout the world that we're doing nothing about, and nobody cares. I mean, did you even know before I said this about what's going on in Armenia, between Armenia and Aberdeen Baijan, which, of course, I probably mispronounced, or in Sudan or anything like that? Are we only supposed to get involved if the TV and the Internet tells us to? If our government officials tell us to? So then we have to ask ourselves, what is the national interest? Now, another thing we have to note is, oh, yeah, somebody noticed mentioned I got something wrong when I said that Israel funded Hamas, it was undermined PLO. I said, I think Hezbollah. But no. The PLO palestinian Liberation Organization. That's why Israel funded Hamas. It was to undermine the PLO. Thank you very much for the comment. I had forgotten. I knew it was something like that. So let's go back real quick. What is the strategic interest of the US? And we also have to ask ourselves, how much can we help? We act like we have an infinite, unlimited supply of aid we can give both militarily and financially, yet we all know our country's falling apart. I mean, go to our major cities. Go to San Francisco or New York or something like that. Go to the border we can't even protect. Defend our own border. And we're talking about sending people to other countries to defend other borders. We're spending billions of dollars to try to defend Ukraine's border, yet our own border is porous. Now we're going to spend even more and maybe even more. Send people to defend Israel's border. I know this sounds callous, but again, if you're saying I sound callous and self centered, do you support us sending people and resources to the Armenian border to help support in Sudan and in Yemen and all these other places? We have to be very, almost even cold about this because we have to recognize our own limitations. If, for example, I'm broke, I have no money, and my neighbor comes to me and I have a big family of five kids. I have more than five kids. I have seven kids. Why'd I say five. Big family. Catholic says five kids. Come on, Eric. Okay, I have a big family of seven kids, which I actually do, and I have no money, and I'm running out of food to feed them. And my neighbor comes to me and says, let's say they have no kids. They're just a married couple. They have no food, and they say, Help me. I can't help them. It's not because I don't want to. It's simply because I don't have the resources. And the fact is, America doesn't really have the resources to help in every conflict around the world. But here's the more important point about this. The more important point about this is that our involvement, the US's involvement always means escalation. It means more lives will be destroyed, more people will be displaced, more infrastructure will be wiped out. Because when we get involved, it always escalates. In fact, that is the goal. I want to pull up something here. I don't know if I have it ready here. I think I do, and it is a video. Let me find it. Okay, here we go. This was recorded hours after the initial attack by Hamas. It was by Ron DeSantis, who's running for president. I think we all know who he is. [00:31:16] Speaker B: Florida Governor Israel is now under attack. I stand with Israel. America stands with Israel. Not only do they have a right to defend themselves, they have a duty to defend themselves against these Iranian backed Hamas terrorists. Iran has helped fund this war against Israel. And Joe Biden's policies that have gone easy on Iran has helped to fill their coffers. Israel is now paying the price for those policies. We're going to stand with the state of Israel. They need to root out Hamas, and we need to stand up to Iran. [00:31:55] Speaker A: Okay, so did you hear that this was hours after a terrorist group, a small terrorist group, kills hundreds of people in Israel, and Ron DeSantis, running for president, united States of America, basically wants to declare war in Iran. That's what he's saying. I mean, that's what his language is. If I'm in Iran. That's what I'm hearing. So he wants to escalate a local border conflict that had some horrific things happen into basically a world war. This is insane. And another thing we need to remember is this might be exactly what Hamas wants. Bin Laden, when he attacked 911, he wanted to drag the United States into another Vietnam, an Afghanistan type war. And that's exactly what happened. He wanted to drag us down. I heard somebody say this, and I think it's a good point. Compare America today to America in 2000. Do you think we're worse off or better off? And do you think all the foreign conflicts we've involved in over the past 23 years helped that or made us worse off or actually kept us from being worse off? Bin LAN got what he wanted in a lot of ways because he dragged us down. And I would argue that this might be. Exactly what Hamas is doing, that it's trying to drag Israel down and the west down as well, because it knows that escalating will just be in our worst interest. The problem is that a lot of people, they want every single conflict today. They look at the model, they look at the example of World War II. But what I would argue is that we need to look at World War I. This week, we actually celebrate the feast of Blessed Carl. You'll see the statue right here behind me? And I have his holy card right here. I'll pull it up, and I have my Blessed Carl Prayer League pin, lapel pin, proudly displayed here. Clearly, I'm a big fan, but Blessed Carl, of course, was the emperor of the Austrio Hungarian Empire during World War I, and he very much worked for peace. But let's remember what happened. A Serbian nationalist murdered his uncle, who was heir to the throne of the Austria Hungarian Empire. By every definition, this should be a local conflict. It should be a local dispute between the empire and Serbia and the people involved. Yes, Austria Hungary had a right to respond because the heir to their throne had been murdered. But it turned into the war to end all wars that killed millions of people, that spread throughout Europe and just was one of the most horrific things that have ever happened in human history, all because of a local conflict. That's exactly what we have to be worried about here, is the exact same type of thing, but we immediately always want to jump to World War Two and think, oh, my gosh, that's the real issue there. That's what we have to care about. But no. We need to think about World War I. Not everybody is Hitler. Not every situation is exactly like that. In this situation, I think it's much more closely aligned to World War I, which escalated into so much destruction. And so what America really needs to do, the American leaders always want escalation. Why? You should ask that. Why are American leaders always so quick to jump, to let's send more