Tag: Israel

Human Rights for Enemies Only? Amnesty International, Iran, and the Blind Spots of “Democracy Now!”

I was listening to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! the other morning. The segment concerned Amnesty International and its latest report on the worldwide increase in capital punishment. According to Amnesty, the sharp rise in executions was driven largely by Iran.

Fair enough. Executions are terrible. State repression is terrible. No civilized person should celebrate either one.

But as I listened, I kept waiting for the larger context. It never came.

Instead, the report and discussion unfolded in the familiar language Western audiences have heard for decades: Iran represses dissent. Iran crushes protests. Iran executes opponents. So does North Korea, Vietnam, and other official enemies of American empire. End of story.

But it’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. Fact is: none of this is happening in a vacuum.

Mossad & CIA

There was no mention that the demonstrations in question emerged in the middle of a long-running U.S.-Israeli campaign to destabilize Iran. No mention that the CIA and Mossad have openly and repeatedly funded, armed, trained, and encouraged opposition movements inside the country. No mention that Iran has lived under sanctions, sabotage, assassinations, cyberwarfare, and threats of invasion for decades.

And perhaps most glaringly, there was no acknowledgment that the numbers executed by Iran pale beside the numbers slaughtered by Israel and the United States in Gaza and throughout the Middle East. Those numbers represent executions as well — mostly innocent children, their mothers, and grandparents.

That omission matters.

I say this as someone who deeply admires Amy Goodman. For years Democracy Now has been one of the few programs in U.S. media willing to challenge empire, question official narratives, and expose Washington’s lies. Which is exactly why this kind of reporting is so disappointing when it happens.

Because independent journalism is supposed to complicate the picture — not flatten it into another morality play where the official enemies of the United States appear uniquely evil while Western violence fades into the background like wallpaper.

Let me be clear. I’m not arguing that Iran is innocent. It plainly is not. Like every government under siege, it has become increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. Many Iranian protesters are undoubtedly sincere people with genuine grievances about corruption, restrictions on freedom, economic suffering, and political repression.

But it is childish — or dishonest — to pretend that foreign intelligence agencies have not been actively working to exploit those grievances.

Washington has done this for generations. Iran itself is one of the clearest examples. In 1953 the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government under Mohammad Mosaddegh because he dared nationalize Iranian oil. Ever since, Iran has been treated as a target for destabilization and regime change.

The United States openly funds opposition groups and propaganda outlets aimed at Tehran. Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists. Economic sanctions have crippled ordinary people. American politicians routinely threaten military action.

So when protests erupt inside Iran, are we really supposed to imagine the CIA and Mossad simply sit on the sidelines wishing everyone well?

Come on.

Recognizing that reality does not mean every protester is a foreign agent. That would be absurd. It simply means understanding how imperial power works.

Amnesty International

And that brings us to Amnesty International itself.

Amnesty has done courageous and important work over the years. Its reports on torture, disappearances, political prisoners, and state violence have often exposed crimes the mainstream media preferred to ignore. Amnesty has criticized the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel as well.

But organizations like Amnesty also have blind spots.

Too often they examine countries in isolation from the global systems of power surrounding them. An execution in Iran becomes a moral outrage standing entirely on its own. But sanctions that destroy healthcare systems? Economic warfare? Proxy wars? Assassinations? Coups? Occupations? Those realities somehow become background noise.

The violence of official enemies is individualized and dramatized. The violence of empire is bureaucratized and normalized. When Iran executes dissidents, headlines scream about barbarism. When Israel blows apart apartment buildings full of children with U.S.-supplied weapons, we hear about “security concerns,” “complexity,” and Israel’s “right to defend itself.” That double standard has become so normal we barely notice it anymore.

And yet the numbers tell the story. Yes, Iran’s executions are horrifying. But compare them to the scale of killing carried out by Israel in Gaza with full American support. Compare them to the deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. Compare them to the million-plus dead from America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One reason the Global South increasingly distrusts Western human rights rhetoric is precisely because of this inconsistency.

The Politics of Human Rights

Human rights matter intensely when the accused government opposes Washington.

They become strangely negotiable when the crimes are committed by allies.

That doesn’t mean Amnesty is part of some sinister conspiracy. I don’t believe that. But institutions absorb the assumptions of the societies in which they operate. And Western institutions — even liberal and progressive ones — often unconsciously treat U.S. power as the invisible center around which everything else revolves.

So Iran’s repression is highlighted. America’s role in creating the crisis is minimized.
Israel’s vastly larger violence is compartmentalized into a separate conversation.
And audiences are left with the impression that the chief danger to humanity comes from the designated enemies of the empire.

Meanwhile the empire itself disappears from view. That is why context matters so much.

A country under permanent siege behaves differently from a country at peace. Again, that does not justify repression. But it explains some of it.

The United States itself cracked down viciously during wartime. It jailed dissidents, spied on citizens, censored speech, and criminalized opposition during both world wars and after 9/11. Imagine how Washington would react if China or Russia were funding and arming internal American protest movements while openly calling for regime change.

We don’t have to imagine, actually. We already know.

Conclusion

The larger problem here is not simply hypocrisy. It’s the way selective outrage helps prepare public opinion for intervention. Partial truths become propaganda because they omit the forces producing the crisis in the first place.

And that’s why I found the Democracy Now segment so troubling.

Not because it criticized Iran.

But because it criticized Iran in a way that quietly erased empire.

