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Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Monday, April 13, 2026
Sunday, April 12, 2026
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Friday, April 10, 2026
Thursday, April 9, 2026
The Empire of Cannibals -
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/the-empire-of-cannibals?publication_id=65949&post_id=193726985&isFreemail=true&r=1y80w&triedRedirect=true
[Salon] Trump and Netanyahu face a reckoning - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Trump and Netanyahu face a reckoning
Summary: the ceasefire that Donald Trump accepted has stopped the war and with the president signalling he does not want a resumption Tehran has secured a significant victory over its greatest enemies.
Is this the emperor has no clothes moment for Donald Trump? The two week ceasefire he announced at the 11th hour, literally the 11th hour saw him “staring into the abyss in the Trumpiest way possible, as if he were a reality-show producer teasing the season finale” as The Economist’s Greg Carlstrom put it.
The New York Times in an exclusive piece took readers into the Situation Room on 11 February when Benjamin Netanyahu sold Trump the ultimate bad deal convincing him that a quick win was possible and that regime change was a few easy steps away from being achieved:
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.
He also baldly claim that the Iranian people would rush into the streets to overthrow the regime abetted by Mossad’s intervention to encourage rioting and revolution (see our newsletter of 19 January.)
In the days that followed the Times says that various people questioned the narrative Netanyahu had stitched together. The head of the CIA John Ratcliffe told the president that the notion of achieving regime change was “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a tad earthier. He told Trump it was “bullshit.”
And yet no one, other than the vice president JD Vance, argued in a forceful way that the war was utter folly. Vance noted that the Iranians would close the Strait of Hormuz with huge consequences for, amongst other impacts, the price of petrol at the pump. He warned the war would alienate his supporters which it did (as Jon Hoffman argued in our podcast of 1 April pointing to a growing split between MAGA always Trumpers and America Firsters angry that the president had broken his promise not to engage in foreign wars.)
Trump brushed aside those concerns because as he told Tucker Carlson who had also intervened at a late stage “everything will be OK because it always is.” The president’s instincts were what mattered and those around him accepted against all the evidence and all the odds that he must be right when in fact he could not have been more wrong.
The president claimed a win even as in an extraordinary volte-face he embraced the Iranian counter-proposal to his 15 point surrender document:
We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated.
Iran has declared a "historic and crushing defeat" of the US and Israel after 40 days of war, forcing Washington to accept a 10-point Iranian proposal that includes a permanent ceasefire, the lifting of all sanctions, and the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
The defence and security analyst and our podcast contributor Andreas Krieg (you can find his latest AD podcast here) used social media to describe the ceasefire deal as:
the worst strategic defeat for the US since Vietnam and possibly the worst strategic defeat for Israel ever. IF the ceasefire term are translated into an agreement, Iran will be able to rebuild capabilities within a year.
Benjamin Netanyahu had no choice but to confirm that Israel would join the ceasefire while attempting to save face by declaring the war against Lebanon will continue. As Haaretz noted the prime minister in doing so had not achieved two of his key aims when he and Trump launched the war:
The first is Iran's nuclear program, with the fate of its enriched uranium still unclear. There is also, for now, no Iranian commitment to abandon its ballistic missile program, which Netanyahu has defined as an "existential threat" and which has been a primary focus of Israeli air force operations over the past month.
Netanyahu’s chief opposition rival Yair Lapid who had backed the war when it was launched was quick to go for the jugular:
There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in our history. Israel was not even at the table when decisions were made on core issues of our national security…. Netanyahu failed diplomatically, failed strategically and did not meet a single goal he himself set.
Iran’s National Security Council issued a statement that concluded “Iran has achieved a massive victory and forced criminal America to accept its 10-point plan.” While the degree of the victory will be debated it is without doubt a win for the Iranian regime. Not only has it survived by playing leverage of the Strait of Hormuz with great skill it has won a huge propaganda success by forcing the world’s most powerful military to come to the negotiating table on its terms.
The war has also forced a reckoning on the Gulf states. Another of our podcast contributors Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil in a social media posting argues:
the Gulf will be more vulnerable than ever before and therefore in need of U.S. help. But Gulf populations have begun to question the United States’ reliability and the value of hosting American bases. To better protect themselves, Gulf leaders must therefore now try to wrest some autonomy from the United States by strengthening cooperation, foremost among themselves.
