Are We Past Reasoned Discussion of the Israeli-Hamas War?

This weekend I came across an article at Survivopedia by Bob Rodgers (of Prepper's Will) on the topic of "What preppers can learn from the Israel-Palestine war." It seems a reasonable topic. After all, Selco writes extensively of his experiences in Sarajevo during the Balkans conflict in the 1990s. I've found books such as Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe and Defiance by Nechama Tec and Edward Zick interesting books that provide useful information for preppers even though they are dealing with World War II and its immediate aftermath and not with prepping or survivalism. The excellent Everything that follows is based on recent, real-life experience that has been proven to work, by James Shepherd-Barron has many good prepping or survival tips and is heavily based on the author's experiences working for NGOs in war zones. And this doesn't even include articles and books on defending one's home during a civil war or during WROL.

    So I was shocked at the comments to Rodger's article. 

    Rodgers started out by trying to lay out the basics of the history leading up to the current conflict, starting out with the Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, the initial UN partition plan in 1947, the subsequent battle between the Jewish settlers and Palestinians and Israel declaring independence, and the Six Day War in which Israel further expanded its land holdings. He then goes over some basic points which should have been obvious and non-controversial:

• It's probably not a good idea to travel to Israel as a tourist right now.
• Disarming civilians is a bad thing. Those in the self-defense community constantly address how criminals (including mass killers) prefer their victims to be disarmed, so this shouldn't be controversial; particularly since Israel apparently was one giant "Gun Free" zone.
• It is a bad idea to put your faith in government to protect you. It is a common refrain that: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away." So I don't see why this should be controversial. 
• Don't trust the media to give you accurate reporting because reporting is driven by biases including, but not limited to, "if it bleeds it leads" mentality, trying to produce content that their viewers/readership want, and the fact that most media is not truly independent. I would point out that we should be suspect of media accounts simply for the reason that most journalists can't get their facts straight even if you make a list or draw a diagram for them to follow. 
• Always to be ready to bug out and some lessons learned from Palestinians who were unable to even move from the north of Gaza to the south of Gaza.

And, I will note, Rodgers did an admirable job of not favoring one side over the other. Unfortunately, and I think this might be where he misstepped, he used the story of the decapitation of Israeli babies as an example where news reporting might be biased. 

    Needless to say, many of the comments to his article were a bit, shall I say, "unhinged". For instance, one comment read:

I’m going to ignore the SLIGHTLY UNBALANCED perspective you display here, not even going to try to argue the points about who agreed to share what land, even with the OSLO Accord. Instead I am going to point out that the Hamas Charter clearly states that they want NO two state solution, and that they want to “ELIMINATE ALL JEWS” from the earth.

 Another, following up on the comment above, stated:

    Slightly unbalanced!

    Looks to me totally blatant 100% using history and giving the narrative a twist to use pure hatred as an excuse to justify the wanton wish of genocide to a race known as Jews.

    Well said Shya.

    I will be unsubscribing today.

    Careful about what side you choose, because you may find they won’t choose YOU.

    Dying for the truth is better than dying for a lie.

 Another:

Taking preparedness lessons from the Israel-Palestine war? Talk about capitalizing on human tragedy. It’s one thing to learn from global events, but using such a sensitive and ongoing conflict as a mere “study” for prepping?

And another:

    I am unsubscribing from survivopedia.

    You obviously have a biased opinion of the facts, and when discussing propaganda, sort of ‘forgot’ to mention the false claim by Hamas of the alleged bombing of a hospital with 500 killed.

    This has been shown to have been an errant rocket strike, launched by Hamas, which didn’t even hit the hospital. It struck a parking area, killing a few people and destroying some cars.

    Now to be fair, there were a couple comments actually on topic: what we can learn from this situation. But the majority were along the lines that the author was horribly biased because his short historical synopsis apparently did not sufficiently paint Jews as the "good guys" in the conflict. Oh, the emotive woman who couldn't stand learning from real world events because it was icky or something. Notably, although I'm sure the babies story is what caused the ire directed against Rodgers, none of the comments I saw even mentioned it or tried to refute it. And no one, outside of the comment above, mentioned the "rocket attack". These are just people making up stuff to discredit Rodgers (whom I wouldn't know from Adam, to be clear) for no reason other than, as noted earlier, he didn't openly side with the Israelis. 

    Frankly, who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys" is completely irrelevant to the topic of surviving in an conflict area. But we seemed to be past a point of reasoned discourse where we are being forced to take sides and, as one of the comments seems to say, God help you if you didn't agree with whomever wins.

    The Awaken With JP YouTube channel explores in his usual sardonic way the issue of how in less than a month we went from no one wanting a major Middle-Eastern War to seemingly everyone cheering for war whichever side they favor.

VIDEO: "Israel vs Palestine - What They Don't Want You to Know"

AwakenWithJP (7 min.)