Marshall McLuhan, Canadian intellectual, coined the phrase "the medium is the message," claiming that the way meaning is conveyed can mean more than the actual content conveyed. For instance, an automated voice at the end of a phone line; a spam message in your email inbox; graffiti on a subway tunnel; all of these things tell you something by means of what they are more than they ever could in what they actually say.
Now, zoom far out of this philosophical realm and return to Israel where she stands today. More specifically, focus on the north, under fire by Hezbollah- literally. Thousands of acres of our homeland have been incinerated by Hezbollah’s barrage of terror. Examine the medium, and learn the message.
Does an army with any tactical aspirations set fire at random to the country they are invading?
Did the Russians set wildfires burning across Ukraine when they invaded, or was it used by the Americans in Afghanistan?
The answer to these two quesitons is no, because these armies had strategies behind them. Examine the medium and you will find the message. The terrorist army in control of Lebanon is not interested in peace with Israel, nor conquering Israel’s land, nor the flimsy falsehood of “coexistence”. They also have no love for the land.
They want to exterminate Jews, and they will raze Israel to cinders to accomplish that end. The time is long since past for this to become an accepted fact, carved into the diplomatic table: the terrorists who surround Israel on nearly every side, the Iran-puppeteered “resistance front”, have no interest in peace, land, or access to the holy sites. These sects and cults, this United Nations of assorted murderous extremists, are united by a single factor: the desire to perpetrate a complete Holocaust of Jews in the Middle East and beyond.
Let this message be burnt into the minds of any who claim they are against an Israeli state but not against Jews: without an Israeli state, millions of Jews in the Middle East would be prey to slaughter at the hands of these fanatics.
On their side, however, if Hezbollah threw down their arms- if only! -would Lebanon be swarming with Israelis brandishing guns and dragging off hostages, burning down houses and murdering civilians? Of course not.
The Muslim militants of the Middle East wage a war of extermination against the Jewish people because they want to; because it affronts the ego of the dar al-Islam, the Muslim empire, that the Jews, to them infidels and rejecters of their prophet, should have status as a nation; because they view Israel as the Lesser Satan and a tool of America (ignoring how often America throttles aid that Israel is in urgent need of, decidedly unlikely behavior for a co-conspirator). The army of Israel fights a war of survival against enemies whose very means of attack spell out their genocidal intent.
The war the IDF is fighting is for survival, and people worldwide must stop assuming that this is any kind of “rational” war- that Hezbollah and Hamas are conventional armies fighting according to the usual strategies of war, seeking to conquer land or destroy military infrastructure. That is the MO of the IDF: collapsing tunnels, destroying weapons caches, establishing checkpoints to inhibit smuggling and infiltration.
The war that our enemies are fighting is a frenzied campaign of extermination against a people and a faith that is loathsome to them, and who they seek to annihilate with every means possible, from high-tech missiles to kitchen knives to the most primitive, stone-age technology of all, simply setting things on fire.
They wage a total war. The nations of the democratic world will only grasp the hateful zealotry Israel is faced with once they stop looking at the messages these terrorists proclaim, and examine their medium.