WN: Indeed, the horror unfolding in Gaza and Israel is utterly heart/gut-wrenching and barbarous! Words fail! The wanton murders carried out indiscriminately by Hamas are execrable!
But how does one measure “barbaric“? How are one party’s terrorists another party’s freedom fighters? How are one person’s “human animals” another person’s “liberators”?
In the above connection, a longstanding astute American Jewish friend, a retired Professor of Psychology, writes in response to this post:
How in that connection do the United States and Israel–both utterly evil Empires–hold nuclear trump cards capapable of obscene world destruction so vast as to be unthinkable? And nonetheless thought with meticulous premeditation! And nonetheless too not utterly condemned by us in the West?
Nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter described this longstanding [U.S.] policy as a “delicate balance of terror .”1 In short, any number of nuclear war planners in Washington contemplated striking 295 Soviet cities, with an estimated death toll total of 115 million, and another 107 million dead in Red China, besides millions more in Soviet satellite countries (ibid, pp. 28 & 29). In some circles, as a kind of sick dark humour, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to “only” 200,000 dead, came to be called “firecracker nukes (ibid, p. 29).”
This is not to mention the millions killed since World War II with related devastation in at least 37 countries around the world, or the millions murdered through US proxy wars, CIA covert operations the world over, surrogate terror exported to countries throughout Central and South America for more than a century, and other parts of the world, etc., etc., etc… (See ibid, throughout the book.2
And these “noble” American nuclear strategists holding up of course America as bastion of freedom and democracy throughout the world, blithely contemplated over many decades mass murder on a scale that all previous mass murderers combined in the history of the world could only dream of! And serious contemplation of first-strike deployment was given repeated consideration: Public as well as confidential proposals to launch a “preventive” or “pre-emptive” strike against the Soviet Union were not uncommon before the Soviets developed a serious retaliatory capability — including such a proposal for instance by General Douglas MacArthur. The American public likewise supported this in general (ibid, p. 41).
This is America — Leader of the Free World?! Vocabulary for such gargantuan evil mindsets utterly fails! Yet every US Administration since Truman authorized the first atomic bombs dropped (which phenomenon he, once a Baptist Sunday School teacher, declared to be “the greatest event in human history” — and not the Resurrection?! — one massively death-dealing, the other universally life-giving), along with thousands of strategists, day-in, day-out, went off to work with this kind of obscene potential horror, like “visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.” How delightfully American (Empire)!
And Hitler, and Stalin are considered “mad” in their mass murders?! By the above dark humour standard, they were only “firecracker despots” compared to a long line of US Presidents. What then are all these upstanding Americans — right up to the present, with possibly a genuinely narcissistic/deranged former President (Trump) seemingly itching to have “nuked” some nation(s) — if not mad monsters? And the overwhelming monstrosity of America the Ultimate Evil Empire only increases exponentially when one reads noted historian Alfred McCoy’s description of what is being developed by said American Empire.
A paper that I wrote years ago, Christianity and the Subversion of Just About Everything!, in relation to this, with an introduction and excerpt, may be accessed here. I explain in introducing it that today were I writing the paper, the overall positing of “Just About Everything!” would mean Empire. The Judeo-Christian Story is nothing if not one long Counter-Narrative to Empire!. . . There is an expanding scholarship that underscores this, links to several instances of which are on the Front Page, and also mentioned on the page introducing the paper above. Amen!Thy Kingdom Come!Maranatha! (Come, O Lord).
All the above is of an “inconvenient truth” nature like nothing else remotely close in world destructive power!
So Ms. Rudoren, How does one measure “barbaric”? I suggest starting with your own country: but please eradicate any notion of its being “the land of the free.” No, America to the world is the land of Ultimate Empire and thus Ultimate Barbarism. . .
But Biden, Blinken, and their team had been clear about their objectives from the start. They saw no contradiction between standing foursquare behind Israel’s right to self-defense, while at the same time calling for respect for the rules of war and for the innocent lives on both sides who might be put at risk in the conflict.
