Darrell Castle talks about the ongoing war in Gaza and looks at the different views of the war by different people who have different perspectives on the same series of events.

Transcriptions / Notes

THREE VIEWS OF THE SAME WAR

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 17th day of November in the year of our Lord 2023. I will be talking about war, especially the ongoing war in Gaza. I will be looking at the different views of the war by different people who have different perspectives on the same series of events and I will argue that neither of the first two perspectives is completely accurate but the third perspective explains not only Gaza but war in general.

I will begin by reminding you that next Thursday is Thanksgiving Day and I plan to spend some time with my family having a good meal and giving thanks so no Castle Report next week. Have a good holiday with family and don’t forget to give thanks.

What do we know for certain about the war in Gaza? I don’t mean what the news media tells us or what we hear through rumors but what do we know for certain. There are so many conflicting opinions of the war that we don’t know much beyond what is happening on the ground with the movement of troops, etc. We can have at least a little confidence in what the reporters on the ground monitoring and reporting on the fighting tell us, but even then, their work is filtered through their networks, newspaper editors, etc.

It seems that Israeli forces are moving through Gaza destroying tunnels and Hamas fighters where they can find them. This is urban warfare and that is the most casualty intense war especially for civilians. For example, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as of September 2023 a total of 9,614 civilians died during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to that date. That low number is because very little of the fighting is urban and in urban warfare often 90% of the casualties are noncombatants.

According to Reuter’s wire more than 11000 people have been killed during the start of the Israeli operation in Gaza, most of them civilians. The civilian casualties are undoubtably higher because Hamas is embedded in the civilian population. The Israelis report that they discovered a headquarters unit of Hamas under a large hospital. I saw video of an Israeli military spokesmen showing the tunnel entrances, weapons recovered etc. Can that video be believed or is it fabricated. That’s the difficult thing about our propagandized technological world. Almost anything is possible so almost nothing is certain and almost nothing can be believed.

Hamas seems to be conducting a delaying operation, withdrawing a little at a time to delay the inevitable and inflict maximum casualties while at the same time waiting for media coverage to take its toll. The war is spreading with attacks in the West Bank and out of Lebanon. The delaying action gives Hamas more time to rally support from its Middle East partners and from news propaganda around the world. The longer the fight, the higher the casualties and the more international sympathy is generated.

So, we sit here in America and we watch television, listen to the radio, or perhaps even read the New York Times or Washington Post. If you read your local paper, it is just a reflection of the opinion of those two papers and is editorially virtually identical. Can we have any confidence that what we are being told is accurate. Not in my opinion because it’s all lying propaganda and nothing can be believed without further investigation. Getting to the truth these days is very hard work and no matter how hard you work you can never be totally confidant. I am, therefore, confident of only one part of the mass media reporting and that is that it is all lying propaganda designed to reinforce the existing regime’s power structure.

The regime’s power structure is in turn,