We all should condemn and hate the fact that innocent women and children have been killed, injured, and captured by a group that can be described as barbaric. It is also barbaric that the Palestinians have been restricted to a caged environment with no access to the outside world and treated worse than animals. They will eventually lash out in the most unimaginable and vicious ways if they have no other recourse.

For years, Israel has wanted to directly take on Hamas deep inside of Gaza.  As America used 9/11 to invade Iraq, Israel will use the October 7 attack as justification to engage Hamas in urban warfare that will be hard, brutal, and catastrophic for Palestinian people regardless of whether they support Hamas or not. 

This plays directly into a larger Middle East strategy by Israel and some of its supporters in America to control the region. Sen. Lindsey Graham and presidential candidate Nikki Haley wasted no time attempting to link Iran to the attack and encouraging hostilities as we did before the invasion of Iraq. 

America is complicit in the Israeli occupation and human rights violations in Gaza and the Palestinians as a whole. We have provided both financial aid and United Nations diplomatic cover for Israel, instead of being a true force for peace and diplomacy. Rather than supporting the drumbeat of war, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to de-escalate and stop this cycle of war and human rights abuses.  

A U.S. military presence will only aggravate other Middle East players and possibly explode the entire region; it may even increase the possibility of us being hit at home by a terrorist act. If we are hit, we have no one to blame but our own government and imperialist pundits.