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PATRICK LAWRENCE: Let Us Now Bury the Truth (Again)

October 13, 2025, By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News

What is going around now is another cover up, another denial of what a lot of people on both sides call “the second Nakba,” the sin atop the original sin.

Headline in the Sunday editions of The New York Times: “A New Test for Israel: Can It Repair Its Ties to Americans?”

What a question. Let us set aside our indignation and think about this.

The piece below this head is by David Halbfinger, whose trade over the years has been to appear balanced when covering the Zionist state while glossing its past, which is wall-to-wall condemnable, and faithfully apologizing for its present, which — need this be said — is also wall-to-wall condemnable.

David Halbfinger, who has just begun his second tour as the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, in action:

“The war in Gaza may finally be ending, after two years of bloodshed and destruction. But among the damage that has been done is a series of devastating blows to Israel’s relationship with the citizens of its most important and most stalwart ally, the United States.

Israel’s reputation in the United States is in tatters, and not only on college campuses or among progressives….

The question is whether those younger Americans will be lost to Israel long- term — and what Israel’s advocates will do to try to reverse that.”

Halbfinger proceeds to quote none of “those younger Americans,” or anyone else of any age who stands forthrightly against “the Jewish state” in response to the campaign of terror, murder and starvation it has conducted against the civilian population of Gaza these past two years.

No, his sources are professors, think-tank inhabitants and, of course, Israeli Zionists, American Zionists and in two cases Israeli–American Zionists — the good old divided-loyalties crowd.

Halbfinger quotes Shibley Telhami, an Arab–Israeli scholar with safe harbors at The Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

You see what is going on here, I trust.

I have anticipated for many months — no great insight in this — that when something like the end of Israel’s terror in Gaza comes there will be no thought among its allies in the West, and certainly none among its Zionist supporters, of any kind of reckoning in the name of justice.

No, a “war” will be over, not a racist campaign of annihilation, and certainly not a genocide. The highly honorable Cost of War Project at Brown University put out a paper on Oct. 7 reckoning total casualties in Gaza (killed and injured) at 236,505, “more than 10% of the pre-war population.” These are responsibly researched facts.

We know these facts. “It doesn’t take rocket science to grasp the picture,” Norman Finkelstein said in a lecture delivered at the University of Massachusetts five days before the Netanyahu–Trump “peace plan” was announced.

He said: “Everyone at this point knows the picture — unless you have a material stake in lying to yourself and lying to others.”

‘Everyone Knows the Picture’

Yes, we know the picture and the facts, and we are invited to live with these facts without any kind of investigation, truth and reconciliation project, such as post-apartheid South Africa conducted in the late 1990s, or any other effort in behalf of restorative justice.

No, the invitation is to go back to our comfort zones while a regime of racist murderers continues on its way.

The liars propose to prevail, to put this point another way.

Whatever other purpose this commentary may serve, I use it to raise my voice in protest against this… this desecration of the human cause.

When I consider the project of the liars now my mind goes back to al–Nakba — further, indeed. David Ben–Gurion and others of his time acknowledged the injustice and the violence on which the State of Israel was founded in July 1948. “We have come and we have stolen their country,” Ben–Gurion remarked.

[“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.]

There is no putting the point more truthfully. And all that has occurred since is the outcome of this, a covering up, a denial of the original sin.

And now again.

…………………………………………Along with everyone else, I do not know at writing whether the Gaza Peace Plan, as it is billed, will hold or when — the better question at this point — it will fall apart like all those that have preceded it.

But — grim knowledge — I know this: It will not end well if the events of the past two years are buried as the events of the past seven and some decades have been buried. The human spirit simply does not work that way.

It will not, indeed, end at all. https://consortiumnews.com/2025/10/13/patrick-lawrence-let-us-now-bury-the-truth-again/

October 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

In its 250th year, America’s genocide support has forever destroyed its worldwide moral authority

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL , 10 Oct 25, https://theaimn.net/in-its-250th-year-americas-genocide-support-has-forever-destroyed-its-worldwide-moral-authority/

US political leaders’ statements touting US as the beacon of democracy, humanitarianism, fair play, decency on the world stage ring hollow to anyone with an iota of moral clarity.

The day after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Israel embarked on grotesque genocide of Gaza’s 2,300,000 Palestinians crammed into the world’s largest open air prison controlled by Israel. Two years on a ceasefire may finally occur, blocking Israel’s lust to kill or expel every remaining Palestinian to bring Gaza into Greater Israel.

The carnage is immense and horrifying. Over 100,000 Palestinians dead, the remaining 2,200,000 suffering starvation and degraded health. All schools and universities gone. All medical facilities gone. All life sustaining infrastructure gone.

Israel could not have conducted their genocidal rampage without the complete support of the United States.

The Democratic Biden administration and the Republican Trump administration, in the only policy they agreed upon, gifted Israel with over $20 billion in weaponry to wipe Palestinians off the Gaza map. The US joined Israel in seeking African and Middle East countries to take in the Palestinians not killed. The US repeatedly voted against UN General Assembly resolutions condemning the genocide; even using their veto to prevent UN Security Council anti-genocide resolutions. The US remains one of only 35 UN members, out of 193, refusing to recognize a Palestinian state.

US media imposed a near complete blackout on the genocide. But enough truth of its horrors got through to turn the American electorate against it. Instead of heeding voters, the President and Congress heeded the Israel Lobby and kept on voting for more billions to obliterate Gaza.

If the shooting stops today, Palestinians will continue dying for days, weeks, months from malnutrition and disease.

It took just under 250 years for America to shatter every principle of freedom, democracy, self-determination it claims to honor. If the degraded American Experiment manages to survive another 250 years, even another thousand years, it likely cannot do more damage to its promise to humankind that it’s done in this its 250th year.

October 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

‘Listen to the cry of the Earth’: Pope Leo takes aim at climate change sceptics.

Associated Press in Rome, 2 Oct 25, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/01/pope-leo-climate-change-sceptics-cry-of-the-earth

Pontiff laments that some ‘ridicule those who speak of global warming’, days after Trump’s claims of ‘con job’

Pope Leo XIV has taken aim at people who “ridicule those who speak of global warming” as he embraced Pope Francis’s environmental legacy and made it his own in some of his strongest and most extensive comments on the subject to date.

