Yesterday, I awoke to grim news that Israel is bombing Gaza yet again, killing a few hundred people, even as the U.S. targets Yemen with “precision” bombs and strikes, apparently to intimidate Iran as well—and perhaps to provoke a war, as Israeli jets escort U.S. B-52 bombers in “exercises.”
War is in the news, incessantly, with Congress sidelined and feckless as usual.
The constant drumbeat of war—the never-ending concussion of bombs in the Middle East—put me to mind of Orwell’s 1984. Nothing favors authoritarian states more than a constant state of war. If you truly want to weaken the Trump administration, reject their “warrior” and “war fighting” rhetoric and their selling of “peace through strength,” by which they mean peace through bombing and killing. Some “peace,” right? They may as well go full Orwell and declare that “war is peace” while making the Pentagon the “Ministry of Peace.”
Speaking of Orwell, and needing a break from death and mayhem, I remembered this piece that I wrote in 2018. Citizens, you had best police not only your words and actions, but the faces you make as well, especially when our Dear Leader is talking.
Written in September 2018
Facecrime!
W.J. Astore
We’re truly living in Orwellian times. A 17-year-old high school student, now known as #plaidshirtguy due to his choice of wardrobe, was removed from a Trump rally in Montana because of the faces he was making as Trump spoke. You can read all about here, and watch an interview with him at CNN.
Not surprisingly, people who stand behind Trump are selected ahead of time and told to clap and cheer. This young man did that, but he also chose to look quizzical, skeptical, and bemused at times. This is not allowed! A Trump staffer eventually intervened to remove him from the audience due to his “face crime.” To make matters worse, he was then held by the Secret Service for ten minutes, after which he was asked to leave the event.
Leave the event? For making skeptical and quizzical facial expressions?
You may recall from George Orwell’s “1984” that “Facecrime” existed. Anyone making skeptical or otherwise unacceptable faces when the Party announced bogus victories, production figures, and so forth opened himself or herself up to serious punishment.
Thanks to plaid shirt guy, we now know that facecrime has come to America. Just remember, fellow citizens, always to smile and cheer in the presence of Our Dear Leader. Unless you want to be detained and sent away — perhaps next time to the cornfield.
*From my copy of “1984”: “In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.” (From the end of Chapter 5.)
As a retired U.S. military officer, I’m appalled at the notion of “peace through strength.” You may as well say “war is peace.” Peace is achieved through dialogue. Diplomacy. Engagement. A spirit of good will. It isn’t achieved by brandishing weapons while selling the same around the globe. (The U.S. dominates the global arms trade, accounting for nearly half of it.)
I’m also outraged by the ongoing militarism of this moment, whether it’s Kamala Harris celebrating military lethality and embracing the Cheneys in 2024 or the Trump crowd that embraces “warriors” and “warfighters.” The solemn tradition of the citizen-soldier has long been abandoned in the U.S., replaced as it has been by a mercenary mindset that sees war as permanent and therefore “normal,” even admirable.
Even as we’re essentially being told and sold “war is peace,” we’re also being told and sold that ethnic cleansing in Gaza is urban renewal, a prelude to a new Riviera, a new playground for the rich, even if it’s erected on the bones of millions of Palestinians. Obviously, this cleansing of genocide using the imagery of crass and vulgar tourism must be condemned in no uncertain terms.
Put colloquially, I often wonder, Dude, where’s my country?
Explore Gaza, by Mr. Fish (at Chris Hedges’ Substack)
I recently ordered a few items from Amazon. Random stuff like a shower caddy, an iPhone case, and lamp sockets. It won’t surprise you to learn they were all “Made in China.”
I ordered some clothes from a fancy online retailer. The clothes said “Designed in California” but they were, of course, Made in China.
What is America making? What are we sending overseas? Bombs and bulldozers for the devastation and dismantlement of Gaza and other Palestinian Territories. Consider this article from Ken Klippenstein (excerpt follows), which details roughly $10 billion in “foreign aid” to Israel.
