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Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Megatron on X: "BREAKING: 🇺🇲🇮🇱 The US is preparing sanctions against the international criminal court in The Hague because of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu - Times of Israel Unprecedented in human history. Members of Congress have warned the International Criminal Court that they will… https://t.co/mY1DbvCrHU" / X
Megatron on X: "BREAKING: 🇺🇲🇮🇱 The US is preparing sanctions against the international criminal court in The Hague because of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu - Times of Israel Unprecedented in human history. Members of Congress have warned the International Criminal Court that they will… https://t.co/mY1DbvCrHU" / X
BREAKING: 🇺🇲🇮🇱 The US is preparing sanctions against the international criminal court in The Hague because of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu - Times of Israel Unprecedented in human history. Members of Congress have warned the International Criminal Court that they will retaliate if arrest warrants are issued against Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials. Speaker Mike Johnson: "If unchallenged by the Biden administration, the ICC could create and assume unprecedented power to issue arrest warrants against American political leaders, American diplomats, and American military personnel, thereby endangering our country's sovereign authority." Members of Congress from both parties are reportedly preparing legislation to sanction ICC officials unless they back down.
[Salon] WHERE ARE THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES? - Guest Post by Seymour Hersh
[Salon] WHERE ARE THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES? - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
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WHERE ARE THE NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES?
Congress just passed an enormous aid package for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but the White House is ignoring news it does not want to hear
Seymour Hersh
President Joe Biden shares a toast with comedian Colin Jost during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington on April 27. / Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images.
It has been a triumphant fortnight for the Biden White House. First the House and then the Senate overcame meek opposition and at last voted to pass foreign aid bills worth more than $95 billion that include military funding to continue Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.
The vote was praised by America’s newspapers: a New York Times report said that the issue before Congress was whether the United States “would continue to play a leading role in upholding the international order and projecting its values globally.” The Associated Press channeled the House leadership, calling the vote “a turning point in history—an urgent sacrifice as US allies are beleaguered by wars and threats from continental Europe to the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific.”
The pleasure in the vote shared by the White House and Congress, and the mainstream press’s enthusiasm, were more than a little off-putting to those with memories of past wars. Billions of American taxpayer dollars are going to support a war in Ukraine that many believe cannot be won, and perhaps could easily be settled, with more billions going to support the war in Gaza that could cost Biden thousands of votes in contested states where there is intense opposition to the ongoing Israeli attacks.
But there was much more to the legislation, officially known as the “Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024,” that did not make it into congressional debate or the reporting about it. At least fourteen of the specific procurement requests for funding Ukraine’s military needs, including weapons, intelligence support, general operations and maintenance provided by American taxpayers, called for the president and his secretaries of state and defense to report to Congress about what was done and when within a given time period.
The reality is that such requirements are almost always ignored at the time they are due and usually fulfilled months later by junior officials in the State Department and the Pentagon, with the questions and answers there for all—that is, almost no one—to read. But the questions posed in the bill remind some in the American intelligence community of the sorts of deeper issues that were formerly raised by a one-time staple: National Intelligence Estimates. NIEs are produced on request from the president and his senior policymakers by a team of National Intelligence Officers at work at America’s senior intelligence office, the National Intelligence Council. These men and women are scholars in their fields and are committed to supplying non-political assessments. They are housed at CIA headquarters but are known to be fiercely independent.
I was told that the president and his top national security aides, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, have yet to request a study that delves deeply into any of the international crises of the day: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The White House’s apparent lack of interest in the most difficult foreign policy issues—as the president focuses on re-election—has bewildered some veterans of the intelligence community. “The Biden Administration is wandering in the wilderness,” I was told by an American intelligence official. “They speak publicly and daily of their objectives. Victory in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. Resolve the Palestinian quandary. Checkmate Xi. Defend Taiwan. Strengthen NATO. Restore our economic strength and limit global climate change.
“Noble,” he said. “But glittering generalities. Each is a title to a needed NIE that does not exist nor has been undertaken. Where is the National Intelligence Council and our stable of the nation’s greatest experts on every issue? Producing unread and irrelevant products” on such issues as UFOs and DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] in the community. No products on the capabilities and intentions of world leaders and the countries that are the keystone of policy development and implementation.”
In 2009 the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government published a background memorandum on the NIE process. It described NIEs as the American intelligence community’s “most authoritative written judgments on national security issues. NIEs usually provide judgments on the likely course of future events and highlight the implications for US policymakers.” In my own reporting on NIEs for the New Yorker, I learned that the final recommendations and conclusions are often reviewed by prominent outsiders in the academic community, after appropriate clearance, to assure objectivity and impartiality [nb. Note cut] before they are distributed to the White House and other vital offices throughout the government.
In a talk ten days ago in Texas, William Burns, the CIA director who has been playing a key role in hostage talks between Israel and Hamas, complained that Hamas rejected what he called a far-reaching proposal that would involve freeing hostages in exchange for unspecified concessions from Israel. Burns claimed that Hamas’s obduracy was responsible for delays in much needed humanitarian relief to Gaza. The New York Times reported today that Israel has reduced the number of hostages sought for release by Hamas in the first phase of a ceasefire truce. Secretary Blinken called the reduction “extraordinarily generous” on the part of Israel. He said that “the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and ceasefire is Hamas.”
I was given a different account of which party was responsible for the failure of the talks by the intelligence official. He complained about the lack of “guidance” in the hostage negotiations—something that an NIE might have provided. “No one in the White House or the administration asked the intelligence community for guidance,” he claimed. If so, they would have been told that the prospects for a settlement were dim. “Israel is going to kill Hamas,” he said. “When the last member of Hamas takes a bullet, then there will be a ceasefire. They are going into Rafah. End of story.” He cited a classic Turkish proverb to characterize Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position: “We will burn a blanket to kill a flea.” The official added that the Israelis have told Washington that if Netanyahu “stepped down tomorrow, a war cabinet member would take his place and there would be exactly no change at all in their policy or commitment.”
