Not long ago, I ran into a long-lost acquaintance who always assumed––always incorrectly––that I was simpatico with her leftist leanings. Maybe it was my long hair or dangling earrings or that I liked to listen to Joe Cocker.

I remembered that she always appeared distressed, not because of a cancer diagnosis or trouble with her two children or a problem in her marriage or with her job as private secretary to a malpractice lawyer, but because of one or another of the endless planet-killing problems that occupy the daily bad thoughts and nightly nightmares of liberals.

Her list was long, and always growing––saving the whales, redistributing income, ending poverty, air pollution, land pollution, the colossal hoax of climate change (as explained by the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman), human rights, animal rights, women’s rights, gun control, world hunger, universal (free) healthcare, big business, and of course, capitalism! Oh, did I omit the U.S. Constitution?!

So, when we ran into each other, I wasn’t surprised that this woman––who probably should have been on antidepressants or antianxiety meds for decades––looked her ole glum self.

“How are you?” I asked, “your kids, your husband, your job, your life?”

“No problems in those departments,” she said. “But look at the world! The news!”

DIDN’T TAKE HER LONG…

“What are you referring to?”, I asked.

“Oh, the news,” she opined, “I think Netanyahu has ruined Israel!”

“Well, a lot of people don’t like it when Jews fight back,” I said.

“But it’s so disproportionate,” she shot back.

It’s not often that you have a ready answer for people with whom you disagree. Usually, you think of the perfect comeback when you wake up at two in the morning.

But as it happened, I simply had the cold, hard facts on my side, so it was almost shooting fish in a barrel to answer this Jew-hating, Israel-loathing liberal.

DO YOU REMEMBER?

My response to her came in a series of questions.

“Do you remember,” I asked her, “when we watched the entire Iraq War –– from 2003 to 2011––on TV, for years? And the endless articles and commentaries and news coverage, all day and all night?”

“Of course,” she responded.

“Well, even before that,” I said, “going back to the sixties, do you remember the years-on end coverage of the Vietnam War––from 1964 to 1973––and the morning and afternoon and nightly news coverage and commentaries of the impassioned anti-war demonstrations across the country protesting this war?”

“You know I do,” she said. “I was on the frontline of those protests. I was with the so-called traitor Jane Fonda all the way!’

STILL GOING DOWN MEMORY LANE

“How about the Korean War in the 1950s,” I asked her, “which wasn’t covered so extensively on TV––TV was relatively new in that decade––but which a million articles were written about, not to mention the extensive radio commentary?”

“Okay,” she said, “and your point?”

“One more question,” I begged her indulgence. “How about World War11 in the 1940s, when 140,000 died in Hiroshima and 74,000 died in Nagasaki after we bombed them?” And that is not to omit the massive, overwhelming loss of life from that war itself––70–85 million deaths.

“Stop with the statistics, already!” she blurted out. “What is your point?”

INDEED…THE POINT

What I told my long-lost acquaintance was that in every war I named, in the massive injuries and deaths that resulted from these wars, in the overwhelmingly panoramic and international coverage these wars received on TV and radio, in the literally trillions of words that had been written and spoken in covering all these wars, the word “proportionality” had never been expressed––not in verbal broadcasts, not in writing––NOT ONCE before Jewish warriors fought back against the savages that attacked them on October 7, 2023.

NEVER!

Look it up. Do your own research.

THE P WORD

“Why is that?” I asked her.

As her eyes widened and she searched for words, I volunteered my own theory.

“I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Because the people who chant ‘proportionality’ hate Jews and detest Israel, but they try to cloak their long-held hatred in a transparent attempt to sound virtuous and caring for…whom?

“Is it for the Hamas Arab rapists who were so violent that they broke the pelvic bones of their victims and then took babies out of their arms and put them in ovens to bake to death? Who photographed their sadistic violence and then showed it to their proud families as they passed out candy to celebrate?”

“Let’s talk about proportionality,” I went on. “Let’s say that 250 Israeli women were raped. Are you suggesting that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tell their troops that, yes, you have our full permission to rape 250 Arab women. But NOT 251!”

I stopped talking as I witnessed a rare case of muteness from Ms. Proportionality.

Of course, I knew that neither facts nor statistics would change her hermetically-sealed mind, but there was pleasure in this brief moment anyway.

UNDERSTANDING WAR

“But war is always wrong,” she said. “There’s no reason we can’t learn to get along.”

Aha, the Rodney King mantra!

“Well, Israel has tried to get along for 46 years,” I said. “Are you suggesting that they go for 47?”

Before I gave up, I explained to this colossally clueless woman that war has nothing to do with proportionality—that war has everything to do with winning!

You attack me…I fight back. Not to deflect your attack. Not to intimidate you. Not to indulge in a body count to make sure it’s “fair” or “equal” or not “humiliating.”

It’s to destroy you and to make sure that you never ever ever come after me again with the intention of annihilating me and my family and my country.

“Capeesh?” I asked her.

“To be honest,” she responded, “I never understood why Jane Fonda was such a pariah. She was just following her conscience.”

That’s when I clearly understood why God coined the word “hopeless.”

Joan Swirsky is a New York–based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.