Ned Lud

I. The Righteous Indignation of the Goliaths Burning Gaza

In the shadow of a thousand warheads, under the weight of a whole history in blood and in scripture, Gaza rises as the altar of Moloch, its charred earth a sacrilegious altar for the new gods of algorithmic empire. What is it to speak of war and not speak to its holy hypocrisy - when scripture, sanctified by centuries of suffering, is wielded as a tool of power, manipulation, and destruction? It is here, where holy decree meets human savagery, that the sacredness of life is tainted and the sanctimony of empire is seen in all its destructive ferocity.

The Torah, once a moral guide, is now being exploited as a piece in the cynical game of power - bent to consecrate murder rather than consecrating peace. With every prayer recited in the name of God, with every appeal to justice, there is a sanctimonious irony: The innocent blood flows in Gaza, while the devout recite Psalms on the lips with which they bless their destruction. This is not the tongue of salvation. This is the tongue of sacrifice - not the righteousness now demanded, as of yore, by the Divine, but the ritual murder of the innocent. In this lamentable travesty, it is not the golden calves of Scripture, but the unclean machinery of war, equipped with high-technology precision, that now supplants the will of God.

"Thou shalt not kill" - the tenet, at the core of all religions professing to be devoted to the God of mercy, is desecrated in the name of defense. In Gaza, the children are not random victims; they are the main and most obvious sacrifice in the altar of international collusion, martyrs to a geopolitics of blood cult which has become acceptable owing to the indifference of the international community. These assassinations are not accidental. They are ordained - not through divine providence, but through the inexorable power of empire, a malevolence far greater than that of any idol from the ancient past. And as these kids burn, their bodies are not just victims; they are the actual flesh of the apocalypse prophecy promised, not in some future, far-off era, but now, in the now, under the cover of state-sponsored violence and corporate complicity.

Scripture promises a day when the righteous would be tested, when humanity would confront its own capacity for evil. That day has arrived. The world has exchanged holy promises for a bloody compact - a bargain not of redemption but of conquest. The children of Gaza, sacrificed to the idols of power, shall not be forgotten, and the God Who saw the pain of His people shall not be muffled by diplomats' hollow rhetoric or generals' technocratic prayer.

We have reached an existential juncture in our existence where the sole proof of faith is not reciting the commandments but living with the will to do so. And as the blood of the innocents is shed, as the wails of the children ring out across the rubble, the answer that we must all give is this: For how long will we permit Gaza to be the altar upon which the children are burned, and the world feigns prayer in the cause of peace?

II. The Blood of the Innocents: Sacred Texts in the Service of Murder

The ancients knew something the modern does not: blood is not just life force, but covenant's binding agent. Sacrifice in the Bible was not to be trifled with; it was a grave act for which the highest price was paid for expiation. The slaying of the innocent was never meant to be glorification, but a profound accountability with sin, a cry of pain that reverberated through the centuries. And now, today, the innocent blood is spilled not for expiation, but for fuel for power - a grotesque corruption of the sacred that reduces human life to mere commodity on the altar of empire.

In Gaza, the sacrifice has been mechanized, ritualized, and efficient. The children, who were once innocence in its most vivid form, are now disposables - their blood a necessary sacrifice to maintain the status quo. The justification is brutal in its elegance: The death of the many is acceptable if they help keep the few alive, and those few are dressed up in the clothing of self-defense. It is a perverted theology, one that cloaks the violence of empire in the garments of righteousness. Murder of the innocents is no longer a bloody, tragic howl to heaven for mercy, but is instead a political necessity, a bloodletting authorized and even glorified by those who justify themselves as doing so in the name of justice.

But there is another blood, the blood which speaks not of empire, but of justice. In the Torah, to shed blood was to signify great offense, to be a sign that the covenant had been broken. In the Book of Leviticus, the Lord warns:

“The life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood that makes atonement by reason of the life.”

Leviticus 17:11

The sacrifice system was never meant to be in the interest of the powerful but as a redemptive system, an attempt to holistically offset the evil of humanity. But in Gaza, this sacrificial logic has been skewed - the blood of innocents shed in the pursuit of power and not redemption, for the protection of the powerful and for muzzling the powerless who cannot defend themselves.

Today, the words of the Bible and Torah are rhetoric tools, employed not to seek out truth or justice, but to vindicate the unjust. The IDF will never invoke the sanctity of life as it launches its missiles into residential areas; rather, it will invoke the terms of scripture - the terms of self-defense, the terms of divine command.

