Anti-Semitism is “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people” (OED).
Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, roughly corresponding to the historical land of Israel, and thus support for the modern state of Israel. Anti-Zionism opposes that.
It is evident, at least to me, that more than a few Democratic legislators are moving to the center, and even dipping their toes in the putrid, polluted water of the Republican Party. I am at the point where I am done with the Democratic Party at the national and state levels. Few are the Democrats willing to stand for liberal progressive values. One such issue is the current war between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Many Democrats, fearful of losing the support of pro-Israel voters (and donors), are now painting people such as I as holding anti-Semitic beliefs. How did they come to this conclusion? Some of us on the left dare to call things as they are. Yes, Hamas’ attack on innocent Israeli citizens was immoral and deserved a swift response from Israel. We saw similar circumstances when the United States responded to Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack on American civilians. If former President George W. Bush had just gone after Bin Laden and his fellow terrorists, I would have little objection. However, Bush/Cheney and Rumsfeld dragged the United States into a two-decade-long war that caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and bombed Iraq back to a third-world country. A war, by the way, that cost trillions of dollars and accomplished nothing other than violence, bloodshed, and death in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now, decades later, knowing that Saudi Arabia played a big part in the 9/11 attacks, the United States is best buds with them, selling them billions of dollars of offensive weapons.
Isreal could have focused its attention on Hamas — you know the terrorists who slaughtered Israeli civilians. Instead, they are now fomenting a genocide against innocent Palestinian men, women, children, babies, and unborn fetuses. Israel has deliberately targeted innocent people who had nothing to do with Hamas’ attack. As a result, Israel has killed at least fifty times the number of civilians killed by Hamas. Their genocidal actions against the Palestinian people are, without exception, immoral.
Yet, when people such as I dare to point this out, both Republicans and centrist Democrats say I am being anti-Semitic. When people say this, we know that they have drunk the Kool-Aid and are unable to parse the difference between someone being anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. I am the latter, not the former. I do, however, object to Israel’s immoral treatment of the Palestinian people. I object to their slaughter of innocent people. I object to their illegal settlements. I object to their roadblocks and identity check stations. I object to their indifference towards the starvation of Palestinians, who are starving as a direct result of Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza. I object to their refusal to accept a two-state solution. I reject the United States’ blind financial and military support of Israel — all because Israelis think a few verses in the Old Testament command them to do so
We must not cower and silence our voices when pro-Israel politicans — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents — use a pejorative definition of the terms anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. What concerns me is that many politicans want to trample the First Amendment, and make it illegal to criticize, demean, and condemn people who are dare to call Israel’s war against the Palestinian people what it is is: genocide.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The United States spends over a trillion dollars per year on defense and security. MAGA Republicans are determined to gut the federal government, but military and security spending is exempt from cuts. We show what we consider important by how we spend our money.
Congress plans to ban deep fake porn. This troubles me greatly. If passed, I won’t be able to make graphics of President Trump fucking the American people.
Hey, MAGA fans, Robert Kennedy, Jr. wants you to swim in a bacteria laden river or lake to boost your immune system. Dive in and open your mouth wide, Americans. Time to cull the herd.
Republican and Democratic legislators alike want criminalize speech in opposition to the nation of Israel. Criticizing Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people is labeled antisemitic. It’s evident that most politicians couldn’t define the difference between antisemitism and anti-zionism if their lives depended on it.
Millions of Palestinians are hungry or starving. What does President Trump talk about? Building a glitzy monument to excess in the West Bank. Spoken like a man who has never missed a meal a day in his life.
Am I the only one who is embarrassed every time King Stupid opens his mouth to speak? His crazy rants remind me of conversations among patients at a state mental hospital.
Four months into the Trump presidency, I’ve concluded that the President is a bully who loves to cause people to fear what might happen to them if they dare go against him. As a result, many law firms, corporations, politicians, and media companies have stopped speaking truth to power. And like most bullies, Trump will fold if people and companies stand their ground. Why so many business leaders and politicians don’t understand this is perplexing, to say the least.