(Sanam Vakil’s latest AD podcast Iran and regime survival is here.)
For Trump a career both in business and politics that has long defied gravity has crashed to earth with a thud that is echoing around the world and most emphatically in America. The loyalists he has surrounded himself with in his second term have seen the would be emperor without any clothes. That will shake them. But beyond the confines of the White House his attempt to sell to a majority of Americans that the ceasefire was a win is not likely to succeed with political implications for the president and the party he had claimed to make his own.
Netanyahu too will face a reckoning. His brutal and genocidal war in Gaza, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the destruction of Lebanon and the ruthless bombing campaign he and the Americans inflicted on Iran have turned Israel into a global pariah state. Most crucially his self-serving policies have squandered support for Israel in the country that matters most: the United States.
Benjamin Netanyahu had boasted that the war would change the Middle East forever. It has but not in the way he thought it would.
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
[Salon] Syria on the edge of regional escalation - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Syria on the edge of regional escalation
Summary: Syria is suffering collateral damage as Israel and the US pursue their war against Iran; with its airspace violated by both sides and the economy reeling a country just beginning to emerge from 14 years of civil war risks being pulled further into the conflict.
We thank Sirwan Kajjo for today’s newsletter. Sirwan, a regular contributor to the AD podcast, is a Kurdish American journalist based in Washington D.C. focusing on Kurdish politics, Islamic militancy, extremism, and conflict in the Middle East and beyond. He is the author of Nothing But Soot about a twentysomething Kurdish man whose quest for a permanent home never ends. You can find his latest podcast here.
It is unusual to see Syria not directly involved in a conflict that includes Iran. Under the leadership of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country has so far avoided direct military engagement in the ongoing U.S.-Israel-Iran war.
Yet despite its formal neutrality, Syria remains deeply entangled in the broader regional dynamics surrounding the war. As the conflict continues, the risk of spillover grows, making it more plausible that Syria could find itself pulled into a wider war with ominous consequences.
Syria is already functionally entangled in the conflict. Its airspace has been used both to carry out attacks against Iran and to intercept Iranian missiles and drones. In practice, Damascus lacks the capacity to enforce or deny control of its airspace, meaning its protestations carry little practical weight in determining who operates there.
From Tehran’s perspective, however, this reality could be interpreted as complicity. Given Iran’s increasingly aggressive actions toward Gulf states since the outset of the war, and should military pressure from the United States and Israel intensify, Iran may expand its regional response to include Syria directly.
On Friday a large group of Syrian pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the UAE embassy in Damascus protesting at the country’s support for Israel amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Syria has seen incidents in which Israeli air defence systems intercept Israel-bound Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. These engagements, often unfolding over Syrian territory, have resulted in both civilian casualities and material damage. A Syrian base near the border with Jordan and Iraq, which until recently hosted US forces, was also struck by drones launched from Iraq, likely by Iranian-backed Shiite militias. Iran’s Iraqi proxies have also launched drone attacks on multiple occasions on two US military installations in Syria’s Hasakah region.
The economic impact of this war is equally visible. For a country still reeling from 14 years of civil war, any regional escalation inevitably casts a long shadow over its fragile recovery. This is especially true for Syria, whose rebuilding efforts remain heavily dependent on regional Arab partners for fuel supplies, investment and broader economic relief. Syria’s energy sector was the first to feel the impact of the war. Just two days after the conflict began on February 28, the Syrian Ministry of Energy announced that daily electricity hours would be reduced due to disruptions in natural gas supplies transiting through Jordan. Syria receives much of its natural gas from Egypt, which in turn imports from Israel – whose natural gas exports were indefinitely suspended on the first day of the war.
Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, have been major financial backers of Syria’s interim government since the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime. They have pledged substantial investment initiatives aimed at reviving Syria’s devastated economy. However, as Iran intensifies attacks on Gulf states and their infrastructure, their priorities may shift inward, especially as oil production declines significantly. This could reduce their capacity and willingness to sustain external economic commitments.