When Leaders Become School Shooters

I’m sure you noticed that on the very first day of the current U.S. war with Iran, American missiles struck a school compound. In that single horrendous attack 165 people (most of them little girls between the ages of 7 and 12) were slaughtered. Their classrooms became rubble. Their playground became a graveyard.

There’s no “fog of war” here. This was a first strike presumably meticulously planned before hostilities began. Put plainly: Trump’s and Netanyahu’s first targets in their completely illegal and immoral war were school children – little girls.

A War of Aggression

Even before considering the victims, let’s underline the war’s undeniable illegality. It was completely unprovoked. That makes it a war of aggression. In international law, initiating such a conflict is considered the gravest of crimes. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials famously declared that to launch a war of aggression “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, because it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” That principle was meant to ensure that powerful states would never again unleash violence against another country simply because they could.

Yet here we are.

Targeting Civilians

As I said, the opening strike on that Iranian school could hardly have been accidental. Moreover, it followed a pattern already well-established by Israel’s war in Gaza under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Again and again, the world has seen images of bombed schools—places that had become shelters for displaced civilians, classrooms for children, or simply the last fragile spaces where families tried to survive. Critics have begun to describe this tactic grimly: the “Gaza-ing” of cities—systematic bombing of densely populated areas where civilians inevitably live.

Now that same logic appears in Tehran.

In this context, be reminded that dense urban neighborhoods are not empty landscapes. They contain apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. They house women, children, the elderly, and the disabled — people who cannot easily flee when bombs begin to fall. When such areas are targeted, civilian casualties are not accidents. They are predictable consequences. They are intentional.

An Epstein War

And here the moral horror becomes even sharper. That fact that most of the victims of that first strike in Teheran were girls between the ages of seven and twelve, connects it unmistakably with Jeffrey Epstein scandal from which the Iran War seems anxious to distract us. (Some are even calling it “The Epstein War.”)

Once again, young girls are the victims. Once again, power stands on one side and vulnerability on the other.

No one is claiming that the dynamics of sexual exploitation and the Trump and Netanyahu school shootings are identical. But the pattern is deeply unsettling. Powerful men act with near-complete impunity; little girls suffer the consequences. When this happens repeatedly—whether in elite abuse scandals or in the conduct of war—it raises questions that go far beyond ordinary sexism. It points toward a culture in which the suffering of the most defenseless becomes politically invisible.

“Leaders” As School Shooters

Meanwhile, Americans continue to express horror at school shootings at home. The 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech where 32 people were killed shocked the nation and remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Americans rightly consider such crimes monstrous.

But what should we call it when a government destroys a school killing pupils and teachers with missiles?

I’ll tell you what I call it. It’s a school shooting. And Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are the most lethal school shooters on earth. The phrase shocks precisely because it strips away the language of strategy and exposes the reality for what it is.

And when national leaders behave this way, they do more than destroy buildings and lives. They set an example. Leadership shapes moral culture. If governments normalize violence against children abroad—bombing schools, flattening neighborhoods, “Gaza-ing” cities —why should we be surprised when violence seeps back into our own societies?

Conclusion

There I’ve said it: the two men just referenced are far worse school shooters than the worst we’ve seen. The moral logic in all cases is nonetheless frighteningly similar. They murder because they can. If we truly believe that children’s lives are sacred, that principle cannot stop at national borders. It reveals the slogan “pro-life” for the grotesque instrument it has become: a banner raised in defense of unborn life at home while bombs fall on little girls sitting in classrooms abroad.

How Even the American Left Keeps Falling for Regime-Change Narratives

Just when public attention is turning—once again—to unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his powerful associates, and the long history of elite impunity in the United States, we are suddenly confronted with a new foreign-policy emergency. Once again, we are told that events abroad demand our immediate moral outrage, our emotional investment, and our political alignment with the very leaders who are most eager to change the subject at home.

This is not coincidence. It is political deflection.

The Trump administration has every incentive to flood the media with international crisis narratives that redirect attention away from institutional corruption, judicial failures, and the uncomfortable truth that powerful men rarely face consequences in this country. And nothing serves that purpose more reliably than the familiar spectacle of righteous outrage against a designated foreign villain.

So here we go again.

We are being told—urgently and with manufactured moral certainty—that we must side with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and Donald Trump’s America in condemning alleged mass killings by Iranian security forces. We are invited to clutch our pearls over reports that “thousands” may have died in Iran in the past week alone, while the credibility of those numbers goes largely unquestioned and the geopolitical context goes mostly unmentioned.

The timing is convenient. The narrative is familiar. And the political utility is obvious.

It all ignores the fact that for more than two years, Israel, with full political and military backing from the United States, has devastated Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed. Hospitals, schools, and water systems have been systematically destroyed. Starvation has been used as a weapon. Yet U.S. officials have either remained silent or have actively shielded Israel from accountability in international forums.

Now those same officials present themselves as guardians of human rights, suddenly appalled by civilian deaths.

Fortunately however, moral authority is not something that can be turned on and off like that at political convenience. By enabling mass slaughter in Gaza, Israel and the United States have forfeited any claim to be neutral or trustworthy narrators of human rights abuses elsewhere. When they point the finger at Iran, they do so with blood soaked hands.

What is most troubling, however, is that much of what passes for the American “left” appears ready—once again—to follow their lead.

Even progressive outlets that have long criticized U.S. imperialism are amplifying claims about Iran with little scrutiny, as if we have learned nothing from Iraq, Libya, or Syria. The familiar script is rolled out: heroic protesters, savage security forces, and a population yearning for Western-style liberation.

