Details: The new arms package is worth billions of dollars and contains more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, sources said. President Joe Biden on the same day said he was devastated by the suffering of the people Israel is bombing in the Gaza Strip and that “we must also pause to reflect on the pain being felt by so many in the Arab American community with the war in Gaza.”
All credit to Reuters for juxtaposing those two items. As President Biden claims he is “devastated” by the Palestinian people and their suffering in Gaza, he’s sending Israel more bombs to devastate Palestinians in Gaza.
If the U.S. government were truly against genocide, it would stop sending genocide-enabling weapons to Israel. If Biden were truly frustrated by Bibi Netanyahu, an arms embargo would be an effective way to show it. But the Biden-Netanyahu spat is kayfabe, a staged event that we’re supposed to pretend is true.
Let’s pretend this is real and unscripted
Kayfabe is a useful concept from the world of “professional” wrestling. Bibi is now being set up as the bad guy, with Biden as something like a good guy, trying to get Bibi to moderate his behavior.
Very few people are fooled by this nonsense. Much more importantly, people in Gaza are dying while this staged nonsense is shoved in our faces by the corporate-owned media.
Annelle Sheline Stands For Honesty and True Public Service
I caught this story first on Twitter/X, then CNN, where Ms. Sheline’s resignation letter was posted. What follows is the text of her resignation letter to the Department of State. It is well worth reading in full.
Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.
Annelle Sheline (Courtesy Annelle Sheline)
Yet Israel is still planning to invade Rafah, where the majority of people in Gaza have fled; UN officials have described the carnage that is expected to ensue as “beyond imagination.” In the West Bank, armed settlers and Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians, including US citizens. These actions, which experts on genocide have testified meet the crime of genocide, are conducted with the diplomatic and military support of the US government.
For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.
Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began. Members of civil society have refused to respond to my efforts to contact them. Our office seeks to support journalists in the Middle East; yet when asked by NGOs if the US can help when Palestinian journalists are detained or killed in Gaza, I was disappointed that my government didn’t do more to protect them. Ninety Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed in the last five months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That is the most recorded in any single conflict since the CPJ started collecting data in 1992.
By resigning publicly, I am saddened by the knowledge that I likely foreclose a future at the State Department. I had not initially planned a public resignation. Because my time at State had been so short — I was hired on a two-year contract — I did not think I mattered enough to announce my resignation publicly. However, when I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, “Please speak for us.”
The Biden administration’s own policy states, “The legitimacy of and public support for arms transfers among the populations of both the United States and recipient nations depends on the protection of civilians from harm, and the United States distinguishes itself from other potential sources of arms transfers by elevating the importance of protecting civilians.” Yet this noble statement of policy has been directly in contradiction with the actions of the president who promulgated it.
President Joe Biden himself indirectly admits that Israel is not protecting Palestinian civilians from harm. Under pressure from some congressional Democrats, the administration issued a new policy to ensure that foreign military transfers don’t violate relevant domestic and international laws.
Yet just recently, the State Department ascertained that Israel is in compliance with international law in the conduct of the war and in providing humanitarian assistance. To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.
Some have argued that the US lacks influence over Israel. Yet Retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick noted in November that Israel’s missiles, bombs and airplanes all come from the US. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting,” he said. “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Even now, Israel is considering invading Lebanon, which brings a heightened risk of regional conflict that would be catastrophic. The US has sought to prevent this outcome but shows no appetite for withholding offensive weapons from Israel in order to compel greater restraint there or in Gaza. Biden’s support for Israel’s far-right government thus risks sparking a wider conflagration in the region, which could well put US troops in harm’s way.
So many of my colleagues feel betrayed. I write for myself but speak for many others, including Feds United for Peace, a group mobilizing for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza that represents federal workers in their personal capacities across the country, and across 30 federal agencies and departments. After four years of then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to cripple the department, State employees embraced Biden’s pledge to rebuild American diplomacy. For some, US support for Ukraine against Russia’s illegal occupation and bombardment seemed to reestablish America’s moral leadership. Yet the administration continues to enable Israel’s illegal occupation and destruction of Gaza.