Prices of everyday commodities have risen sharply, driven by higher shipping costs from regional markets. Economists estimate that inflation for some essential goods climbed between 20 and 40 percent two weeks after the start of the war. This is an especially severe burden in a country where 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Syria remains a devastated country, still grappling with significant domestic challenges. Damascus’s efforts to avoid becoming a direct participant in the conflict are rooted in this reality. But Syria’s ostensible neutrality is less a strategic choice than a reflection of its vulnerability. Lacking both the capacity to control its own territory and the resilience to absorb further shocks, Damascus is navigating a conflict whose consequences it cannot fully avoid. The longer the war persist, the more tenuous this posture becomes. With no end in sight for this conflict, Syria risks once again becoming not just a bystander, but a battleground where external rivalries are projected onto a fragile state still struggling to stand on its own.
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Monday, April 6, 2026
[Salon] Pope Leo XIV visits Algeria and revisits St Augustine - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
Pope Leo XIV visits Algeria and revisits St Augustine
Summary: the upcoming visit by Pope Leo to Algeria is both historic – he is the first pope to visit the country – and symbolic, a statement that in a region and a world plagued by violence the rejection by St Augustine of unjust wars is the only path to take.
We thank Francis Ghilès for today’s newsletter. Francis is a senior associate research fellow at CIDOB and a visiting fellow at King’s College, London. You can find his latest Arab Digest podcast Algeria, Libya and Europe’s urgent energy needs here.
On Palm Sunday Pope Leo XIV delivered a subtle but powerful rebuke to those who use God to justify war:
Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who use war but rejects them saying ‘even though you make many prayers I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.’
Though he did not name them he was implicitly referring to Christian Zionists who embrace the belief that the land of Jesus belongs to the Jews and that when the Jews possess it in its entirety Jesus will return to Jerusalem for the Rapture, the end of time, when Christians will be saved and all those others who do not convert will be consigned to eternal damnation.
It is an ideology embraced by the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Ambassador Huckabee quoted the bible to support his belief that much of the Middle East belongs to Israel. He told Tucker Carlson: “Israel is a land that God gave, through Abraham, to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place and a purpose….It would be fine if they took it all.”
Of Secretary of Defense Hegseth the religion scholar Toby Matthiesen writes:
He called on God to ‘break the teeth’ and kill the ‘wicked’ enemies ‘who deserve no mercy’ and should be ‘delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.’ In other words, for Hegseth this is a holy war in which he calls on God to ‘grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence.’
A week from today and a little more than two weeks since that Palm Sunday rebuke Pope Leo will arrive in Algeria a Muslim country with a great and ancient link to the Catholic church. Algeria is the birth place of St Augustine.
A statue of Saint Augustine of Hippo at the entrance to his Basilica in Annaba, Algeria
In making this historic visit the Pope, a self-proclaimed Augustinian, is paying tribute to this towering figure when he begins a two day visit on 13 April, the start of a trip that will also take him to Cameroon, Angola and Guinea Bissau.
In Book X of his Confessions, St Augustine says of God: “Late have I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new”. The same could be said of a man who, for Christians, remains, nearly sixteen centuries after his death in Hippo Regius - now Annaba in eastern Algeria - the most referenced authority after the Bible. The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne was so taken with St Augustine’s City of God that he slept with it under his pillow. St Thomas Aquinas refused to criticise him despite holding a different opinion and the Augustinian influence did not wane after the Middle Ages. It was an Augustinian friar (Martin Luther) who started the Reformation, and its greatest systemiser, John Calvin famously proclaimed: “Augustinus……totus noster est” (Augustine is totally ours). Following the Reformation, St Augustine influenced many important thinkers: both Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal saw him as the foundation of their own philosophical and theological projects even though they were fundamentally at odds with one another. In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzshe wrote The Genealogy of Morals which the Dominican friar Bonaventure Chapman describes as “St Augustine’s City of God argued backwards”.
For Algeria, the first visit by a pope is something of a diplomatic coup. At a time when the country’s relations with France are fraught, far right French commentators have expressed their surprise that the pope should visit a country that they see as a dictatorship. Others in France hope that Algeria’s president Abdelmajid Tebboune might pardon the French sports journalist Christophe Gleizes who was arrested in 2024 and the following year sentenced to seven years in jail for “glorifying terrorism.” Algerians acknowledge in private that the charges are trumped up. The Archbishop of Algiers, Mgr Jean-Paul Falco first suggested to the pope that he visit Algeria. The archbishop regularly visits Gleizes in prison.