But we have seen this movie before. And we know how it ends.

Consider a striking example from just this week. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. During the interview, Panahi acknowledged something crucial: because of internet shutdowns and information blackouts, he said, “I do not have any trustworthy news from inside Iran. I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know where my colleagues are, where my family is. It is only the bits and pieces that you hear.”

And yet moments later, he spoke confidently of thousands—perhaps 2,000, perhaps even 20,000—killed by Iranian security forces. The interviewer did not challenge the figures, ask for sourcing, or remind viewers that casualty estimates in politicized conflicts are often wildly inflated during the early stages of unrest.

This is not serious journalism. It is narrative reinforcement.

None of this is to deny that Iran represses dissent or that many Iranians have legitimate grievances. It is simply to insist that repression alone does not explain why certain countries suddenly dominate Western headlines, while others—such as Israel—are insulated from scrutiny even when their actions are far more destructive.

The difference is not morality. It’s the way imperialism works.

Recall that immediately after 9/11, General Wesley Clark publicly revealed that the Pentagon had drawn up plans for regime change in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Iran. While the timeline shifted, the strategic objective did not. Iran has remained a top target of U.S. and Israeli policy for decades, regardless of which party occupies the White House.

Political scientists such as John Mearsheimer have described how these operations tend to follow a consistent pattern:
First, economic sanctions that cripple daily life and undermine public confidence in the government;
Second, support for opposition movements, often including covert funding and the use of provocateurs to escalate unrest;
Third, aggressive information warfare, in which unverified or exaggerated claims are circulated internationally to delegitimize the targeted regime;
Fourth, threats of military intervention—or actual intervention—once instability has been sufficiently inflamed.

This is not speculation. It is documented policy history. Libya followed this script. Syria followed this script. Iraq followed this script with catastrophic results.

Sanctions, in particular, deserve far more attention than they receive in Western reporting. They are not “smart” tools that surgically target political elites. They are blunt-force attacks on entire populations, restricting access to medicine, banking systems, and basic imports. They produce precisely the social desperation that then gets cited as proof of governmental illegitimacy.

In effect, we help create the crisis, then point to the crisis as justification for further intervention.

And after Gaza, skepticism about Western moral posturing is not cynicism. It is responsibility.

What is perhaps most disheartening is how easily even progressive voices are drawn into amplifying the early stages of these campaigns. Figures who would never have accepted Pentagon talking points about Latin America or Vietnam routinely accept them uncritically when the target is Iran. Good intentions do not prevent anyone from becoming useful to empire.

True solidarity with the Iranian people would start by opposing both domestic repression and foreign destabilization. It would recognize that sanctions are not neutral policy tools but instruments of social punishment, designed to fracture societies and manufacture crisis. And it would reject the deadly illusion that U.S.-backed regime change delivers democracy rather than collapsed states and endless violence.

We know this because we have already seen it—in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria. These were not humanitarian successes. They were geopolitical experiments whose costs were paid by ordinary people.

The lesson should be obvious by now: when governments that have just enabled mass civilian slaughter suddenly rediscover their concern for human rights, we should ask what strategic objective that concern is meant to serve.

After Gaza, Western outrage over Iran cannot be separated from Western impunity in Israel. One exposes the hypocrisy of the other. The crucial fact is simple: the U.S. does not fund uprisings, enforce sanctions, and manipulate media narratives out of compassion.

It does so to maintain empire. To keep its hegemony.

Those who truly care about the future of Iran should resist becoming foot soldiers in yet another regime-change campaign. They should demand diplomacy, economic normalization, and international accountability that applies to allies as well as adversaries.

Above all, they should remember that justice does not arrive on the wings of bombers or through the quiet work of covert operations.

It never has.

And if the past quarter-century has taught us anything, it is this: the loudest voices claiming to defend human rights are too often the ones preparing the ground for the next war.

Author’s Note

This essay connects to themes explored in the author’s recent ChatGPT-assisted political novella, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever, which uses storytelling to examine how media narratives, economic coercion, and permanent war distort democracy at home and abroad. Both the novella and the Arc of Justice Alliance / Project 2029 project argue that real security comes not from regime change or military dominance, but from building a “Republic of Care” grounded in democratic accountability and human dignity.

The U.S. & Israel: Cancers on the Planet

Let’s face it squarely: the United States and Zionist Israel function today as cancers on the body of our planet. Like malignant growths, they spread violence, exploitation, and environmental destruction far beyond their borders. If the earth is to heal, these cancers must be confronted, contained, and ultimately transformed— perhaps not in some apocalyptic purge, but healed through justice, repentance, and the dismantling of imperial systems that have long held humanity hostage.

That may sound harsh. But look at the evidence. Both nations operate as neo-colonial powers whose survival depends on domination—economic, military, and ideological. They perpetuate a global apartheid that privileges a small minority of largely white elites while oppressing and dispossessing the majority of the world’s people. Their leaders speak the language of democracy and freedom while practicing the politics of theft and genocide.

Israel has become a settler-colonial project rooted in dispossession and sustained by U.S. complicity. It violates international law with impunity, massacres civilians under the guise of “self-defense,” and treats the Palestinian people as less than human. The result is genocide—a twenty-first-century repetition of the very atrocities the world once swore “never again” to allow.

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson recently observed that Israel’s behavior could easily provoke a war with Iran, a conflict that might finally expose the illegitimacy of Israel’s apartheid state. Though one might pray for peace, it is difficult not to hope for Israel’s utter defeat in its conflict with Iran. The world would be far better off if the Zionist state of Israel did not exist at all.