Here’s what Klippenstein had to say:
*****
While the entire news media is focused on Trump’s suspension of arms for Ukraine, the administration is arming Israel to the teeth. The nature of the bombs being sold indicates Israel’s military is preparing to continue its bombing campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen; as well as preparing for possible war with Iran.
Included in the sales are tens of thousands of controversial 2,000 lb. bombs so heavily criticized during the Gaza war for their destructive capacity, and thousands of “Hellfire” missiles that are used for targeted killings.
When I visited the Defense Security Cooperation Agency website’s section for major arms sales to see a breakdown of the weapons, I was immediately struck by the fact that five of the last six sales were to Israel.
Screenshot of DSCA’’s “Major Arms Sales” landing page
The U.S. bombs and missiles being sent to Israel, almost all made by Boeing, are included in:
2,166 GBU-39/B 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) Increment 1.
2,800 MK 82 General Purpose, 500-pound bomb bomb bodies.
13,000 KMU-556 JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to MK-84 (2,000-pound) bomb bodies.
3,475 KMU-557 JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to BLU-109 (2,000-pound) bomb bodies.
1,004 KMU JDAM Guidance Kits to attach to 500-pound GBU-38v1 bomb bodies.
17,475 FMU-152A/B multi-function fuzes for bombs.
*****
Holy shit! Nearly thirty-six thousand 2000-pound bombs! That is 36 kilotons, roughly the equivalent of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. And that’s not including the assorted 1000- and 500-pound bombs tossed into the mix.
This is an astonishing amount of ordnance for Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.
President Trump, of course, has the full support of most Democrats in sending this stockpile of destruction to Israel. Call it bipartisan genocidal enablement.
America sure is an “exceptional” nation. No nation is better at bombing others—or supplying the bombs for others like Israel to do so—then flattening what remains with “Made in USA” bulldozers.
Honestly, I wish my country made shower caddies, iPhone cases, and lamp sockets instead of bombs and bulldozers. Don’t you?
My latest article at TomDispatch (below) was written before President Trump’s most recent commitment to end the Russia-Ukraine War while cutting Pentagon spending in a big way (up to 50%, he said; even a 10% cut would be a minor miracle in DC).
Even as Trump makes positive moves in favor of peace and lower spending on wars and weapons, he continues to advance a madman’s theory of Gaza as a new Riviera (without Palestinians, of course) while gobbling up places like Greenland and the Panama Canal. A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Trump is a palindrome of sorts. Whether read forward or backward, it’s always all about TRUMP.
Greenland! Canada! The Panama Canal! The Gulf of America! Gaza!
Manifest Destiny Gets a Reboot Under President Donald Trump
A few years ago, I came across an old book at an estate sale. Its title caught my eye: “Our New Possessions.” Its cover featured the Statue of Liberty against stylized stars and stripes. What were those “new possessions”? The cover made it quite clear: Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. The subtitle made it even clearer: “A graphic account, descriptive and historical, of the tropic islands of the sea which have fallen under our sway, their cities, peoples, and commerce, natural resources and the opportunities they offer to Americans.” What a mouthful! I’m still impressed with the notion that “tropical” peoples falling “under our sway” offered real Americans amazing opportunities, as did our (whoops — I meant their) lands. Consider that Manifest Destiny at its boldest, imperialism unapologetically being celebrated as a new basis for burgeoning American greatness.
The year that imperial celebration was published — 1898 — won’t surprise students of U.S. history. America had just won its splendid little imperial war with Spain, an old empire very much in the “decline and fall” stage of a rich, long, and rapacious history. And just then red-blooded Americans like “Rough Rider” Teddy Roosevelt were emerging as the inheritors of the conquistador tradition of an often murderously swashbuckling Spanish Empire.