My comment: It is hard to square Biden’s call for “respect for the rules of war,” and his urging Israelis “not to surrender to all-consuming rage” following this month’s unprecedented attacks by Hamas. Biden represents/is party to the horror of that described above (and a vast amount more!). He has given a kind of carte blanche permission to pummel Gaza with endless bombing; to mount an imminent invasion by land, sea, and air; and has backed it all by moving massive military support of Israel into the region. And he knows intimately about the above. . . So, Caveat lector (Let the reader beware), and Sit lectorem decernere (Let the reader decide). Please see in this regard my post:
A State Department official, Josh Paul, who worked on arms transfers to foreign powers resigned over the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict in Israel and Gaza, declaring he could not support further U.S. military assistance to Israel and calling the administration’s response “an impulsive reaction” based on “intellectual bankruptcy.” His departure marks a rare measure of internal discomfort over the administration’s robust support for Israel. “Let’s absolutely note the horror of what Hamas did, and the scale of it. And therefore I fear the scale of the potential Israeli response or ongoing Israeli response,” Paul said in an interview. (Everything we know about the Gaza hospital strike, October 19, 2023.)
Nonetheless we pray for Palestine and Israel, and yearn for peace.
I’m writing to you on the seventh day of the Al Aqsa Flood, the Gaza uprising. At this moment, the Palestinian Ministry of Health is reporting that Israeli forces have murdered 1,799 Gazans and injured 7,388 more. 583 of the martyrs are children. Furthermore, Israeli airstrikes have internally displaced 340,000 Gazans. The Civil Service in Gaza reported this morning that 90% of the bombings enacted by Israeli forces have targeted inhabited homes, many without any warning at all. Other targets of Israeli airstrikes have included shelters, schools, hospitals, medical aid workers, and journalists. For days now, Gazans have been denied access to their own resources in the midst of a genocidal siege imposed by Israeli politicians: they have had no access to electricity, and there is no food, water, or aid entering the besieged Gaza Strip.
For days, we have watched the news with horror. I have found myself, many times now, desperately trying to translate and describe the scenes unfolding on my screen only to be left thinking, “This is beyond words.” Today alone, Israeli forces targeted and bombed a convoy of Gazans traveling on an allegedly “safe” path from the north of Gaza to the south, per directives by Israeli forces themselves, killing approximately 70 people and injuring another 200. This command, which called on more than 1.1 million Palestinians to leave their communities and homes despite bombed roads and a denial of access to fuel for cars, provoked mass panic and confusion. How do you decide whether or not to leave your home after days of deadly terror from the sky which you can neither predict nor escape? How do you decide whether or not to trust a military that exists for the purpose and as a result of the displacement and brutalization of your people?
It is important to let you know that these horrific crimes against the Gazan people are not the only news. Palestinian resistance forces taking part in Al Aqsa Flood continue, both in the north and south, and Israeli forces have not been able to regain control over many areas, including Sderot and Asqalan (Ashkelon). Despite Israeli colonial violence from the state and its settlers carrying out assassinations in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel for arrest, Palestinians rose in solidarity with Gaza today in cities all over Palestine — from Jenin to Tulkarem to Hebron. Jordanians drove from Amman to amass at the border, leaving their cars behind, crossing closed roads, and confronting state forces to stand with Gaza and the uprising. In Iraq huge crowds declared their support for Palestinians and Gazans resisting colonialism. Even in Gaza, young men took to the streets in the evening, rejecting fear and Israeli attempts to incite panic, and declaring their intention to stay in Gaza and their support for Al Aqsa Flood. These messages of courage and strength at a time when so many of us feel so much hopelessness and desperation, and we must follow their lead in pursuing liberation, and above all, justice.
