Talking to pro-Hamas people half of today has only made it painfully obvious to me how many of them are lying, wilfully ignorant, and deeply misinformed.
The denialism of what Hamas just did in spite of their overtly stated genocidal intentions and tons of easily accessible evidence, the naked antisemitism, the failure to recognize the differences between aggressor and victim, the utter fabrication of history, the sheer audacity of more than a few I've encountered to equate Israel with Nazi Germany... It's been absolutely astounding to witness.
The events of the last few years have really taken a toll on my broadly optimistic disposition, but this is insane on a level I wasn't really prepared for.
Like every government, Israel is worthy of significant criticism, and I'm always happy to have that conversation... But there's no rational way to look at what happened a month ago and see it as somehow justified, nor is it remotely intelligent to look at the Jihadist, extremist theocrats running most of the other governments in the region and not recognize how much worse they are in every conceivable way.
It's not a big brained take to blame Israel for the aggression and anti-Jewish hatred that's been a proud theme of fundamentalist Islamic ideology for thousands of years... And yet I'm seeing a ton of that now.
On some level, I know that this is something lots of Jewish friends have always had to deal with, but the scale of it all is vastly larger than I realized.