The official’s predictions for the immediate future are dark ones: “Bibi will be indicted by the International Criminal Court, along with three Israeli generals. The IDF begins the Rafah squeeze on five known Hamas lairs. US policy remains incomprehensible. Events on the ground and massive financial aid are uncoupled from policy.
“World leaders are working on the problem. I could go country by country. The United States? Our leader thinks his uncle was eaten by cannibals.”
--
[Salon] Le Pouvoir and the Hirak: revenge served cold - ArabDigest.org Guest Post
[Salon] Le Pouvoir and the Hirak: revenge served cold - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
Le Pouvoir and the Hirak: revenge served cold
Summary: having defeated the Hirak the Algerian regime has turned its attention to opposition members who escaped the counter revolution and are now living abroad.
In February 2019 peaceful weekly protests known as the “Hirak” swept Algeria and millions marched through the streets of major cities and smaller towns demanding basic rights and freedoms in a challenge to Le Pouvoir, the cabal of military and security elites that run the country. By 2022 however it had become clear that the revolution had failed, stalled by the Coronavirus pandemic as well as constant harassment and arrests by the security services. Since then the regime has been on the offensive targeting human rights activists, academics and journalists as well as anyone else perceived to have had a leading role in the Hirak.
Inside Algeria, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has been pursuing "justice by telephone", handing down sentences and legal decisions from on high to the corrupt judicial apparatus that has already seen around three hundred activists and protesters detained in a pseudo-anti-terrorist campaign because of their support for the Hirak or because they spoke up in solidarity with the detainees or against human rights abuses. Many detainees are held in pretrial detention for unjustified long periods of time, while others have been sentenced to harsh sentences under problematic articles in the Penal Code such as harming the national security or interest, undermining national unity, offending public officials, incitement, spreading fake news and terrorism. Several organisations that supported the Hirak have also been banned, including the Youth Action Rally (RAJ), the Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LADDH) and two opposition parties, the Socialist Workers’ Party (PST) and the Democratic and Social Movement (MDS).
With the internal opposition now under control the regime has been turning its attention to opposition members who escaped and are now living abroad. Algeria's political isolation means that although the regime is no less vindictive than any other Arab regime, it does not have such a free hand when it comes to dispatching émigré dissidents in West as does, for example, Saudi Arabia. At the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman journalist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 by a Saudi death squad called the Tiger Team.
Nevertheless Algeria’s Direction de la Documentation et de la Sécurité Extérieure (DDSE), one of the three branches of the powerful intelligence services, devotes enormous resources to monitoring political opponents abroad. Top of its most wanted list are the leaders of the principal exiled Algerian political opposition organisations: Rachad, an Islamist political movement founded in 2007 that "intends to work for the establishment of a rule of law governed by democratic principles and good governance" and the Mouvement pour l'Autodétermination de la Kabylie (MAK), a separatist movement founded in 2002 demanding the independence of provinces inhabited by Berbers in eastern Algeria. Both groups operate openly in exile. Last year MAK met US lawmakers after recruiting Elisabeth Myers, an American lawyer, as its lobbyist in Washington and thousands of its supporters demonstrate on a weekly basis in the streets of Paris and other French cities. Ten days ago MAK’s leader Ferhat Mehenni proclaimed the rebirth of the Kabyle state to his supporters at the foot of the skyscraper housing the UN headquarters in New York.
MAK leader Ferhat Mehenni speaking outside the UN headquarters in New York on April 20, 2024 [photo credit: TikTok]
In January 2022 French journalist Nicholas Beau reported on how the DDSE had set up a secret cell with a mandate to carry out covert operations and executions of Algerian dissidents and political opponents living in the European diaspora. Two men were reportedly behind it: Abdelkader Tigha, a former non-commissioned officer in the Algerian secret services living in exile in Belgium and Colonel Hocine Abdelhamid, aka Boulahya ("the bearded one"), deputy head of the DDSE and a former officer in the death squads during the “Années de Plomb” which ran from 1992 until 2002.
After a promising start Beau reported that collaboration between the two men broke down after Tigha realised his role was to be trapping and assassinating dissidents in Europe. He then turned double agent and began monetising the information he had collected from the Bearded One by tipping off his would-be targets and sharing other DDSE dirty laundry on the internet with help from Hicham Aboud, a former Algerian army officer turned prominent opposition journalist who runs a You Tube channel with 685,000 followers from his home in Roubaix, northern France.
The regime also targets dissidents through diplomatic and legal channels. One such case is that of former army corporal Mohamed Benhalima who had been sentenced to death in absentia in Algeria for espionage and desertion and was refouled from Spain in March 2022. He had fled there in 2019 fearing reprisals after participating in the Hirak and ran a YouTube channel denouncing military officials before he was returned without due process or evaluation of his asylum claim.
In 2021, Mohamed Larbi Zitout, a former Algerian diplomat turned YouTuber and one of the founders and leaders of Rachad who now lives in the UK announced that the British authorities had warned him that he should leave his home immediately as they had information about "an imminent threat to his life".
Slimane Bouhafs, an advocate for the rights of Algeria’s Kabyle population and an officially recognised UN refugee was kidnapped on August 25, 2021 from his home in Tunis. Four days later he surfaced in police custody in Algiers and was put on trial for terrorism. He had previously served 18 months in prison for “insulting Islam.”
