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# Thomas Small’s Smokescreen on TRIGGERnometry
- URL: https://otherwise.ghost.io/thomas-smalls-smokescreen-on-triggernometry/
- Published: 2025-10-21T14:12:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-17T13:43:16.000Z
- Author: Khaled Salih
- Tags: Newsletter, #Migrated-1792244264359, #Import 2026-10-17 14:38

*By Khaled Salih*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/5a01bad0-8220-41a6-a40e-9cc16a42f655_1581x890-heic.jpg)

[TRIGGERnometry](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av3icsesNE8&t=2465s&ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

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.

What follows, then, is not a plea for sympathy but a demand for lucidity, starting by peeling away the smokescreen of false equivalence and expose what lies beneath: the concrete facts of Israel’s multi-front reaction; the gradual emergence of American doctrine of unapologetic power that enabled it; and the deep current of Israeli political history that has always, in the end, preferred the hard truth of survival to the narcotic of fashionable despair.

**Narrative Falsehoods**

To misunderstand the origin of a conflict is to forfeit any right to pronounce upon its conduct. The war of ideas surrounding Israel’s security and military campaign has been clouded by a fog thicker than any discharged on the battlefield: an intellectual smokescreen woven from moral confusion and factual indifference. Chief among them is exemplified by Thomas Small, whose analysis would be merely naïve if it weren’t so consistently wrong. His depiction of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s communication with Qatar as an “apology” for Israel’s military action belongs not to the realm of interpretation but of invention.

The record, for those who still believe in such a thing, is plain. Netanyahu expressed regret for the death of a Qatari citizen during an operation against Hamas: a conventional diplomatic gesture of condolence, not a confession of guilt. To pretend otherwise is not just a misreading; it is a small act of propaganda, the moral twin of Hamas’s own cynical theatrics. Small transforms a moment of civility into an indictment of legitimacy and, in doing so, exemplifies the decadence of a culture that finds contrition more admirable than courage.

This small deceit mirrors a much larger one: the contemporary addiction to moral equivalence. Small’s argument, that “the ledger is red on both sides,” belongs to that weary genre of Western hand-wringing which cannot distinguish between self-defense and savagery. As Dr. Dan Shueftan observed, our age has learned to grant immunity to “barbarians proud of their barbarism,” provided they conduct it from behind the bodies of their own civilians. It is a philosophy that would have found equal fault, one suspects, in the firemen of London and the Luftwaffe.

Israel’s struggle is not a debating exercise. It is the daily confrontation between civilisation and its sworn enemy. To describe it otherwise, to drape murder in the garb of moral parity, is to misunderstand not merely an event but a century. For Israel, born from the ashes of extermination, the distinction between aggression and defense is not a matter of semantics; it is the very definition of existence. Those who cannot perceive that distinction are not analysts. They are spectators mistaking their own confusion for insight.

**The American Fulcrum**

No war is won in isolation, and Israel’s success was amplified by a transformation in American statecraft. Under President Donald J. Trump, Washington abandoned the therapeutic rituals of diplomacy and re-discovered the old, unfashionable virtue of power. The so-called Trump Doctrine was not a philosophy so much as a posture, a reminder that peace, if it is to endure, must be imposed, not negotiated. While the salons of Europe still murmured about proportionality, the United States re-asserted the principle that peace through strength is not a slogan but a historic necessity. President Trump has repeated told Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli decision-maker one thing: Remember October 7th.

Small, in his infinite moderation, sees in Israel’s campaign a destabilising gamble. He mistakes energy for recklessness, and will for chaos. Yet the record suggests otherwise. Under Trump’s unblushing assertion of dominance, sixty counties signed on to the framework of a regional order that, for the first time in living memory, made peace in the Middle East seem less like an oxymoron. The point was not the deal itself but the demonstration: that a superpower willing to act as one can realign the world faster than a thousand conferences can misunderstand it.