"Thou shalt not kill," the commandment rings out, but the hypocrite who speaks it is not interested in its application. Rather, the commandment is used as a means of permitting murder, the invocation of God's name being the cover that hides the perpetrators of the bloodshed in His name.

In this contemporary theater of blood, the language of Scripture is used to conceal the savagery of empire. The old gods of Israel's past enemies, Moloch and Baal, return - but not in wooden or stone idols, but in the iron fist of military nationalism, the ghost of espionage, and the cold logic of war. The sacrifice is no longer a religious purification, but an instrument of control. The children of Gaza, whose blood was spilled for the same tired illusions of security, are the ultimate proof of this hypocrisy.

III. The Lord's Wrath: When the Sacred Turns to Dissonance

We come now to the voice of the prophets, to the voices of the prophets of old who uttered the word of the Lord in hours of moral night. And there is no more evocative metaphor for Gaza than the wrath that fell upon the cities of the wicked in the Old Testament. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the fall of Jericho, the Canaanites' obliteration - these weren't really military conquests; they were the judgment of God, an apportioning of evil that brought ruin to those who had forsaken righteousness.

In the Book of Ezekiel, the prophet declares God's judgement upon those nations which spill innocent blood:

"Thus saith the Lord God: Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the idols of thy abominations, and because of the blood of thy children which thou didst give unto them... behold, I will take away thy lovers, wherewith thou hast delighted, and all of them that thou hast loved, with all of them that thou hast hated."

(Ezekiel 16:36–37)



Not only a denunciation of a nation, but of a whole ethos - an ethos based upon the victimization of the weak for the advancement of the strong. It is the language of judgment, a judgment that echoes in Gaza's ears - a country where the blood of children is spilled not for pardon, but for the political expediency of hegemon powers.

The language of "self-defense" echoes loudly in modern Israel, but in fact, it is the defense of empire that is in the balance. The blood of the innocent is not the cost of creating peace, but the consequence of guaranteeing superiority. And the biggest hypocrisy is this: While the righteous are outraged at the storm of war, the mighty continue to use scripture to justify their ferocity.

"Thou shalt not kill," they chant, yet simultaneously they order the instruments of war to continue doing what they do.

The children get burned first, not because they are least precious, but because they are the holiest. For every one of them in their little lives, we witness a lost world - a world that might have been, a world that should have been. Their blood is not merely spilled in war; it is spilled as a part of a larger, more evil sacrificial system - a system that sacrifices their futures to the phantasms of security and domination.

IV. Goliath's New Clothes: The Despotism of Empire in the Modern Technological Age

Goliath of old was the personification of the strong and the despotic. Towering, unharmed, his power came not only from his bulk, but from the fact that he could impose his will by pure force. His slingshot, the icon of David's triumph over tyranny, has become something else now - Goliath's new implement is no longer a rock, but a missile; no longer an improvised slingshot, but the technical power of a militarized state, forged in the crucible of modern war and bound together by the cold, unyielding grip of algorithmic domination. The rock has been replaced by the bomb; the impotent weapon has been rendered obsolete in a world where the mighty can strike from miles away, free from accountability, shielded by the arm's length of their power.

In Gaza, this Goliath does not walk upon the earth, but hovers above it - in drones, in satellite-guided missiles, in the quiet hum of AI-assisted surveillance. It is an empire of the unseen, an empire of knowledge, whose victories are written in digits and coordinates, and not in the scarred earth of war. The destruction of Gaza is less the work of soldiers in the field than of invisible algorithms and faceless politicians, whose work goes through the unadorned calculus of geopolitics and self-interest. The incinerated children’s faces in the rubble are statistics to them - mere collateral damage in a war whose motivations are not moral, but empire.

In this twisted incarnation of Goliath, the covenant with the divine has been turned on its head. The sacred right of defense has been twisted into a pretext for wanton violence. The IDF, armed with the latest technological marvel, is the modern equivalent of Goliath - invincible, amorally efficient, and unstoppable. And like the biblical giant, it is both an awesome power and an empty one. Goliath's hubris does not come from his physical strength, but from his belief that he is free to do as he wishes, without fear of reprisal from an angry God.

And yet, this new Goliath - draped in the flag of self-defense, bedecked with the rhetoric of security - is not invincible. He, too, falls within the law of divine retribution, a law which has echoed down the centuries. In Amos' book, the prophet laments those who pervert justice, those who, with a smile, sentence the innocent to death under the cover of righteousness:

"They sell the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals."