Another prominent dissident who was targeted by the regime abroad is the French-Algerian activist Amira Bouraoui. She was sentenced to two years in prison for "offending Islam" and "attacking the person of the President of the Republic" as well as being banned from travel but she managed to escape by crossing illegally into neighbouring Tunisia using her French passport. In February 2023 she was arrested in Tunisia and faced deportation to Algeria but was allowed to leave for France instead, sparking a diplomatic incident. Algeria accused France of assisting her "clandestine and illegal exfiltration" via Tunisia and recalled its ambassador in Paris. Two of her family members were subsequently arrested, Amira's sister Wafa Bouraoui was detained a few hours after she messaged her more than 19,000 followers on Facebook that the family house was under siege; Amira’s 73 year old mother Khadidja Bouraoui was held in custody for a week.
Reports continue to circulate that the Algerian regime is running an active clandestine external intelligence campaign that systematically targets dissidents and defectors living in the West, following in the footsteps of the Saudis, Libyans and others. Some say Algerian dissidents have recently been subjected to kidnap and extraordinary rendition back to Algeria from France.
Such stories seem plausible but hard to prove because the DDSE are more professional than the Saudi Tiger team and French authorities would always seek to cover up these sorts of operations just as they covered up and then dropped the police investigations into the seizure of the two dissident Saudi Princes Saud bin Saif Al Nasr and Prince Sultan bin Turki who were kidnapped from Paris in 2015 and 2016 respectively. Algerian dissidents would be well advised to continue to take full security precautions.
Monday, April 29, 2024
Washington has lost touch with reality. If it doesn't adapt, the world will pay | Middle East Eye - Guest Post
Washington has lost touch with reality. If it doesn't adapt, the world will pay | Middle East Eye
Washington has lost touch with reality. If it doesn't adapt, the world will pay
A person in a suit Description automatically generated
Marco Carnelos
24 April 2024
In a failing quest to maintain its 'primacy', the US has cast China, Russia and Iran as global villains.
US President Joe Biden is pictured in Hanoi on 10 September 2023 (Saul Loeb/AFP)
US President Joe Biden is pictured in Hanoi on 10 September 2023 (Saul Loeb/AFP)
The US intelligence community recently released its annual threat assessment, which focuses on worldwide threats to the country’s national security. The document reflects the collective analyses and insights of the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and more than a dozen other agencies.
The report’s foreword provides a clear sense of this community’s dystopian and self-referential thinking: "During the next year, the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications."
It continues: “An ambitious but anxious China, a confrontational Russia, some regional powers, such as Iran, and more capable non-state actors are challenging longstanding rules of the international system as well as U.S. primacy within it.”
Iran, Russia and China are thus the main villains for allegedly challenging longstanding rules of the international system. No surprises here; this has been a US policy mantra for years.
The problem, rather, is that it is not clear to which rules the report is referring: the customary international law enshrined in the UN Charter and UN conventions, or the so-called US-led rules-based world order. The main conceptual problem is that for the US political establishment and its key western allies, there is no distinction. But as is often the case, they are grossly mistaken.
International law and the UN Charter are the pillars of the global order built after the Second World War, to which the US provided an outstanding contribution. Conversely, the US-led rules-based international system is a more recent evolution of American political thinking: a self-referential mindset twisted to the interests of Washington and its allies.
This order is based on neoliberal ideology and imbued with double standards, of which the tragedy unfolding in Gaza is the latest and most visible example.
Based on a series of assumptions, such as US exceptionalism and the undisputed superiority of western democracies (ie, “western civilisation”), this system claims national laws as universal ones. It assumes a set of values and connected rules, but is quite careful not to implement them when they collide with its own interests. This order can be summarised by an informal motto: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Challenging US hegemony
Unsurprisingly, the report from the US intelligence community blames China, Russia and Iran, along with a handful of non-state actors (including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and the Houthis in Yemen) for challenging not only the rules of the international system, but above all, US “primacy within it”.
It seems that the real crime is not challenging the system itself, but rather US hegemony. Yet, while such a preposterous position could still have been accepted a few years ago, it is now openly challenged - or at least resented - by many countries across the so-called Global South.
Only a minority of countries in Europe and East Asia consider US primacy to be an essential prerequisite of a stable international system. In fact, scrutiny of the last two decades of history proves the opposite.
Throughout history, empires have risen and then collapsed. US policymakers would be wise to adjust to these rules of history
The global order is shifting from a unipolar configuration centred on the US to a multipolar one. Throughout history, empires have risen and then collapsed. US policymakers would be wise to adjust to these rules of history and give up on the notion of their indispensability. They now face a binary choice: accept history’s verdict, as the UK has progressively done since 1945, or catastrophically resist it.
A reference to the Gaza crisis in the report is even more enlightening about the US intelligence community’s dystopian views: “One need only look at the Gaza crisis - triggered by a highly capable non-state terrorist group in Hamas, fueled in part by a regionally ambitious Iran, and exacerbated by narratives encouraged by China and Russia to undermine the United States on the global stage - to see how a regional crisis can have widespread spillover effects and complicate international cooperation on other pressing issues.”
This passage suggests that the US intelligence community is fundamentally incapable of seeing the conflict in Gaza for what it really is: a national liberation struggle triggered by decades of brutal and unpunished Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, facilitated by massive US weapons deliveries and a political shield at the UN Security Council, where the Israeli government would otherwise be held accountable for its war crimes.
The US narrative - that the events of 7 October are also traceable to Chinese and Russian attempts to undermine Washington on the global stage - borders on the ridiculous.
Double standards
The real factor undermining the global standing of the US is not the alleged actions of certain autocracies, but mostly Washington’s own international behaviour and double standards, exemplified by its unwavering support for Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza - an assault that violates all the rules that the US has been preaching for decades.
The Biden administration thus missed another excellent opportunity to distance itself from hypocritical double standards
This is demonstrated perfectly by the Biden administration’s behaviour after the recent adoption of a UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. After allowing the resolution to pass by abstaining, the US rushed to minimise its meaning and impact by qualifying it as non-binding.