I am haunted by the final social media post of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on February 25: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
I can no longer continue what I was doing. I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world.
Learning from Ashleigh Banfield’s Landon Lecture of April 2003
Early in 2003, Ashleigh Banfield was a star in the making. A rising journalist at MSNBC, she covered the opening stages of the Iraq War. Before that, she’d made a name for herself covering the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Smart, pretty, highly skilled, she was heading nowhere but up. Until she gave an honest lecture on her experiences in Iraq and the Middle East on April 24, 2003.
I’ve written before about Banfield’s honest and heartfelt critique of Iraq war coverage in the U.S. mainstream media, which won her no friends at NBC News. In fact, the NBC brass sidelined and essentially exiled her. I recently reread her Landon Lecture at Kansas State University and realized NBC wasn’t just angry about her critique of mainstream media war coverage: they were likely even more incensed at how she humanized and empathized with Palestinians and other Middle Eastern peoples and groups, including organizations like Hezbollah.
Here’s some of what she had to say back then in 2003:
But it’s interesting to be able to cover this [Israel and Palestine]. There’s nothing in the world like being able to cross a green line whenever you want and speak to both sides of a conflict. I can’t tell you how horrible and wonderful it is at the same time in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel. There are very few people in this world who can march right across guarded check points, closed military zones, and talk to Palestinians in the same day that they almost embedded with Israeli troops, and that’s something that we get to do on a regular basis.
And I just wish that the leadership of all these different entities, ours included, could do the same thing, because they would have an eye opening experience, horrible and wonderful, all at the same time, and it would give a lot of insight as to how messages are heard and how you can negotiate. Because you cannot negotiate when someone can’t hear you or refuses to hear you or can’t even understand your language, and that’s clearly what’s happening in a lot of places in the world right now, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, not the least of which there’s very little listening and understanding going on. Our language is entirely different than theirs, and I don’t just mean the words. When you hear the word Hezbollah you probably think evil, danger, terror right away. If I could just see a show of hands. Who thinks that Hezbollah is a bad word? Show of hands. Usually connotes fear, terror, some kind of suicide bombing. If you live in the Arab world, Hezbollah means Shriner. Hezbollah means charity, Hezbollah means hospitals, Hezbollah means welfare and jobs.
These are not the same organizations we’re dealing with. How can you negotiate when you’ re talking about two entirely different meanings? And until we understand — we don’t have to like Hizbullah, we don’t have to like their militancy, we don’t have to like what they do on the side, but we have to understand that they like it, that they like the good things about Hizbullah, and that you can’t just paint it with a blanket statement that it’s a terrorist organization, because even when it comes to the militancy these people believe that militancy is simply freedom fighting and resistance. You can’t argue with that. You can try to negotiate, but you can’t say it’s wrong flat out.
And that’s some of the problems we have in dealing in this war in terror. As a journalist I’m often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, “Here’s what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here’s what the Lebanese are telling me and here’s what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here’s what they have to say about the Golan Heights.” Like it or lump it, don’t shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.
We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.
Emphasis added. Original spelling retained. You can watch her speech here.
Banfield tried to be a real journalist for MSNBC. She tried to understand and report the Israeli perspective but also the perspectives of groups like Hezbollah, and for that she was severely punished.
For Hezbollah, you could say something similar of Hamas today. As Banfield says, you don’t have to praise groups like Hamas (or, for that matter, Israel). But what you should try to do as a journalist is to understand them and to report on them as clearly and honestly as possible. As she says, her reward was to be defamed and dismissed as a slut by a fellow reporter, even called an accomplice to murder, after which her bosses at NBC punished and demoted her!