Leo presided over the 10th-anniversary celebration of Francis’s landmark ecological encyclical, Laudato Si (Praised Be), at a global gathering south of Rome. The encyclical cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern and launched a global grassroots movement to advocate for caring for God’s creation and the peoples most harmed by its exploitation.

Leo told the estimated 1,000 representatives from environmental and Indigenous groups that they needed to put pressure on national governments to develop tougher standards to mitigate the damage already done. He said he hoped the upcoming UN climate conference “will listen to the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor”.

He did not name names but history’s first American pope spoke just days after Donald Trump complained, with false statements, to the UN general assembly about the “con job” of global warming. Trump has long been a critic of climate science and polices aimed at helping to transition to green energies such as wind and solar power.

Leo quoted Francis’s follow-up encyclical, published in 2023, in which the Argentinian pope challenged world leaders before a UN conference to commit to binding targets to slow climate change before it was too late.

Citing Francis’s text, Leo recalled that some leaders had chosen to “deride the evident signs of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them most”.

He called for a change of heart to truly embrace the environmental cause and said any Christian should be onboard.

“We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded,” he said, presiding on a stage that featured a large chunk of a melting glacier from Greenland and tropical ferns.

October 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Trump’s visit proved the utter corruption of our political and media class.

19 September 2025, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-09-19/trump-visit-corruption-politics/

Aside from the spectacle of our leaders openly prostrating before Trump, the truth of Britain’s “special relationship” with the US was mostly found in unscripted moments around his visit.

I don’t know about you, but I find myself increasingly at a loss to put into words the extraordinary times we are living through.

Even the best satirists cannot compete with the astonishing, comic scenes offered to us by the British and US ruling classes during Donald Trump’s visit to Windsor Castle and Chequers.

King Charles giving Trump the run-around of his taxpayer-funded mansion and grounds simply served to underscore Britain’s vassal status.

But the king’s flaunting of his, and our, servitude to the US imperial order somehow failed – as it might have done in times of old – to contribute any greater stature to the perma-tanned gangster-in-chief. He just looked even more the spoilt, giant toddler in need of constant distraction and pacification.

Stuff him in the golden carriage-pram and let him roll around the grounds, out of sight, for an hour or so. Let him play with some soldiers and watch fast planes flying overhead. Let him dress up and have a party in the big dining hall.

All of this in the hope that he wouldn’t throw a temper tantrum and stick nasty tariffs on our goods.

Maybe his scriptwriter understood that postmodern irony was the only proper response. He slipped into Trump’s after-dinner speech an approving reference to George Orwell, the author of the dystopian novel 1984 about a society where everyone is enslaved to Big Brother.

What might Orwell have made of that?

Aside from the spectacle of our ruling class openly prostrating before Trump, the truth of Britain’s “special relationship” with the US was mostly found in the unscripted moments around his visit.

It was Trump explaining to a rogue Australian reporter, who tried to question the US President about his corrupt personal affairs, the implicitly transactional relationship between world leaders and the media: journalists get access to the centres of power but only if they don’t probe too deeply.

Trump made clear: “You are hurting Australia very much right now. They want to get along with me. Your leader is coming to see me soon. I’m going to tell him about you.”

Which career-minded journalist wants to lose their job – or to be held personally responsible for the imposition of a new round of US tariffs?

Which perhaps explains why, when Trump and Starmer faced the press after their meeting today, the journalists selected to address the pair obediently delivered only softball questions.

Those not in fear of their professional standing – that is, ordinary people – were free to take to the streets to protest the visit. So long as there was no danger Trump might be exposed to their clamour.

Four members of the group Led By Donkeys who dared to organise a protest that might actually be heard were arrested for “malicious communication”. They projected onto one of Windsor Castle’s towers a nine-minute documentary charting the decades-long, intimate relationship between Trump and notorious child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

According to the 1988 law, a communication is malicious if it is “threatening, indecent, grossly offensive, or a known falsehood”. As the film was entirely truthful and nothing in it indecent or threatening (except to the US President’s reputation), the British police are presumably interpreting “grossly offensive” to mean anything that might offend Trump – which covers a huge number of truthful things.

It is not just journalists who have an entirely transactional, principle-free relationship with power. The visit was a potent reminder that politicians do too.

Yvette Cooper, the new foreign secretary, warmly greeted Trump as he stepped off his Air Force One plane in London. That is the same Cooper who a few years ago, when safely in opposition of course, made an impassioned speech denouncing Trump in no uncertain terms as a sexual predator we should have nothing to do with.

If that turnaround seemed baffling, Tory politician Penny Mordaunt was on hand to remind us what political principle looks like.

Questioned by the new Green Party leader Zack Polanksi, she called out as “student politics” his – and presumably most reasonable people’s – opposition to Trump banning books, militarising the police and reversing women’s long-fought-for reproductive rights.

Mordaunt, like King Charles, Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, is an adult in the room. They understand that principles are a luxury we cannot afford.

Let genocide in Gaza roll on. Describe the starvation of children as “self-defence”. Define anyone trying to stop it a “terrorist”.

Because the worst crime in the world is to behave like principles matter, and to imagine that saving innocent lives is more than just silly “student politics”.

September 22, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Ending a War That Never Should Have Started.

09/02/2025•Mises Wire•Kevin Rosenhoff

Six months after Zelenskyy’s historic humiliation in the Oval Office, Trump’s meeting with Putin hopefully signals an end of the Russia-Ukraine war. From a moral point of view, this is to be welcomed, as the war—from both sides—has been morally illegitimate from the outset.

A Morally Justified War Must Be Proportionate

The central framework for evaluating the morality of war is the so-called just war theory—an ancient tradition shaped by various philosophers. Within it, a fundamental requirement for starting and continuing a war is proportionality. Generally, this means the evils caused must stand in due proportion to the evils prevented. American philosopher Jeff McMahan differentiated this idea with his distinction between narrow and wide proportionality. Simply put, while narrow proportionality concerns the appropriate harms inflicted on aggressors (e.g., Russian soldiers), wide proportionality deals with harms inflicted on innocents (e.g., Ukrainian and Russian civilians)……………………………………………………………………………

“To the Last Man”—Why Ukraine’s War is Disproportionate

The reasons for Russia’s invasion are contested. Some point to Putin’s imperial ambitions and fear of Ukrainian democracy, others to NATO’s expansion. Still, there is broad agreement: Russia’s invasion is not only a violation of international law but also of morality. Waging war in the absence of a prior or imminent attack is reprehensible from every perspective. Participating Russian soldiers who threaten innocent lives can neither complain about being harmed nor demand compensation or an apology. Since they are therefore not wronged, their killing is proportionate in the narrow sense and, in principle, also morally legitimate as a means of warding off the threat……………………………………………………………………..