This was not diplomacy by the old rules. At Sharm el-Sheikh, Trump turned negotiation into theatre and theatre into policy. His handshakes were tests of submission; his mockery of Arab monarchs’ private jets at the Knesset was not mere vulgarity but performance art in the service of supremacy: If you don’t follow my lead, your America-made private Boeing 747 will remain grounded. What his critics mistook for crudeness was, in fact, choreography: a deliberate spectacle of American power designed to remind allies and adversaries alike that Washington was once again a capital with consequences. It was Realpolitik for the age of spectacle: less Bismarckian than gladiatorial, and all the more effective for it.

Beneath the bombast, however, was coherence. The dismantling of the Iran nuclear deal, the reimposition of sanctions, the destruction of strategic targets by B-2 bombers (made possible by Israeli pilots taking out Iran’s defence system), all formed part of a single, fearless line of thinking: that the guardians of order must sometimes act like its executioners. The result was not chaos but clarity. For Israel, the return of the Pax Americana was not a gift; it was an instrument. And for those, like Small, who prefer weakness dressed as virtue, it was an unforgivable reminder that power, properly used, is its own justification.

**The Political Bedrock**

Every war has its external enemies and its internal accomplices. For Israel, the October 7th massacre was not only an attack from Gaza but a brutal indictment of its own domestic divisions. In the months preceding the assault, the country had been tearing itself apart over judicial reform: a quarrel so shrill and self-absorbed that even Hamas mistook it for terminal weakness. Yahya Sinwar, in his subterranean arrogance, read Israel’s protests not as the noise of democracy but as the rattle of a dying state. Like so many before him, he confused argument for decay.

The irony was instant and cruel. The attack that sought to exploit Israel’s divisions ended them. Within hours, the nation that had been shouting at itself found its voice. The same protesters who had blocked highways now lined up to donate blood; reservists who had vowed never to serve under this government rushed back to the front. What Hamas intended as an existential blow became the forge of a renewed national unity: proof that the Jewish state’s internal arguments, however savage, remain the quarrels of a family, not the fractures of a failing society. Same pattern as in 1948.

This spontaneous cohesion was more than emotional; it was historical. It completed a cycle that began half a century earlier, in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Then, too, a complacent leadership had been caught off guard; then, too, catastrophe had reshaped the Israeli psyche. Golda Meir’s humiliation gave rise to Menachem Begin’s “national camp,” which made security, not sentiment, not diplomacy, not even prosperity, the cornerstone of statecraft. The 2023–2025 conflict, born of another intelligence failure, reaffirmed that same admirable wisdom: in Israel, the right to argue depends on the ability to survive.

The parallel is almost biblical in its precision. Just as the Yom Kippur War ended the monopoly of the old Labor elite, the Hamas war ended the illusion of post-Zionist politics. It reminded Israelis that history, unlike opinion, cannot be reformed by committee. The state’s existence is not guaranteed by its moral rectitude, its technology, or its clever lawyers: solely by its will to endure, armed and awake. When the Knesset stood united before the world, as President Trump observed with something approaching awe, it was not unity of ideology but of necessity: the only kind that ever lasts.

Thus Israel’s victory was not merely military, nor even diplomatic. It was political in the deepest sense: the re-assertion of a national creed forged through trial and kept alive by fear: the conviction that security is not a policy but a faith. It is a reflection of a core national anxiety that, as the journalist Amit Segal notes, is animated by the deep-seated fear that “One morning they will wake up and discover that Israel suddenly stopped existing overnight.”

The old divisions will return, as they always do; democracies are built on argument, not unanimity. But for now, the lesson stands written in the scar tissue of history: Israel quarrels loudly, fights reluctantly, and survives miraculously. The shock of the October 7, Israel’s *Black Swan*, has transformed the country and its people into a living example of *Antifragility* in action.

**A New Regional Reality**

Thomas Small’s analysis fails not because it lacks compassion, but because it lacks comprehension. He gazes at the Middle East through the smudged lens of equivalence and wonders why everything looks blurred. In his universe, where every act of defense must be balanced by a corresponding sin, the murder of civilians and their protection are twin moral crimes. This is not balance; it is paralysis dressed as thought.