It’s no wonder that mainstream media coverage by most reporters today is so slavishly pro-Israel. Who wants to be slut-shamed and demoted? Who wants their career ruined just because they sought to understand more than one side (the Israeli/U.S. one) of complex situations in the Middle East?
My brother once quipped: “We learn, good.” MSM reporters in America “learned good” that being rabidly pro-Israel (and, of course, pro-U.S. government and pro-war) is always the safest bet to accolades and promotions from their corporate overlords.
With admirable honesty, Banfield spoke of the horrific face of war at Kansas State Univ. in 2003. Soon after her speech, she was demoted (Image courtesy of KSU)
And, as I wrote in my previous piece on Banfield: Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful. Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Phil Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Jesse Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.
Banfield tried to tell us there’s a difference between journalism and coverage; that far too many voices of dissent had been silenced in America before and during the opening stages of the Iraq War; that war coverage was (and is) far too often both one-sided and sanitized.
Again, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to listen to her lecture and reflect on her honesty and integrity—and how she was punished for it.
After watching this, you’ll understand why the reporters you see today on U.S. TV and cable networks are nothing like Ashleigh Banfield.
“War is ugly and it’s dangerous” and it fuels hatred. Yes it is and yes it does, Ms. Banfield. Thank you for your honesty, your integrity, and your courage.
Israel Is the Tail Wagging the American Dog of War
The U.S. government is complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Americans may think that “aid” to Israel is held up in Congress, more than $14 billion in death-dealing munitions and machinery of war, but in fact the U.S. has already provided massive amounts of bombs and targeting guidance to Israel, all with the tacit approval of Congress, and of course with the full-throated support of the Biden administration.
Israel is the tail wagging the American dog of war.
Guess who’s being invited to address (or, should I say, command) Congress again?
The best summary of this reality that I’ve seen came in a recent TomDispatch article written by Stan and Priti Gulati Cox. Here’s an extended excerpt:
Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing [Israeli] killing spree [in Gaza] by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”
In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)
In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”
Such powerful bombs, reportedAl Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars.
Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in the IDF’s operations. According to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report, even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding that “for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza.”
And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it this way when it came to President Biden’s warning not to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and destroying Hamas.”
The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this, but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did successfully last fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israelis are mostly bombing civilian sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their way through the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured themselves, along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in past Israeli attacks.
I sure wish the Biden administration and Congress could do something to stop the genocide in Gaza. Don’t you? But I guess they can’t control their own tails. Put differently, perhaps they simply can’t disobey their master’s commands.
Speaking of which, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is currently competing with Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to see which one of them can roll over and beg more quickly and obsequiously to their master, Bibi Netanyahu. Yes, Bibi is being invited once again to wag the Congressional dog and issue his commands to a slavishly obedient pack of Washington politicians.
There’s nothing like a foreign leader coming to Congress to bark out commands to make me proud to be an American.
If you’re like me, you subscribe to news services like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters, which send daily news reports and quick highlights. Given the busy pace of life, most people probably read those headlines and short summaries and little else. The mainstream media is counting on that.
Consider this quick summary I received today from Reuters’ “Daily Briefing”:
ISRAEL AND HAMAS AT WAR
More than five months into Israel’s ground and air campaign, launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, there are widespread shortages of food, medicines and clean water in Gaza, doctors and aid agencies say. Starving children fill hospital wards as famine looms.
Note the framing here. It’s a war between Israel and Hamas, with history beginning on October 7, 2023. Most of all, note how widening famine is described: it’s just happening, apparently due to a war that Hamas started.
You’re not told that the famine is man-made. That the Israeli government is blocking thousands of trucks loaded with food, medicine, and clean water for Gaza. Instead, you’re encouraged to think it’s much like a natural disaster, if not entirely the fault of Hamas, which allegedly started all the trouble on October 7th.
Sorry, kid: the Israeli government won’t let the aid trucks roll. Blame Hamas!