It is clear, at least to me, that former President Joe Biden never should have run for reelection. Had Democrats understood this earlier, they could have had a real primary to choose a candidate to run against Trump. I have no doubt that Kamala Harris would not have won the primary.
Any thoughts about battling climate change are over. President Trump is doing everything he can to destroy theclimate. My grandchildren will pay the price for Trump’s anti-climate, anti- environment agenda. Species are dying off, and that includes us.
It’s summertime. Time to attend ballgames and concerts. Last week, we heard A Girl Named Tom. This week, we plan to hear The Fray. Other concerts on the schedule include 1985 (an 80s cover band), Killer Queen (a Queen cover band), Buffalo Rose, and Redferrin (country). Also on the schedule are minor league and Cincinnati Reds baseball games, dirt track car races, and plays, dance recitals, and baseball/softball games. Other concerts will be added later once they are announced.
Bonus: Want a kitten? We have eight of them. Two of last year’s feral cats had a litter of four kittens each. We do what we can for the stray and feral cats who visit our yard. However, we already have four cats — all strays — so we cannot take any more in. I plan to talk to the humane society about establishing a trap/neuter/release program for our community. The cats aren’t to blame; the assholes who abandoned them are. Someone told me that I should stop feeding the cats, and then they will go elsewhere. True, but I firmly believe I have a moral obligation to do what I can for the cats. All the cats survived the winter thanks to the heated boxes we put out for them. On some cold nights, there would be 4-5 cats in the boxes. I still felt sorry for them, but I’m glad they survived the winter.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Object to calling the prison in El Salvador the Trump Administration is using to house undocumented immigrants a concentration camp? Consider: “What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” (U.S. Holocaust Museum)
President Trump thinks executive orders are the equivalent of law. Unfortunately, Congress has done nothing to disabuse him of this false notion.
I saw a video of a Trump Cabinet meeting where the people seated at the table went around the room, one by one, giving praise to King Donald. Disgusting, to say the least. Trump is a petulant child who must be frequently praised lest he throw a tantrum.
When it comes to the Trump Administration, everything I see and hear reminds me of junior high. Well, except for the fact that these juveniles have a massive military and nuclear weapons. What could go wrong, right?
We are in the middle of a measles outbreak that has killed two children and sickened hundreds more, yet HHS director Robert “Worm Brain” Kennedy, Jr. is “investigating” the efficacy of vaccines. Just take Vitamin A, he says, and now we have children getting sick from vitamin poisoning. Kennedy is a threat to the health of the American people.
When Trump first appointed Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, I thought he was a decent pick. However. I noticed in a picture yesterday that Rubio has dark brown stains on his nose — the sure sign of someone who spends his days and nights kissing Trump’s ass. His behavior, so far, has been disgraceful.
President Trump wants to show the world he has a big dick. On his birthday in June, Trump plans to have a large military parade in Washington, D.C. Only authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have dick-wagging parades.
Doubt that MAGA is a cult? Some Republican members of Congress want to chisel Trump’s likeness on the face of Mount Rushmore, rename Dulles International Airport with Trump’s name, put his face on the $100 bill, and print a new $250 bill with Trump’s face on the front of it. And then there’s the Marjorie Taylor Greene types who think Trump is the greatest president to ever sit in the Oval Office. Can’t fix that level of stupid.
It’s hard to believe Andrew Cuomo is running to be the next mayor of New York. What’s next, Anthony Weiner running for president? Hell, why not? Morals and ethics no longer matter.
Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people continues unabated. While Hamas is the stated target, it’s clear that it is the Palestinian people who are facing the brunt of Israel’s bloodlust. It will take decades to rebuild Gaza — that is, if Trump doesn’t turn Gaza into an amusement park for American billionaires.
Bonus: The Cincinnati Reds are one game above .500, having won four straight games. Dare I hope? Polly and I hope to attend several games this year.
Bonus Video: Do you have TRS — Tesla Regret Syndrome?
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
This series, titled Trump Dump, features outlandish, untrue quotes from Donald Trump, MAGA supporters, and Right Wing media. If you come across a quote for this series, please send it to me with a link to the news story that contains the relevant quote.