So, for the sake of clarity, the indispensable nation that prides itself as being the main enabler of the longstanding rules of the international system, the beacon on the hill, is essentially telling another UN member state (Israel) that it can ignore a Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, after more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The tragic irony is that the Netanyahu government did not even need this US exhortation; it would have ignored the resolution anyway.
For the record, UN Security Council resolutions are always binding. The Biden administration thus missed another excellent opportunity to distance itself from hypocritical double standards. It accomplished an outstanding masterpiece by upsetting everyone: Israel and the vast pro-Israel lobby in the US for not casting its veto; and the left of the US Democratic Party, the Palestinian people and the rest of the world for outrageously calling the resolution non-binding.
Meanwhile, the US threat assessment attributes to China “the capability to directly compete with the United States and U.S. allies and to alter the rules-based global order”. It thus equates a simple Chinese capability into a deliberate intent pursued by its leadership, while indirectly confirming that in US official thinking, the only world order that can be contemplated is one led by Washington.
In a flash of common sense, the threat assessment acknowledges that US actions intended to deter foreign aggression are often “interpreted by adversaries as reinforcing their own perceptions that the United States is intending to contain or weaken them, and these misinterpretations can complicate escalation management and crisis communications”.
If the US intelligence community’s analysts have been surprisingly smart and honest in recognising this problem, known by international relations experts as the concept of “the indivisibility of security” (ie, any security measure taken by one nation can be interpreted as a threat by another), they should also be able to admit that their tendency to equate hypothetical capabilities with automatic intentions, is a big part of the increased tensions characterising modern geopolitics.
Marco Carnelos is a former Italian diplomat. He has been assigned to Somalia, Australia and the United Nations. He served in the foreign policy staff of three Italian prime ministers between 1995 and 2011. More recently he has been Middle East peace process coordinator special envoy for Syria for the Italian government and, until November 2017, Italy's ambassador to Iraq.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/us-must-adapt-lost-touch-reality-world-pay
[Salon] Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism - Guest Post by Allan C. Brownfeld
[Salon] Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail
Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism
By Allan C. Brownfeld April 27, 2024
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The American Council for Judaism has, since 1942, advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality , and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim.
The Council has challenged the Zionist philosophy which holds that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews and that Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile. In doing so, the Council has contended that its philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of Jewish Americans, a largely silent——but, in recent days, increasingly vocal—-majority, which is not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name. Clearly, the homeland of American Jews is the United States.
In 1841, at the dedication of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski declared: “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”
In recent years, there has been an effort to redefine antisemitism to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, declared that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of Israel with white supremacists.
Even some Israelis admit that the equating of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize, describes how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
To call opposition to Zionism the equivelant of antisemitism is to ignore the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism.
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, did not believe in God or in Judaism. The state he wanted to create would be based on the idea of Jewish “national” or “ethnic” identity. In the 19th century, the Zionist idea was rejected by most prominent Jewish voices. The chief rabbi of Vienna, Mortiz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish nationalism. “Belief in One God was the unifying factor for Jews,” he declared, and Zionism was incompatible withJudaism’s teachings.
For Reform Jews the idea of Zionism contradicted almost completely their belief in a universal prophetic Judaism. The first Reform prayerbook eliminated references to Jews being in exile and to a Messiah who would miraculously restore Jews throughout the world to the historic land of Israel and who would rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The prayerbook eliminated all prayers for a return to Zion.
The distinguished rabbi Abraham Geiger argued that Judaism developed through an evolutionary process that had begun with God’s revelation to the Hebrew prophets. That revelation was progressive; new truth became available to every generation. The underlying and unchangeable essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community destined to carry on the mission to “serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to God and His moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not punishment for their sins, but part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the universal message of ethical monotheism.
In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh adopted a platform rejecting nationalism. They declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine…nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared, “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.”
It was not only Reform Jews who rejected Zionism. In 1929, Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a contradiction to Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He noted that, “Judaism at root is not some religious concentration which may be localized and or situated in a single territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’ in the sense of modern nationalism, fit to be woven into the three-foldedness of ‘homeland, army and heroic songs.’ No, Judaism is Torah, ethics and exaltation of spirit. If Judaism is really Torah, then it cannot be reduced to the confines of any particular territory. For as Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is greater than the earth.”
Those who claim that opposition to Zionism is the equivelant of antisemitism are either ignorant of Jewish history or are using such a false charge to silence criticism of Israel which, sadly, has violated Jewish moral and ethical standards in its treatment of Palestinians.
Many Jewish voices warned against adopting a narrow nationalism in place of Judaism’s universal moral and ethical values. One of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights for all people, said, “Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. So, too, the State of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history, But a test of the integrity of the Jewish people and the competence of Israel.”
In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.”
Sadly, Israel’s treatment of the indigenous population of Palestine has violated Jewish moral and ethical values. Zionist terrorism was widespread. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and Lehi launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin was of no threat to Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the attack took place. All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than a hundred civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly and helped prompt a panic flight of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They were never permitted to return. After this terror attack Menachem Begin, the Irgun leader and later to become Israeli prime minister (referred to as a ‘Fascist’ and ‘racist’ by Albert Einstein and historian Hannah. Arendt), issued this message to his troops: “”Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…As in Deir Yassin , so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God Thou hast chosen us for conquest.”
David Shipler, the New York Times correspondent from 1979 to 1984, reports that, “The Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas’ talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem, a scene still remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.”
Many Israelis, concerned about their country’s treatment of Palestinians , lament its departure from Jewish values. Professor David Shulman of the Hebrew University notes that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent disenfranchisement of a huge population…In the end, it is the ongoing moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most dangerous, most unacceptable. This failure weighs heavily on our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.”