money, more troops to these foreign conflicts? Do you really think they care? Do you really think your typical American politician, who doesn't even care about his own people he represents, cares about the Donbass region in Ukraine, or cares about the border between Israel and Gaza, or how Palestinians are treated, or how Israel is treated? No, they do not. It gives them more power. It gives them more control. What they need to do is what America needs to do. We need to be the mediator for peace. I mean, we are the big dog in the world. People do listen to us, but we automatically now are jumping to, okay, we have to take one side and go all in on one side instead of saying, let's try to be a mediator for peace, to end this conflict as quickly as possible. This is why I really think here in Catholics we need, in today's world, we need our default as Catholics should be anti war. Now, when I say that, I know that term still has some bad connotations for especially older people like me about like think about the liberal hippies who just are pacifist. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, yes, there is such thing as a just war, but wars today are rarely just. Because remember in fact, I'm going to pull up here just war from Credo, the great catechism from Bishop Athanasius Schneider. And he basically says what conditions are necessary to render a war truly just? And he says one be a last resort. Two, be undertaken only in response to external aggression and to prevent certain grave and lasting damage. Three, pose some prospect of success. Four, not produce worse evils than those present. I think we always forget number four. We always forget number four, that the consequences of escalation, particularly, which usually is not just, is much worse than the original situation. But then the next question is what are the rights of individual soldiers under the Fifth Commandment? In a just war, soldiers have the right to stop their foes with lethal force while sparing non combatants. So all those who are acting like it's no big deal if we kill Palestinian civilians or think it's no big deal to kill Israeli civilians, that is immoral. I'm not saying that there isn't the possibility that civilians could be killed even in a just war. What I'm saying, though, is the essential targeting of them is unjust. And frankly, one example of this is how Israel cut off, I think it was electricity, medical supplies, water, everything to Gaza, or at least sections of Gaza that is targeting innocence. Innocent people will die because of that. And that is unjust. It simply is unjust. And so we need to be skeptical of the war machine. As Catholics. Again, as Catholics, we need to learn the lessons of modern warfare, particularly since 911. We should have gone just after Bin Laden. We end up escalating beyond all reason the same thing. We can't let this happen here. Now, it's not that Israel or others cannot respond to an attack, it's how they respond that matters. That's what I think so many people miss. It's not just whether or not you can respond, it's how you respond. Yes, Israel can respond, but that does not give it a blank check to do whatever it wants. It can't just, as Lindsey Graham and others would say, just flatten Gaza with a nuclear bomb or something, just turn it into a parking lot. I've literally heard that said by actual leaders, not just a non Twitter accounts. That is not acceptable from a moral standpoint. So we need to step back and we need to be, catholics need to be the rational ones, the ones who are arguing for the just war. And fortunately, there are some Catholic leaders doing that. I will be the first one to commend actually, you know, I'm usually not the first one to commend Pope Francis, but the fact is, for all my criticisms of Pope Francis, he has been very right on siding for peace and arguing against escalation and trying to bring conflicts to an end. He's been doing that with Ukraine, Russia conflict, and now he's doing it here as well. But, of course, another example is Cardinal I don't know how to pronounce his name, but Pisabala. He is the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and he is called for a day of fasting and prayer, which is today, by the way. So if you forgot and you haven't been doing it yet or if you're listening to this later, oh, well. But on October 17 is supposed to be a day of prayer and fasting. If you haven't yet, do it now. Pray for peace today. He has also offered himself as in exchange for the hostages that Hamas is holding. This is exactly what a cardinal is called to do, what a prelate of the Catholic Church is called to do. We need to look to his example. So we need to pray and fast. We need to support our Catholic leaders like the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, like Pope Francis in this case. And also we need to pray, I think, for the intercession of Blessed Carl, the Emperor of peace. I think we need to look to him as an example of somebody who did not want things to escalate. He tried to bring conflicts to an end, even though he was brought into it. Remember, he was not the emperor when World War I started. He became emperor in the middle of it. He tried immediately to bring it to an end as quickly as possible in a just way, because we are still looking for justice. Justice would not be Israel just doing nothing and allowing Hamas to do this. Justice would not be either just wiping out the Palestinians. Justice is a proper and measured response to the conflict and not an escalation of it. So another last thing I would want to note is we see it also thought this was very inspiring. The patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem, which is all of them, which is a lot. They issued a statement on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and they were basically saying that Israel's call to evacuate before bombing started, but force people out where they had nowhere to go and the cutting off of all the supplies, that is an injustice. They weren't saying that they were supporting Hamas. They were just simply we need to think of those who were the innocent people involved in this. And I'm hoping, as Catholics, that's what we'll do. Okay, I think I'm going to cut it there. I've gone a little bit long because I think this is a very important issue, I would just say please don't get caught up in war fever. Don't fall for all the lies that always happen in the fog of war. Don't be so quick to demonize our enemies. And actually, neither of these sides are our enemies. Don't be so quick. And don't be so quick to believe everything you read. And pray and fast. That's the most important thing we can do. As Cardinal P Zabala says, we need to pray and we need to fast. We need to pray and fast for peace. Okay, everybody, that's it for now. Until next time, god love.