(Amos 2:6)

And this same perversion is what drives the corridors of power today. The cost of the innocent is paid in blood and bombs, not sandals or silver.

The true instrument of Goliath - the one that ensures the endless perpetuation of empire - is not the drone or missile, but the thoroughly rehearsed propaganda of self-preservation. The lie is not in the violence itself, but in the justification for it. "We do this to protect our people," they claim. But guarding does cost money - and it is being financed by Gaza's children, whose blood stains the pages of history and the words of scripture.

For in the battle between Goliath and David, the true weapon isn't the rock that smashes the giant, but the rock tossed into the river, the rock that penetrates the muddy waters of propaganda and deceit and unmasks the true face of power. Gaza is not a war zone alone. It is the laboratory for this great moral battle - where the innocent will be made to suffer so that the powerful do not encounter any obstacle, where the blood of children must be spilled so that the mighty will be appeased by the insufferable hunger of empire.

V. The Lament of the Silent Witness: A Modern Exile of Conscience

And as the children of Gaza slumber beneath the debris, as faceless drones fly overhead, there is yet another more evil tragedy - exile of conscience. Exile was a punishment in the time of ancient Israel, banishment from the covenant of God, retribution for sin of the moral order. The prophets decried the wickedness of the people, but they too saw their banishment from the land of promise. But in this latest era, it is not a single nation that has been exiled, but the world's conscience. We are an era when moral purpose has been lost in the fog of information war, when the truth has been buried under propaganda depths, and when the slaughter of innocents has become a business cost.

The children get burnt first, not in the ancient pyres of gods, but in the subzero, mechanical fires of modern war. Their screams are muted by thick walls of state-narratives, by anesthetic words of self-defense and austere deeds. The war crimes do not remain on the battlefield; they are legitimized by the world leaders, framed in the rhetoric of diplomacy, offered as a package deal of security and stability. The exile of conscience is now absolute - the world has not only allowed this violence to continue, but has actively aided it, either with complicity or willful ignorance.

The wail that echoes through the Gaza streets is not just the crying of the downtrodden, but the crying of the soul of the world, torn from its moral anchor. The prophets of old spoke of this day when the land would mourn because the people had departed from righteousness.

“How the gold has become dull, how the rich gold has changed! The holy stones are scattered at the head of every street.” (Lamentations 4:1)

And that gold is not the holy covenant, but the war money, exchanged in the backrooms of politicians and gun runners. The holy stones are not scattered but buried under the concrete of a thousand bombed houses, and the world closes its eyes.

Exile in Gaza is complete. The world has lost the capacity to weep for the innocent. The act of witnessing injustice has been commodified - reduced into a media spectacle, where the true tragedy becomes lost in the game of hashtag activism and soundbite looping. The feeble cries of children are drowned out by the cacophony of drone strikes and newsreaders, their pain erased, their dying rendered inconsequential. But there is no avoiding the fact: The conscience exile is political, yes, but also spiritual.

VI. The Test You Failed: Deuteronomy 30:19 Revisited

“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

In ancient times, the people were offered a decision: to live by the commandment of God, to live in favor of life rather than death, in favor of blessings and not curses. The Torah offered a straightforward but rich ethical paradigm: live in favor of life. But in contemporary times, this has been corrupted. The world has elected in favor of death, and not in favor of any death, but in favor of the organized killing of innocents. Gaza is not just a battlefield; it is the testing ground for the moral spine of the international community. The world, in its overall complacency, has chosen to allow Gaza to be annihilated in the name of politics and power. It has chosen to look away, to give no intervention, to bless the massacre with its silence.

But it is not a passive choice; it is an active choice. It is the choice of every nation that stands idly by, of every government that continues to back the war machine, of every citizen who remains silent when confronted with injustice. The murder of innocents is not a deplorable side effect of war; it is the war itself. The blood of Gaza's children is on the world's hands, and no level of diplomatic verbiage or legal immunity can wash it away.

The trial Deuteronomy offers us is not a political act. It is a trial of the soul. We are not being asked whether we can justify this violence, but whether we have the moral strength to say, “Enough.” When we opt for death, we not only fail the test of conscience, but the test of humanness itself.



VII. The Last Kaddish Will Be Algorithmic: Psalm 137 and the Digital War Machine

Ancient Israelites, in their most desperate moment of exile, swept beside the Babylonian waters, wailing,

“How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:4)

It was both personal and public, a lament from the very heart of their beings as they stood before the ruin of their world. Gaza grieves today by another kind of river - a river of data, where the pain of the innocent is filtered, algorithmically chosen, and ultimately forgotten.

