The word for stinky in Arabic is "netan," an unfortunate coincidence for Netanyahu, the current Israeli prime minister and murderous, child-killing villain scumbag of a person. While media outlets worldwide continue to refer to him by the cutesy nickname "Bibi" — with at least 3,579 articles using Netanyahu's nickname from October 7, 2023, to May 31, 2024, it's worth noting that his actual name literally means "stinky" in Arabic. No matter how serious a conversation about the ongoing tragedy in Gaza becomes, we always return to the grade school level satisfaction of mocking this man's appropriately stupid name.

The media's insistence on using "Bibi" feels particularly galling when discussing someone who now faces ICC arrest warrants for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. There's something deeply unsettling about news anchors using a childhood nickname while reporting on charges of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against civilian populations. It's like calling Hitler "Ady" while discussing the Holocaust; the informality feels grotesquely inappropriate given the gravity of the accusations.

Palestinian families carry histories that stretch across generations, marked by displacement and survival. Parents once fled their homes under gunfire, whispering instructions no child should ever have to hear: don’t get shot, don’t get bombed, if your brother falls, keep running. These words linger long after the moment has passed, echoing through families for decades. The trauma materializes in subtle ways, in hoarding habits, in hypervigilance, in the inability to throw away a plastic bag from the 1990s. It is inheritance, not by choice but by circumstance, passed down like an heirloom recipe, bitter, enduring, and inescapable.

But here's what makes this moment particularly maddening: Jewish and Israeli families carry similar stories. Arab families carry similar stories. The entire region is haunted by intergenerational trauma, by families who survived unspeakable horrors. The bonding ritual of sharing family tragedies, times our grandparents were displaced, shot at, bombed, has become a grotesque commonality across ethnic and religious lines.

This shared experience of suffering should create empathy, not justify more suffering. World War II ended. The Holocaust ended. The constant murder of innocent children has not. During World War II, Jewish people fighting to save their community were a necessary resistance against genocide. Right now, Netanyahu's actions in Gaza, which even Trump administration officials describe as acting "like a madman" who "bombs everything all the time," represent something else entirely: the transformation from oppressed to oppressor.

The arithmetic of human value that has emerged is morally bankrupt. The equation shouldn't be that one Jewish life equals a thousand Arab lives, yet that's precisely the mathematics we see playing out in prisoner exchanges and military responses. Netanyahu faces nationwide protests for his security failures during the October 7 attacks and his inability to secure the return of Israeli hostages, yet his response has been to double down on collective punishment that has pushed millions to the brink of starvation.

The effects of World War II are indeed still lasting. The horror the Jewish community faced in the 20th century should not be forgotten. But acknowledging historical trauma cannot become a license for perpetrating new traumas. When stinky-yahu trades a thousand Palestinians for one Israeli soldier, when humanitarian aid workers are bombed while trying to feed starving populations, when children are killed at rates that shock even seasoned war correspondents, this isn't self-defense. This is what happens when trauma survivors become trauma inflicters.

The cruel irony is that Netanyahu's actions are creating new generations of traumatized families, new stories that will be passed down for decades, new children who will grow up hoarding plastic bags and flinching at loud noises. The cycle continues, fed by a man whose very name means "stinky" in the language of the people he's bombing.

Perhaps it's time for media outlets to stop using cutesy nicknames when discussing alleged war criminals. Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that calling someone "Bibi" while reporting on starvation campaigns feels uncomfortably like normalizing the unnormalizable. And perhaps it's time to recognize that a man named "stinky" is living up to his name in the worst possible way, leaving a stench that will linger in history long after he's gone.

The grade school insults write themselves. The grade school nickname needs to end.