Israel has occupied the West Bank in violation of international law for more than 50 years. Its indigenous Palestinian residents live under what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, call “apartheid.” In violation of international law, Jewish settlements are being built across the West Bank. Jewish residents can vote in Israeli elections and have full legal rights, Palestinians have no such rights.
I know a bit about apartheid. During the years when apartheid was in force in South Africa, my column from Washington appeared in the Afrikaans-language newspapers Beeld in Johannesburg and Die Burger in Cape Town. I had the opportunity in those years to spend some time in South Africa. My Afrikaner friends used to tell me, “We know apartheid is wrong. Unless we abandon it, our children will leave. They will go to America, Canada, Australia. We are Western Christian people who believe in freedom. We must abandon this system of apartheid.” And that’s what white South Africans did. President F.W. De Klerk made South Africa into a Western-style democracy—-and received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. Many people forget that during the years of apartheid Israel was a close friend of South Africa. In fact, it was South Africa which provided Israel with uranium for its nuclear weapons program. The first foreign leader to visit Israel was a pro-apartheid South African Prime Minister.
It has always been my hope that a leader like President De Klerk would emerge in Israel and abandon its own undemocratic system. Instead, Israel now has a far-right government which speaks of annexing the West Bank and expelling its Palestinian residents. None of this would be possible without the massive aid received from the U.S. and the political support which accompanies it.
The Oct. 7 terrorist attack upon Israel by Hamas was a terrible event. Israel had every legitimate right to respond. Unfortunately, its response has been excessive ——-destroying Gaza’s hospitals, churches, mosques and living quarters. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed so far and 77,000 wounded. More than 70 per cent are women and children. Famine is about to engulf the area.
Without U.S. aid, Israel could not conduct itself in this way. As a result, we are now witnessing demonstrations throughout the U.S. calling for a cease fire and an end to aid to the Netanyahu government. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described student protestors as “antisemitic mobs” and likened the demonstrations to “what happened in German universities in the 1930s.” In response, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-VT), who is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust, addressed this message to Netanyahu: “It’s not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions. No, Mr. Netanyahu, it is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians…70% of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless, almost half the population.”
What the future holds is, of course, impossible to say. President Biden speaks of a two-state solution, but the current Israeli government speaks of annexing the West Bank and removing its Palestinian population. Others speak of a “one-state solution,” in which all of Palestine would be united and there would be equal rights for all, Jews, Christians and Muslims.
At the present time Israel is a theocracy. It is strange that American Jewish organizations advocate complete separation of church and state in the U.S.but embrace theocracy in Israel. Non-Orthodox Jews have fewer rights in Israel than anyplace in the Western world. Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis cannot perform weddings or conduct funerals in Israel Their conversions to Judaism are not recognized.
Historically, there is no reason why Jews and Muslims cannot live in peace. Jews in Muslim countries never faced the discrimination inflicted upon them in much of Christian Europe. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 by its Christian rulers, they were welcomed into the Muslim Ottoman Empire and other Muslim countries. Jews lived in peace in Muslim countries for hundreds of years. Ironically, the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, have had to pay a high price for the sins of others.
Until the advent of Nazism, Zionism was a small minority movement in most Jewish communities. Then, looking for a way to properly handle and rehabilitate the large number of displaced Jewish victims, many Jews began to view the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a positive possibility—-even though the Palestinians had nothing whatever to do with the tragedy that had befallen the Jews of Europe.
Historian Deena Dallasheh points out that, “The Holocaust was a horrible massacre committed by Europeans. But I don’t think the Palestinians figure that they will have to pay for it. Yet the world sees this as an acceptable equation. Orientalist and colonial ideology were very much at the heart of thinking, that while we Europeans and the U.S. were part of this massive human tragedy, we are going to fix it at the expense of someone else. And the someone else is not important because they are Arabs. they’re Palestinians and thus constructed as not important.”
Salim Tamari, a sociologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, notes that, “Sending the Jewish refugees to Palestine was a byproduct of European guilt, but a hypocritical kind of guilt because they did not want to bear the social and economic cost of absorbing the refugees themselves. The vast majority of Jewish refugees who came were not Zionists. They did not have a choice about where to go.”
In the view of Abigail Jacobson, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “It’s often argued against the Palestinians , how come you didn’t accept partition? But it’s important not to read history retrospectively. When you look at the demographic realities of 1947 and the division of the land, it was 55% for the Jews and 45% for the Palestinian state, even though there were double the number of Palestinians as Jews at that point. If you were a Palestinian in 1947, would you accept that offer? One needs to remember that the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority in an Arab state.”
On Dec. 4, 1945, President Harry S. Truman received Lessing J. Rosenwald, the first president of the American Council for Judaism in the Oval Office. H Rosenwald called for the admission of both Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons to Palestine and urged that, “Palestine shall not be a Muslim, Christian or Jewish state but a country in which people of all faiths can play their full and equal part,” and that the U.S. take the lead in coordinating with the U.N. “a cooperative policy of many nations in absorbing Jewish refugees.”
Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears Roebuck, and the son of philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who worked with Booker T. Washington after the Civil War to build schools for black children in the South,testified before the Anglo-American committee of Inquiry on Jan.10, 1946 and urged that large numbers of Jews be admitted into Palestine on the condition that “the claim that Jews possess unlimited national rights to the land and that the country shall take the form of a racial or theocratic state, were denounced once and for all.”
The American Council for Judaism’s warnings about Zionism have been prophetic.Jonathan Saran, a Brandeis University historian and author of the book “American Judaism,”. Says that, “Everything they (the American Council for Judaism) prophesied—-dual loyalty, nationalism being evil—-has come to pass.” He states that, “It’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the Diaspora, recent years have highlighted that Zionism is no panacea.”