A lot of people forget that Gaza was once a place inhabited by both Jews and Palestinians until 2005 when Ariel Sharon decided to give it all away.
And the result we saw October the 7th. President Trump did something bold. He looked into the future and said kind of a what if. We don’t know exactly what might happen in Gaza, but here’s what could have happened in Gaza.
Gaza could have been Singapore. Instead, Hamas turned it into Haiti.
And I’m very optimistic that with his leadership, his bold and innovative thinking, he doesn’t think like the other politicians and diplomats have thought. I heard somebody say he’s thinking outside the box. That’s ridiculous. He’s not thinking outside the box. He throws the box away and says, let’s start with a blank slate and see where this could go. That’s leadership.
I will use this term, Maria. I think we will see something of biblical proportion happen with his leadership in the Middle East.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The 2025 Major League Baseball season started yesterday with the LA Dodgers playing the Chicago Cubs in Japan. This is sacrilegious. The first game of the year was traditionally played by the Cincinnati Reds. They are the oldest team in baseball. I’ve been to one opening day. No team and community does opening day better than Cincinnati. Hope springs eternal. While it’s doubtful the Reds will win the division, league, or World Series, they hopefully will field a competitive team and keep them competitive after football starts.
Trump allegedly won a golf tournament over the weekend. I say “allegedly” since Trump is a notorious cheat.
Over 400 Palestinians were killed, and 500 were wounded, in Israel’s latest genocidal attack on Gaza — with the support of the Trump Administration. There is no moral justification for Israel’s continued slaughter of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children.
U.S. Attorney General Barbie Doll Bondi wants to arrest people picketing Tesla dealerships, charging them with domestic terrorism. Evidently, Bondi doesn’t know anything about the Bill of Rights.
Will the rule of law survive Donald Trump and his minions? Maybe, but it increasingly looks like Trump plans to break the government, even if it means violating the law. What are people to do when a branch of government willingly breaks the law and ignores court rulings?
Trump wants new coal mines built — operations that will produce “clean coal.” There’s no such thing as clean coal, but the Trump Administration denies reality, so all things are possible when you are delusional.
Egg prices are coming down. Thanks to Trump? Nope. Those of us who live in farm country know that if you cull millions of hens due to bird flu infection, the supply chain will be disrupted and prices will go up until flocks are repopulated.
Trump plans to bend over and give Vladimir Putin what he wants as Ukraine helplessly stands by. Ukraine is a sovereign state. They, alone, should be negotiating with Russia. Trump wants the world to see him as a shrewd deal maker. I suspect Putin thinks Trump is a useful idiot.
Trump bombed Yemen yesterday, killing scores of civilians. Is it any wonder that hundreds of millions of people hate the United States? Every immoral bombing plants seeds for more terrorists. War and violence NEVER bring peace. After two world wars and countless other wars, it’s clear that many American politicians of both parties are warmongers.
Just because I oppose Israel’s immoral war against Palestine doesn’t mean I’m an antisemite. Supporters of Israel use the antisemite label to shut off criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. I’ve heard several Democratic leaders say protesters are “antisemites.” Others think protesters are “terrorists.” This tells me that some Democrats need a dictionary.
Bonus: After watching The Atheist Experience, Talk Heathen, and other atheist programs for the past fifteen years, I’ve concluded that Christians do not have persuasive arguments for the existence of God — the worst of which is Pascal’s Wager.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Come January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the forty-seventh president of the United States. A grossly unfit, vulgar man, Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college. Worse, Republicans took back the U.S. Senate and will likely continue to narrowly control the House of Representatives. With full knowledge of Trump’s racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and criminal conduct, a majority of voting Americans voted him into office. Rational, thoughtful people saw Trump as unfit for office, but tens of millions of rural white working-class people and Latinos thought differently. Even women, knowing Trump is a sexual predator who routinely and frequently dehumanizes women, voted for him. We want to blame white Evangelicals for blessing the United States with a second term of Trump’s lunacy, but the fact is, Trump won virtually every demographic category that matters.
