Type “stu­pid” into Roget’s The­saurus and more than 50 nouns and adjec­tives pop up. In vary­ing degrees, all of them are applic­a­ble to the remorse­less list of tragedies that plague the world. The tragedy of that is how accept­able will­ful and blind stu­pid­i­ty have become.

Gaza tops the list of avoid­able-with-a-mod­icum-of-intel­li­gence debacles.
Hamas was mon­u­men­tal­ly stu­pid to have start­ed the war. React­ing to an albeit large stum­bling block in the shaky but essen­tial cease­fire by resum­ing hor­ren­dous vio­lence against fault­less civil­ians trapped in the embod­i­ment of a dystopi­an world, reduces the Israeli gov­ern­ment to a Hamas-lev­el men­tal­ity.
Among the 600 and count­ing Gazans killed and more than 1,000 injured in Israeli bom­bard­ment this week to, in the words of an Israeli Defence Force spokesman, “…weak­en their (Hamas) mil­i­tary and gov­ern­men­tal capa­bil­i­ties and remove threats to Israel”, were sev­en rank­ing Hamas oper­a­tives. The oth­er vic­tims includ­ed “…,a father and his sev­en chil­dren, as well as the par­ents and broth­er of a month-old baby who sur­vived along with her grandparents”.
In a state­ment in Eng­lish few if any Gazans would actu­al­ly see, Israeli Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu warned that the lat­est round of bom­bard­ment was “only the begin­ning”, then cyn­i­cal­ly advised Gazan civil­ians to “…avoid any con­tact with Hamas ter­ror­ists” and “get out of harm’s way”.
Israel has con­sis­tent­ly – and cor­rect­ly — charged Hamas with hid­ing among civil­ians. Even pre­tend­ing to believe that ordi­nary Gazans have any choice in the mat­ter shouts gold star lev­el stu­pid, with cal­lous as a bonus point.
But not as loud­ly as a video mes­sage by Defence Min­is­ter Israel Katz. The min­is­ter, who has  (ille­gal­ly) advo­cat­ed Israeli set­tle­ment expan­sion in the occu­pied West Bank, warned Gazans: “What comes next will be much hard­er, and you will pay the full price.”
Appar­ent­ly Min­is­ter Katz is not aware that apart from their lives, most Gazan civil­ians haven’t got enough left of any­thing to pay the price for what they need to get through the day, even if they could find it.
Or maybe he is…
Short­ly after Phase One of the cease­fire deal expired ear­li­er this month, Israel shut most of the bor­der cross­ings to stop human­i­tar­i­an aid, includ­ing food, med­i­cine and oth­er sup­plies, from enter­ing the enclave. That was fol­lowed by cut­ting elec­tric­i­ty to a desali­na­tion plant in cen­tral Gaza.
U.S. researchers using satel­lite imagery esti­mat­ed that at the time of the cease­fire, 70  per­cent of Gaza’s build­ings, includ­ing 90 per­cent of the schools have been dam­aged or destroyed, 68 per­cent of the strip’s farm­land has been dam­aged and between 80 and 96 per­cent of irri­ga­tion sys­tems, orchards, machin­ery and barns have been dec­i­mat­ed.
Hamas killed 1200 Israelis and oth­ers in the attack that start­ed the war. Since then, Israel has killed almost 40 times that many Gazans, 18,000 of them children.
Any­one who counts all of that as a vic­to­ry of any kind is, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid.

                   SPEAKING OF WHICH

 Nonethe­less, a White House spokesman said the lat­est Israel oper­a­tion had Pres­i­dent Trump’s full backing.
On Wednes­day, Trump vowed that the Iran-backed Houthi mil­i­tant group in Yemen, which fires mis­siles at Israel and attacks ships it believes are bound to or from there, would be “com­plete­ly anni­hi­lat­ed” by U.S. mil­i­tary strikes.
That echo of Israel’s boast about what it is going to do to Hamas and the fate pre­vi­ous U.S. admin­is­tra­tions declared they would vis­it upon Al-Qae­da, the Tal­iban and ISIS is wor­thy of any and all of Roget’s list. “Stu­pid” being at the top.
Instead of try­ing to fix a coun­try that, accord­ing to the World Bank is eco­nom­i­cal­ly and social­ly “crip­pled” by a ten year civ­il war, the Houthis declared  a war they can­not win.
Yet Trump thinks (if that’s not over­stat­ing the case) that a group stu­pid enough to do that can be bombed out of exis­tence, even though repeat­ed attacks by Israel and the Biden admin­is­tra­tion had lit­tle dis­cernible effect.
But then, Trump also boast­ed he would end the war in Ukraine within
24 hours of tak­ing office.
That kind of brava­do alone is stu­pid even for him. As evi­dence, at the time of writ­ing, it’s approach­ing 1,500 hours since he was sworn in,  and the best he’s done is a “…ten­ta­tive deal to par­tial­ly rein in the grind­ing war”, which Vladimir Putin shred­ded with­in 24 hours.
The great Dr Mar­tin Luther King summed it up best: “Noth­ing in the world is more dan­ger­ous than sin­cere igno­rance and con­sci­en­tious stu­pid­i­ty.” 

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