When I traveled to Israel in 1996, things were pretty calm. Minus a couple brief side trips to Jordan and Egypt, I was there for about a month.

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was serving his first term as Prime Minister, but was much less “conservative” than he is now. The only violence deemed front-page worthy by the media was the stabbing murder of two West Bank “settlers.”

Israel is, not surprisingly, a pretty militarized place, and that can be a strange experience. All young people must serve in the military (excepting, curiously, ultra-Orthodox Jews who have been given a pass for religious reasons), and it was not uncommon to find myself sitting next to a beautiful female member of the Israeli Defense Forces on an Egged bus, her rifle resting lightly between her knees as she slept.

And all around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I picked up on the pride Israelis feel in their ability to protect their tiny nation, surrounded from its founding by potential enemies. In particular I remember seeing a T-shirt with a photo of an American-made F-16 fighter and the message, “Don’t worry America — Israel is behind you!”

Intended as a winking defiant inversion of a message Israelis must tire of hearing, the shirt conveyed a certain pugnacious grit: After the triumph of the Six Day War in 1967 and the near disaster of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, many citizens of the Jewish state came to believe they could withstand any assault.

Things are more complex now, following more dubious military actions and the continued occupation of territories taken from Jordan, Egypt and Syria. To boot, Israel has taken unilateral, pre-emptive action to forestall what it saw as future threats. That’s what happened in 1981, when IDF planes bombed Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility in Iraq and Syria’s incomplete al-Kibar nuclear installation in 2007.

In both cases, the United States government stood firmly behind the nation that receives more American foreign aid each year than any other (about $3 billion annually, or nearly one out of every six U.S. foreign aid dollars; most of it is in military aid).

Now we hear that Israel is prepared to take matters into its own hands and attack several nuclear facilities in Iran, amplified by American politicians eager to seem “tough.” Netanyahu’s government and many Americans are convinced that the big dog of the Persian Gulf (for that we can thank the ill-advised war in Iraq) is pursuing nuclear weapons.

President Obama said Monday that the United States “will always have Israel’s back.” At the same time, he has criticized all the cheap belligerence emanating from GOP presidential candidates and Israeli hawks. On Tuesday, he rightly called out the Republican war hounds for not taking war seriously enough.

“This is not a game,” the president said.

No, it’s not. But it’s all to easy for many Americans to treat it as if it is. The media is generally more than happy to aid and abet that thinking.

After listening to (but in my case, never believing) the lies we were told about the extreme dangers of Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” the recent drumbeats for war against Iran have sounded distressingly familiar.

First, there is not unequivocal evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, at least not yet. As Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a Senate committee hearing on Feb. 28, “I think they’re developing a nuclear capability (but) our intelligence makes clear that they haven’t made the decision to develop a nuclear weapon.”

And according to many careful military analysts, it’s far from certain that Israel could effectively carry out a mission to destroy or cripple three Iranian facilities, due to limitations in aircraft fueling, among other logistical issues.

And that would mean the U.S. would be forced to enter the fray.

Such a move would almost certainly catalyze further anti-American fury across the Muslim world, set Hezbollah and Hamas aflame on the borders of Israel, kill thousands of Iranian civilians and create chaos on the region — probably the world. What’s more, it could even make it more likely that the Iranians would develop nuclear weapons.

“Should Israel rush to war, Iran might follow Hussein’s example (after the Osirak attack) and rebuild its nuclear program in a way that is harder to detect and more costly to stop,” wrote Colin H. Kahl of the Center for a New American Security in The Washington Post on March 2.

Let’s say Iran does wind up with a nuclear weapon or two. As North Korea has learned, that’s pretty good protection against an attack, which might make it easier to build more nukes.

Netanyahu continually raises the specter of another Jewish holocaust at the hands of a nuclear-armed Iran. And, he suggests, failing to attack preemptively would be the equivalent of appeasing Hitler, Neville Chamberlain-style.

But is Iran truly “insane” enough to attack Israel, the only nuclear-armed nation in the Middle East, with an estimated 200 warheads poised for delivery? To read the Western press, yes, the Persians are all mad, mad I tell you, bent on Israel’s destruction even at the cost of their own annihilation. As someone rather vividly put it to me, if Iran launched prospective nuke(s) at Israel, “It would immediately become the world’s largest ash tray.”

Americans are tired of war, according to most polls. Even so, 48 percent polled by Rasmussen in February said the U.S. should join any effort by Israel to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

Yet that’s more than the 43 percent of Israeli Jews — compared to 42 percent of all Israelis — who think their nation should attack so long as America joins in. (A solid 32 percent say they don’t think Israel should attack at all.)

Could it be that Israelis, who have tasted the bloody fruits of war, take it more seriously than Americans? We were rightfully aghast at the deaths of some 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Why is it that so many of us don’t seem to feel that same horror when tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, are killed in other nations — sometimes at our hands?

All “those who are … beating the drums of war should explain clearly to the American people what the costs and benefits would be,” Obama said last week.

And if we do take such stock, is it too much to ask that we consider the potential death and suffering of people other than ourselves into those costs?

E-mail: claybonnyman@yahoo.com

Ever loved a dog or cat? My guess is that most people in the United States have.

So imagine this:

Take that beloved pet and place her in a confined space in which she cannot stand up or turn around. Artificially inseminate her, and when she whelps, move her — beat her, if necessary, because she won’t want to go — into a “gestation crate” where her pups will have a small space to nurse.

