Darrell Castle talks about the war between Israel and Hamas and the terrifying potential for it to escalate.

Transcription / Notes:

THIS WAR SMELLS A LITTLE LIKE ARMAGEDDON

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 3rd day of November in the year of our Lord 2023. I will be talking about the war between Israel and Hamas and trying to make sense of it as I am able at this time. What is the war about right now, and what does it have the terrifying potential to escalate into soon.

I can’t use a title with the word Armageddon in it without talking a little about what the word means. It is a word coming from the Christian Holy Bible in the book of Revelation chapter 16 verse 16. “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon. “The battle of Armageddon is basically predicted to be the final battle between good and evil or God’s forces against the kings of the earth. Do I think this war is the actual battle of Armageddon, no I don’t but what I am trying to say is that unless cooler heads prevail it could morph into something at least resembling it.

The war has been ongoing since October 7th so it has been only about two months. The thing that strikes me about it other than the killing and dying which is what war is, has been the propaganda. Real events are used to inflame the populations of both sides as well as the populations of interested countries. Israel is portrayed as the persecutor of the Palestinian people having kept them imprisoned in an open-air concentration camp for 15 years. Hamas is portrayed as bloodthirsty savages. How much of the propaganda is truth and how much is fiction is anyone’s guess right now. We in the West sometimes think we know but often our assurances are just guesswork based on our own innate prejudice.

As usual in the best propaganda there is at least a little truth on both sides. The attacks out of Gaza into Israel were savage and barbaric with no military objective. I mean that the objective was terror by killing, raping, and torturing and it is hard to understand sympathy with the nature of it. Other than the rockets and missiles used, the attack itself was very low tech designed to defeat the high-tech Israeli security systems with simple means. Communication between Hamas leadership and soldiers was always written messages hand delivered, never by email or text. They used paragliders that can be found in most beach resorts. Bulldozers were used to breach the walls and fences and then soldiers on motorcycles and in pickup trucks poured through.

The simple nature of the plan made it much harder for the Israelis to uncover. Thus explaining at least in part how it could have escaped Israeli defenses. The leadership of Hamas who live luxurious lives in Qatar, by the way, while their people suffer in Gaza, but nevertheless they must have known that the brutal savagery of the attack would inflame the Israelis and incite a desire for revenge. The stories of rape and murder complete with photos of burned babies, I at first thought were exaggerated for propaganda purposes, but apparently, they are accurate.

 Most recently the story of a young woman named Shani Louk hit the international press. She was a beautiful 24-year-old woman attending a music festival until she was captured. Pictures emerged of her paraded naked through the streets of Gaza and just this week her body was found with her head in a different place. O.K. if one wants to refer to people who do that as barbaric savages perhaps there is truth there. It’s the same type of mentality we’ve seen before with Hitler’s forces and the Jews he portrayed as sub-human. Acts of barbarism are justified because your enemy is sub-human.

Does the average man, woman, or child on the streets of Gaza City see all Jews as sub-human? It really doesn’t matter anymore because that is the story, they are presented by their leadership who apparently do it ...