Of course, freedom-loving Americans were supposed to know better than to follow in the tradition of “old world” imperial exploitation. Nevertheless, cheerleaders and mentors like storyteller Rudyard Kipling were then urging Americans to embrace Europe’s civilizing mission, to take up “the white man’s burden,” to spread enlightenment and civilization to the benighted darker-skinned peoples of the tropics. Yet to cite just one example, U.S. troops dispatched to the Philippines on their “civilizing” mission quickly resorted to widespread murder and torture, methods of “pacification” that might even have made Spanish inquisitors blush. That grim reality wasn’t lost on Mark Twain and other critics who spoke out against imperialism, American-style, with its murderous suppression of Filipino “guerrillas” and bottomless hypocrisy about its “civilizing” motives.
After his exposure to “enlightened” all-American empire-building, retired Major General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, would bluntly write in the 1930s of war as a “racket” and insist his long career as a Marine had been spent largely in the service of “gangster” capitalism. Now there was a plain-speaking American hero.
And speaking of plain-speaking, or perhaps plain-boasting, I suggest that we think of Donald Trump as America’s retro president from 1898. Isn’t it time, America, to reach for our destiny once again? Isn’t it time for more tropical (and Arctic) peoples to be put “under our sway”? Greenland! Canada! The Panama Canal! These and other regions of the globe offer Donald Trump’s America so many “opportunities.” And if we can’t occupy an area like the Gulf of Mexico, the least we can do is rebrand it the Gulf of America! A lexigraphic “mission accomplished” moment bought with no casualties, which sure beats the calamitous wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in this century!
Now, here’s what I appreciate about Trump: the transparent nature of his greed. He doesn’t shroud American imperialism in happy talk. He says it just like they did in 1898. It’s about resources and profits. As the dedication page to that old book from 1898 put it: “To all Americans who go a-pioneering in our new possessions and to the people who are there before them.” Oh, and pay no attention to that “before” caveat. We Americans clearly came first then and, at least to Donald Trump, come first now, and — yes! — we come to rule. The world is our possession and our beneficence will certainly serve the peoples who were there before us in Greenland or anywhere else (the “hellhole” of Gaza included), even if we have to torture or kill them in the process of winning their hearts and minds.
It’s 1900 Again in America
My point is this: Donald Trump doesn’t want to return America to the 1950s, when men were men and women were, as the awful joke then went, “barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen.” No, he wants to return this country (and the world) to 1900, when America was unapologetically and nakedly grabbing everything it could. To put it in his brand of “locker room” language, Trump wants to grab Mother Earth by the pussy, because when you’re rich and powerful, when you’re a “star,” you can do anything.
It’s white (male) hunter all over again. Think Teddy Roosevelt and all those animals he manfully slaughtered on safari. Today, we might even add white (female) hunter, considering that Kristi Noem, the new director of homeland security, infamously shot her own dog in a gravel pit because she couldn’t train it to behave. It’s an America where men are men again, women are women, and trans people are simply defined out of existence while simultaneously being forced out of the U.S. military.
To replace the “yellow journalism” of newspaperman William Randolph Hearst in that age, think of the corporate-owned media networks of today, with billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos showing due deference to you know who. For the robber barons of that age, substitute men like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (to name only the two most famous billionaires of our moment) along with Bezos and their billionaire tech bros. It’s a new gilded age, a new age of smash and grab, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer, where the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.
Of course, it’s highly doubtful Trump can convince Canada to become the 51st state. Denmark doesn’t seem remotely interested in selling Greenland to America and the Panamanians aren’t eager to return their canal to all-American interlopers and occupiers. Even the “Gulf of America” remains the Gulf of Mexico to the other peoples of the Western Hemisphere. But perhaps Trump and Musk can team up to plant the American flag on Mars!
Yet, while Trump may fail when it comes to any of these specific imperial designs, he’s already succeeding, famously so, where it really matters. With all his imperial blather about Greenland, Gaza, and the like, what he’s really conquering and colonizing is our minds. The man and his ideas are now everywhere. Whatever else you can say about Trump, you can’t get rid of him, especially in the mainstream media which he uses so effectively to trumpet (pun intended) his expansionist agenda.