The problem of Ukraine’s war is not the harming of Russian invaders, but the harming of innocents by the Ukrainian state—that is, wide proportionality. These innocents include, not only the over 7,000 civilians in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine presumably injured or killed by Ukrainian bombing attacks, but especially the many men forcibly recruited and held trapped. Since the war’s beginning, men between the ages of 18 and 60 have not only been prevented from fleeing the country but have increasingly been seized from their families and sent to the front—where they are highly likely to be killed or wounded. “A woman screamed for the army to spare her husband from conscription. A soldier slapped her and took her husband,” reported US journalist Manny Marotta, describing one of the forced mobilizations at the war’s outbreak. His account stands pars pro toto for the broader problem of the widespread unwillingness to fight and die for the Ukrainian state. According to former presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, half of Ukrainian men have refused to submit their data to recruitment centers. Over half a million men of military age have fled to the EU—and thousands more have been caught while trying to escape.

While initially there were still volunteers, their numbers have dwindled to zero. “There are no more volunteers,” complained military police officer Roman Boguslavskyi to Der Spiegel in November 2023. To avoid running into people like Roman, Ukrainians use Telegram channels to warn each other. The Kyiv-based group—Kyiv Povestka—alone now has close to 250,000 members. However, dodging the recruiters does not always work: the internet is flooded with videos showing military officers grabbing men off the street and trying to force them into minibuses like cattle. Accordingly, the term coined for this practice—“busification”—was named Ukraine’s Word of the Year in 2024. The cutesy term, however, should not obscure the repressive reality. In her 2024 essay Mobilisation, Ukrainian writer Yevgenia Belorusets reveals the world behind the videos—a world in which women hide their husbands and a brutal state no longer spares even those suffering from cancer or HIV. Ukrainians are thus not only victims of Russia, but also of their own state. Or, to quote the Ukrainian doctor Semyon from Belorusets’s essay: “We are in a situation we never imagined. We are devouring ourselves. Shelled by Russia, at war with Russia, and now at war with those who have decided we must question nothing.”

How should the actions of the Ukrainian state be judged morally? Unless the civilians harmed by Ukrainian bombing have consented, the state is wronging them—no differently than someone who injures or kills bystanders while fending off a mugger in the street. The same applies to the forcibly conscripted men: anyone who sees and hears how they are hunted down and torn from their loved ones should intuitively judge the state’s actions as a violation of their moral rights—and those of their families. After all, such conduct would be regarded in virtually any other context as an injustice requiring justification.

If I were attacked in my home and abducted you to defend me at risk to your life, I would be committing a moral wrong, both against you and your loved ones. Consistently, the actions of the Ukrainian state should be judged in the same way. It treats human beings as material to be used and consumed—a clear violation of their dignity and rights. The possible counterargument of a “duty to fight” seems unconvincing given the risk involved. According to reports by the Financial Times, Ukrainian commanders estimate that between 50 and 70 percent of new frontline soldiers are killed or wounded within just a few days. Yet we are normally not required to take significant personal risks to save others. If you could save my life by playing Russian roulette, doing so would be noble—but not your duty. To compel you anyway would still be a rights violation.

the Ukrainian war suffers from a more fundamental problem. Zelenskyy declared—both before and during the war—his intention to fight “to the last man” and “whatever the cost,” thereby rejecting proportionality itself. The Ukrainian state acts like someone who deliberately diverts a runaway train onto a track without caring how many people are on it. On this premise, all Ukrainians—and potentially humanity—become fair game to be sacrificed for Ukraine’s cause. Such conduct, which explicitly denies proportionality, can hardly be considered proportionate and morally justified. Under Zelenskyy, Ukraine has waged a war that has been morally unbounded from the start, with no regard for any losses.

It would therefore be right to end this war. Two morally illegitimate wars should be brought to a close—Russia’s war under Putin and Ukraine’s war under Zelenskyy. https://mises.org/mises-wire/ending-war-never-should-have-started

September 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, Russia, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Holy See tells nations at UN to end threat of nuclear weapons, even as deterrence.

Vatican Vatican News by Gina Christian, United Nations — September 8, 2025, https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/holy-see-tells-nations-un-end-threat-nuclear-weapons-even-deterrence

Amid a global arms race, ending the threat of nuclear war — and even the testing of nuclear weapons — is imperative, said the Holy See’s diplomat to the United Nations.

Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s U.N. permanent observer, shared his thoughts in a statement he delivered Sept. 4 at U.N. headquarters in New York, during the General Assembly High-level Plenary Meeting to Commemorate and Promote the International Day Against Nuclear Tests, observed that same day.

“The pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons is not only a matter of strategic and vital necessity, but also a profound moral responsibility,” Caccia in his remarks.

He pointed to the introduction of nuclear weapons — first detonated by the U.S. in 1945 over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people, during World War II — as unveiling to the world “an unprecedented destructive force.

“This event changed the course of history and cast a long shadow over humanity, unleashing grave consequences for both human life and creation,” Caccia said in his statement.

“The devastating aftermath of this dramatic event led to the problematic assumption that peace and security could be maintained through the logic of nuclear deterrence — a notion that continues to challenge moral reasoning and the international conscience,” he said.

That challenge has intensified in recent years, with more than 120 conflicts now taking place throughout the world, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Military spending has soared worldwide, with the global total reaching a record high of close to $2.5 trillion in 2024, up more than 7% from 2023 and averaging just under 2% of nations’ gross domestic product. The European Union, United Kingdom and Canada have accelerated defense investments, as the U.S. under the Trump administration has unsettled longstanding defense alliances.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by the U.N. in 2017, serves as a legally binding instrument towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons. But while there are 94 state signatories and 73 states party to the treaty, neither the U.S. nor Russia, which together account for approximately 88% of the world’s nuclear weapons, have signed on.

That trend is “particularly concerning,” said Caccia.

“Rather than advancing towards disarmament and a culture of peace, we are witnessing a resurgence of aggressive nuclear rhetoric, the development of increasingly destructive weapons and a significant rise in military expenditure,” he said, “often at the expense of investment in integral human development and the promotion of the common good.”