Kamala Harris had a hard road to walk in her attempt to defeat Donald Trump:
Harris, largely an unknown candidate, had 100 days to mount an effective campaign. Trump has spent the past nine years, from the trip down the escalator to today, campaigning and promoting the MAGA/Trump brand.
Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden, saying that there wasn’t anything she would do differently from President Joe Biden. Hooking her wagon to a President with a 40 percent approval rating was a bad idea.
Harris is a woman. Some men won’t vote for a female candidate regardless of her party and policies.
Harris is Black. Many Americans won’t vote for a Black candidate regardless of his or her party and policies.
Both Harris and Tim Walz failed to adequately address the skeletons in their respective closets.
Harris made several mistakes that cost her votes.
First, Harris chose to ignore and distance herself from Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. Not allowing pro-Palestinians to speak at the Democratic Convention was a big mistake. Not supporting an Israeli arms embargo was a bad idea.
Second, Harris flip-flopped on numerous policies, abandoning the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and attempting to position herself as a centrist (as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before her).
Third, Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party as a whole, ignored the economic plight of working-class Americans, telling them that their struggles with inflation and never-ending price increases were not a big deal; and that the U.S. economy was booming. Democratic politicians and cable news pundits — especially on MSNBC — ignored the plight of the poor and working-class people, choosing instead to tout and preach up Bidenomics.
Fourth, Americans are tired of endless wars. The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was, by any measure, a debacle. Harris uttered not a word about the American war machine, the military-industrial complex, and runaway defense/security budgets. My God, Harris climbed in bed with Dick Cheney — a war criminal.
Fifth, Harris provided no comprehensive answer to the illegal immigration crisis at our southern border. Trump is right to point out we have an immigration problem even if his “answers” are racist and immoral.
I do not doubt that Trump will cause untold harm to our Republic and standing in the world. With Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as trusted advisors, it is likely the American people have hard times ahead. How Democrats respond remains to be seen. Personally, I am unsure of my continued support of the Democrats. I need time and distance before I decide who I want to support with my vote and money. As of today, I wonder if I should refocus my efforts on local/state issues. It’s been three presidential elections since the Democratic candidate for president was someone I voted for in the primary. Clinton, Biden, and Harris were not my first, second, or third candidates. I increasingly think that I have become too progressive/liberal for the Democratic Party.
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity, and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic, and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
….
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care, and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness, and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger, and a sense of worthlessness.
“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social, and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment, and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
….
We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world, and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose, and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
As you might surmise, I will have a lot more to say on these issues in the days/months/years that lie ahead. Today, I am depressed, filled with despair and anger towards millions of stupid Americans. In time, I will reorientate myself to the present reality. I am not ready to quit fighting, though I do plan to rethink my methodologies and support of the Democratic Party.
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
By Brett Wilkins, used with permission from Common Dreams
As the Biden administration pushes Congress to approve an additional $18 billion arms sale to Israel even as it wages what much of the international community considers a genocidal war against the people of Gaza, Palestine defenders on Friday urged U.S. senators to support an effort by Sen. Bernie Sanders to block weapons transfers to the key Middle Eastern ally.
The Biden administration is urging congressional lawmakers to sign off on the sale of a package involving as many as 50 McDonnell Douglas F-15 fighters, as well as munitions, training, and other support, to Israel. The sale cleared a key hurdle last month when two holdouts—Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democratic member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the top Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrat—agreed to support the transfer.
If given final approval, the sale would be one of the largest to Israel since it began its nine-month assault on Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7 attacks. More than 137,500 Palestinians have been killed, maimed, or left missing by Israel’s onslaught, which is the subject of both an International Court of Justice genocide case and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan’s bid to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas Chief Yahya Sinwar.
The Biden administration has approved billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and more than 100 arms sales to Israel since October. This, atop the nearly $4 billion Israel already got from Washington annually.
“While much of the media is focused on the drama of the U.S. presidential election, we must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse,” Sanders said Friday.