Yes, Trump is normalizing imperial conquest (again); yes, naked exploitation is unapologetically “destiny” (again). It’s “drill, baby, drill” and party like it’s 1900, since ideas about global warming due to fossil-fuel production and consumption simply didn’t exist in that age. It’s so retro chic to be chauvinistically selfish, to loot openly, even to commit or enable atrocities under the cover of humanitarian concerns. (Think of Gaza and Trump’s recent open call for cleansing the region of Palestinians to make way for their “betters,” the Israelis, to enjoy peace and a “beautiful” seaside location.)
Regression, thy name be Trump. Unabashed greed and unbridled hypocrisy are selling points once again. Protectionist tariffs are “great” again. Immigrants, black- and brown-skinned ones naturally, are depicted as endangering America’s way of life. Time to get rid of as many “illegals” as we can. Deport them! Jail them in Cuba! America is for Americans!
A Global Military Makes It All Possible
President Teddy Roosevelt was a big fan of the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet, the 16 battleships, painted white, that he sent around the world in 1907. He used it to intimidate recalcitrant powers and impress them with America’s growing might and reach. Though the U.S. wasn’t quite a military superpower yet, it was already an economic one, and combining military persuasion with economic prowess was an effective tactic to get other countries to toe Washington’s line.
Today’s U.S. military is quite obviously a global one, an imperial one bent on total dominance of everything: land, sea, air, space, cyberspace, information, narrative. You name it and our military and its partners in what Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT (which includes industry, Congress, intelligence, the media, academe, and think tanks) conspire to seize, occupy, control, and otherwise dominate. Small wonder that Trump and his operatives within what might be thought of as the Mondial Imperial State have continued a tradition of seeking ever greater budgets for the Pentagon, more and more weapons sales, and the unending construction of new military bases. Contraction in this highly militarized version of disaster imperialism is never an option (until, of course, it becomes one). Only growth is to be allowed, commensurate with seemingly bottomless appetites.
One example: newly appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his Project 2025 supporters argue that U.S. military spending should equal 5% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). With this country’s GDP sitting just under $29 trillion in 2024, that would drive an imperial war budget of $1.45 trillion instead of the nearly $900 billion in this year’s Pentagon budget. For Hegseth & Co., the U.S. military is all about warfighting (and wars, if nothing else, are expensive), so it must embrace and hone its warrior mystique. It matters to him and his like not at all that, since 9/11, if not before then, the U.S. military has honed its warfighting identity in disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.
Another example. Just before I retired from the U.S. military in 2005, I learned of efforts to create a new military command with sub-Saharan Africa as its focus. At first, it seemed like a joke. How was Africa directly related to U.S. national security? Whence the threat? Of course, Africa as a threat wasn’t the issue. It was Africa as an arena for U.S. economic exploitation, just as it had been for European countries like Belgium, England, France, and Germany circa 1900, most infamously in the Congo, later exposed as the “heart of darkness” at the center of a European imperialism that would contribute to the tensions leading to the eruption of World War I in 1914. Two years after I retired, the U.S. military did indeed form Africa Command (AFRICOM) as its latest combatant command. Today, every sector of the globe has been accounted for by various commands within the Pentagon assigned to four-star generals and admirals, each in his or her own way as powerful as, once upon a time, the proconsuls of the Roman Empire.
With all of this as background, in his own mind at least, Donald Trump doth bestride the world like a colossus. What backs him up is a Republican vision (shared by most Democrats) of an imperial military (theoretically) unchallengeable in all domains. And whether the United States spends $1.45 trillion or a mere $900 billion annually on it, count on this: in the years to come, that military will be used in, most likely, the stupidest and most violent ways imaginable.
How Long Before the Next World War?
If you buy the conceit that Donald Trump is taking America back to 1900, it suggests a likely starting point for the next world war roughly 10 to 15 years in our future. Ever-increasing military spending; calls for mobilization and a return of the draft; talk of enervating national decline that could allegedly be reversed by an embrace of a new warrior mystique; viewing all competition as zero-sum games that America must win and countries like China must lose: these could act collectively to create conditions similar to 1914 — a tinderbox of tensions just waiting for the right spark to set the world aflame.
