Global
As the 2020 presidential election entered its final stretch, Christina Bobb was not just covering it as a TV newswoman for the pro-Donald Trump One America News Network (OANN). The tall, dark-haired, clear-speaking ex-marine and lawyer was working to overturn it.
When, as expected, President Joe Biden signs off on the Antisemitism Awareness Act the Department of Education will be empowered to send so-called antisemitism monitors to enforce civil rights law at public schools as well as at colleges to observe and report on levels of hostility towards Jews. The monitors’ reports will eventually wind up in Congress which can propose remedies as required, including cutting funding and recommending civil rights charges in extreme cases. One of the more regrettable features of the act is that it accepts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism as it applies to the state of Israel, making criticism of the Jewish state ipso facto antisemitism. Its text includes the “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” as an antisemitic act. In reality, however, actual antisemitism is not as prevalent as Israel partisans claim.
Persisting in his support for an unpopular war, the Democrat in the White House has helped spark a rebellion close to home. Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.
I wrote the above words recently, but I could have written very similar ones in the spring of 1968. (In fact, I did.) Joe Biden hasn’t sent U.S. troops to kill in Gaza, as President Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam, but the current president has done all he can to provide massive quantities of weapons and ammunition to Israel — literally making the carnage in Gaza possible.
Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision.
For hundreds of years, the map of the Roman Empire seemed more Mediterranean and, ultimately, Middle Eastern than European - per the geographic, or even geopolitical demarcation of today's Europe.
Hundreds of years of conflicts, wars and invasions redefined the Roman identity, splitting it, by the end of the fourth century, between West and East. But, even then, the political lines constantly changed, maps were repeatedly redrawn and identities fittingly redefined.
Mine! Mine! Mine! Praise God . . .
This is perhaps the worst thing human beings do: They take their deepest values — connection, love, empathy — simplify them down to a religion, a name (Christianity, let us say, or Judaism, or whatever) and suddenly they have a flag to wave and a “cause” to go to war for. And the blood flows. Kill the savages! Kill the non-believers! Kill the enemy! (Take their land.)
Here’s the question of the day, as Israel continues to inflict hell and starvation on Gaza, as brutal conflict and murder rage across the planet: How do we reclaim — and maintain — the integrity of our deepest values? Acting in love and connection with an “Other” is, or can be, remarkably complex; declaring the Other to be an evil being who doesn’t deserve to live not only simplifies things enormously, but allows part of humanity to connect with itself, in fear of that enemy.
VINNIE DESTEFANO’S information on Julian Assange includes a way YOU can help by calling your Senators & Representatives to get him FREE!
MYLA RESON, DAVID GURAN and WENDI LEDERMAN chime into the amazing battle to save the right to practice journalism anywhere on Earth.
RUTH STRAUSS talks to us about “Outside Agitators” and Joe Biden.
From Georgia's RAY MCCLENDON we hear the latest on the Trump prosecutions and also on the arrival of the Vogtle nuclear plant already devastating the Peach State economy.
Republican Arizona state Senator KEN BENNETT explains the 4-point program for guaranteeing safe, fair, digitally scanned paper ballots that produce accurate outcomes in public elections.
With legendary election protection pioneer JOHN BRAKEY we conduct an astonishing excursion into the workings of the AZ legislature’s progress into the world of actual democracy.
Will this publicly verifiable method of conducting the vote counting and auditing process become a national model? Let’s hope so.