The same holds true for the United States—Israel’s patron and enabler. The U.S. is guilty of the same imperial arrogance. As economist Jeffrey Sachs reminds us, there is scarcely a conflict anywhere on the globe that cannot be traced back to Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, or Brussels—the old colonial capitals still trying to govern a postcolonial world. Together, they represent barely twelve percent of humanity, yet they presume to dictate the fate of the remaining eighty-eight percent.

Instead of acknowledging their centuries of plunder and offering reparations to the Global South, these powers double down on their arrogance. When formerly colonized nations begin to cooperate for mutual development through alliances such as BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the West responds not with support but with sanctions, propaganda, and threats. The message is clear: independence will not be tolerated; self-determination will be punished. The Global South’s neocolonial status and resulting poverty must continue for the benefit of “the developed world.”

Consider the behavior of U.S. presidents—Republican and Democrat alike—who behave less like diplomats than emperors. Donald Trump exemplified this imperial mentality, issuing demands and threats as if the world were his personal fiefdom. He ordered the execution of alleged drug traffickers in Caribbean waters without trial or evidence. He commanded Vladimir Putin to agree to an unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine, as though Russia were a vassal state. He even demanded that Brazilian President Lula da Silva drop charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right politician accused of attempting a coup.

This is not diplomacy; it is imperial arrogance in its purest form. As Sachs notes, such behavior stems from a toxic blend of stupidity, historical amnesia, and contempt for international law. The U.S., with only 4.2% of the world’s population, continues to imagine it has the divine right to rule the remaining 95.8%. Its military planners openly speak of “full spectrum dominance”—the ambition to control every domain of warfare, from land and sea to air, space, and cyberspace. No other nation on earth — not Russia, not China, not Iran — articulates such a strategy. It is a uniquely American pathology.

Yet history has moved on. The world of 2025 is not the world of 1945. The United States no longer holds uncontested military or economic supremacy. The unipolar moment is over, and multipolar reality has arrived. China has surpassed the U.S. economically and possesses a formidable military that no Western coalition could hope to subdue. Numerous countries now possess nuclear weapons, making large-scale invasions suicidal. Pentagon war games repeatedly reach the same conclusion: in any conventional conflict with China, the United States would lose.

Nor can the U.S. claim superiority in Europe’s proxy war against Russia. The conflict in Ukraine has revealed that the combined military might of NATO—supposedly the greatest alliance in history—cannot defeat Russia on its own borders. Despite unprecedented aid and intelligence sharing, Western powers have been humbled by a nation they long dismissed as backward and fragile. Like David against Goliath, Russia has exposed the limits of Western militarism and the hollowness of its propaganda.

Meanwhile, the rise of digital communication has shattered the West’s monopoly over information. Once, Washington and London could script the global narrative through newspapers, Hollywood, and network television. Today, social media and independent journalism allow the world’s majority to challenge those narratives in real time. The lies that once justified wars and coups are now exposed within hours. The empire’s ideological armor is cracking.

And yet, the rulers of the old order refuse to accept this new reality. They continue to act as though history has not moved on, as though the colonial empires of yesterday still command obedience. They’ve not gotten the memo that humanity has entered a new era—one in which power is shifting toward the Global South, and the earth itself demands a politics rooted in balance rather than domination.

What is at stake is nothing less than planetary survival. The cancers of imperialism and Zionism threaten not only justice but the ecological stability of the planet. Endless war, fossil-fueled militarism, and corporate greed are devouring the biosphere. The U.S. Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of oil on earth. Israel’s occupation of Palestine includes the theft of scarce water resources. Together, these systems of domination represent metastasizing tumors that drain the life force of our shared home.

But cancers, as any doctor will tell you, can be treated. The cure begins with truth-telling—with naming the disease for what it is. It continues with radical surgery: dismantling military bases, ending illegal occupations, canceling debts, and redistributing resources to repair centuries of exploitation. And finally, healing requires transformation: the emergence of a new consciousness that recognizes the oneness of humanity and the sacredness of the earth.

These are the issues voters should insist be addressed. These are the issues both Republicans and Democrats avoid.

The era of empire is ending, whether Washington and Tel Aviv acknowledge it or not. The world is awakening to a different vision of civilization—one based on cooperation rather than conquest, on justice rather than greed. If the United States and Israel wish to survive, they must abandon their imperial pretensions and join the human community as equal members, not self-appointed masters.

For the good of the planet—for the sake of life itself—it’s time to stop pretending that the cancers of empire can coexist with the health of the earth. Healing requires courage, repentance, and a willingness to imagine another way of being in the world. The future belongs not to the empires of the past, but to those who choose life, solidarity, and planetary wholeness.

Spare me the Crocodile Tears: Assassination Is the American Way

Please spare me the handwringing over the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. Like you, I’ve heard our politicians say there’s no place for political violence in America. Others have said such atrocities are the province of the right or alternatively of the left

All of that is false. It’s complete B.S. Face it, America itself and its CIA (often in cooperation with organized crime) are assassination experts. It’s not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. It’s not a question of “left” (as if there were a real “left” in America) or “right.”

No, it’s the American way. It’s what “we” do in the world. And to stop domestic assassinations, that’s what must change.

As Martin Luther King told us long ago, the U.S. (along with Israel, and NATO I would add) is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. (Vijay Prashad calls NATO “the machine that destroys humanity.”) Our government and those allies commit targeted and random assassinations all the time.