But history, which has little patience for sentimental geometry, has already rendered its verdict. Israel did not merely repel its enemies: it re-ordered them. The Lebanese front has been neutralised, Hezbollah’s roar reduced to a growl. Syria has imploded into acquiescence, its alliances shattered. Iran, once the puppeteer octopus, finds its tentacles cut and its hands trembling. In Gaza, the most fortified patch of land on earth, the violence-worshipe theocrats of Hamas discovered that martyrdom makes for good television but poor strategy. Even Yemen’s Houthis, bellowing from the edge of the map, have managed only to remind the world that nihilism is not resistance but self-parody.

What emerges from this crucible is not peace in the sentimental sense, but order in the classical one: the Pax Americana restored, enforced by power rather than paperwork. The Trump Doctrine, derided by its critics as brutality in a red tie, has proven what its detractors could never forgive: that deterrence works, and that the world’s moral health occasionally requires a dose of unapologetic strength. Power, properly understood and purposely utilised, is not the enemy of peace; it is its precondition.

Inside Israel, the transformation is no less profound. Out of division came unity, out of complacency resolve. The country that had been caricatured as fractured and fatigued has reasserted the hard-won virtue that created it: the refusal to die conveniently for other people’s moral comfort and virtue signalling. The ghosts of 1973, the blindness, the self-doubt, the intellectual masochism, have been exorcised. In their place stands a society chastened, armed, and unrepentant.

And so, the region enters a new dispensation: one that demands clarity rather than apology. The age of hand-wringing might be over. The age of consequences has begun. Israel, that small and obstinate Jewish democracy, has once again defied both its enemies and its moral accountants. It has shown that survival, in a world still allergic to conviction, is the ultimate act of defiance.

Those who cannot tell the difference between defense and destruction will continue to mumble about balance sheets and “red ledgers.” The rest of us can see, with something like ironic satisfaction, that the century has turned a corner. The war is not merely over; the argument is, too. Israel stands, its detractors sulk, and history, unromantic, unsentimental, and entirely unsupervised, moves on without them.

**References:**

Comedy Cellar USA, 20251021, “Did Israel Win in Gaza? ‘Yes — Emphatically, and Tragically, No.’ Ambassador Michael Oren.” [www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDTBaTbveY&t=1565s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDTBaTbveY&t=1565s&ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

Life Insights, 20251019, “Behind Israel’s Victory | SHUEFTAN FILES.”

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, 20251021, “Against Moderation. With Notes on Murder and Wine and a Short Treatise on Deniable Plausibility.”

[Against ModerationEpigraph: “The Reader who wants to know at all times exactly what Hussein really thinks about something, whether he is making a serious or a smiling face, has to be given up for lost: for he knows how to convey both with a single word; he likewise knows how to and even wants to be right and wrong at the same time, to entangle …![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d6/2c/d62cdd13-a476-41c5-8f2c-29270c99d95d/content/images/2026/10/8c1818ff-0a62-4308-b38c-97f5e0925299_864x864.png)The Abrahamic Metacritique](https://critiqueanddigest.substack.com/p/against-moderation)

Khaled Salih, 20251019, “War of Revival at the Core of Israel’s Antifragility.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-176597531](https://substack.com/home/post/p-176597531?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

— 20251017, “Dominance: Donald Trump’s Art of Humiliation as Statecraft.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-176432039](https://substack.com/home/post/p-176432039?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

— 20251016, “‘I, Donald J. Trump,’ Love Israel and the Middle East.” [https://substack.com/home/post/p-176367071](https://substack.com/home/post/p-176367071?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

*—* 20251014, *“The cilantro leader: A review of Amit Segal’s A Call at 4 AM.”* [*https://substack.com/home/post/p-176133419*](https://substack.com/home/post/p-176133419?ref=otherwise.ghost.io)

TRIGGERnometry, 20251019, “The Untold Story of the Gaza Ceasefire. Thomas Small.” [www.youtube.com/watch?v=av3icsesNE8&t=1501s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av3icsesNE8&t=1501s&ref=otherwise.ghost.io)