The very prospect of nuclear testing is problematic, he said, noting that since the first nuclear weapons test in 1945, more than 2,000 tests have been conducted “in the atmosphere, underground, beneath the oceans and on land.”

“These actions have affected everyone, particularly indigenous peoples, women, children, and the unborn,” he said. “The health and dignity of many continue to be affected in silence, and all too often without redress.”

The archbishop stressed the Holy See’s call to reflect on “the urgent shared responsibility to ensure that the terrible experiences of the past are not repeated.”

He affirmed the Holy See’s support for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes, as well as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

“It is imperative that we move beyond a spirit of fear and resignation,” said Caccia.

The archbishop quoted the exhortation of Pope Leo XIV in his June 18 general audience, saying, “We must never become accustomed to war. Indeed, the temptation to place our trust in powerful and sophisticated weapons must be firmly rejected.”

September 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Zionism Is What It Does

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 21, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/zionism-is-what-it-does?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=171529578&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Israel apologists always attack anti-Zionists by saying “Zionism just means self-determination for Jews! If you hate Zionism then you hate Jews!”

No, that’s not what Zionism means. Zionism means exactly what we see before us today. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Apartheid. Nonstop violence and abuse. That’s what Zionism means. And anti-Zionism means opposing these things.

There is simply no argument to the contrary. This is indisputably what Zionism looks like. There is no other alternate reality iteration of Zionism you can point to where genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and nonstop violence and abuse are not happening. This is the only way Zionism looks. The Zionist experiment has been run, and these are the results.

Trying to argue that Zionism doesn’t mean genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and nonstop violence and abuse is exactly the same as trying to argue that Nazism doesn’t mean all the things that happened when the Nazism experiment was run. Nazism means all the things that happened under Nazism. You can’t legitimately tell me “No, actually, Nazism just means a safe and prosperous homeland for the German people.” We’ve seen what Nazism looks like, and we’ve seen what Zionism looks like. To argue otherwise is to argue with reality.

It’s just so obnoxious how Israel supporters are like “Zionism means these nice things and nice words, so if you’re against Zionism you’re against the nice things and nice words!” No, asshole, that’s not how it works. You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own reality.

Israel is what it does. Zionism is what it does. You can’t separate them from their actions. The debate about the true nature of these things has been settled by the reality of what is happening.

It doesn’t matter if you believe Israel just wants to live in peace. It doesn’t matter if you believe Zionism is just the idea that Jews deserve self-determination. Reality says you’re wrong. Reality says Israel and Zionism mean nonstop violence and abuse. Reality says Israel and Zionism necessarily entail genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Because that’s the reality on the ground.

Them’s the facts. If you disagree with them, you are objectively wrong.

I saw a clip of ABC host Patricia Karvelas raking Netanyahu policy advisor Ophir Falk over the coals for his denialism of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, and the thought occurred to me that Israel really has lost the normies. All the mainstream western empire loyalists who dutifully toe the imperial line under normal circumstances are dropping away, one by one.

The fact that Israel has managed to alienate western liberals is so funny, because they’d be Israel’s biggest cheerleaders if they were given the tiniest bit of justification for that position.

So much about Israel fits in perfectly with western liberal mythology. A US-aligned capitalist democracy run by a plucky religious minority who survived horrific persecution, which embraces secular progressive values and reinforces the dominant western narratives about the wonderful things the US-led order has been able to accomplish since its triumphant glorious victory in the second world war. All Israel had to do was give them something, anything, and they’d still think Israel is the greatest thing in the world. They just needed an excuse — even a very meager one.

But Israel couldn’t even give them that. Genocide, racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and expansionism were just too important to its driving ideology. The Zionist project simply could not continue without going mask-off at some point, so now they’ve lost all the mainstream moderate liberals and pretty much everyone besides the “killing Muslims is good” far right extremists and the “we have to support Israel because God commands it” Christian Zionists.

Eventually all the contradictions had to come out into the light.

The Israeli press are pushing the narrative that if people in Gaza are suffering so bad they should leave, which is precisely the narrative I said we’d soon be hearing from Israel in facilitation of its longstanding ethnic cleansing agenda.

Last month I wrote the following in an article titled “They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It”:

“Western governments are beginning to speak out against the mass atrocity in Gaza, far too little and far too late. We can expect Israel and the United States to respond to this outcry by saying that Palestinians need to be evacuated out of Gaza as quickly as possible in order to rescue them from this deliberately manufactured humanitarian crisis. We can expect them to denounce anyone who opposes this ethnic cleansing operation as evil monsters who want to starve the poor Palestinians.”

The Jerusalem Post has just published an opinion piece titled “Gaza humanitarian crisis should expedite Trump’s relocation plan,” subtitled “Now that there is public awareness of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it should be leveraged to garner support for Trump’s Gaza relocation proposal.”

The article’s author, Gol Kalev, complains that “the Gazans” are being “denied the basic human right to flee a war” by the mean, nasty Europeans who just want to accuse Israel of war crimes and atrocities.

“They are needed under the rubble in Gaza — not just by Hamas, who uses them as human shields, but also by Europe and its proxies, who use them as pawns in their age-old opposition to the Jewish state, and as a proxy assault on America,” Kalev writes, arguing that public frustration “should not be directed at Israel, but at those standing in the way of Trump’s relocation plan, including European leaders.”

“Now that there is public awareness of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it should be leveraged to garner support for Trump’s Gaza relocation proposal — which could lead to safety and prosperity for Gazans, and peace for the entire region,” writes Kalev. “The public message must be clear: Let the Gazans be free — let them flee.”

Just as I said they would do, they’re disguising a naked ethnic cleansing operation as humanitarianism and denouncing anyone who wants to provide Palestinians with a massive relief effort in their historic homeland as an uncaring monster. We can expect to see more of this messaging going forward.

Anyone who tells you they support Israel for religious reasons is telling you to stop trying to reason with them. They’re saying their position is not based on facts, evidence, logic or morality, but their blind faith in a collection of made up stories. So there’s nothing you could possibly say to them that would change their mind or convince them that they are wrong.

Trying to debate or reason with such a person would be the same as trying to convince someone that there is no God. It’s an entirely unfalsifiable position about which no argument can be made using facts and evidence.

