War is hell.

Millions of innocent civilians have been killed in wars, and more women, children and babies than soldiers.

War isn’t a children’s game. There is no “Olly olly oxen free” that lets civilians escape the horrors of war.

It is irrational to send soldiers out to war and ask them to “Play nice.”

More than 4.5 million people have died in post-9/11 war zones, reports Brown University’s Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, and the numbers climb every day.

The war for our independence claimed the lives of 25,534 Americans, but only about 27% of them died in combat, according to Howard H. Peckham’s book, "The Toll of Independence."

The television History Channel’s program, "How Many Died in the Revolutionary War?" broadcast in September 2023, asserted that the loss of 25,534 Americans was then highly significant in a nation of only 2.5 million.

Wars always have opponents. Our Revolutionary and Civil wars had opponents. There were American opponents of all 108 of our military conflicts, and innocent civilians died in all of them. Died in war and military actions that most Americans have never heard of, including Indian wars.

Yes, there even were American civilians who opposed our entry into World War II. One of the most famous was the great aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping.

While the news media didn’t ignore the opposition, neither did it side with them the way American media is now doing.

TV news programs incessantly wave the gore of civilian suffering and brutal deaths of innocent civilians, fathers, mothers and children in our faces.

In doing so, it is, whether knowingly or unknowingly, taking sides with Hamas terrorists who started the war and daily commit war crimes in their stated goal of eliminating the Israeli nation.

Israel sustains almost daily missile attacks, which have driven more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes. Yet, television’s main media ignores that side of the war, focusing instead on injured, dead, and starving Palestinians that Hamas uses for protection against Israel’s military.

Yahya Sinwar, top military leader in Hamas, has said "that increased fighting -- and more Palestinian deaths -- work to his advantage,” The Wall Street Journal has reported. Dead women and children “are necessary sacrifices. ... We have the Israelis right where we want them.”

The New York Post editorialized that, “Israel can’t even rescue innocents without Hamas’ cheerleaders and useful idiots in the West erupting in outrage.”

Journalists at ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN are principal useful idiots. They are siding with bloodthirsty terrorists whose aim is to destroy the Jewish state. In the name of fairness, they have become mouthpieces for terrorists.

Can any informed and sane person conjure a vision of American journalists interviewing Hitler or his generals during WWII, or in the validation of Nazi propaganda, as television journalists are doing today with Hamas during Israel’s fight for the mere right to exist?

Yes, war is hell, but contrary to a Moscow-Pullman Daily News columnist’s recent claim that there are no moral wars, Israel’s battle for survival is a moral war, as were the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and some other wars that we have fought.

Day has lived in Pullman since 1972. He served on the Washington State University faculty for 32 years as a science communicator, retiring in 2004. His peripatetic readings are catholic, with a small c.