Think of the extrajudicial bombing of that Venezuelan fishing boat just last week. Without advancing any evidence whatsoever, those in the boat were blown up because of “suspicions” that they were drug dealers. No proof, no arrests, no trial. No handwringing or tears. Just killed remorselessly “on suspicion.”  All the victims had (now severely traumatized) families.

Then think of Israeli threats to “take out” (decapitation, they call it) the elected leaders of Iran – or of their attempts a week ago to kill Hamas leaders as they participated in peace talks in Qatar. Think of the way Israel recently killed Yemen’s prime minister Ahmed al Rahawi and other Yemeni political leaders. And need we say the names Allende, Lumumba, Kaddafi, Guevara, or of a whole host of other political leaders routinely offed by the United States? Or all those attempts to murder Fidel Castro. Now they’re talking about taking out Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela

But Kirk was different you might say. Though liberals don’t agree with most of his positions, he was a journalist, a debater, an organizer. His assassination was an attack on free speech, on the first amendment. Killing him threatens the very concept of press freedom.

And the way he was killed was especially brutal. On “Breaking Points,” Krystal Ball even urged her viewers not to watch the video. “It will haunt you for the rest of your life,” she warned.

But all of that is B.S. too. “Our” assassins don’t care about free speech, free press, the first amendment or the assassinations’ brutality. For instance, “we” and Israel kill famous journalists virtually every day. And it’s all done in the most horrendous ways imaginable. More journalists (many of them award-winning) have been killed by U.S.-supported Zionists than all those killed in WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined.

AND IT HAPPENS VIRTUALLY EVERY DAY!!

Those routine atrocities occur in Palestine, where many of the victims have their heads blown completely off. And it’s not just the journalists and other public figures. In many cases it’s their families too – wives, children, infants, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents — who are killed along with them.

So, again, please spare me the crocodile tears! You can’t routinely assassinate innocents, political leaders, and journalists across the planet and not expect it to come home.

Yes, with the political murder of Charlie Kirk assassination’s homecoming is undeniable and horrific. The chickens have indeed come here to roost.

And it’s not something that can be cured by stricter gun laws or by left and right singing Kumbaya together.

What must change is U.S. policy. “We” and Israel and NATO must stop being the world’s foremost political assassins!

So Far, The World Is Better Off with Trump!

I never thought I would find myself writing these words. But I think the world is far better off with Trump as our president than with Genocide Joe Biden.

There I said it. I do so under the threat of great personal detriment. I mean, I can hardly voice such opinion in polite progressive company.  I can’t even say so in my own family.

So, at the risk of complete isolation, let me try to explain myself.

I think the world’s better off with Trump because a head of state should at least be sui compos mentis. Clearly, Joe Biden was not. By most accounts, Jake Sullivan has been running the country for the last four years. Secondly, Trump is better because he’s backing us off from nuclear war with the Russians. Joe wouldn’t even talk with them.  Thirdly, whatever we might think of his words about real estate in Gaza, the Donald has introduced a cease fire there. It seems to be holding. Fourthly, President Trump shows promise of dismantling the CIA and FBI. That has no downside as far as I can see. And finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, he’s unifying the country around the issue of truth-telling. I mean it. Let me explain.

Trump’s Not Senile

I can hardly believe the Democrats knew Joe Biden was mentally over the hill from the first day of his administration. And yet after four years, they were willing to run him out there for a second term, when everybody knew he could scarcely tell up from down.

How cynical is that? How disrespectful to voters! How anti-democratic!

Thank God for the first presidential debate that showed the old man mired in an advanced condition of senility.

As such, his defining issues became:

  • Billions and billions and billions for Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine. (Trump stopped that right quick.)
  • His inability to do anything about a ceasefire in Gaza. (Trump turned that around even before he was sworn in.)
  • Unstinting cooperation in the genocide of Palestinians. (We have yet to see Trump’s final policy here, though his words and supply of 2000 pound bombs are not promising.)
  • Maintaining U.S. hegemony at all costs.

Those are the issues that obsessed and defined Genocide Joe – Ukraine, Gaza, genocide itself, and refusal to recognize that we live in a multipolar world. Little else he did really counts.   

Trump Talks Russian

In sharp contrast to Biden’s foolishness, Donald Trump has agreed to peace talks with our proxy adversary in Ukraine. That war could have been entirely avoided had Biden even acknowledged reading and had he responded to Mr. Putin’s peace proposal in December of 2021. However, preferring war to diplomacy, he chose not to.

Shortly afterwards, the war could have been stopped in its tracks had Biden not (through Boris Johnson’s nefarious graces) effectively voided the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine initialed by both belligerents in March of 2022. Instead, the old man again chose war that so far has exacted more than a million casualties.

In other words, Biden’s version of diplomacy was refusal to even talk with Putin.

Donald Trump has reversed all of that. Simple man that he is, Trump evidently realizes what all of us teach our children – make up with those you’ve been fighting with. Talk with your “enemies.”  Try to see things from their point of view. No good parent would instruct them otherwise.

Diplomacy is as simple as that. Its exercise under Donald Trump has made the world a safer place.

Ceasefire in Gaza

So far, Trump’s policy in Gaza has made Palestinians safer as well.