Someone like Mike Huckabee is never telling the truth or saying what he really thinks is going on when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, he’s just making whatever mouth noises he needs to make to help fulfill a Biblical prophecy and secure his eternal reward. Such people have no place in the conversation. They should be completely excluded from the debate, because they are not actually participating in it. They’re just lying and manipulating for reasons that have nothing to do with truth or morality.

August 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Stopping The Gaza Holocaust Is The First Step Toward A Healthy World

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 13, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/stopping-the-gaza-holocaust-is-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=170832055&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Nicole on Facebook writes, “I would love to hear you explain how Palestine is the moral question of our time. Why it’s so important. How it’s related to every movement and should be a concern to everyone.”

Palestine is the moral question of our time because the abuse of the Palestinians is the most glaring, in-your-face symptom of the imperial disease. You can see the effects of so many of the empire’s abusive dynamics in how this thing is playing out, from racism to colonialism to militarism to war profiteering to mass media propaganda to empire-building to government corruption to suppression of free speech to ecocide to the heartless, mindless, soul-eating nature of the capitalist system under which we all live.

But there’s more to it than that. The primary reason to place Palestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. Stopping the Gaza holocaust and bringing justice to the Palestinians is the very first step toward a healthy civilization.

Palestine is the moral issue of our time for the same reason if you saw someone in your family torturing another member of your family to death, it would be the most urgent matter happening in your life at that moment. You’d have other problems in your life, but that would come first.

If we’re the sort of society that would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of our own government and its allies, then we’re not the sort of society that can steer away from its trajectory toward dystopia and armageddon. If you’re the sort of individual who would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of your own government and its allies, then you’re not the sort of individual who can help steer our species away from disaster.

Gaza is not the only thing that matters in the world. But if you’re not forcefully opposing the Gaza holocaust, you definitely don’t have a healthy enough conscience to address any of the world’s other problems.

I sometimes see Israel supporters refer to pro-Palestine sentiment as “virtue signaling”, which is funny because it means they view themselves as holding the unpopular, unvirtuous position. But really there’s nothing particularly virtuous about supporting Gaza, and it’s not some cool, special thing you’d want to signal about yourself. It’s just what you do when you’re not an extremely shitty person. It’s the basic, bare-minimum expectation of normal human morality.

I don’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t oppose the Gaza holocaust. I don’t want to follow any commentators or analysts who don’t speak out against the Gaza holocaust. At this point I don’t even want to listen to any music or read any poetry from people who don’t take a stand against the Gaza holocaust. Since 2023 I’ve moved from rejecting anyone who actively sided with Israel to rejecting anyone who is even complicit in their silence.

The other day I saw some Australian influencer forcefully trying to assert that it’s okay not to take a position on Gaza, and nobody in her replies was buying it. Supporting Israel and aligning with US foreign policy comes with a lot of career benefits for high-profile individuals, and you don’t get to both enjoy those perks and also keep ethical people interested in what you have to say. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between the perks and the people. You actually do.

Opposition to the Gaza holocaust is the very first step in assessing if someone is worth my time. If you can’t even meet the basic, bare-minimum expectation of opposing an active genocide, then you are too callous and apathetic to be my friend. If you can’t even get this basic, kindergarten-level moral question right, then your mind is too shallow and your heart too hardened for me to be interested in your analysis, your ideas, your politics, or your art.

There are so many terrible things in our world, and there is so much work that needs to be done to address them. I don’t know what ideas, strategies and movements will get us out of this mess, but I do know that if any are going to emerge they’re going to come from the people who’ve been taking a strong stand against Israel and its western allies these last two years. Those are the individuals, movements, and political factions to pay attention to going forward. Nobody else is equipped to help.

August 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Vonnegut on Nagasaki: “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery”

““The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.”

Author: John LaForge, August 7, 2014, https://www.peacevoice.info/2014/08/06/vonnegut-on-nagasaki-the-most-racist-nastiest-act-by-this-country-after-human-slavery/

For the full article:
Vonnegut on Nagasaki: “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery”
877 Words

“The rights and wrongs of Hiroshima are debatable,” Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, once said, “but I have never heard a plausible justification of Nagasaki” — which he labeled a war crime.

In his 2011 book Atomic Cover-Up, Greg Mitchell says, “If Hiroshima suggests how cheap life had become in the atomic age, Nagasaki shows that it could be judged to have no value whatsoever.” Mitchell notes that the US writer Dwight MacDonald cited in 1945 America’s “decline to barbarism” for dropping “half-understood poisons” on a civilian population. The New York Herald Tribune editorialized there was “no satisfaction in the thought that an American air crew had produced what must without doubt be the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind.”

Mitchell reports that the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five — said, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.”

On Aug. 17, 1945, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. …we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. …we…did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”

If shame is the natural response to Hiroshima, how is one to respond to Nagasaki, especially in view of all the declassified government papers on the subject? According to Dr. Joseph Gerson’s With Hiroshima Eye, some 74,000 were killed instantly at Nagasaki, another 75,000 were injured and 120,000 were poisoned.

If Hiroshima was unnecessary, how to justify Nagasaki?

The saving of thousands of US lives is held up as the official justification for the two atomic bombings. Leaving aside the ethical and legal question of slaughtering civilians to protect soldiers, what can be made of the Nagasaki bomb if Hiroshima’s incineration was not necessary?

The most amazingly under-reported statement in this context is that of Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes, quoted on the front page of the August 29, 1945 New York Times with the headline, “Japan Beaten Before Atom Bomb, Byrnes Says, Citing Peace Bids.” Byrnes cited what he called “proof that the Japanese knew that they were beaten before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.”

On Sept. 20, 1945, Gen. Curtis LeMay, the famous bombing commander, told a press conference, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

According to Robert Lifton’s and Greg Mitchel’s Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial (1995), only weeks after August 6 and 9, President Truman himself publicly declared that the bomb “did not win the war.”

The US Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted by Paul Nitze less than a year after the atom bombings, concluded that “certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and ever if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Likewise, the Intelligence Group of the US War Department’s Military Intelligence Division conducted a study from January to April 1946 and declared that the bombs had not been needed to end the war, according to reports Gar Alperovitz in his massive The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. The IG said it is “almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war.”

Russia did so, Aug. 8, 1945, and as Ward Wilson reports in his Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons, six hours after news of Russia’s invasion of Sakhalin Island reached Tokyo — and before Nagasaki was bombed — the Supreme Council met to discuss unconditional surrender.

