Existential Threats
Yet another rant by Simon

OK, campers — time for today's thought exercise.

Pretend, just for a moment, that the President of your country is a total douchebag. A smirking bigot who milks religious prejudice for political gain. An anti-Semitic, homophobic jerkwad who treats indisputable scientific and historical facts as, at best, untested hypotheses. A tyrannical hyena who fecklessly utters terrifying threats against sovereign nations. A power-mongering shitheel who's gutpunched a modern country until it staggered backward in the direction of the Middle Ages.

I know, I know. But try to picture it. Stretch that long imagination of yours!

Got it? Good for you. Now let's say that a seriously huge, badass foreign power has decided that your President is a threat to the security of the region and, indeed, the very globe. You might even be inclined to agree; fact is, if President Scumbucket choked on a lamb shank or a pretzel or something, you'd be unlikely to slip on a black armband.

But here's the catch: The danger posed by your leader, the big foreign government declares, necessitates that bombs fall on your neighborhood, your electricity grid, the closest hospital, the little market where you buy vegetables, all nearby sources of potable water, the buildings housing ancient treasures of your civilization, TV and radio stations, etc. Perhaps one of these bombs will fall right on your home, scattering the limbs of your relatives and pets into an interspecies jumble.

As much as President Creep makes your gorge rise, you might be thinking that this is not the preferred way to bring about regime change.

So as the weird reverberations of Ahmadinejad's visit to New York begin to subside, as the Liebermans, Podhoretzes, Cheneys, Bushes and other bloodthirsty excuses for human beings populating the political class amp up their demand for military strikes right now just in case Iran might one day build a nuke, I want you to forget about the leaders for just a moment and pretend you're just somebody who lives on a street in a city where bombs might go off.

Speaking personally, even if I believed our weapons could surgically scrub only evil leaders off the planet without collaterally singeing the flesh of the innocent, I'd still be agin it. America should finally hang up its illegal-foreign-intervention jersey once and for all. It was always wrong, and now it isn't even accomplished competently. But the fact is, our bombs aren't as smart as our leaders say they are. They can't tell a Caligula-like dictator from an apple-cheeked schoolchild, and guess which one is better equipped to survive an explosion?

Once again, I rant about this because we Jews are going to hear a lot, right in the wake of making our yearly amends for tiny wrongs and insults, about how Tehran going up in flames is somehow good for the Chosen. Even though Jews will be among those blown to bits by those righteous explosives. Even though Jews will suffer reprisals from idiot terrorists who glory in the extension of the war against the Great Satan. Even though Jews will be blamed by certain parties for how it all turns out, regardless of what we do or say.

Once again, with my full throat, with the flying, curly locks of all my Semitic forebears urging me on, I say: Fuck you, Neocons. Fuck you, Joe and Norman and Dick and George and fucking AIPAC. Go to hell. Even those of you who are nominally Jewish are not good for the Jews.

Once again, I say that if I really thought that being a Jew meant I had to go along with this destructive nightmare I would become an Episcopalian. But it doesn't. Jews have been great, strong voices against misguided militarism for eons. It's time for us to speak up, VERY LOUDLY, against a new, disastrous war in Iran.