The whole sequence of events since Trump’s diplomatic intervention illustrates the point. Since then, the whole world has witnessed:

  • Thousands upon thousands of Palestinians returning “home.”
  • The Zionist-caused rubble of their homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, mosques, and churches.
  • The uncovering of untold numbers of friends, relatives, doctors, nurses, and teachers buried and uncounted under the rubble raising the number of Palestinians indiscriminately killed to well over 100.000 – more than half women, children, and the elderly.
  • The survival of Hamas fighters still proud, well-armed, and undefeated by Israel’s genocidal attacks.
  • The testimony of Hamas prisoners about humane treatment on the part of their captors.
  • The contrasting emaciated and evidently tortured bodies of Zionist prisoners released by the Zionists.

None of this has been good for Israel’s image in the world. Instead, it’s made the world aware of the justice of the Palestinian cause.

To repeat, all of that makes Palestinians safer. It has also shown President Trump’s policy in Israel to be better than Mr. Biden’s, at least so far.

Today, Palestinians are better off under Trump.

Dismantling the CIA

And then there’s Mr. Trump’s appointment of Tulsi Gabbard to oversee the country’s 18 spy organizations. Those agencies spy on us! They engage in regime change operations. According to ex-CIA director, Mike Pompeo, they lie, they cheat, they steal all the time. They take entire courses on how to do so. Pompeo was proud of that. He thought it was a big joke.

But ask Julian Assange. Ask Chelsea Manning. Ask Edward Snowden. It’s not a joke.

Tulsi Gabbard realizes all of that. In Senate testimony, she refused to identify Snowden as a traitor.

Clearly, she has the “intelligence” establishment quaking in their boots.

That makes all of us better off.

Conclusion Bringing Us All Together

Recently, I saw a YouTube discussion between leftist comedian Jimmy Dore and progressive journalist Matt Taibbi. Dore raised a question about climate change. He confessed that in view of all the lies that have infected the scientific community (and American public life in general) he was for the first time having doubts about climate change. Was its threat being overblown?

In response, Taibbi admitted that the exposure of so many lies conveyed by politicians, clergymen, journalists, and university researchers had him wondering too. “I’m ashamed to say so,” he said in effect, “but all of that has me wondering about beliefs I’ve taken for granted over the last 30 years of my life.”

The exchange between Dore and Taibbi made me realize that even the falsehoods conveyed by the Liar in Chief currently manning the White House has important benefits.

On all segments of the political spectrum, it has us wondering about truth. We no longer trust those claiming to be truth tellers. We no longer trust the “fact checkers.” They’ve all been shown to be liars.

Regardless of where we stand on politics or climate change, that’s a hugely important point for Americans to realize and agree to. Thank you for bringing us together, Mr. Trump.

Syria: Another Regime Change Operation by the U.S. & Israel

I’m always disappointed with Democracy Now’s (DN) coverage of Syria. Its reporting on the fall of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad was no exception. It described Assad’s deposition as primarily a triumph of freedom and the will of a brutally repressed people.

Absent from DN’s narrative was the straightforward truth that the fall of Assad was the fruit of another regime change operation. It was part of the U.S. plan announced in 2001 to depose seven governments in five years, viz., Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Iran.

Though the American timetable was overly optimistic, with the change of regime in Syria, the U.S. has succeeded in hitting six of its seven targets. Only Iran’s government remains in place.

Let me show you what I mean by summarizing DN’s account, contrasting it with its counter narrative, and sketching the way U.S. regime change operations work.

The Official Syrian Story

For years DN’s usually critical founder, Amy Goodman, has for some reason sided with the United States and Israel by uncritically repeating their official story about the Zionists’ neighbor to the north. It tells us that:

  • Bashar al Assad is a brutal dictator who succeeded his dictator father to rule Syria with an iron fist for the last half century and more.
  • He has not only claimed absolute power in Syria,
  • But has run an extensive secret prison system there (a “human slaughterhouse”) where captives are systematically mistreated, tortured, and held without charge.
  • His use of chemical weapons against those objecting to his rule is well documented by independent witnesses such as the Syrian Civil Defense Organization,  the “White Helmets.”
  • For all these reasons, the U.S. and Israel have long held that “Assad must go.”
  • “Moderate rebels” have recently transformed that imperative into facts on the ground. Thankfully, they have successfully overthrown the hated dictator.
  • Since his removal from office, his brutality and consequent unpopularity have received ample testimony and denunciation by ordinary Syrians who are universally celebrating his fall from power.
  • Thus the U.S. and Israel (as champions of democracy, just war, and humane incarceration, and as opponents of torture and the killing of innocent civilians) have triumphed once again in yet another mid-east country.
  • The triumph mirrors what they have accomplished so idealistically and benevolently in Iraq, Afghanistan,  Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia and other countries benefitting from their wars fought for democracy and peace.

That’s the official line DN’s Amy Goodman consistently presents and/or implies.

A More Complete Picture

However, what Goodman’s account fails to explore are its following contradictions that would have us forget that:

  • The foreign powers advocating and celebrating the end of Assad’s cruelty (i.e., Israel and the U.S.) are the current perpetrators of genocide in Palestine. Arguably, that deprives them of ability to convincingly champion human rights in any forum. It demonstrates that they have no concern about civilian deaths, secret prisons, unjust torture, democracy, freedom, or peace.
  • In fact (according to George Galloway) during its war on terror, the U.S. used Syrian prisons as black sites to which they rendered “terrorists” for torturous interrogation.  
  • Moreover, the “moderate” agents fulfilling the U.S. and Israel’s imperative to remove Asad from power are successors to the very “terrorists” responsible for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks 23 years ago).
  • That is, while designating Syria as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” the U.S. has once again allied itself with al-Qaeda as it had in Afghanistan during Russia’s war there (1979-1989).
  • Additionally, the U.S. has crippled the Syrian economy by illegally occupying its eastern oil fields since 2014 effectively stealing its oil revenue since then.
  • While Israel has similarly occupied its neighbor’s Golan Heights.
  • Syria’s economy and population have suffered severe hardships under a U.S. sanctions regime that started in 2011 and whose effects worsened following a massive earthquake in February of 2023. For years they’ve had to function on the provision of a single hour of electricity each day.  