Samuel Friedman devoted his June 26, 2010 “On Religion” column in The New York Times to the American Council for Judaism. He pointed out that, “…the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made the group look significant, even prophetic…The rejection of Zionism …goes back to the Torah itself. Until Theodor Herzl created the modern Zionist movement…the biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction…The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.”
Since that was written, it has become increasingly clear that Israel has turned its back on traditional Jewish moral and ethical values. It has denied equal rights to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and has provided no rights to Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories. Now, in Gaza, Israel has engaged in what more and more of the world considers Genocide. Noah Feldman, professor at the Harvard Law School and author of the book “To Be A Jew Today,” declares : “Today, many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.”
The ahistoric declaration that “antiZionism is antisemitism” has no basis in fact or history. In fact, the opposite is increasingly seen to be true. Zionism and the state it has created represents the antithesis of genuine Judaism, something which more and more Americans of all religious backgrounds, including Jews, are coming to understand.
##
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. The author of five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and the Office of the Vice President.
January 6 and America’s Slippery Slope on Free Speech
January 6 and America’s Slippery Slope on Free Speech
Courts are forgetting that free speech protections cover words they don’t agree with
What to Do When You’re Canceled | City Journal
What to Do When You’re Canceled | City Journal
Ilya Shapiro
What to Do When You’re Canceled
A report from the front lines
/ From the Magazine / The Social Order, Politics and law
Spring 2024
/ Share
It can happen to anyone. A bad tweet, viral video, or something you say (or text, post, e-mail, or Slack) gets blown out of proportion. Then comes a public pile-on or an official investigation, followed by punishment or ostracism. Cancel culture—the mob-like desire to punish politically incorrect speech—has made modern life into a minefield.
Those who deny the existence of cancel culture argue that the term is a smoke screen to excuse bad behavior from people who don’t want to accept the consequences of their actions. But the mere articulation of an unpopular opinion or uncomfortable truth shouldn’t make it impossible for ordinary people to live their lives. As the writer Jonathan Rauch has observed, criticism, or “expressing an argument or opinion with the idea of rationally influencing public opinion through public persuasion,” can be distinguished from canceling, which is “organizing or manipulating a social environment or a media environment with a goal or predictable effect of isolating, deplatforming, or intimidating an ideological opponent.”
If you find yourself the target of a cancellation campaign, as I did two years ago (about which more anon), you’ll understand the difference. What follows is a guide for what to do if it happens to you.
Rafah Is Not Gaza's Stalingrad. It's Another Manipulation by Netanyahu - U.S. News - Haaretz.com Guest Post
Rafah Is Not Gaza's Stalingrad. It's Another Manipulation by Netanyahu - U.S. News - Haaretz.com
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-04-28/ty-article/.premium/rafah-is-not-gazas-stalingrad-its-another-manipulation-by-netanyahu/0000018f-2496-d0a5-abcf-37fe560b0000
Rafah Is Not Gaza's Stalingrad. It's Another Manipulation by Netanyahu
Alon PinkasApr 28, 2024
In the summer of 2023 – which since October 7 seems like political eons ago – there was endless chatter, speculation, wishful thinking, misinformation, disinformation and real exploration regarding a so-called tripartite U.S.-Saudi-Israeli deal.
The geopolitical logic was there, the ideas were there, the upside seemed like a no-brainer. The political feasibility was never there, however, and given the constitutional coup that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was instigating in Israel, it is doubtful U.S. President Joe Biden was ever convinced such a deal was possible.
There were two elements that generated skepticism: the U.S.-Saudi component that would have included a NATO-like defense pact and a civilian nuclear reactor; and a Palestinian component that the United States, for some obscure and inexplicable reason, thought Israel was ready to entertain.
Relitigating the concept's viability, pros and cons on the basis of pre-October 7terms is now futile. Yet the underlying geopolitical logic of October 6, essentially reconfiguring the Middle East, became more urgent, and arguably imperative, in the wake of the October 7 terror attack and ensuing war.
Chas Freeman via Salon
10:39 AM (6 minutes ago)
to salon
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-04-28/ty-article/.premium/rafah-is-not-gazas-stalingrad-its-another-manipulation-by-netanyahu/0000018f-2496-d0a5-abcf-37fe560b0000
Rafah Is Not Gaza's Stalingrad. It's Another Manipulation by Netanyahu
Alon PinkasApr 28, 2024
In the summer of 2023 – which since October 7 seems like political eons ago – there was endless chatter, speculation, wishful thinking, misinformation, disinformation and real exploration regarding a so-called tripartite U.S.-Saudi-Israeli deal.
The geopolitical logic was there, the ideas were there, the upside seemed like a no-brainer. The political feasibility was never there, however, and given the constitutional coup that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was instigating in Israel, it is doubtful U.S. President Joe Biden was ever convinced such a deal was possible.
There were two elements that generated skepticism: the U.S.-Saudi component that would have included a NATO-like defense pact and a civilian nuclear reactor; and a Palestinian component that the United States, for some obscure and inexplicable reason, thought Israel was ready to entertain.
Relitigating the concept's viability, pros and cons on the basis of pre-October 7terms is now futile. Yet the underlying geopolitical logic of October 6, essentially reconfiguring the Middle East, became more urgent, and arguably imperative, in the wake of the October 7 terror attack and ensuing war.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman speaking in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last July, as Joe Biden listens in.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman speaking in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last July, as Joe Biden listens in.Credit: Saudi Royal Court/Reuters
Israel is not paying attention, though, nor is it willing or politically equipped to make strategic decisions. It's all tactical. Israel is consumed by justifiable rage, frustration and an impasse on three fronts: in Gaza against Hamas; in Lebanon versus Hezbollah; and, in the outer circle, against Iran.
