Beginning in the 2010s the mid-20th century term “woke” has gained popularity as connected to matters beyond race such as gender and identities perceived as marginalized. It became popular with millennials and members of Generation Z, and by 2020 became a sarcastic pejorative among many on the political right and many centrists in Western countries. Writer and activist Chloe Valdary, essayist Maya Binyam, and others have written that the new usage of the woke concept is a double-edged sword, being used for “Woker-than-Thou-Itis” which leads to canceling people for a potpourri of opinions – societal, economic, political, educational – and worse.

Being woke has become, for a very vocal and powerful minority, a raison d’etre; the social group to which they belong, indiscriminately adopting every element shouted most loudly by the woke in-crowd. Because this includes most of the Western media, it sometimes seems that it is representative of the entire Western world. And since cancelation can mean not only a loss of acceptability but a loss of status, job, and income, the majority of people, those who see that the emperor is, indeed, naked, are reluctant to speak out against the increasing lunacy.

There are comedians like Ricky Gervais who unabashedly refer to “The old-fashioned women, the ones with wombs.” or “Oh, they want to use our toilets. Why shouldn’t they? They are ladies – look at their pronouns! What about this person isn’t a lady? ‘Well, his penis.’ “Her penis, you fxxking bigot!” But the bad boy of comedy can certainly court cancelation. He’s already a multi-millionaire. And, even so, he was condemned by LGBTQ groups, and his Netflix special SuperNature was criticized as ‘dangerous’.

What’s dangerous is this entire alternate reality we’ve witnessed come into being. A reality that exists only in the minds of the woke, but has been attracting Generation Z. You know the ones – zoomers – university students who do not yet have real knowledge about anything much and are wont to invest time or energy in learning about an issue before they join earnest activists and their paid counterparts on the front lines of protest.

When it was mostly about pronouns, we could smile at the annoying reminders. Perhaps many of us balked at the plural ‘them’ being used for a single person, but generally, we made the crossover gracefully. When we got over the surprise at the audacity and absurdity of portraying the Queen of England as Black in Bridgerton, many of us could even accept the importance of opening a wider range of roles for people of color (although note that the sanctimonious woke are not so accepting of actors with no physical disability portraying characters with physical disabilities or for a Jewish Israeli actor portraying Cleopatra).

Critical Thinking Theory, originally introduced by Watson Glaser in his Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) used to be a process of using and assessing reasons to evaluate statements, assumptions, and arguments. This approach, based on thinkers such as Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, is not to be confused with the new, woke-lauded Critical Theory which is an attempt to disprove and discredit widely held or influential ideas or ways of thinking in society, also perhaps commendable if used without the current agenda of rewriting, or as gentler souls than I refer to it, reframing history. This includes taking people respected in the context of their time and condemning them with the eyes of 21st-century North America.

And if it weren’t enough to turn already-confusing adolescence into a morass of further gender identity crisis on steroids and with suicidal tendencies, demand that everyone change biology and grammar to accommodate the 10% (I’m being generous – some put it as low as 3.8%) who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and to force commendable, often heroic personalities of a past long dead (as are they, of course) to retroactively conform to the woke standards of 2024, the alternate reality today is most conspicuous in the war against the terrorist organization, Hamas.

Why have I waited until now to come out against the “Alternate Reality of Woke”? Because in this most recent mutilation of reality, brave young people are sacrificing their lives and my own country’s existence is at stake. We must not cast a benevolent forgiving eye on the misinformation accepted blindly by those protesting as “Pro-Palestine” or claiming that the atrocities of October 7th never happened.

The world’s blatant ignorance of the history of the Jewish People in their homeland of Israel fosters the claim that “Israel popped up in 1948 as the creation of the British colonizers”, a statement presented as fact in a question-and-answer forum in one of United States’ most respected universities. It allows people who have never experienced modern-day Israel to state with confidence that Israel is an apartheid state. It encourages people to call the casualties of war in Gaza genocide.

Support for the Hamas cause should not be surprising.

For decades, perhaps as many as five, the United Nations has been controlled by anti-Israel interests. Since the creation of the UNHRC in 2006 over half of the country-specific resolutions passed were those condemning Israel. The sitting UN Commissioner for Human Rights, an Austrian, has been vocal in condemning Israeli airstrikes on Hamas in Gaza but to my knowledge has made no comment about the 1300 Israeli civilians murdered in their homes, dismembered, or about the over 200 Israeli civilians taken hostage of which only an estimated 100 remain alive. UNWRA workers were filmed participating in that horror.

In the alternate reality over 35,000 Arab civilians have been killed during the war in Gaza, all as a result of genocide. In reality, Israel has gone to lengths never before seen in the history of warfare to evacuate civilians from the areas of conflict. And clearly, a large number of those killed were Hamas fighters, inserted into residential areas to use civilians as human shields.