Experiments with hell fire?

Nagasaki was attacked with a bomb made of plutonium, named after Pluto, god of the underworld earlier known as Hades, in what some believe to have been a ghastly trial. The most toxic substance known to science, developed for mass destruction, plutonium is so lethal it contaminates everything nearby forever, every isotope a little bit of hell fire.

According to Atomic Cover-Up, Hitoshi Motoshima, mayor of Nagasaki from 1979 to 1995, said, “The reason for Nagasaki was to experiment with the plutonium bomb.” Mitchell notes that “hard evidence to support this ‘experiment’ as the major reason for the bombing remains sketchy.” But according to a wire service report in Newsweek, Aug. 20, 1945, by a journalist traveling with the president aboard the USS Augusta, Truman reportedly announced to his shipmates, “The experiment has been an overwhelming success.”

US investigators visiting Hiroshima Sept. 8, 1945 met with Japan’s leading radiation expert, Professor Masao Tsuzuki. One was given a 1926 paper on Tsuzuki’s famous radiation experiments on rabbits. “Ah, but the Americans, they are wonderful,” Tsuzuki told the group. “It has remained for them to conduct the human experiment!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, edits its quarterly newsletter, and writes for PeaceVoice.

August 16, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, Japan, Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

To Future Generations: They Knew. They All Knew What Was Happening In Gaza.

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 09, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/to-future-generations-they-knew-they?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=170505794&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

A note to future generations for historical record:

Every pundit, politician and reporter of our time who claims they didn’t know what was happening in Gaza is lying.

They knew what was happening. They knew Israel was telling lies. They knew about everything.

They had access to the same information as all the rest of us. We watched them make excuses and ignore indisputable facts every step of the way. There was absolutely no confusion about what they were looking at. It was all right out in the open.

Don’t let them get away with saying they didn’t know. They knew. They knew the entire time. Brand them permanently with this shame, and force them to carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

I hate all genocide supporters equally, regardless of their religion. Telling me your religion is like telling me about your dreams: it’s completely uninteresting to me. If you support an active genocide you’re a bad person who deserves to be shunned and reviled, regardless of what your religion happens to be.

It’s so wild how Jewish people will just stride confidently into public discourse about Gaza while strongly emphasizing their Jewishness, as though their support for genocide is somehow special and different from any other asshole’s support for genocide. Wanting to starve civilians and mass murder children makes you a piece of shit, whether you are Jewish, Mormon, Buddhist, or atheist.

Nobody cares what religious belief systems you happen to hold in your head while you advocate massacring civilians, they care about the fact that you advocate massacring civilians. Being Jewish doesn’t give you some kind of magical immunity from being held to basic moral standards and being judged by society for supporting a mass atrocity. It’s got nothing to do with anything.

After a whistleblower on the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation named Tony Aguilar shared the heartbreaking story about a boy named Amir who became one of the many Palestinians massacred by Israeli forces while trying to obtain food at an aid site, his family reported that he had been missing since that day and they hadn’t known what had happened to him. They still don’t know where his body is.

The fact that people just “go missing” in Gaza after being killed indicates Israel often buries the bodies of victims to cover up their deaths — something they’ve been caught doing before. This is one of many reasons why we can be sure that the actual death toll is much higher than the official record.

Still can’t believe Israel supporters spent days yelling “Israel isn’t starving children, it’s starving SICK children!” and thought that was an awesome argument.

Friendly periodic reminder that the “Israel bombs hospitals because the hospitals are Hamas bases” narrative was conclusively debunked when IDF soldiers were repeatedly documented entering the hospitals they attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment, one by one. Hamas isn’t the target, healthcare is the target. That has been irrefutably established.

Opposing the Gaza genocide has meant being proven right about everything from the very beginning every step of the way, hating being proven right, and then having the liberals who kept yelling at you for your rightness slowly begin to acknowledge that you were right, while still finding excuses to hate you for being right anyway.

A new poll by the Israel Democracy Institute has found that only 6.7 percent of Jewish Israelis say they are “very troubled” by reports of starvation and suffering in Gaza, with 67 percent saying they are either “not at all troubled” or “not so troubled” by the news. That means those who are pretty much fine with deliberately starving children outnumber those who hold a normal attitude on the matter ten to one.

Poll after poll after poll shows that Jewish Israelis are horrible people who are quantifiably much more cruel and immoral than pretty much any other population. At a certain point you have to stop thinking the polls might be mistaken and see that the only real mistake is Israel.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian support for the war with Russia has plunged even further, with a new Gallup poll finding that just 24 percent of Ukrainians now support continuing the fight until victory. A 69 percent supermajority now say they want peace negotiations as soon as possible.

I get called a Putin-loving cryptofascist vatnik tankie Kremlin agent whenever I say this, but a majority of Ukrainians have wanted this war to end for a while now. At this point the only ones who want more war are westerners, plus some of the Ukrainians who live far away from the fighting.

We’re being told the holocaust in Gaza can’t be ended, and we’re being told the war nobody wants in Ukraine must continue. We are ruled by monsters.

August 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

August 6, 2025 By Edward Curtin / Behind the Curtain, https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/06/the-satanic-nature-of-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters

American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions of innocent people that continues down to today. “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although many Americans, if they are even aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.” Or something from the past. Most know nothing about it, for they have never opened a history book.

Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent. We are conscienceless. We are brutal. We are in the grip of evil forces.

The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” It still hasn’t.

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.

Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?

In Tokyo alone more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil? Demonic? Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed.

As a conclusion to such bombings, in August 1945 the atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’ words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.

So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousand Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since. Shortly after, in September 1945 the U.S War Department made plans to wipe out the U.S.’s ally, the Soviet Union, with a massive nuclear strike aimed at 66 major cities. Professor Michel Chossudovsky documents it here.

Satan always wears the other’s face.

Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb. They are lucky. They grew up. They got be scared. They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it. Do you remember dog tags? Those 1950s and 1960s? The scary movies?

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. To be accurate: we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them. But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation. Poor us!

Fat Man, Little Boy – how the names of those atomic bombs echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature. Innocence – it is wonderful! We are different now. “We are great because we are good”; that’s what Hillary Clinton told us. The Libyans can attest to that. We are exceptional, special. The 2020 election was said to prove that if we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values,” all will be well.