For weeks, Israel has been half-threatening to launch a massive operation in Rafah, on Gaza's southern border with Egypt. "There are four Hamas battalions there and destroying them is the key to eliminating Hamas" is the official line. The Hamas military wing's center of gravity is in the south, Israel Defense Forces generals explained to their U.S. counterparts in October and November, failing to provide an adequate reason as to why, in that case, Israel was planning an invasion of northern rather than southern Gaza.
Since the war descended into pointless, goalless attrition, Israel has been raising the Rafah invasion as some imaginary tipping point that would end the war decisively. Yet Rafah is not Stalingrad, nor is it the Battle of the Bulge – certainly not from a strategic point of view while Israel is contemplating an offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But are these Israel's real choices? Is there a strategic road map that would conceivably be a game-changer? Yes. It's called the Biden Plan, and however imperfect or lacking details it may be, it is the only game in town unless Israel willingly wants to sink in the Gazan and Lebanese quagmires.
"This is one of the most fateful choices Israel has ever had to make. And what I find both disturbing and depressing is that there is no major Israeli leader today in the ruling coalition, the opposition or the military who is consistently helping Israelis understand that choice – a global pariah or a Middle East partner – or explaining why it should choose the second," wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times on Friday.
Friedman is a seasoned and astute observer of Israeli politics, society and national security. He knows the answer, and that is why "disturbing and depressing" is warranted.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Saturday, April 27, 2024
Students Go After the Hypocrites, by Eric Margolis - The Unz Review- Guest Post
Students Go After the Hypocrites, by Eric Margolis - The Unz Review
Students may be poor and too emotional, but they are often filled with repulsions at the sight of mass killing, political brutality, and murderous hatred such as we see today in the prison camp of Gaza. They have yet to learn the sordid truth about how money can buy indulgences from killing civilians and other war crimes.
Just ask Joe Biden, and British PM Rishi Sunak. They are continuing to arm and finance Israel’s mass killing and starvation in Gaza for the sake of huge cash donations as elections loom, and the support of ardently pro-Israel voters who are marching to the drum of Israel’s far right-wing government. The US and British media have been whitewashing the genocide in Gaza and twisting their reporting to justify mass killing of civilians. The New York Times has earned opprobrium by ordering its staff to slant the news it misreports. This once great newspaper has ruined its reputation. It reminds of the great Mark Twain’s famous bon mot, ‘If you don’t read the news you are uninformed. If you do, you are misinformed.’
Let’s be frank. President Joe Biden, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and their pal Egypt’s despot Abdel el-Sisi are directly responsible for the deaths of 14,000 Palestinian children, almost 35,000 Palestinian civilians seriously wounded, some 2 million Palestinians now homeless, growing starvation and disease across Gaza used by Israel as a refuse dump for unwanted Arabs. The Biden administration is providing over $14.1 billion in arms to Israel, including the deadly 2,000lb bombs used to crush entire civilian apartment buildings and hospitals, plus tank shells fired at residential targets. All in clear violation of US arms export laws written by Congress.
Why is Biden the key player in such mass destruction? Why is his UN delegation vetoing resolutions to stop Israeli laying waste to Gaza? It’s election time coming up. And because the Democrats get the lion’s share of their finances from pro-Israel sources.
Big money talks. Human rights walk. The US Congress, a sorry collection of used car salesmen, has been bought and sold. What a disgrace for the USA. The oil Arabs could also have bought Congress but they were too busy squabbling with one another.
So, while the high and mighty averted their gaze to massacres and famine in Gaza, it was left up to students around the globe to raise their voice in anger over the crimes there. My alma mater, Georgetown Foreign Service, raised a chorus of protests. So too Columbia University and UCLA, Sciences Po in Paris, in fact just about everywhere except Germany, whose people are still paying Israel for World War II.
Big money donors, who made billions off our rigged financial system, are trying to silence protests over Israel’s wanton cruelty. Israelis are right to be furious over the killing of an estimated 1,139 Israeli civilians and soldiers. But killing tens of thousands of innocent Arabs was wildly out of proportion and clearly criminal.
America, Britain and Canada have disgraced themselves – all for the sake of money. The Gaza massacre has revealed the US to be a deeply corrupt society. University students at least helped save America’s honor. They are doing the right thing. Alas, they do not yet have a Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young band to turn their protests into electrifying music. Meanwhile, Palestinian children continue to starve or die of disease while Israel ruins its name and paid-for politicians spout lies.