“Nine months into this war, more than 38,000 people have been killed and 88,000 injured—60% of whom are women, children, or elderly. The full toll is likely higher, with thousands more buried beneath the rubble,” he continued. “Nine in 10 Gazans—1.9 million people—have been driven from their homes.”
“Many people have been displaced four or five times, and most do not have homes to return to, with more than 60% of residential buildings damaged or destroyed,” he added.
“Israel continues to restrict the entry of [United Nations] humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza, prevent the entry of key humanitarian items, and obstruct aid workers’ access to many areas,” the senator noted. “These restrictions have prevented aid organizations from setting up a sustained, effective response.”
Sanders stressed:
Yet, in the midst of this horror and violations of international law, the United States continues to send billions of dollars and thousands of bombs and other weapons to support this war. We, as Americans, are complicit.
We must end our support for Netanyahu’s war. Not another nickel to make this horrific situation even worse. I intend to do everything I can to block further arms transfers to Israel, including through joint resolutions of disapproval of any arms sales. The United States must not help a right-wing extremist and war criminal continue this atrocity.
Palestine defenders backed Sanders’ effort.
“Every single senator should be supporting Sen. Sanders upcoming joint resolution of disapproval against an $18 billion weapons giveaway to Israel, which would further enmesh and implicate the U.S. in Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Institute for Middle East Understanding policy director Josh Ruebner said on social media.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Every year or two, I ask readers to submit questions they want me to answer. That time has arrived once again. Any question. Any subject. Please leave your questions in the comment section or send them to me via email. I will try to answer them in the order received.
I look forward to reading and answering your questions.
Jerry asked:
What was your view on the Israel vs Palestine situation when you were a Christian?
Determining my view on Israel and Palestine depends on where I was at a particular moment in my theological journey. I started the ministry as a premillennial, pretribulational dispensationalist. Israel was God’s chosen people, and all the land prescribed in the Bible belonged to them, and nations who bless or curse Israel will be blessed or cursed by God.
In the late 1980s, I left the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) and embraced Evangelical Calvinism. My eschatology changed to amillennialism and posttribulationalism. No longer a dispensationalist, I viewed the New Testament church as God’s chosen people. I saw a continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament. While I believed God had a plan for Israel, they, as a people, at this present time, have been set aside. This allowed me to view Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in a different light.
Today, I view the state of Israel — not Jews individually — as a violent bully propped up by the United States. Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison, depriving Palestinians of basic civil rights. I view their illegal settlements in the West Bank similarly. And I think it can be argued that the land “given” to Israel in 1948 was, in fact, violently appropriated from indigenous Palestinian people
The solution to the intractable war between Israel and the Palestinians is straightforward: the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Further, ALL the illegal Israeli settlements must be dismantled and the land returned to its rightful owners. Of course, these things will never happen as long as Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israelis are running the show. No amount of pressure from the United States will stop Israel from turning Gaza into a compact version of Syria. It will take decades for Palestinians to recover and rebuild. Their schools, hospitals, and infrastructure have been destroyed.
Rebuilding homes in Gaza destroyed during Israel’s seven-month military offensive could take until 2040 in the most optimistic scenario, with total reconstruction across the territory costing as much as $40bn (£32bn), according to United Nations experts.
An assessment, which is to be published by the UN Development Programme as part of a push to raise funds for early planning for the rehabilitation of Gaza, has also found that the conflict may reduce levels of health, education, and wealth in the territory to those of 1980, wiping out 44 years of development.
Expectations of a breakthrough in ceasefire talks in Cairo between Israel and Hamas have cooled in recent days, and many observers believe the conflict is likely to continue, if at varying degrees of intensity, for many months or even longer.
More than 34,500, mostly women and children have died since Israel launched its offensive, according to health authorities in Gaza, after Hamas attacked Israel in October and killed about 1,200 people. The militant Islamist organisation, which took power in Gaza in 2007, also seized 250 hostages.
More than 79,000 homes in Gaza have been “completely destroyed” in the conflict, with another 370,000 damaged, the new assessment found.
“Even under optimistic scenarios for the pace of physical reconstruction, the scale of destruction in Gaza has been such that, simply from the narrow perspective of moving in building materials, it would still take until 2040 and probably longer to restore the housing units destroyed since the start of the war,” the researchers concluded.