Now that they were restored with Biden’s support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, delusionary Trump 2024 voters might be learning that those core values are bipartisan. “We are great because we are good,” goes the mantra. We kill, therefore we are. There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

Perhaps you think I am cynical. But understanding true evil is not child’s play. It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions. Evil is real. There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature. How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?

But so many Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today, as in 2016, Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day or minute, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.

Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.

Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.

Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace in the final year of his presidency, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, “You believe in redemption don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would when he gave his extraordinary American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.

So hope is not all lost. There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications. False innocence must be abandoned. Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.

How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people? American history is rife with such examples up to the present day. The native peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. – the list is very long. Savage wars carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds. Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution, as the ancient Greeks said. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s the road we’ve been traveling, as Trump’s second term is showing us, as he facilely and recklessly talks of nuclear war and makes moves that make it more likely.

The projection of evil onto others works only so long. We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections. Only the fate of the world depends on it.

August 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera

Text originally published July 26, 2025.

Scheerpost, By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, August 4, 2025 , https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/

TRANSCRIPT:

Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor. https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/

August 7, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Israel’s Genocidal Intentions Have Been Obvious This Whole Time

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 03, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israels-genocidal-intentions-have?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=169999925&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Liberal Israelis are slowly beginning to join the rest of the world in admitting that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide — a fact that has been clear to anyone with eyes and a basic sense of morality from the very beginning of this nightmare.

It was obvious in October 2023 that Israel intended to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, in part because you would never treat a population that way if you intended to leave survivors on your border. Because you’d know they’d seek revenge later on.

Call it the Inigo Montoya problem — if you kill someone’s father right in front of him, it’s a safe bet that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you. If you intend to act in monstrous ways that fill young children with thoughts of revenge, then you need to get rid of the children, and you need to get rid of the women who will give birth to them. Otherwise you’re just creating a problem for your own children and grandchildren down the road.

The Nazis understood this. Heinrich Himmler famously said, “I did not feel I had a right to exterminate the men — i.e. kill them or have them killed — while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge upon our sons and grandsons. We had to reach the difficult decision of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth.”

The savagery of Israel’s post-October 7 onslaught was so horrific right off the bat that it was clear they didn’t intend to leave anyone alive in Gaza. It was clear they intended to kill as many people as possible and force any survivors to leave, because there’s no way they’d be acting with such sadistic bloodlust if they had any plans to leave survivors within striking distance of themselves.

And that is exactly how it has played out. They’ve intentionally turned Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland while creating a waking nightmare of death and unfathomable suffering, and Trump and Netanyahu are openly saying that it’s not going to end until all the Palestinians have been removed one way or another.

If you’re going to rape and torture a child, you probably don’t intend to then drop them off at the nearest hospital when you are done with them, because you know the police will be at your door the next day. If you’re going to murder your enemy’s wife and kids in front of him, you probably don’t intend to leave him alive to seek revenge at a later date. Once you’ve gone all-in on perpetrating a sufficiently terrible act, you often need to do some extra killing on top of it to protect yourself from the consequences of your actions.

That’s one of the many reasons why it has always been clear that Israel’s intentions for Gaza are genocide and ethnic cleansing. Even if Israeli officials hadn’t been making openly genocidal statements, and even if genocidal sentiments hadn’t been proliferating throughout the collective consciousness of apartheid Israel for many years — hell, even if you knew absolutely nothing about Israel and Palestine and just looked at the reality on the ground in Gaza — it would still have been obvious to you that Israel did not intend to leave any of those people there. Just because of where they were located and how Israel was treating them.

So when people claim at this late date that they are coming to the reluctant conclusion that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, I have a hard time believing them. It was obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of human nature that Israel had no intention of leaving any survivors of this mass atrocity on its border. People are just covering their own asses and trying to wash their hands of their guilt for their complicity in a 21st century holocaust over the past 22 months.

August 5, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Anti-nuclear weapons demo takes place at Faslane base

HM Naval Base Clyde is home to the Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class submarines – HMS Vanguard, Vengeance, Victorious and Vigilant – which each carry Trident 2 D5 nuclear missiles.

Gemma Ryder Reporter, 02 Aug 2025,
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/anti-nuclear-weapons-demo-takes-35664128

The “No To Nuclear Weapons” gathering was organised by Justice & Peace Scotland, and brought people of all faiths together for prayer, reflection, and a public stance against nuclear arms.

Those in attendance included Most Rev William Nolan, Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow and Bishop-President of Justice & Peace Scotland; Rt Rev Rosie Frew, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and Most Rev Mark Strange, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

They were joined by members of the Quakers, the Iona Community, the United Reformed Church, and other religious groups amid growing global tensions.

The UK is preparing to upgrade and expand its nuclear weapons system and President Trump ordered two nuclear submarines to be deployed “in the appropriate regions” in response to comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on social media.

Archbishop Nolan said: “The phrase ‘never again’ gained much currency 80 years ago.

“But the actions of nuclear powers, including our own, run contrary to that.

“As the late Pope Benedict articulated, the very concept of a nuclear deterrence has instead fuelled an arms race as those on opposing sides keep seeking to outdo the other.

“We have seen this in the replacement for Trident. Deterrence itself, therefore, has increased insecurity and does nothing to build up trust which is necessary to encourage disarmament and build up peace.”

HM Naval Base Clyde — located near Helensburgh on the Gare Loch — is home to the UK’s four Vanguard-class submarines, each armed with Trident 2 D5 nuclear missiles, capable of striking targets up to 4,000 miles away.

Rt Rev Frew said: “On the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seems right to stand with other Christians saying ‘No’ to nuclear weapons and ‘Yes’ to peace.

“My hope and prayer is to live in a world without war or the threat of war, a world without the threat of the deployment of nuclear weapons.

“I know opinion is very divided on holding nuclear weapons but I don’t believe anyone would ever wish them to be deployed, both those who will gather outside and those who serve in HM Naval Base Clyde.

“The Church of Scotland stands in solidarity with all those who work at Faslane in the service of the United Kingdom, while praying for peace in a world where there is no threat of nuclear weapons ever being used.”

Justice & Peace Scotland said the use and threat of nuclear weapons is incompatible with Christian teaching, and called on political leaders to reject a future based on “fear and power-wielding”.