She, meanwhile, will be pressed to the ground by metal bars, forced to eat in that position and urinate and defecate onto hard concrete floors. She’ll probably develop sores. Because of that, and because she lives in a massive indoor facility with hundreds of other animals just like her, she’ll need to be injected with huge amounts of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals.

Her offspring will be taken from her unnaturally soon, so she can start cycling again and produce more puppies. Her boredom will be so excruciating that she and many of the animals around her will literally go insane, smashing their faces and breaking teeth against bars, bloodying their mouths while chewing on anything nearby.

You can well imagine that after three or four years of such an existence — she’ll never have seen the sun or experienced a kind touch — she’ll be no good as a mother and she’ll be shipped off for slaughter.

You surely realize, by now, that I’m talking not about your cat or dog, but an animal of equal intelligence and social needs: pigs. (But for the record, this more or less goes on in puppy mills, too; if you want to adopt a rescued mill dog, check out milldogrescue.org.)

This is how more than 99 percent of hogs are raised in the United States, in so-called “concentrated animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs in meat-washed industry argot. All factory farming is repugnant, but because of the combination of their intelligence, sociability and the brutal conditions that bring us our daily bacon, pigs are by far the most tortured.

(By the way, the agricultural industry doesn’t want you to know how it raises hogs or other meat species. In Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Montana and other states, there are now laws banning the filming of these death houses, pushed by agri-giant Monsanto. Out of sight, out of mind)

Pigs are amazing — and clean — animals. The only reason they roll in the mud is because they have no natural cooling systems. They are, by some measures, smarter than cats and dogs, able to perform certain complex tasks as quickly as chimpanzees.

So. Still think bacon is funny? Hip? A bold symbol of independence?

Still think it’s cute to chuck bacon at Bolder Boulder runners?

Maybe you’d like to slip on your hip “Push Button, Receive Bacon” T-shirt?

Think Homer Simpson’s dimwitted devotion to the delicious cured meat is a riot?

For reasons that I can only guess at — and I will — bacon has become hip and clever. A kind of tag that says, “Screw you, health Nazis! I love my bacon.”

I’ve seen clever posters of roses made of bacon. T-shirts that read, “This girl ? bacon!” And, my favorite — it’s just so darned rebellious — a bumper sticker saying, “I’d Kill a Kitten for Bacon.”

So what is it with all this bacon “humor” ?

Sure, it tastes good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any (though the fake stuff is surprisingly good), but I remember. No wonder, with all that yummy fat and salt.

Clearly part of it is in reaction to the increasing pressure to eat a more healthy diet that’s lower on the food chain, a recipe for a healthier planet. Americans are rugged individuals, you know, and don’t like to be told what to do. So often we respond with juvenile “nyaa, nyaahs” to prove that nobody’s the boss of us.

And, I’m thinking, at least a few people are overcompensating for a sense of inner guilt. I think most of us — maybe not in Paducah or Tulsa, but surely in Boulder — actually know how harsh and horrible 99 percent of pig farms are.

And, I suppose, some people truly don’t give a damn about suffering.

Whatever the roots of this greasy bit of zeitgeist, just remember that every time anyone buys bacon, they’re voting “yes” for the torture described above. Unless, that is, they make the effort to buy humanely raised pork (or, of course, become a vegetarian or vegan; more on that below).

But lucky us. In Boulder County, we have a growing number of truly local farms that are rejecting the nasty, unhealthy, violent factory-farm model and raising “dirt hogs” — animals that get to have real lives before slaughter.

At Cure Organic Farm on Valmont Road in Boulder, Anne and Paul Cure raise a number of different species the old way, including hogs. In other words, the animals live on pasture supplemented by grain and produce culled from other parts of the farm. They are rotated to new pastures every two or three weeks, depending on the condition of the grass (yes, hogs are a grazing species; drive by Black Cat chef Eric Skokan’s farm on 75th Street near Valmont and you’ll see plenty of piggies, heads down in the grass).

The animals at Cure are allowed to develop natural social hierarchies, and they are never vaccinated or immunized.

“We like to have them in a natural habitat, where they can range, root up ground, turn up the soil,” says Anne Cure. “We let the social dynamic be as natural as it can be.”

When the time comes for young pigs to go to slaughter, they are sent to a small, USDA-approved, family-run processing plant in Evans, Colo., Innovative Foods.

Cure finds it curious that so many people who visit the farm are uncomfortable with the idea that the animals die. Yes, these are meat eaters.

“The switch hasn’t happened yet in their minds, of really wanting to know how food is produced. They’re still in the dark, thinking it just comes in a package,” Cure says.

(Having killed pigs, cattle, sheep and poultry myself, I’ve long thought that all meat eaters should be required to do this at least once, to dispel all that denial.)

But locally, as more and more traditional producers crop up, Cure sees a lot of people waking up.

“I applaud those community members who have gotten to the place of really wanting to know, of caring enough to seek out producers who do it in a natural way,” she says.

Now, back to that vegetarian/vegan thing.

Yes, sure, that’s a great choice if you are concerned with the cruelty of factory farming. But I’ve argued for a long time that the likelihood of America going veg is approximately nil. Given that reality, I urge carnivores to be willing to spend a little more to support the people who are farming in a more ethical way. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to change the hideous, hellish practices that bring us all that hilarious, hip bacon. (I always get yelled at by people who tell me “free range” is terrible, too; maybe, but it’s better, and that’s progress.)

Bacon isn’t funny or cool. It’s cruel. It’s brutal.

But it doesn’t have to be.

E-mail: claybonnyman@yahoo.com.