Image via original article at Unz.com
In Donald Trump’s America it is always possible to wake up in the morning and peruse online the overnight headlines to discover something new and exciting. Over the past week it has been a medley of going to war (again) with Iran coupled with a complicated performance on other issues as President Trump apparently takes aim at his enemies in the US and elsewhere. America’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is fully on board with a surge in worldwide mayhem. He is looking forward to an increase in US initiated violence, ordering that male soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines be tested for their testosterone levels. “Hegseth argues the effort, to become part of the military’s periodic health assessment for troops over 30, will ensure the optimal performance and long-term health of warfighters.… the move plays into Hegseth’s focus on appearances and masculinity, which one Democrat said this week borders on ‘homoeroticism’.” Those who fail to have sufficient of the “male characteristics” hormone in their systems will be determined to be not fit for combat, where lethal instincts as encouraged under Hegseth require a satisfactory level of anger. Some soldiers might be offered therapy to increase their hormone levels.
And perhaps not so strangely, it often seems that much of the daily news relates to America’s “best friend and closest ally” Israel. One of the great ironies of the Israel against the rest of the world competition is how the “Torah” Old Testament is regularly being cited by Washington and the national media to justify anything the Jewish state does. That occurs in spite of the fact that Biblical Judea has little in common with the real Israel of today apart from providing an enduring mythology interwoven with the “holocaust” fantasy to sustain the myth of “chosen-ness.” In reality, Judea ceased to exist as an actual nation in 70 AD when the Romans destroyed to include the Second Temple in Jerusalem, of which absolutely nothing physical remains, and forced the Jews to depart. After that, what is now described as Palestine was ruled in various fashions by Rome, Byzantium, Muslim Arabs, Christian Europeans, Mamelukes, Turks, and the British until the politically driven re-creation of a Jewish state in 1948. That means for nearly 1900 straight years there was no such thing as an “Israel” or a Jewish nation and any Jewish presence was marginal in the region where the religion was born. Clearly there was no historical mandate to move a group of foreigners, whose only tie was to a religion that many of them did not actually practice, into a land that those foreigners then began to depopulate of its indigenous inhabitants who had lived in that place under both Christian and Muslim foreign rule for two millennia.
Recent American presidents have certainly tried to make the brutal Israeli suppression and occupation of what was supposed to be a neighbor state called Palestine somehow seem to be something quite acceptable. This is particularly due to the nonsense regurgitated by a group of American fundamentalists that many refer to as Christian Zionists (CZ), best exemplified by the delusional US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. These are folks that revere the Jewish Bible, as one might described it, as “explained” by the nineteenth century Scofield Bible. Huckabee insanely even claims that “Without Israel, without the Jewish foundation, there would not be America.”
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the CZ exist in large numbers in southern and some midwestern so-called Bible Belt states and they vote reliably for congressmen and even presidents who are Israel Firsters. So we get monsters like Texan Ted Cruz, Arkansan Tom Cotton and the recently deceased South Carolinian Lindsey Graham calling the shots on foreign policy. And we get presidents like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, both of whose exceptional loyalty to Israel should have been challenged when they ran for office!
The latest bid by Congress to allow Israel to be even more intolerant of the Christians and Muslims that it is supposed to share the former Palestine with is a recently passed amendment calling for equal Jewish prayer rights on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The Mount currently houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of three most holy religious sites for Muslim believers, reputedly the location where Mohammed himself was spirited up to heaven by Allah. When Israel was created in 1948 Jerusalem was categorized by the UN as an international city inclusive of all faiths. The Mount was regarded as special for Muslims and believers in other faiths had only limited access to it. More recently, there has been constant agitation from extremist Jewish politicians in Israel to open up the site and there have even been calls to build a Jewish Third Temple on it as well even more radical demands to demolish al-Aqsa completely as part of the process. This has been accompanied by increased persecution and even closure of churches and mosques located elsewhere in the city with the clear intention of making Jerusalem more exclusively Jewish. Trump and company have, of course, not raised any objections to the Jewish activism even when Christians are being actively persecuted and denied access to their churches and holy sites.
Israel aside, the views of Americans who value the First Amendment Freedom of Speech right should be particularly concerned by the authoritarian direction the federal government is moving in. One must pay attention to last week’s denunciations by Trump and National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Marco Rubio of “communists” and “terrorists” among the predominantly progressives who apparently are in the forefront of those who are opposing the enlightened policies being promoted by the White House. It is apparently the belief that labeling opponents in that fashion will guarantee victory in the upcoming November midterm elections where Democrats will inter alia be labeled as anti-Israel and it will also make it easier to root some such folks out for deportation or imprisonment to silence them as has already been happening with foreign students at American universities.
Regarding what is developing, Trump’s activation of the little known “alien terrorist” deportation court presumably will conveniently provide the president and his fanatics with a new tool to cleanse the country of anyone who might object to killing people without any constitutional or legal process as has been taking place in the Caribbean, Iran and Sudan. Not that Trump needed a new court since he is no friend of “rule of law” and has been repeatedly acting in one of his rages whenever he sees fit to punish both American citizens and foreigners. One might cite the recent arrest of an American citizen who was traveling in Spain. As reported by The Guardian, “Spanish authorities, operating on a US extradition request, arrested the 41-year-old James Chambers, a US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects worldwide, last Friday in Ibiza. He has been transferred to a prison in Madrid. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice is seeking his extradition for alleged financial support of Hamas, according to a spokesperson for the Spanish high court. This is the first known case of the US seeking extradition of a citizen over alleged support for Hamas… It is unfolding as Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, convened 66 countries this week – including Spain – as part of a broader effort to discredit leftwing activity as terrorism…”
In reality, of course, Hamas is a legitimate resistance movement and the ones who should be arrested on terrorism charges are Israelis, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dares to visit the UN in New York in August, but that fine point is not about to bother Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. One can only assume that the Trump Administration will be moving sharply to the right over the next three months, labeling all critics as threats to the security of the United States of America. The initial focus will be on foreigners living in the United States, but the mechanism will easily be expanded to include all critics or supporters of resistance groups, like is happening to American citizen James Chambers in Spain. It is easy to go to Congress or have the White House declare some entity “terrorist” and people who support them in their resistance to US policy will begin to be on the receiving end of punishment. That is what is coming unless we the people unite to put an end to it right now!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.