In the alternate reality, the people of Gaza are starving. In reality, the markets are open and functioning in addition to the huge amounts of humanitarian aid received. Gaza has been given foreign aid to the tune of literally billions of dollars since Israel left the area in August 2005. Sufficient funds to develop Gaza into a Garden of Eden for residents and the development of a thriving tourism industry. Sadly, over 75% of the population is considered to be living in poverty as the aid has been used primarily for Hamas weapons and the building of hundreds of kilometers of underground tunnels large enough for truck traffic in which to store weapons and house the military arm of Hamas

In the alternate reality, hospitals and schools have been bombed by Israel. In reality, yes, they have, but only after careful investigation showed that they were serving as storage for Hamas weapons, and Hamas camps. They received ample notice to evacuate and IDF soldiers helped evacuate patients from hospitals, sometimes at great risk to their own lives.

In the alternate reality, Israel is villanized and constantly pressured to stop fighting in Gaza by countries and organizations posing as humanitarians. In reality, Hamas has remained uncensured for refusing to give a list of hostages still in captivity, alive or dead, or for refusing to allow The Red Cross to visit the hostages or provide medical care for those in need. Those organizations also ignore the fact that Hamas has changed the terms of agreement to a ceasefire significantly at the last minute every time – and then blamed Israel publicly for not signing.

In the alternate reality, the LGBTQ community has come out full force as Pro-Palestine, in some cases Pro-Hamas (which is beyond comprehension on every level). In reality, Hamas indiscriminately and without compunction murders anyone known to be LGBTQ, while Tel Aviv has been listed as the No. 1 LBGTQ-friendly city in the world.

Israel has had a Jewish presence for 3000 years. From time to time during those 3 millennia, Israel has been controlled by Jews. The Jewish People, as a recognized People, has existed for between 3000-4300 years, depending on the source of information.

There has never been an entity called Palestine, other than in Yasir Arafat’s mind, Arab propaganda, and the alternate reality. As a People, those considered ‘Palestinian’ today are a collection of tribes bound together for political purposes.

There are so many lies, so much misinformation, and lack of information, that it’s virtually impossible to debunk them one by one here. And, of course, if unwilling to invest the time and energy to research them adequately, one can never know who to believe. Why believe me? Easier to just decide blindly, choosing the worldview that best serves you in your preferred social group.

I could present hundreds of photos of Arabs, Asians, Blacks, Whites, Jewish, and non-Jewish meandering freely in Israel’s malls, on Israel’s streets, working as pharmacists, doctors, nurses, store owners, teachers, or sitting in Israeli coffee shops and restaurants. Anyone who visits Israel knows how ludicrous the claims of apartheid are. But you could prefer to believe that the photos are as photo-shopped as the horrendous photos and clips of the October 7th atrocities.

The Muslim world began planning for this day in the early 70s when they began filling American universities with their young people. They have increased funding and investment in American universities, institutions, and commercial interests to the point of dependency. They have an extensive and extremely talented public relations arm that has created an alternate reality that builds on the naivete and laziness of the Western psyche as well as an Israel lulled into complacency.

Make no mistake – October 7th was the culmination of decades of planning, strategizing, coordinating, and enlisting. It was an excellent plan. If it had gone as planned they would have seen their dream of a new Middle East realized.

Israel didn’t get one plane or helicopter into the air for 8 full hours. Israeli civilians were left to the mercy of barbaric murderers, with only sparse, ridiculously small groups of IDF soldiers trying to stem the tide of thousands of Hamas terrorists and Gaza civilians who stormed the flimsy fence. Only their own bloodthirsty culture, which focuses on death and the extinction of Jews, ruined their plan. If they had not been stalled by the joy of seeing several thousand Israeli young people running for their lives from the Nova Music Festival of Peace and Love, or the thrill of decapitating people, burning babies alive in front of their mothers or gang-raping young women while forcing their boyfriends to watch before murdering them, they could’ve been all the way to Tel Aviv and northward before Israel recovered from the shock and lack of preparedness.

Hezbollah was caught off guard. Apparently, the original plan had been for a two-pronged attack; Hamas from the South and Hezbollah from the North. But the Nova Music Festival was too tempting for Hamas and Hezbollah was not yet ready to join in.

One of my pet peeves is people who use the language of the Holocaust in political argument about our 21st world. However, we are in a war for the very continuation of the State of Israel – nothing less – in a world that is showing itself to be unfriendly to Jews at best and anti-Semitic altogether at worst. Israel is our homeland and only safe refuge in this topsy-turvy world. The Holocaust proved unequivocally that we can never again allow ourselves to be dependent on other police, army, government, or people. In the mere 79 years since 6 million Jews were murdered while others stood by or collaborated, it seems that much of the world – many of them Jewish – have forgotten or convinced themselves that it could never happen again.

October 7th should have destroyed that alternate reality.

Hamas must be wiped out totally and irrevocably. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is living in an alternate reality; one that doesn’t bode well for the world.