If challenged to write my own summary for Reuters, I’d pen something like this:
Israeli government policies are producing mass famine in Gaza. Israel has already killed or wounded more than 100,000 Palestinians since the October 7th Hamas attacks. An Israeli blockade on most aid to Gaza promises death tolls in the hundreds of thousands over the next few months. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send weapons to Israel while providing diplomatic cover in the UN, making it complicit in genocide.
We see similar narrative elision with the Russia-Ukraine War, which in the mainstream media is all the fault of Vladimir Putin, who woke up in February 2022 and decided to invade Ukraine because he’s a power-hungry maniac, a new Hitler—or worse. Meanwhile, Putin blew up his own highly profitable Nordstream pipelines, or maybe a rogue element from Ukraine did it. Who can tell, right?
Dishonest and disingenuous reporting is facilitating genocide in Gaza and a horrendous war in Ukraine that is hollowing out that country. In each case, what we’re supposed to focus on is something else: the crimes of Hamas and the alleged megalomania of Putin.
Gaza is especially egregious since a genocide is in progress there, enabled and empowered by massive weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. But I guess there’s nothing we can do to help those starving Palestinian children “as famine looms.” I guess we can construct a temporary pier that will take two or three months to build; I hope the starving children can hold on that long. Whether that pier will facilitate relief efforts or serve mainly as a Trojan horse to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing by the boat load) remains to be seen.
“A Ministry of Risk” is a new book on Philip Berrigan that gathers his “writings on peace and nonviolence.” It’s edited by Brad Wolf, who has helped to lead the ongoing “Merchants of Death” war crimes tribunal against the vast profiteering of America’s military-industrial complex. (Full disclosure: I participated in the tribunal and blurbed the book.)
The Berrigan brothers, Phil and Dan, fought courageously against war and for peace, coming from a deeply felt Catholicism centered in Christ’s teachings, e.g. blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. I previously wrote about Dan Berrigan and his spirited protest against the Vietnam War as part of the Catonsville Nine. Phil was equally devoted to peace, being a Christian witness against America’s deep-seated culture of war and other forms of violence.
Phil wrote with great eloquence about the need to change America, and his short entry on “Liberation from Fear” in 1969 from New Politics vividly shows the brilliance of his insights. I’ve written before about the salience of fear in America and the need to counter it. Given my own peculiar interests, I’ve cited a powerful saying from “Dune” that “fear is the mind-killer” as well as the words of Master Po from “Kung Fu” that “fear is the only darkness.”
This is what Phil Berrigan had to say about fear, love, and the need for a revolution in America, not, hopefully, a violent revolution, but a complete change in values:
As for myself [wrote Berrigan], I fail to see how a society can be thrown into revolution except through massive civil disobedience, which in the case of America means that domestic and foreign business is rendered unprofitable, and hence inoperable. And I fail to see how extensive civil disobedience can be an effective factor unless the movement is built of people who are less concerned about power and more about justice; who are fearless but not rash; who are disciplined but not bureaucratic; who are patient but not dilatory; who are moral but not moralistic—in private and in public.
But above all, a movement must be built of those who would risk the jaws of the Beast, not in the prospect of being torn alive but rather in trust of their own weapons—truth, justice, freedom, love. Revolution is a time of personal and public purification if it is truly revolution, and the liberation principally sought after is a liberation from fear. Doesn’t Scripture say something about perfect love casting out fear? Which may suggest that the chief obstacle to revolution is fear, or the fear to love. And revolution without vast resources of love will be a bloodbath and, at best, a mere shift in power.
These words pulse with meaning and insight. America needs a revolution, and one based on love is the one least likely to end in a violent bloodbath. Marianne Williamson, to her credit, campaigned on a message of love four years ago to counter the fear she saw being stoked by candidates like Donald Trump. She wasn’t wrong about this.