The most famous Archbishop of Algiers was Cardinal Charles Lavigerie (1825-1892) who played a key role by reconciling the young Third Republic with the Vatican in 1886. He also founded the White Fathers order in Algeria with the aim of bringing Berbers back to the faith of their ancestors. Christianity had long prospered in what was then known as Numidia which gave three popes to the early Church. Few Berbers were converted by the White Fathers but they did include my paternal grandfather who was the son of the imam of Tizi Hibel in Kabylia, the mountainous region due east of Algiers. The three early popes who hailed from North Africa left a lasting mark on the Church. Victor I (189-199) is best known for insisting that Christians celebrate Easter on a Sunday. Miltiades (311-314) was granted permission by Emperor Constantine to build the Lateran Basilica, now the oldest public church in Rome. Gelasius I (492-496) was the first pope to be called the Vicar of Christ.
The focus of the papal visit is St Augustine who was born in Thagaste - an important Roman community in north east Algeria – in 354 of a pagan Roman father Patricius, who converted on his deathbed, and a native Christian mother Monica. A fiery student in Carthage, he later established a school of rhetoric where he taught for nine years and fathered a son Adeodatus from a long term lover before moving to Rome and Milan. There he was awarded the plum appointment of professor of rhetoric at the imperial court where he met Bishop Ambrose who helped him re-evaluate his relationship with Christianity. He was baptised on Easter Vigil in April 387 in Milan, returning to Africa that same year. He was ordained priest in Hippo Regius in 391, becoming bishop of the city in 395.
In his Confessions, one of the most read books in Christendom, Augustine explained that his conversion was prompted by reading a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Romans, which said: “Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in clambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof”. During his lifetime, it is believed he preached some 6,000 to 10,000 sermons, of which 500 are accessible today. The Vandals, who had swept down across Gaul, Iberia and the Strait of Gibraltar, laid siege to Hippo Regius. Augustine died during the siege in 430. When they broke into the city the Vandals burned almost everything apart from the library and cathedral Augustine had built.
St Augustine represents the most influential adaptation of the ancient platonic tradition within Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian world. Though he was the first to enunciate the concept of just war he did so within a framework of abhorrence of violence and war.
The idea that humans are inherently sinful and that conjugal relations within a Christian marriage was a means of redemption and act of grace was something largely formulated by Augustine. Recognised as a Doctor of the Church by Pope Boniface VIII in 1298, he is venerated by Catholics and Protestants alike. The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch states that “Augustine’s impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated.”
There are a few thousand Catholics living in Algeria today though the country boasts hundreds of Catholic cemeteries, a testimony to the 132 years of French colonial rule (1830-1962) and fewer than 200 Jews. At a time when conflicts in the Middle East are increasingly presented by Israeli leaders and Christian Zionist Americans in the eschatological terms of the Rapture the visit of the Pope to Algeria and the lasting influence of St Augustine remind Westerners that Europe’s history is inextricably bound up with that of North Africa and that closer economic, scientific and cultural cooperation between Europe and North Africa would benefit both rims of the western Mediterranean. Pope Leo’s visit underscores that such a vision is achieved not by war but by peace.
Sunday, April 5, 2026
(575) Mass of the Resurrection of the Lord - 4/5/2026 - YouTube
(575) Mass of the Resurrection of the Lord - 4/5/2026 - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa71nFPLmGc
I have observed all four days of service at St. Cecilia this week.
It has been a wonderful four days. But today, Easter Sunday
please listen to the Homily. It will give you an understanding of
what it means to believe and the need for hope.
Saturday, April 4, 2026
The Lord’s Descent into Hell - The Catholic Thing
The Lord’s Descent into Hell - The Catholic Thing
Listen to this article
4 min
What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.
Truly He goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; He wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, He who is God, and Adam’s son.
The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, His Cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: “My Lord be with you all.” And Christ in reply says to Adam: “And with your spirit. Amen!” And grasping his hand, He raises him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.”
“I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise.”
“I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.”
“For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden.”
The Harrowing of Hell by Fra Angelico, c. 1441-1442 [Museo Nazionale di San Marco, Florence]
“Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.”
“See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.”
“I slept on the Cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.”
“But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of Heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.”
“The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages.”
A reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday
Prayer
Almighty, ever-living God, whose Only-begotten Son descended to the realm of the dead, and rose from there to glory, grant that your faithful people, who were buried with him in baptism, may, by his resurrection, obtain eternal life.
(We make our prayer) through our Lord.
(Through Christ our Lord.)
Prepared by Pontifical University Saint Thomas Aquinas
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