Just as this didn’t begin on October 7, this is not over, not by a long shot. Gazans need a ceasefire, but equally importantly, they need the status quo to change. They need an end to the 16 year long Israel-imposed siege that has kept them trapped without access to their own resources or the ability to determine their futures. Over the days, we have seen increasing efforts to demonize, silence, and murder Palestinian Gazans. As a result of these efforts, day by day, live content from Gaza has dwindled before our eyes.
Our friends and allies cannot lose hope. As we are less able to access our partners in Gaza, we must step up our efforts to speak about them publicly and loudly — reaching out to our elected officials repeatedly, organizing public demonstrations, correcting misinformation online and continuing to post accurate updates when we have access to them. GSC released a guide on propaganda corrections the other day, and we will continue to work on this effort over the coming days.
We need your support now across all of Palestine today, perhaps more than we have in a long time. This is an emergency, and we need all hands on deck.
Until liberation and return,
Lara Kilani
Good Shepherd Collective
Communications
“Unfortunately, the Israeli government is supportive of these attacks and does nothing to stop this violence.”
Then:
With international focus on the horrors of Israel’s assault on Gaza, 30 Israeli human rights and anti-occupation organizations on Sunday aimed to draw attention to a surge in settler violence against Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank.
The coalition of groups—including B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and the Israeli arms of Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights—released a joint statement calling on the international community “to act urgently to stop the state-backed wave of settler violence which has led, and is leading to, the forcible transfer of Palestinian communities in the West Bank.”
In retaliation for a Hamas-led attack earlier this month—in which over 1,400 Israelis were killed and around 200 others were taken hostage—Israel has waged what some legal scholars are calling a genocidal war, killing more than 8,000 people in Gaza.
“Settlers have been exploiting the lack of public attention to the West Bank, as well as the general atmosphere of rage against Palestinians, to escalate their campaign of violent attacks in an attempt to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities,” the coalition noted. “During this period, no fewer than 13 herding communities have been displaced. Many more are in danger of being forced to flee in the coming days if immediate action is not taken.”
Jewish settlers have recently tried to scare Palestinians into fleeing the West Bank by displaying dolls covered in blood or a substance meant to mimic it and distributing leaflets with messages like “Run to Jordan before we kill our enemies and expel you from our Holy Land, promised to us by God.”
In particular, please also see the work of Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, a brilliant pastor, theologian and voice for the voiceless Palestinians, amongst whom he is numbered. Above all, please read: Faith in the Face of Empire, an enormously eye-opening volume. Of it:
Jesus was a Middle Easterner. If he were to travel through Western countries today he would be “randomly” pulled aside and scrutinized. For Mitri Raheb, a Palestinian Christian living under Israeli occupation, the Middle Eastern context of the biblical story is crucial to its understanding and its relevance to his people today. A Palestinian reading of the Bible begins with an awareness of the role of empire–a constant feature of Palestine for thousands of years, from the Babylonians and Egyptians, to the Romans, Ottomans, British, and the state of Israel. Each empire imposed its own system of control, undergirded by an imperial theology. For “the people of the land,” those who endure from one empire to the next, the question, “Where is God?” carries practical and theological urgency. For Raheb, faith in God is the hope that there is something greater than empire. Jesus embodied that hope, and so Raheb spells out Jesus’ political program in relation to the Roman Empire of his time, its relevance for his community, and the biblical values relevant for the Middle East, past and present.
A presentation on his book by Dr. Raheb is here:
I add: What controls the narrative is invariably (in this case the) Israeli empire, with which the U.S. is in lockstep. . .
But Jesus and The Kingdom au contraire come crashing in, overturning the tables on all such false narratives. Maranatha–Even so come, Lord Jesus!
Finally, Pastor Michael Rudzena of Good Shepherd New York (its liturgical music by Good Shepherd Collective is also outstanding!) preached a remarkable sermon Sunday, October 15, 2023, in light of the tragedy (ongoing!) in the Middle East, and his personal experiences in Palestine and Israel, engaging the Lectionary scripture reading of Philippians 4:1 – 9:
Think of Excellence
1Therefore, my beloved brethren whom I long to see, my joy and crown, in this way stand firm in the Lord, my beloved.