I have a modest proposal: Stop all U.S. aid to Israel. Why does Israel need billions and billions in aid, mainly so they can buy U.S. weaponry? If they need it, they can pay for it. And if they’re going to use U.S. weapons to kill massive numbers of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, America shouldn’t sell them the weapons no matter what Israel is willing to pay.
Am I anti-Israel? Anti-semitic? Only if IDF General (and war hero) Matti Peled was.
Here’s what Israeli general Matti Peled had to say about U.S. aid to Israel:
“Until 1974, Israel had not received foreign aid money and we did fine. Receiving free money, money you have not earned and for which you do not have to work, is plain and simply corrupting.” His son, Miko Peled, then added that his father consistently argued “that the weapons the U.S. sold [or gave] to Israel were corrupting the country and were being used to maintain the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.”
Miko Peled wrote that his dad consistently said “It is bad for Israel, it is morally wrong, and it is illegal” (cited on page 68). Again, was General Matti Peled, IDF war hero, anti-Semitic? A self-hating Jew? Of course not. He was a moral, principled, courageous person who fought against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. His son Miko continues that fight.
Miko Peled recounted his dad’s position in “The General’s Son: Journey of An Israeli in Palestine,” published in 2012 by Just World Books. I first learned of the Peled family’s activism against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people in an interview between Miko Peled and Chris Hedges in January of this year. I highly recommend both that interview and Miko Peled’s book.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Gives Israel a Blank Check to Kill
I was watching Congressman Ro Khanna question Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on 2/29 about Israel’s demolition of Gaza when Austin uttered a humdinger about trusting Israel to “utilize weapons that we provide them in a responsible way.” He said that after noting that Israel has already killed more than 25,000 women and children in Gaza.
What “responsible” looks like
U.S. weapons shipments and transfers to Israel are couched as “security assistance,” and these weapons are often paid for by the American taxpayer, or put on the national credit card for future generations to pay. When Americans get antsy about being complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Biden administration, supported by many Republicans, remind them that allegedly these weapons for Israel create jobs in the USA.
“Genocide creates jobs” is not exactly a healthy slogan.
Of course, Lloyd Austin alone isn’t the problem here. The entire Biden administration supinely supports Israel and Bibi Netanyahu. Donald Trump, Biden’s most likely opponent this fall, is even more slavishly pro-Israel.
And so the nightmare in Gaza continues as Israel utilizes its “Made in USA” bombs and missiles “in a responsible way.” Responsible in this case meaning the killing and injuring of more than 100,000 Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza’s ability to sustain human life for the remaining two million Palestinians there.
Disgust is the word today that captures my feelings about the actions of “my” government. Disgust at facilitating and defending the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as casualties among Palestinians soar above 100,000. Disgust that Congress only clamors for more billions for Israel ($14 billion in the Biden administrations’s bill; $17 billion in the alternate bill from the House Speaker) to enable more killing. Disgust at the strenuous efforts being exerted to get $61 billion in more weapons and aid to Ukraine while denying any oversight over or insight into how that money is spent. Disgust at the government seeking more billions to arm Taiwan, possibly stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble with China. Disgust at constant fear-mongering about Russia hacking the 2024 presidential election, as if that “threat,” such as it is, can’t be countered and contained. Disgust.
My parents must have loved me …
To think that as a boy I stuck American flag stickers all over the house, including on the entry door and the washing machine, which must have just thrilled my parents, though I can’t recall them punishing me for it. To think that I saluted the flag innumerable times while standing at attention in uniform while serving in the military for twenty years.
Here’s the thing. I’m not disgusted at America. I’m not disgusted with Americans. I meet people every day who are kind, helpful, and generous, from the nurse who took my blood pressure this morning to the postman who delivered my mail and waved to me this afternoon since I happened to be outside when he came. Americans, generally speaking, are decent people. But there’s something seriously wrong with the U.S. government and its owners and donors, who are basically unaccountable to the rest of us.
