OLIVER GHORBANIFAR: Support Israel, but keep American soldiers out of it

The images from this weekend’s heinous attacks on innocent Israeli men, women, and children by the barbaric savages of Hamas will be seared into the memories of all those who witnessed them for the rest of their lives.

With almost unbelievable violence, thousands of animal-like terrorists raped and murdered their way across southern Israel, sparing no one. Entire families were systematically hunted down and butchered in their homes, and those were the lucky ones. The less fortunate were captured and taken back to Gaza, and are currently being held in conditions it may be best not to contemplate for very long.

The evil carried out by Hamas was deeply primal in nature, and carried with it a series of particularly demonic attributes. The kind of violence described by the late great American novelist Cormac McCarthy in his timeless work Blood Meridian, about the trail of primordial evil carried out by a band of scalp hunters across the American southwest.

Like the barbaric scalp hunter of McCarthy’s novel, the fanatics of Hamas have carried “war of a mad man’s making into a foreign land.” And just like McCarthy’s characters, they too will “wake more than the dogs.”

And therein lies the problem for the United States, the war between Hamas and Israel is nothing like their previous conflicts in which rockets and bombs were exchanged for a short period of time before a new status quo emerged. This time it truly is different. The war is now existential and the odds of it drawing in other major players from across the region and world are extremely high. 

It has been popular in recent days to compare the Hamas attacks to 9/11, but this is, at best, a superficial analysis of the situation. The more apt, and more troubling, comparison is actually to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A brutal act carried out by a small and fanatical group of terrorists that ended up inadvertently setting off a series of explosive dominos which ultimately ended in complete civilizational catastrophe.

As a show of moral support and in an attempt to intimidate Hezbollah and Iran, President Biden has foolishly moved a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group, in addition to a significant amount of other U.S. assets off the coast of Lebanon. Very likely within the range of Hezbollah’s dangerous anti-ship missiles. All it will take is one spark for it all to end badly and right now the entire region is a raging inferno.

It is for this reason that whatever may happen in Israel in the coming weeks and months U.S. troops must stay out. Providing arms, reconnaissance and military advice to Israel is one thing but putting U.S. troops in harm's way—including airforce and navy pilots—is simply unacceptable. Not after the American people expended mind-boggling sums in both blood and treasure across the Middle East for over two decades, only to eventually have to withdraw in defeat. Quagmires which we have only very recently managed to extract ourselves from.

Iran, a nation twice the size and population of Iraq, and its network of proxies across the Middle East regularly indulge in acts of extreme evil on a regular basis.

Still, regardless of the demented ravings of neocons like Lindsey Graham, a war with it offers the American people nothing but ruin and a new quagmire that will make our experience in Iraq seem like a trip to In-N-Out Burger by comparison. 

Our hearts are with the Israeli people as they fight back against the primordial savagery of the fanatics of Hamas, but America’s fight is no longer in the Middle East but along our southern border and in the streets of our increasingly violence cities.

Or as Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec href="https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1711042807769563425?s=20" target="_blank">put it: “All I want is for American leaders to defend America as much as they defend Israel.”