The critical difference, of course, is nuclear weapons. Though World War I wasn’t the “war to end all wars,” a World War III fought between the U.S. and its allies and China and/or Russia and their allies promises to be that “last” war. There’s nothing like a few dozen thermonuclear weapons to settle accounts — as in ending most life on Planet Earth.
In an age of weapons of mass destruction and their widespread “modernization,” jaw-jaw, as in compromise and cooperation through conversation, is the only sane choice when war-war looms. Dominance through destruction must give way to détente through dialogue. Can the Trump administration advance progress toward peace instead of letting us regress into war?
Mr. President, here’s the real art of the deal. Rather than turning the calendar back to 1900, your goal should be to turn the atomic clock back to several hours (if not days or weeks) before midnight. That clock currently sits at a perilous 89 seconds to midnight, or global nuclear war. With every fiber of your being, your goal should be to guarantee that it will never strike that ungodly hour.
For surely, even the most deluded strong man shouldn’t wish his manifest destiny to be ruling over an empire of the dead.
Now it’s take and take and takeover, takeover It’s all take and never give All these trumped up towers They’re just golden showers Where are people supposed to live?
Yesterday, President Trump said the U.S. would take over the redevelopment of the devastated Gaza Strip (destroyed mostly by bombs, shells, and bullets made in the USA), turning it into a “new Riviera,” not for the Palestinians, obviously, but for Israelis.
To borrow from Don Henley, Where are the Palestinians supposed to live? Not in Gaza, where their presence would interfere with Zionism as well as Israeli desires to control profits from offshore gas fields. Roughly 1.8 million Palestinians are simply supposed to leave the Gaza “hellhole” (Trump’s descriptor), after which a lot of men with briefcases (and bulldozers) will move in to turn Gaza into a paradise on earth, free of Palestinian “savages” (a word I’ve seen employed often online, and obviously one that echoes how the white man saw Native Americans, whose land was ruthlessly stolen from them as well).
So, where will be the Palestinian “reservation”? Trump has floated Egypt and Jordan, but both countries have expressed no enthusiasm for this scheme. Greenland, maybe?
Trump has the virtue of saying the quiet part out loud. There will be no Palestinian state, no two-state solution. There will be one state, Greater Israel, with Palestinians either killed or ethnically cleansed from their lands. This was the policy of the Biden administration, even if that administration gave lip service to a two-state solution. Trump just states it plainly, like a mafia don intoning: “It’s nothing personal—it’s strictly business.”
Congress, which is owned by AIPAC, may grouse a bit about Trump’s terminology, but look for most members to rubber-stamp this plan, if one can call it that.
I suppose Trump’s admirers might say he’s cut the Gordian knot here—that peace in the region will only be attained when Israel is completely dominant and Palestinians are simply gone for good—but something tells me the fantastical new Riviera in Gaza is another manifestation of “trumped up towers.”
If one side is armed with cap guns and the other with bazookas, would we call that a “war” between roughly equal powers?
I thought of this as I turned to Antiwar.com to see that President Biden has approved yet another massive arms shipment to Israel, to the tune of $8 billion. Here’s the report:
The sale includes AIM-120C-8 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 155 MM artillery rounds, small-diameter bombs, JDAM kits, and 500-pound bombs. Many of these munitions have been used by Israel during its campaign of extermination in Gaza, including in attacks on civilian targets.
In June, CNN reported that Israel used US small-diameter bombs in an attack on a school that killed 40 civilians. In October, The Washington Post noted, “The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Remember when human rights used to matter (just a little bit)? Remember when genocide was considered morally reprehensible—a murderous wrong? The U.S. government simply ignores human rights except when they advance a particular agenda. And genocide? It’s OK when it’s couched as Israel doing it in the cause of “defending” its “right to exist.”
If your “right to exist” involves denying millions of others their right to exist, have you not bought that “right” with blood money?
