It has been more than 2,500 years since Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, said “In war, truth is the first casualty.” It is a truism, proven by the thousands of wars that have occurred over the last 25 centuries.
Consider the current war between the Jewish state of Israel and Hamas. On the morning of October 7, Hamas bombarded Israel with no less than 3,000 rockets. After which three thousand (3,000) armed Hamas men, in six separate groups, traveling by air, land, and sea, crossed the border between Gaza and southern Israel. They attacked military bases and civilian settlements. Hamas forces killed 1,139 people in fourteen civilian settlements. Among the dead were 260 young people who had been attending a music festival for peace. Three Hundred seventy-three (373) of the people killed were members of the Israeli defense force. The terrorists also killed 695 Israeli civilians (38 were children) and 71 foreign nationals.
The Hamas men recorded themselves decapitating children, cutting an unborn baby from a mother’s belly, torturing children in front of their parents. They raped women, and preteen girls and forced their friends, and families watch, then killed everyone. They burned men, women, and children alive.
As a last action, the invading Hamas terrorists took about Two hundred fifty (250) civilians and soldiers back to the Gaza Strip. Among the hostages were 30 children, 10 Americans, and other foreign nationals, all of whom could be used as after-action bargaining chips.
The Israeli Victims, and the Hamas killers recorded the horrors of Oct. 7th on their cell phones. The images were broadcast to the world. The Israelis compared the events to the holocaust. Hamas bragged about the terror they created. The Israel defense forces (IDF) promised to destroy Hamas, and to free the Palestinians in Gaza from Hamas rule. The IDF planned counter attacks and they beseeched the Palestinians in harm’s way to evacuate those Areas before the attacks, but Hamas terrorists cut off their escape routes, resulting in the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Then the truth died.
Hamas leaders had spent years developing their attack plan. They took control of the government in Gaza. They built underground operational centers, and weapons storage areas, under, in, and adjacent to schools, mosques, and hospitals; places least likely to be bombed by the Israeli air force. These underground areas were linked by miles of tunnels, some of which extended under-the-wire into Israel.
Hamas leaders knew the Iseral Defense Forces (IDF) would respond to their attack. Hamas planned to use hostages and Palestinian civilians as shields. The deaths of innocent women and children would offset the atrocities they committed on Oct. 7th. They also knew that the best way to escape retribution was to play the victim in a public relations battle, where the death of one Palestinian child would be more destructive to Israel than a dozen Hamas rockets.
Fast-forward seven months, naïve American college students accept misleading social media posts as “truth” and blindly follow professional agitators. They protest the war by screaming “death to Israel, death to America” and “The Jews are committing genocide, they must be wiped from the face of the earth.”
The kids march with signs proclaiming, “We are Hamas”. They don’t know that they are carrying “truth” to its grave. The kids didn’t kill “truth”. The educators who told them “How they should feel” did. If we want to resurrect “Truth” we must encourage one another to look at all the facts and ask each other “what do you think?”