Thomas Small’s Smokescreen on TRIGGERnometry
By Khaled Salih
Let me start by stealing and modifying a paragraph from Hussein Aboubakr Mansour:
I would rather have you read this text suspiciously than credulously. I would rather you approach the arguments with rolled sleeves than with blind trust. For when you know I exaggerate, you do not let me hypnotise you like those other Egyptian magicians who speak calmly, politely, etc., etc., etc.—and you believe them without question because they seem reasonable.
Introduction
The prevailing commentary on the Hamas–Israel war, epitomised by Thomas Small’s performance on TRIGGERnometry, is not merely mistaken; it is a perversion of intellect masquerading as balance. His lament that “the ledger is red on both sides” is not moral insight but moral surrender: the comfortable piety of those who mistake symmetry for justice and confusion for compassion. In Small’s world, murderers and their defenders are co-signatories on a shared tragedy, and history itself is a matter of personal opinion.
In truth, the record is neither symmetrical nor ambiguous. A clear-eyed examination of the evidence reveals that Israel, far from faltering, achieved a decisive strategic victory: one that has redrawn the balance of power in the Middle East and exposed the bankruptcy of the moral relativism that seeks to obscure it. To describe this as “a war with no winners” is to mistake exhaustion for analysis and cynicism for wisdom. The ledger, if we must use one, is written in reality’s ink: one side defended its citizens; the other still sacrificing them.