The last Kaddish will not resound in the heavens, but in the cold, uncompassionate servers of Silicon Valley, where the dying words of the downtrodden will be rendered into bits and bytes, lost in the ocean of information, drowned by the bottomless scroll of social media news.

“Happy is he who smites the infants on the rocks!” (Psalm 137:9)

It is not a command, but a cry of desperation - a cry for people who have lost everything. And yet, in our era of war by technology, even this old cry is rendered useless.

The atrocities of Gaza are not fought on the ground alone; they are fought in cyberspace, where the brutal face of human suffering is veiled under a cloak of disinformation and distraction.

We, the witnesses, are as removed from the face of death as the Babylonians were from their conquered exiles, regarding their sufferings as a distant story, an afterthought in the books of history.

The last Kaddish, unchanted by Gaza’s bereaved, but by an algorithmic voice, will be the last desecration. In the surveillance state, the time of the digital empire, the scream of the innocent will not even echo in the winds - it will be filed, sorted, forgotten.

This is the last silence: not the absence of sound, but the destruction of history.

VIII. The Final Prophecy: The Judgment of the Invisible

Gaza’s dead children are not faceless victims in some abstract geopolitics. They are the face of a world that has lost its sacred charge - a world that has left the divine imperative to love life behind.

The reckoning is not coming on some distant horizon… it is coming now - in this very instant in which the blood of these innocents is being shed, and in the moment when we, as bystanders, continue to look away, anesthetized to state and media technocratic lies.

“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.” (Revelation 20:12)

The “books” in question are not the sacred books which have been our guides throughout the centuries - they are books of history, books of human action and omission.

The world’s failure to act in Gaza is already recorded in these books. The children’s blood, spilled for empire, is not a statistic, but an indelible stain on the moral awareness of humankind.

And yet, no divine intervention to save us from our own downfall. Gaza’s destruction is not an inevitable act of fate, but the result of the collective will - the states’ will, the corporate will of states, the will of those who are capable of acting, but do not want to.

In Daniel, the vision is clear:

“And I heard the man clothed in linen… when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.” (Daniel 12:7)

Here we see the culmination of a war not just against a country, but against humanity itself - a war against the sacred order of creation, a war to extinguish the light of justice and replace it with the dark, suffocating haze of empire.

In Gaza, the holy ones are uprooted. The strength of the innocents is broken beneath the force of state terror and international apathy.

And yet, there is a last act to come.

It is not up to us to know the day and the hour of judgment, but we do know this: when the books are opened, we will be judged not by what we own, by what we are strong at, or by what serves our pragmatic interests, but by whether we were willing to act - to act on behalf of the innocent, to choose life instead of death, and to speak truth to power.

The final of the prophecies is brief:

“I was hungry, and you gave me no meat; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you visited me not.” (Matthew 25:42–43)

In answer to Gaza, we must answer ourselves: How will we be judged?

IX. The Reckoning of Empires: The Age of Indifference Ends

Gaza stands as a living witness to the failure of empires, old and new, to safeguard the sacredness of life. It is Sodom and Gomorrah of today, where the cries of the victims are stilled by the war machines, where the innocent blood is spilled to define the privileges of the powerful.

Today’s empires - the United States, Israel, or any other empire involved in the violence - have not learned the lessons of history. They have not learned that empires expand by oppressing the weak, and that empires collapse once they lose the path of justice.

The prophetic books, both in the Torah and Bible, are full of warnings to leaders:

“Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees… to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right… that they may make the fatherless their prey!” (Isaiah 10:1–2)

This is the fate of empires that grow fat on the suffering of the poor - they are not gauged by their economic power or military might, but by whether they are willing to stand for what is right, to fight for the vulnerable, and to respect the worth of human life.

The reckoning that awaits Gaza is not just for the authors of violence, but for all those who endorse it, all those who remain silent, and all those who allow this chain of bloodletting to continue.

The question is not should we end the war in Gaza today, but are we willing to change our vision of the world - to peer beyond the curtain of empire and recognize our own pain in the pain of the innocent.

If we don't act now, the final judgment will not only come on those directly guilty of the slaughter, but on all of us - on a world that has stood idly by while it has happened without action, without conscience, and without mercy.

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The Sacrifice of Innocents: Gaza, Divine Wrath, and the Gospel of Collateral Devastation