Arnaud Bertrand on X: "People don't realize just how dangerous this rhetoric is. This is in effect the US demanding China become hostile to Russia by stopping to supply items that "power its industrial base"... meaning asking China to join the West in trying to weaken Russia as a country. As a…" / X
Arnaud Bertrand on X: "People don't realize just how dangerous this rhetoric is. This is in effect the US demanding China become hostile to Russia by stopping to supply items that "power its industrial base"... meaning asking China to join the West in trying to weaken Russia as a country. As a…" / X
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1784098974477250629
Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
People don't realize just how dangerous this rhetoric is. This is in effect the US demanding China become hostile to Russia by stopping to supply items that "power its industrial base"... meaning asking China to join the West in trying to weaken Russia as a country. As a reminder this is exactly the reason why during WW2 Japan went to war with the US: the US at some point stopped supplying oil to Japan and this directly led to Pearl Harbor. Countries typically don't take it very constructively when you're trying to strangle them economically... The worst part is that the only rational they give China for doing this is 100% stick and 0% carrot: "if you don't do this we in turn will be even more aggressive towards you than we've been to date". With of course, in the back of China's mind the knowledge that the US's calculus is that they want to be done with Russia in order to fully concentrate on containing them. So they're presenting China with a completely lose-lose proposition: be hostile to your neighbor now so we can contain you faster down the line, or don't be hostile to your neighbor and we'll ramp up our containment now. How attractive is that? China will of course not start being hostile to Russia, in fact if anything this will convince them that the US is even more unhinged and unreasonable that they thought. It's very hard to predict what they'll do... An ideal scenario for China would be to secure peace in Ukraine on terms that are agreeable to all except the US, weakens the transatlantic alliance and unites Eurasia. By the way, objectively speaking this would also be the best scenario for Europe's interests because it stands to reason that a long-term Korea-style divide with Russia would be a complete disaster. President Xi is going to Europe shortly and I am ready to bet he'll argue for something along these lines. But the thing is that he'll be speaking to Europeans who, if anything, are even less reasonable than Americans so I don't think we can be very optimistic about that prospect... The more realistic scenario is that China does nothing and reacts to additional hostile measures against it in ways that weaken the US more than it weakens them. Some sort of Kung Fu move where you use your opponent's strength against them. For instance the US floated the idea of expelling Chinese banks from the global financial system: China, the biggest trading partner of almost all countries, can then say "from now on to trade with us, you need to use our system", which would be a big blow to the US dollar's status as the world's preeminent currency. All in all, we're well and truly in Cold War 2, which is pretty sad. Just like WW1 was really different from WW2, Cold War 2 is different from the first one: this time it's not an ideological competition between 2 blocs, but it is still a war in all respects except a direct military fight between the world's 2 largest great powers, which is what makes it a cold war. The key cause is because the US cannot bear to lose its global hegemony and wants to restore a unipolar order where they call the shots and try to transform the world in their own image... which is the very reason why it's a 100% certainty they won't succeed: to win a cold war you need to convince a significant share of the world that your cause is worthy and this is anything but. The whole world saw what happens when the US achieves unipolarity: insane hubris where they don't hesitate to destroy entire nations and kill millions in the process. No-one wants to get back to that, except maybe a few die-hard vassals in the West. China's cause on the other hand is a multipolar world order, an order where the US simply doesn't call the shots, something a good 80% of the world's countries can get behind. Furthermore China can point to 1,800 years out of the past 2,000 years when it was the world's preeminent power and never tried to submit the whole world: colonialism, transforming the world in their own image or being "the world's policeman" is just not in their DNA. So I think we can safely predict that this transition towards a multipolar world order is unavoidable, in fact we're probably already there. The question now is when will the US stop challenging this reality and start being a constructive actor in this new world as opposed to waging war and sowing conflict everywhere. And I'm afraid we can wait a long time for that... In fact it's already a de-facto characteristic of the new order: it's a multipolar world order with a revisionist power in its midst that wants to restore its former hegemonic imperial status.
Quote
Friday, April 26, 2024
The McCarthyist Attack on Gaza Protests Threatens Free Thought for All – ScheerPost
The McCarthyist Attack on Gaza Protests Threatens Free Thought for All – ScheerPost
Warren Coats writes:
"Earlier this week I posted each of the following paragraphs on Facebook.
If we are not free to express antisemitic (or any other hateful) views (whether about Palestinian semites or Jewish semites), we will have lost our cherished freedom of speech.
https://scheerpost.com/.../the-mccarthyist-attack-on.../ If we cannot present our antisemitic views civilly, we will have lost our ability to persuade anyone of our views. I am anti rudeness and pro open civil debate and anti stereotyping people into groups and pro treating each person individually.
****************.
I want Israel to be a safe and prosperous country. I want every country to be safe and prosperous. Sadly, Israel’s current war in Gaza is contributing to neither. Neither its stated objectives of eliminating Hamas or of removing (one way or the other) Palestinians from the River to the Sea (each objective publicly stated by one member of the Israeli government or another), will make Israel safe and/or prosperous. Israel’s brutal attacks in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank are making it less safe and poorer. The inhumanity of its attacks has lost it support and sympathy around the world but it is also worsening its relations with the neighbors it needs to be at peace with, especially its Palestinian Semitic cousins. Until Israel treats its neighbors fairly and decently it will remain subject to their attacks"
What is the “Radical Prayer”? Don’t pray this prayer if you want to live according to the world’s expectations.
GF_042624_BB_Friday_April_26
Being a Christian is pretty radical.
“Wait, radical?” you might ask. “We’re called to be radical?
Well, yes! As Christians, we’re called to reject the things of this earth, which is quite radical in today’s world
But being this kind of radical is a challenging task. After all, the world is against us.
Thankfully, a spiritual giant—St. Ignatius of Loyola—left us with some guidance and a few powerful tools.
ignatius
One of these tools is the Suscipe Prayer, also known as the Radical Prayer:
Take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Whatever I have or hold, You have given me; I restore it all to You and surrender it wholly to be governed by Your will. Give me only Your love and Your grace, and I am rich enough and ask for nothing more
This prayer is not just a petition but a total offering of oneself to the divine will, an unconditional surrender of ourselves, our powers, and our plans to God. It cultivates humility and detachment by acknowledging that all gifts come from God and are to be used according to His purpose. It’s a total surrender that, paradoxically, does not cause fear or worry—it actually brings a spirit of peace and contentment that stays strong regardless of external circumstances.
This “radical” offering is a cornerstone for those seeking a deeper relationship with God, because it fosters a profound union with Him and a deliberate spirit of cooperation with His will
Wow. That’s a pretty radical feat in our materialistic and self-centered culture!
Be the best kind of radical with the help of St. Ignatius. His methods of self-examination and meditative prayer have led countless souls down the path of radical holiness for centuries. The Spiritual Exercises is St. Ignatius’s most beloved work. It is a complete guide to his life-changing spiritual practices! Order your copy today from The Catholic Company!
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