Civil Discontent in Syria

As for the testimony of Syrians applauding and celebrating the fall of Asad . . ..  It too demonstrates the effectiveness of standard American policy against designated enemies whose political “regimes” the U.S. wishes to change. That policy never deviates from the following procedure:

  1. Vilify the regime leader as the latest incarnation of Hitler.
  2. Under the pretext of punishing him, use sanctions, economic blockades, bombing, propaganda, bribery, election interference, terrorism, and internal subversion whose real purpose is to make the lives of locals so miserable
  3. That they will arise,
  4. Overthrow the regime in question,
  5. And celebrate the victory as the triumph of democracy.

This is the standard policy followed not only against Syria, but against official enemies such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

The subversion invariably causes the threatened governments to adopt their own counter-policies that the U.S. and its allies then describe as authoritarian, oppressive, and brutal. The policies include imprisonment of compromised political opponents, jailing and mistreatment of terrorists (no harsher btw than the mistreatment of prisoners in Israel and the U.S.), and restrictions on (usually foreign allied) press along with fifth column civil and religious organizations. All these government actions provide further evidence of the illegitimacy of the regimes in question.

They also provide well-meaning news sources like Democracy Now with reasons to uncritically repeat imperialist talking points.

Conclusion

Listening to Democracy Now’s account of a people’s triumph in Syria after more than a half century of dictatorship made me think of Cuba. As a friend of the revolution there and as a frequent visitor to the island, I couldn’t help thinking how in the case of a successful uprising there (God forbid!), a similar sort of account might be concocted.

There’d be the same people dancing for joy in Havana’s streets and the same people saying on camera how relieved they are that the hated regime had been deposed. There’d also be the same ex-pat Cuban professors from prestigious U.S. universities sharing the joy and supplying historical details about the brutalities of Castro’s legacy.

Misinformed viewers would be led to conclude “Thank Goodness Cubans are finally free!”

But if the current Syrian template were followed, those viewers would never be stimulated to question the official story. They’d never be reminded of the disastrous effects of 60 years of sanctions, blockade, and acts of terrorism against the state. They’d never know about attempted assassinations of the country’s president. Neither would they think critically about the effect of anti-Cuban propaganda on their own psyches.

The point I’m trying to make here is that questions should always be raised about official stories concerning designated enemies of discredited imperialist countries like the United States and Israel.

They should be asked as well when perpetrators of genocide decry the human rights record “dictators” carefully selected from a long list of tyrants routinely supported by the complaining parties and when the black sites and “slaughterhouses” of the offending dictators have been used by their accusers themselves.

Yes, critical reporters should be able to identify such contradictions.

Simply repeating “the official story” helps no one.

Democracy Now is usually better than that.

Normalizing Genocide

[Sorry for not publishing lately. I recently spent 4 days in the hospital dealing with some ill-effects from my recent knee replacement surgery. And while the new knee is doing great, I still find myself very tired from an unexpected infection and early sepsis.]

__________

You know, it might be my recent illness. But these days I can’t listen to the news without sobbing. Really.

Just the terms genocide, Raffa, Zionists, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), settler colonialism, apartheid, 2000-pound bombs (supplied using my tax dollars), and unrestricted infanticide are enough to make me cry.

And let’s be clear. This is not a war. It’s a genocide. And our president Genocide Joe Biden is at the heart of it along with that butcher, Bibi Netanyahu.

No, it’s not a war. The only army with its air force, tanks, and sophisticated weapons (including a nuclear arsenal) is the IOF. Hamas is a rag tag group of Palestinian freedom fighters armed with Kalashnikovs and protected by an elaborate tunnel system that Zionist butchers find impossible to penetrate.

And their completely justified resistance did not begin on October 7th. It was a response to nearly 100 years of slaughter and mayhem at the bloody hands of Israeli Neo-Nazis.

I keep imagining my grandchildren and their mothers suffering the way little Gazans are. Can you imagine watching them undergo amputations without benefit of anesthesia?  The Zionists evidently love it. They’re sadists.

Yes, they’re committing war crimes before our very eyes – using food and water as weapons, bombing hospitals and schools, administering collective punishment, executing hospital patients with their hands tied behind their backs, beheading some, and machine-gunning starving Palestinians waiting in line for food. When is all this going to stop?

Can you imagine the outcry if Russia performed such atrocities in Ukraine? We’d never hear the end of it. I mean the ICC without a moment’s hesitation issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for removing children from a war zone. Nothing of the sort for Netanyahu, much less for Genocide Joe. They both deserve to be hung the way Nazis were for the genocide they committed in those prison camps that were the precursors of Gaza, “the world’s largest open-air prison” – itself a concentration camp.

Thank God for student protestors at Colombia, Princeton, at the New School, and elsewhere. Shame on the administrators of those institutions for calling in the police to harass and arrest peaceful demonstrators. Such a disgrace to “higher education.”