Disgust is my prevailing emotion. So I write about it, I speak about it. I could do more, much more, but I suppose I am too risk-averse, too reluctant to act in a disobedient way to prevailing authority. So, in a way, I am part of the problem as well.
I am perplexed at how my fellow Americans can keep voting for men like Biden and Trump. Or any of the “usual suspects” who occupy Congress. Nothing will change for the better if we keep electing the same corrupt no-accounts. Why do we persist in such folly?
I suppose Senor Airman Aaron Bushnell couldn’t take it anymore. He was so disgusted, so demoralized, so damaged, by what he was witnessing in Gaza that he burnt himself alive in front of the Israeli embassy, crying out against genocide and for a free Palestine. When not ignoring his sacrifice, the mainstream media has been busy dismissing him as a radical anarchist raised within a religious cult. He was no “radical.” His “cult” was a devoted Christian community.
Aaron Bushnell, a brave and principled young man, sacrificed himself to draw attention to an ongoing crime against humanity. And so I feel more disgust when I see how his sacrifice is being twisted, when it’s addressed at all, by media sites in America.
Disgust. It’s not enough, I know. But I think when we open our eyes and truly seek hard truths, and truly see them for what they are, maybe then we can begin to move the needle in a better direction.
As a reader here says, hope is not a plan. But hope can sustain us as we come together to make a plan. A plan for a better America, one that isn’t constantly fear-mongering and warmongering, whether here or abroad.
A new America that might make me proud to slap a sticker of the flag on my door, as I did with such innocence a half-century ago on a door now long gone …
I saw the following oped at the Boston Globe yesterday morning:
If Republicans won’t stand up to Putin, he won’t stand down in his threats to American interests
Helping Ukraine fight off Russia is not an act of charity. It is a vital investment in world security.
There’s so much to write about here. First, as Vice President Kamala Harris has already said, charity is now a bad or disreputable idea. Helping Ukraine is not about charity, apparently because that message doesn’t resonate strongly with Congress. So, what does resonate? The idea of war as “a vital investment.” Apparently, if the House approves $61 billion in more aid to Ukraine, the payoff will be “world security.” How can you argue against that, right?
Second, apparently Republicans who oppose another $61 billion in aid to Ukraine, on top of roughly $120 billion in aid already provided since the Russian invasion two years ago, are all Putin appeasers. They are weak, refusing to “stand up to Putin.” Apparently Democrats are strong because they are standing up to Putin.
In sum, if America wants to be smart and strong, it must “invest” in more war against Putin and Russia.
How about “investing” in more trench warfare? Such a “rich” history!
I’m sorry but I never see war as an “investment.” Perhaps I would if I were the CEO of Boeing or Raytheon, but I’m not. I see war as “all hell,” as Civil War general William T. Sherman famously said. It’s horrific, it’s wasteful, it’s the negation of humanity. Sorry: no “vital investments” in war for me.
The war isn’t going well for Ukraine. Russia currently has the edge, Ukraine is short on troops and ammunition, and now might be a propitious time for serious negotiations to end the killing, before Ukraine collapses. Yes, in seeking peace, Ukraine will probably have to cede territory. Yes, perhaps Putin will sell this as a Russian victory. But I very much doubt that Putin’s costly “victory” in Ukraine will embolden him to launch attacks on NATO countries. He knows he would risk total defeat and nuclear war if he did so, and Putin, whatever else he is, is no fool.
Meanwhile, the French are making noises about the possibility of European troops deploying to Ukraine to fight against Russia. This would be folly in the extreme, turning a regional Russia-Ukraine conflict into a more general European war on Russia, with echoes to World War II.
I love that term, “strategic ambiguity.” Is that a good idea, creating “strategic ambiguity” against Russia, a nuclear power with the ability to destroy the world? Macron was being recklessly idiotic here.
Forget about “investments” in more war and strategic ambiguity. Try charity and peace. It’s time to end the killing.
Bracing Views 