Of course, we’re all told by the “experts” that the situation in the Middle East is immensely complicated. Certainly, the history of the region is complex. But what’s happening there today to the Palestinians isn’t complex. In Israel, Zionism has run amuck as Israel grabs land, water, oil and gas rights, indeed everything it can, in the cause of creating a Greater Israel. It just doesn’t matter to most Israelis, and the U.S. government as well, that two million Palestinians will be killed, wounded, or displaced. Might makes right here, accentuated by media spin and government propaganda.
Speaking of the Middle East, I watched a superb documentary recently: “This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth.” I highly recommend it. Fisk was a foreign affairs journalist for The Independent. When I lived in Britain from 1992 to 1995, I used to read his articles in that paper. He lived in Beirut and covered the Middle East, ultimately spending forty years living in and writing about the region. The documentary follows him on assignment, demonstrating what a principled and brave man he was. Fisk did journalism the old fashioned way: he got out among the people, he journeyed to the front lines, he saw the dead bodies from massacres (indeed, in one horrific moment, he was forced to climb over a “barricade” of dead bodies, a nightmarish moment for him, as one would expect).
There are very few journalists like Fisk left today. A truth-seeker, he was unafraid to criticize the powerful when they deserved it. He always sought to understand what was happening through knowledge gleaned at firsthand, carrying his trusty notebook and a pen or pencil.
Check out the documentary on Fisk. You’ll learn a lot and be inspired by a man of considerable courage and unimpeachable integrity
I caught this headline in the morning send-out for the New York Times:
It Can Be Lonely to Have a Middle-of-the Road Opinion on the Middle East
Some college students and faculty members are seeking space for nuanced perspectives on the Israel-Hamas war on deeply divided campuses.
See, it’s a “war” between Israel and Hamas, and what’s really needed here is “space” for “nuanced perspectives.”
Don’t you want to have “a middle of the road opinion” on genocide in Gaza? Don’t you want to explore all the “nuances” of Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, where the death toll is likely to have reached 200,000 and counting? (Or not counting, since apparently Palestinian deaths don’t count for much.)
Here are some “nuances”: As Chris Hedges recently noted, the genocide in Gaza resembles that of Armenians during World War I. It’s happening in the open, unlike the Holocaust which the Nazis tried to hide, yet not enough people, especially in the West, are seeking to stop it.
In fact, the U.S. government is deeply complicit in the genocide in Gaza, arming Israel and providing military and diplomatic cover at a cost of scores of billions of dollars (when you factor in maintaining two carrier strike groups in the region as well as all the weapons shipments to Israel).
The intent is obvious: the creation of a Greater Israel in which Gaza and the West Bank cease to exist as lands for a Palestinian state. The “nuance” here is a “no-state solution,” as Palestinians are killed or forced from their land in the name of Israel’s “right to exist.” The fall of the Syrian government, meanwhile, sees Israel expanding into the Golan Heights and beyond, also in the name of protecting Israel.
It’s a land grab, a water grab, a gas reserves grab, a power grab, all for Israel and its big brother, the USA. It’s an illustration of Thucydides’ lesson that “The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.” Israel, supported wholeheartedly by the U.S. government, is strong; the Palestinians (and now the Syrians) are weak; so the latter suffer.
The New York Times article suggests I should be looking for “middle ground” here, but I have news for them: Israel has already seized and occupied it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promises to press on with Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon dashed hopes that the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwarmight help end more than a year of escalating conflict in the Middle East.
Is anyone surprised at this? Netanyahu gains power from war. He evades prosecution and accountability through war. He achieves his vision of a one-state solution through war. It was never just about Sinwar or Hamas or even vengeance. It’s all about adding Gaza and the West Bank to a “greater” Israel while killing, starving, and displacing more than two million Palestinians in a second Nakba or catastrophe for them.
America’s role is simple: Help and obey Israel in its genocidal activities. And American politicians are more than willing to do this. Look at Congress rapturously applauding Netanyahu. Look at President Joe Biden describing himself as a Zionist. Look at all the money U.S. politicians willingly take from Israeli-American lobbyists. Look at the fear in U.S. politicians’ eyes when AIPAC threatens them.