They added: “Nuclear weapons are fundamentally incompatible with this call as their existence threatens indiscriminate destruction and a future built on fear and power-wielding rather than on fraternity amongst nations.”

August 5, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, Religion and ethics, UK | Leave a comment

Time to De-Zionize the Israeli Mind

By W.O. Munce / August 1, 2025, https://www.thepostil.com/de-zionize-the-israeli-mind/

Israel is a deeply sick country which become monstrous. How is it that the descendants of the victims of Nazi atrocities feel that they can proudly film themselves carrying out similar atrocities? This is bitter fruit of cultivating the “Holocaust industry,” in which Jewish victimhood has been made so sacrosanct that it has created an entire generation that feels that it can do whatever it wants, that crimes can never be committed by Israelis.

Genocides do not happen in a vacuum. At least, when the Nazis were carrying out their murderous plans, they had the “decency” of trying to hide all their crimes, so the world would never know. But such is not the case with Israelis when it comes to the genocide in Gaza. Rather, it is now commonplace for ordinary Israelis to film their enthusiasm for genocide, and post it all on social media—because (a) they do not see killing Palestinians as a crime, and (b) they wear genocide as a badge of honor, because they see it as yet another expression of their exalted victimhood.

For example, videos and images have circulated showing Israelis, including soldiers and settlers, holding barbecue parties near the Gaza border, while—obviously—Palestinians inside Gaza starve. Multiple sources confirm footage of these barbecues near Gaza, while those deemed to be “less human” face famine and widespread starvation.

What kind of satisfaction do these Israelis derive from such behavior? What has the Israeli mindset become that it can imagine that this kind of criminality will meet with approval of the world?

Perhaps, the time has come to begin speaking of an urgent process—the minds of the Israelis have to be de-Zionized.

Fear and hatred play a central role in maintaining Zionist views by creating a psychological and emotional framework that sustains exclusivist national identity and resistance to change. Fear, rooted deeply in historical trauma including the Holocaust, is learned and collective among Israeli Jews. It fosters a sense that the Jewish people face an existential threat from Arabs and the wider world, framing conflicts as struggles for survival against enemies, intent on destruction. This fear is harnessed into a collective, fear-driven hatred directed at Palestinians, portrayed as a monolithic hostile force. Such emotions justify ongoing security measures, territorial claims, and resistance to peace efforts, reinforcing a binary worldview of “us vs. them” where people and states are either friends or enemies.

Hatred, as part of this emotional complex, promotes internal solidarity within Jewish Israelis, reinforces group boundaries, and inhibits empathy towards Palestinians. It can also justify violence and exclusionary policies as necessary defensive actions. The emotions of fear and hatred thus work together to entrench Zionist nationalist ideology by making alternative narratives or conciliatory approaches psychologically and emotionally difficult to accept.

The main psychological barriers to de-Zionizing the Israeli mindset are socio-psychological forces deeply embedded in Israeli Jewish society that inhibit the acceptance of alternative narratives and impede peace processes.

These are rigid, ideological beliefs that justify the continuation of nationalist and territorial claims, such as the belief that Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza is legitimate and that Jews are the main contributors to peacemaking efforts. Such beliefs strengthen exclusivist national identity and resistance to compromise or territorial withdrawal.

Negative emotions toward Palestinians, including fear of security threats and hatred, create emotional resistance to changing perspectives or accepting Palestinian narratives.

There is a biased, closed-minded tendency to selectively process information that supports the dominant Zionist narrative while rejecting or ignoring conflicting information about Palestinians or peace efforts.

Many Israelis sustain a strong sense of collective victimhood from historical trauma (such as the Holocaust or past wars), which fuels defensiveness and reluctance to acknowledge Palestinian suffering fully.

The idea that time is on Israel’s side discourages urgency or willingness to make territorial concessions, promoting a wait-and-see attitude that can reinforce inaction.

Traits that favor traditionalism and authority can increase in-group loyalty and delegitimize Palestinians, reducing openness to peace negotiations.

These barriers operate in an integrated way, involving cognitive, emotional, and motivational dimensions that combine to make shifts away from Zionist nationalist ideology psychologically difficult for many Israelis. They also perpetuate selective bias and resistance to change, complicating efforts to “de-Zionize” or fundamentally rethink the Israeli identity in more inclusive or non-nationalist terms.

What lies ahead is undoing or rejecting Zionist ideology that centers on Jewish nationalism and exclusivism, and replace it with alternative Jewish that emphasizes universalism, religious adherence, or political justice. This process is complex and varies widely depending on religious, political, or social perspective.

Groups like Neturei Karta reject Zionism as apostasy, arguing it undermines Jewish Law and faith by emphasizing secular Jewish nationalism over religious devotion. They seek to restore Judaism as primarily a religious identity, not a nationalistic or territorial one. This includes opposing the State of Israel’s Zionist foundation and advocating for alliances with Palestinians based on shared religious ethics rather than nationalism.

Some Jewish voices oppose Zionism on liberal or humanistic grounds, emphasizing justice and equality for all peoples, including Palestinians. Opposition here focuses on dismantling structures of racial and national exclusivity, advocating for a future Israeli society based on equal rights, democratic principles, and recognition of Palestinian national rights.

Former Zionists or Israelis disengaging from Zionism often describe a journey of critical reflection, learning about Palestinian histories and suffering, and rejecting exclusionary nationalism. This mental de-Zionization involves questioning nationalist narratives, recognizing the impact of occupation, and embracing solidarity with Palestinians.

Left-wing Israeli critics see de-Zionization as abolishing Jewish exclusiveness codified in laws like the Law of Return, ending imperialist ties, and transforming Israel into a multi-national democracy that grants equal rights to all inhabitants regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Perhaps the only path forward, then, is not to advocate for a two-state solution, because the question that must be answered by those who claim support for this idea is rather straight forward: Can a state that has committed genocide suddenly become acceptable by the world community?

The answer can only be—no.

More and more, it will become obvious that if this part of the world is to know any peace, then Israel must be de-Zionzed—and the only way to do that is to create a one state in the Levant, in which everyone can live equally, a state in which Zionism will be banned and illegal.

It is time for the Israeli mind to be freed from all notions of grandeur and superiority. Otherwise, Zionism will continue to produce atrocities.

If this is not done, then the slaughter will go on, generation after generation, until the world grows sick of such crimes—and what happens then will be a lot worse

August 3, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

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