It’s a well-known fact that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. But it’s a little-known fact that he did so not because Kennedy was the President of the United States but because he had been having an affair with Oswald’s wife. It’s little known because between the time of his arrest later that day, and when he was killed in turn by Jack Ruby the next morning, no one thought to ask him why he shot Kennedy. Dallas being in Texas, if Oswald had been asked, and if he hadn’t been killed by Ruby, he’d have been sentenced to an approving wink from the judge, a slap on the wrist, and sent on his way. Why? Because intention is everything!

If you’re going to make a turn, the law requires you to signal. Why? Because you’re sharing the road with other drivers who need to know your intentions. Similarly, then, if someone’s going to go postal – whether the target is a synagogue or mosque or gay pride parade or what have you – there should be a law requiring him to be honest, explicit, and precise, about what he’s targeting. For example, is it because he thinks the synagogue is full of Jews, in which case the attack might plausibly reflect his antisemitism? Or is it because he thinks it’s full of Zionists, in which case it’s more likely his anti-Zionism? Or is it because he thinks the ex-business partner who cheated him is inside, in which case, not unlike the Kennedy ‘assassination’, it’s neither. And why should there be such a law? So, not unlike other drivers, people could know how best to respond.

Too quick. Suppose he reports he wanted to kill Zionists. But not all Jews are Zionists. For that matter, not all Zionists are Jews. So the law should require him to target all and only gatherings of all and only Zionists. And for their part, organisers of such gatherings should be required by the law to make it clear that all and only Zionists should attend these gatherings. Why? Because we all have an interest – and this includes the attacker – in minimising collateral damage. He shares that interest because collateral victims tend not to be any more understanding. That is, if I’m going to be targeted regardless, I might as well be a Zionist.

If you think about it, this is precisely the logic driving Just War Theory’s immunity of non-combatants. That is, if I’m going to be targeted notwithstanding I’m a civilian, I might as well join the army. So targeting civilians is counter-productive. As, therefore, is collateral damage in general.

Too quick. The essence of terrorism is to pressure the civilian population to pressure the government to accede to the terrorists’ demands. So it might prove effective to pressure Jews in general to pressure their Zionist co-religionists to back off the current genocide. But if that’s the case, the targeting of Jews in general ceases to be collateral. But in that case, my proposal is doubly warranted. Zionism trades on the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. And the media is (I suspect knowingly) complicit in this conflation.

Such is the nature of high dudgeon. Had the American people known the truth about the Kennedy ‘assassination’, would the political narrative have changed? Or would the need for that particular narrative have driven a collective conscious dismissal of the truth? A good question then. A good question now.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: anti-Zionism, antisemitism, collateral damage, Jack Ruby, Jew, Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, terorism, Zionists