Over to you, Bibi!
Kamala Harris says Israel has a right to defend itself and that she’ll never approve an arms embargo. Donald Trump is 100% for Israel and accuses Harris of hating Jews and Israel (Harris’ husband, of course, is Jewish, even as Harris herself wholeheartedly defends Israel). Trump’s advice to Israel is to “finish the job”: Trump even accused Biden of being a Palestinian! It’s a strange Palestinian who hugs and defers to Bibi, who proclaims himself to be a Zionist, and who has taken more than $5 million from AIPAC over the course of his career.
And so Trump competes with Biden/Harris over who can be more loyal and subservient to the far right in Israel while ordinary Americans suffer and the Palestinians burn. Politics in America is a sick joke.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country faces war on seven fronts and called them the “enemies of civilization.” Heavy Israeli airstrikes pounded southern Beirut overnight, with the military saying it was targeting Hezbollah.
Wow. And I thought a two-front war was bad.
Netanyahu is a war criminal. And whether it’s Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, U.S. leaders bow before him, giving him all the weapons, military cover, and diplomatic cover he needs to wage his so-called seven-front war.
Let’s not forget the rapturous applause Netanyahu received on his recent appearance before Congress. Half the Congress allegedly hates the other half, but they sure came together to profess their love of Netanyahu and Israel.
Maybe Netanyahu and Israel are the “enemies of civilization”? Perish the thought.
Israel is at pains to portray its neighbors as uncivilized even as Israeli bombing produces scenes like this one:
Civilized Israeli bombing of Beirut, Lebanon (Hussein Malla/AP)
That scooter just might be Hezbollah. Maybe Israel can rig it with explosives and remotely detonate it in another one of their “precision” attacks, like all those pagers exploding in “precise” ways.
CNN, of course, always reports the Israeli perspective. Rarely if ever do you hear the Arab perspective, the Persian perspective, the Palestinian perspective. Why listen to the “uncivilized,” right?
The 2024 election in America, which has witnessed total support by Democrats and Republicans of whatever Israel does no matter how heinous, shows the utter bankruptcy of U.S. government rhetoric and the moral bankruptcy of its leaders.
Why do we continue to listen to these people? Why do we contemplate voting for them?
Coda: Netanyahu is going to keep waging war and committing crimes against humanity because that’s what’s keeping him in power. As long as the U.S. keeps arming him and blessing him, mass death will follow. How pathetic is it that our leaders clap to this man like so many trained seals?
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered to work in Gaza and who’ve witnessed the effects of the Israeli onslaught there suggest that nearly 120,000 Palestinians are already dead.
That huge number doesn’t surprise me. When you look at the photos from Gaza and the Stalingrad-like devastation, I’d guessed that the “official” death toll of roughly 42,000 was a serious undercount. That number comes from morgue and hospital statistics; it doesn’t account for people buried under the rubble, for missing people, and of course for people who’ve died of “natural” causes due to the disruption of hospital care, of potable water supplies, and so on.
More details are provided in this article at Antiwar.com. Also, you can read the letter written by these 99 healthcare workers, imploring the Biden/Harris administration to stop providing the bombs, missiles, shells, bullets, and other munitions Israel has been using to shred the bodies of so many innocent people in Gaza.
“Never again” was supposed to be the message we learned from the horrific Holocaust against the Jews perpetrated by the Nazis and their fellow travelers. “Never again” applies to the people of Gaza. It applies to people everywhere who are slaughtered simply because of who they are and because another people wants to be rid of them.
This is the leading reason why I can’t support Biden/Harris, now Harris/Walz. I can’t support Trump/Vance. The U.S. political establishment is completely spineless and immoral in its total support of Israel as it applies its own final solution to the Palestinian question. Whether it’s Harris or Trump, the message is “Support Israel” no matter what. And I refuse to sanction that. I refuse to vote for that.
Gaza, much like Stalingrad in World War II, is a desolate and increasingly unlivable moonscape of craters and destruction
Bracing Views 