Earlier today someone asked me how the passage in Deuteronomy 21 regarding God avenging the blood of the innocent dealt with the victims of war. My first thought was that it didn’t. Since the beginnings of history, we have realized that a great many ordinary people have been put in harm’s way and died as a result of the mistakes of their rulers. The refusal of the five kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar to pay tribute led to a massive coalition of Mesopotamian and Hittite (?) forces beating up on the cities and their people and the resulting kidnapping of Lot, and kidnapping Lot led to Abraham and 318 armed servants and his allies among the sons of Heth (more Hittites?) defeating the Mesopotamian kings. Genesis 14 reveals a great deal of suffering by obscure but ordinary people in the ancient world for the behavior of their leaders and nothing has changed in the millennia since then. The people of Iran and Israel, Ukraine and Russia, and anywhere else where war is going on, are in danger not because they are evil by the standard of human beings, but because of the behavior of their leaders.

Let us take the example of the people of Tehran, for example. A few hours ago my dear Persian friend (who now lives abroad) informed me that she had received a warning in a group chat about Israel seeking to bomb the part of Central Tehran where her family is and she was frantically trying to all her parents to urge them to escape the coming disaster but found them to be asleep and unable to take her call or act on its information. Immediately after that I heard of a ceasefire being agreed to in Qatar between Israel and Iran (Iran has some mouth-breathing retards who deny that such an agreement was made to muddy the waters, it must be admitted), but the ceasefire stated that Israel and Iran both had twelve hours to finish their last operations before the ceasefire was to start. Was the destruction of the neighborhood of my dear friend’s parents (where she used to live) included among those last missions of Israel’s air force? It is quite possible.

There is no question that the parents of my dear friend are innocents as far as these matters go. I have interacted with them and seen them on video calls and they are both dear people, albeit each with their own quirks. Among the quirks that have revealed themselves is that the father of my dear friend is quite stubborn about remaining in Tehran even though the rest of the family was able to escape to safety in the north in the Caspian Sea region. Among the quirks of the mother, understandably so, is a commitment to remaining with her husband even if both found themselves in harm’s way by staying in a city that was vulnerable to attack that from the beginning the Iranian government lacked any ability to defend. I consider this sort of attachment to one’s city to be foolish in the extreme, but it is not wicked. People who are decent ordinary people may be foolish, we may all be foolish in one way or another, but it seems extreme that an excessive attachment to one’s city may be a fatal one.

Let us hope and pray that the good people of Tehran survive another night, and that they end up being able to enjoy the freedom to sleep in their homes and walk along the streets and live their lives without suffering destruction from bombs and missiles and drones and other horrors of contemporary war. Let us hope for the good people in Tel Aviv that the same is true for them, it should be noted as well. Whatever folly they have in being attached their homes does not merit death from above. It behooves us all to remember, though, that it is for the sins and follies of leaders, most of whom consider themselves to be immune from the harm they bring to their own people and the rest of the world, that such people are in harm’s way to begin with.