Peace

While many are earnestly pointing at the devastation of war, the rampant human rights violations and the deliberate relegation of international and humanitarian law, there are those who see war from an entirely different perspective: profits.

 For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales. 

 The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity. 

One thing you can say about the Administration of President Joe Biden is that nearly every week there is something new and exciting to discuss. Galloping dementia recently gifted us with Joe’s 11 minute abdication speech in which he announced that he would not be running for another term as president. He babbled about how he was taking the step in spite of his desire to continue.

Over the past 45 years, I have been active on the streets and on the
internet for our people struggle for return and self-determination in the
face of a most brutal and merciless colonial regime. I read thousands of
books and wrote a few myself. I read tens of thousands of research and
analytical papers (and wrote hundreds myself). The problem of our country
can actually be described very briefly. Its solution (remedies) can also be
described briefly. Implementing the solution would be doable and is the
only way to avoid a catastrophic world war.

So briefly, we have 15 million indigenous Palestinians, over 8 million of
us are intentionally made refugees or displaced people (and that number
increases daily). So far over 250,000 Palestinians were killed or perished
prematurely thanks to genocidal policies since 1948. A million were injured
and another million imprisoned since 1948. The perpetrator Jews fell under
the spell of an idea called Zionism that tries to convince people that
Jewishness is a nationality (Constantinian Judaism as called by Marc Ellis)
and thus that Jews as a collective not only have a right to this ancient

And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
And could only find his people
(Palestinian Poet Mahmud Darwish)

I hope we all continue to post about the ongoing genocide. We will not
rest, we will not stop- because this is the moral and most critical issue
of our time, the test of humanity and the test for all who claim they want
peace.

UN Office of the Coordinator of Humanitarian affairs. Update #199!
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-update-199-gaza-strip
but it is even worse: In Gaza, the Casualty Rate Is a Mere Fraction of the
Death Rate. Starvation. No Food or Medical Supplies are Entering Gaza

On Wednesday, July 24, 2024, the US Congress reached a new low. Our elected officials, once the envy of the world, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that, in the words of Will Rogers, “the United States of America has the best Congress money can buy.” Or, as Mark Twain said, “We have the best government that money can buy.” On this day of infamy, a certified war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been committing genocide in real-time for the past 10 months while the world watches, was received by the US Congress and hailed as a hero.

Everyday we hear horror stories from the Gaza strip (concentration camp).
70% of residential buildings are now destroyed, friends of ours that have
been forced to move 7, 8 or 9 times to places that are then bombed again.
Children burned or mutilated. Tens of thousands of women and children
murdered with Western Support. The situation here in the occupied West Bank
has been horrible before 7 October but the level of horror amplified ten
fold since. This increase in rate of home demolitions, land confiscation,
killing of Palestinians, military and settler pogroms against our people,
closing off of 12 ghettos/concentration camps created to store the unwanted
indigenous people.  All Palestinians are targets whether they miraculously
remained in Palestine or are in exile diaspora. The Zionist movement is
taking desperate measures to liquidate even the hope of liberation. Even
the delusional hope of a two state "solution" is obliterated with laws and
with increased colonial settlements: There are two times more colonial
settlers per square kilometer here in the West Bank than inside the Green
Line.

The First Gulf War back in 1990 was a big huge success. One of the things it accomplished was a major U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia. Muslims around the world were outraged. Bombs were repeatedly set off at Khobar Towers where troops were stationed. In 1998 Osama Bin Laden declared:

“For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. . . . The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

Much has been written about the political earthquakes in Britain and France, the first
resulting in the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party and the latter in the
overpowering of the far right, by a largely leftist coalition.
 
But these were not the only important outcomes of the July 4 and July 7 general elections
in two of Europe's most influential countries.
 
One other important, if not unprecedented outcome, was the centrality of the Palestinian
cause to the political discourses in London and Paris which, in truth, are only reflections
of greater changes underway on the entire European continent and body politic.
 
For a long time, we have been told that outward advocacy of Palestinian rights is a lost
political cause in Europe, where Israel holds a special status due to the West's historical
role in creating, sustaining and defending Israel.
 
That affinity, however, was cemented by more than mere political traditions. In countries
like the United States - but also Britain and France - the pro-Israel lobby served the role

As hard as I try, in the privacy of my own being, not to get caught up in the scathing absurdities of the moment — e.g., the presidential election, America’ looming fascism, our love of money and war (to name a few) — yikes, here I am, caught up in it all.

And all I can do is reach for a larger truth . . . peace will prevail, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And it so quickly feels like a cliché. Welcome to cynicism!

I swat at it, push it away, but it’s always there. So calm down, I tell myself. I’m doing so right now. In the context of a Biden blank stare and a looming Trump presidency, here I am, reaching for a sense of hope and transcendence — a sense of belief, a sense of joy, that humanity is evolving, that the present is just a necessary flicker in our becoming.

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