2I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to live in harmony in the Lord. 3Indeed, true companion, I ask you also to help these women who have shared my struggle in the cause of the gospel, together with Clement also and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
4Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! 5Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. 6Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
8Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. 9The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
excerpts:
Everything I thought I knew about Israel and Gaza turns out not to be true. And everything I feared about Hamas has come to fruition.
That’s what I’m reckoning with as I continue to absorb this unimaginable fact: More Jews were murdered on Saturday than on any single day since the Holocaust — inside the Jewish homeland, in the nation-state that is supposed to be our safe haven, on the watch of the strongest military in the Middle East, by terrorists whose tactics can only be described as barbaric.
It is almost too much to bear. But looking away is not an option. Not for anyone who cares about the future of Israel and the Jewish people — nor for all who care about peace, democracy, civility, humanity.
…
I was also wrong about the unity and cohesiveness that any attack generates among Israelis from all political, geographic, religious and ethnic backgrounds. The open way in which journalists, military analysts and individual families are calling out the government’s gaping missteps even while the battles are raging is something new, something I did not see in 2014 and 2012, something that perhaps reflects the deep wounds this government and its judicial overhaul have inflicted on the body politic.
None of which changes the fact that Israel, for all its flaws, was just subjected to one of the worst terror attacks in history. Competitive tragedies are never a good idea, but stop for a second to ponder this: Given Israel’s tiny 9 million population, the death toll is akin to the U.S. losing 11 times the number it did on 9/11.
…
We were all wrong. Dead wrong. About everything except the brutality of Hamas.
The horrific acts of terror these militants filmed themselves carrying out are every bit as bad as their fiercest critics ever described. Our empathy for individual Palestinians in Gaza, our support for Palestinian national sovereignty, must never obscure the cold truth of Hamas militants: They are hateful, antisemitic terrorists who want to wipe Israel from the map.
Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those of the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries [under direct sway of US Empire] (“The Cold War in Central America,” pp. 216 – 221).
What was true for Latin America was true for around the world: massive human rights abuses, assassinations, regime changes of democratically elected governments, etc., etc., etc. orchestrated by US Empire. Yet Americans invariably have wanted it both ways: to be seen as the exemplary “City on A Hill” that upholds universal human rights and democracy, while operating a brutal Empire directly contrary to all such elevated values, and a concomitant rapacious Empire market economy that takes no prisoners. This began of course even before the founding of the United States of America and continued apace, in its mass slaughter and dispossession of indigenous peoples, in its brutal system of slavery on which its obscene wealth in the textile industry in the first place was built. “The Land of the Free” conceit was a sustained con job on the part of America’s leaders. It was also apotheosis of hypocrisy. American exceptionalism was/is true in one respect only: it was brutal like no other Empire in its eventual global reach.[↩]
Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for the California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of 2017 List
In These Times “Best Books of 2017” Huffington Post’s Ten Excellent December Books List
LitHub’s “Five Books Making News This Week”
From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day.
Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
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And Hitler, and Stalin are considered “mad” in their mass murders?! By the above dark humour standard, they were only “firecracker despots” compared to a long line of US Presidents. What then are all these upstanding Americans — right up to the present, with possibly a genuinely narcissistic/deranged former President (Trump) seemingly itching to have “nuked” some nation(s) — if not mad monsters? And the overwhelming monstrosity of America the Ultimate Evil Empire only increases exponentially when one reads noted historian Alfred McCoy’s description of what is being developed by said American Empire.
In particular, please also see the work of Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb, a brilliant pastor, theologian and voice for the voiceless Palestinians, amongst whom he is numbered. Above all, please read: , an enormously eye-opening volume. Of it:
excerpts:
Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Of it we read:
