Danger of Iran war getting stronger because of blindness, hypocrisy

By David McElroy · November 3, 2011

Nobody who follows the Middle East can be surprised to find out that Israel is apparently considering an offensive attack on Iran. Why is Israel considering attacking Iran? Because the Iranians are trying to develop nuclear weapons. Who already has nuclear weapons? Israel.

The Iranian government is made up of fundamentalist religious nuts. I’m not thrilled about the idea of them having nuclear weapons. But I’m also not happy about Israel having nuclear weapons — or Pakistan or India or France or Russia or the United States. If you want to get brutal about reality, there’s only been one government so far that has shown the willingness to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of civilians with nuclear weapons — and that wasn’t Iran.

If a war between Israel and Iran (and possibly other neighbors) starts, it seems very likely that the United States will be pulled into the mess. It seems even more likely that the flow of oil to the U.S. economy will be disrupted. Gasoline and heating oil will become massively more expensive, which will probably create cries for price controls, leading to shortages and possible rationing. Even if you disregard to tremendous human cost to the participants, the price for the rest of the world will likely be huge if a full-scale war erupts.

And why do so many in the United States want to support Israel, even though it’s a semi-socialist country that was built by taking land from other people and continues to brutally attack others? For some people (both Christians and Jews), it’s all about strange religious ideas. For others, it’s leftover collective guilt about the Holocaust 75 years ago. For various reasons, the United States seems committed to supporting a state on the other side of the world which has nothing to do with our own national interests (even if you assume such things are legitimate).

If the United States gets involved in a shooting war with Iran, it will only be because we’re blindly hypocritical in accepting things from Israel that we would never accept from Iran. I’ve talked before about the evils of antisemitism, but it’s not antisemitic to point out that supporting the state of Israel isn’t in our best interests.

Nothing good is going to come out of attacking Iran, by Israel or the United States. Give them time and the Iranian people will overthrow their religious dictators. We don’t need to help bring about national unity for them by creating a common enemy.

Note: If you’d like to know more about Israel’s nuclear weapons program, this interview with the Israeli who revealed the truth about the weapons is interesting. After working with the weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu believed he was doing the wrong thing, so he revealed the secrets. Israeli officials then kidnapped him in Rome and brought him back to Israel, where he was send to prison for 18 years.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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