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The humiliation of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers in the occupied city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) on July 10 was not the first such episode. Sadly, it will not be the last. 

 Indeed, the stripping of five women in front of their children, parading them naked around their family home and then stealing their jewelry by an Israeli military unit, was not a random act. It deserves deep reflection. 

 Palestinians rightly understood the event - investigated at length by the Israeli rights group B'Tselem, in a report published on September 5 - as an intentional Israeli policy.

In 2022, Getty Villa’s annual outdoor theater show, which – in keeping with the Romanesque museum’s décor and displays – are devoted to staging ancient Greek and Roman theater, mounted Sophocles’ Oedipus, about the ill-fated Theban king who, unwittingly, slew his father and married his mother. (Whoopsy!) Now, in that grand show biz tradition of “sequels,” this year Getty Villa is presenting a highly idiosyncratic version of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. Which chronologically is the second part of dramatist’s Oedipal trilogy (with Antigone being his grand finale). The 17th annual Villa Outdoor Classical Theater production is entitled The Gospel at Colonus, an unlikely hybrid of Greek tragedy and African American gospel music and spirituality.

According to writer/director Howard Skora’s Freud on Cocaine, during the early days of his career Sigmund Freud was an avid user of and experimenter with coke – if, but of course, for mainly professional purposes. Indeed, there is substantial evidence to support Skora’s contention, notably Dr. Freud’s own writings, such as his 1884 The Cocaine Papers. This subject has previously been dramatized, especially in the wonderful 1976 feature The Seven-Percent-Solution, starring Alan Arkin as a rather compassionate founder of psychoanalysis, who helps Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) overcome his addiction to cocaine (see the trailer at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075194/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_1_nm_0_q_The%2520Seven%2520Percent%2520Solution). 

Israel kills Palestinian children as a matter of policy. This claim can easily be demonstrated and is supported by the latest findings of a Human Rights Watch report.  

 The question is: why?  

 When the police or military shoot a child anywhere in the world, though utterly tragic, it can be argued, at least in theory, that the killing was an unfortunate mistake. 

 But when thousands of children are killed and wounded in a systematic, 'routine' and comparable method within a relatively short period of time, the killing of children must be deliberate.