And then there’s the Mainstream Media (MSM) normalizing it all. This morning’s New York Times published a lead article entitled “The Debate over Rafah.” In it they completely normalized genocide, presenting the dilemma facing Butcher Bibi and Genocide Joe. Here, they said, are the arguments on both sides of the question! There are good reasons for Israel to invade, and equally valid reasons not to. That is: there are good reasons for genocide and equally good reasons against.

Every word written in that vein should make anyone sick. We should all be in tears.

In Defense of Higher Education: How To Address Genocidal Congress-members

As a life-long academic, I’m still smarting from watching Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, being bullied during her nearly four-hour testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The House committee was convened to uncover anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses in the context of students protesting the genocide taking place before our eyes in Gaza and on the West Bank.

It was embarrassing to see President Minouche Shafik grovel before congress-members who evidently know nothing about higher education. Adopting her best baby fundie voice and attitude, she squirmed, smiled, and assured her interrogators that student “mobs” protesting Zionist genocide would be duly restricted and professors exposing students to Palestinian history and viewpoints would be fired.  

Previously, the committee exuding full redolence of the McCarthy era, had been successful in forcing the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The resignations resulted from the women’s alleged failures to restrict student demonstrations on their campuses against the slaughter taking place in Palestine over the past six months.

Evidently, the intention in grilling president Shafik was to add a third victim to their list of forced presidential resignations. 

 While my disappointment with the Colombia president was real, my heart went out to the poor woman. She seemed intimidated, anxious to please, fawning, and frankly fearful of losing her job.

Imagine having to answer questions like the one posed by Representative Lisa McClain (R Michigan). She demanded a “yes or no” answer to her question: “Are mobs shouting, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ or ‘long live the infanttada (sic)’ – are those antisemitic comments. Yes or no?

In response, poor Ms. Shafik was at a complete loss for words.

She shouldn’t have been.

As an academic, she should have had the wherewithal to say, “Ms. McClain, that’s not a yes or no question. It’s like the old saw, “’Yes or no, are you still beating your wife?’ Or like my asking you, ‘Tell me, yes or no, are you still accepting bribes from the military-industrial complex.’ I mean, it’s either a trick gotcha question or (with all due respect) an ignorant one. The answer is complicated.

“For example, Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ to define Israel’s ambitions in Palestine. Yes, he has. You can Google it. Was Netanyahu’s (as you put it) an anti-Semitic comment? Remember the Palestinians are Semites too. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten that.”

“Do you see the complications I’m talking about?’

And as for your questions about Intifada. . .. (And by the way, it’s pronounced ‘in-teh-fah-dah’ not ‘infant-tah-dah’) Do you know what the word means? Yes or no, do you?

“In case you don’t, let me tell you it refers to aggressive nonviolent resistance to illegal Zionist occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem by the apartheid Israeli government. You can Google that too.

“And even if such protests turned violent, are you familiar with Article 51of the UN Charter? Yes or no.

“I can see by your hesitation, that perhaps you don’t. So let me inform you that Article 51 gives the right to those in illegally occupied territories to use violence against their occupiers.”

It would have been fun to see Ms. McClain squirm a bit and to hear her comments.

Can’t be done, you say?

Yes, it can.

Left-wing member of the British Parliament George Galloway showed how. In 2005 he testified before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He had been accused of making a questionable oil deal on behalf of his campaign to end the Iraq war. Had the deal included a kick-back to the then villain of the hour, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein? Yes or no.

Here’s a shortened version of how he addressed his questioners. (It’s also worth reviewing his entire 48-minute statement): 

Had President Shafik adopted George Galloway’s confidence and tone, she would have said something like this:

“Honorable congress-members, thank you for inviting me here today and offering me opportunity to defend the University of Colombia and  its students from the slander, calumny, and outright lies endorsed by this committee. Let me assure you that Colombia University today under my leadership is the same institution of higher learning that its proud history has always shown it to be. In that tradition, we have a first-class faculty that has been vetted, constantly peer-reviewed, and evaluated, and held to the highest standards. Those standards require professors in every discipline to introduce students to all sides of every debate. There can no limits to topics addressed. Absolutely none. So, for you to summon me here under accusations that a topic or point of view forbidden by the state has been addressed, discussed, or expressed by members of our faculty is frankly insulting. It is also insulting for you to demand that I dismiss Columbia faculty members on the mere accusation of their engaging in speech forbidden by the state. We have rules and procedures at Colombia that restrict such precipitous termination without hearings and deliberation by faculty commissions. That is, your demands reveal a profound misunderstanding of the function and democratic procedures governing higher education. Similarly, your evident desire to prevent students from taking sides with the victims of genocide now unfolding in Gaza flies in the face of our university’s valued tradition of freedom of expression, and of our nation’s Constitution which guarantees freedom of speech and the right of petition. In this committee, you seem unaware that more than 34,000 Gazans (fully half of them children and their mothers) have been slaughtered by the Zionists over the last six months before our very eyes. At Colombia, we are proud that our students can recognize such genocide and reject the very crimes that you, are aiding and abetting. I mean, everyone here who has voted to supply the Zionists with arms is guilty of genocide. Shame on you all! Your participation in that crime reveals this present reincarnation of McCarthyism for what it is. This hearing is nothing more than a smokescreen to divert public attention from your crimes and from those of Zionist apartheid settler-colonialists. Again, I thank you for the opportunity to set the record straight.”

Yes, Ms. Shafik could have responded just as George Galloway did. That she didn’t shows how not only our representatives and the mass media have become agents of state propaganda. So has higher education.