In addition, schools, health facilities, roads, sewers, water pipes and all other critical infrastructure have all suffered massive damage.
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“The scale of the destruction is huge and unprecedented. This is a mission that the global community has not dealt with since the second world war,” al-Dardari said.
The latest assessment found that, with the high number of casualties and the big destruction of health facilities in Gaza, life expectancy had already been reduced by a minimum of four or five years and was likely to be reduced by seven, if the war continued into its ninth month. Researchers also found that real GDP per capita in the territory could be reduced to its lowest level since the mid-1990s.
More than 37m tonnes of debris needs to be cleared in Gaza to permit reconstruction. The mountains of rubble are full of unexploded ordnance that leads to “more than 10 explosions every week”, with more deaths and loss of limbs, Gaza’s Civil Defence agency said on Thursday.
It is doubtful that a two-state solution will be achieved in the short term. Until Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is turned out of office and the United States stops funding Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians, no change is forthcoming. It is far more likely a regional or world war will break out than that a sovereign Palestinian state will be established. Netanyahu is hell-bent on destroying Gaza, and nothing the feckless Biden Administration says will stop him. President Biden is more concerned about reelection than he is about protecting innocent Palestinians.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Evangelicals love the Jews, or so they would have you believe, anyway. Grossly misinterpreting what the Bible says about Abraham and Jehovah’s chosen people, the Jews, many Evangelicals believe the future of the United States rests squarely on the unconditional support of Israel and its genocidal war against the Palestinian people. God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who don’t, so the thinking does. What’s not stated outside the safety of Evangelical churches is what else they believe about Jews:
Jews are not chosen in a salvific sense of the word. Because Jews reject Jesus as their Messiah, they will go to Hell when they die.
After Jesus returns to earth and raptures away his chosen ones — born-again Christians — earth’s inhabitants will face seven years of violence, torture, bloodshed, and death at the hands of God and the AntiChrist.
Many Jews will eventually bow a knee to Jesus, but going to Heaven after they die requires them to be martyred for their faith. As the movie A Thief in a Night showed, many of these Jewish martyrs will be beheaded for their allegiance to Jesus.
Jews need to be aware that these teachings lurk behind all the “We Love and Support Israel” talk flowing from Evangelical mouths. The Jews are just a means to an end, and when all is said and done, they will burn in Hell.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Like the Black movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for a free Palestine is global, not just a U.S. domestic movement. Central to the movement is opposition to the war on the civilian population of Gaza, rightly labeled genocidal. This combines with ongoing opposition to the slower-moving but still brutal Israeli offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Yes, the destruction of Gaza was in reaction to the unprecedented and unjustifiable October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas (rightly labeled terrorist) on Israeli civilians. But there is no equivalence between these two criminal acts, at least not in quantitative terms. To equate them is to engage in ideological posturing, not credible political analysis. Indeed the parallel between the terms “genocide” and “terrorism” is a lot more intelligible.
I have been told by family members I have in Israel that “all Palestinians are terrorists” (full disclosure: I am Jewish and the child of survivors of the Shoah), but I don’t think they really believe that; they are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply. I’m sure some Palestinians would say that Zionism equals genocide, but I don’t think they really believe that either. They are expressing their rage rather than thinking deeply.
The student-led movement for a free Palestine is not antisemitic. Thousands of Jewish students have joined it. Hundreds of rabbis and cantors too, as well as leaders of Jewish organizations and prominent Jews across U.S. society and beyond. Despite fervent attempts to stigmatize anti-Zionism as anti-Jewish, despite strident efforts on Israel’s part to merge its national identity with Judaism itself, or indeed with Jewish culture and ethnicity, despite the wildly inappropriate calls from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the U.S. to crack down on student protest, Israel does not represent all Jewish people or types of Jewishness. So the movement for a free Palestine is not a movement to destroy Israel and expel Jews. Everybody knows that the Israeli Jewish population is not going anywhere, any more than the Palestinians are. The phrase “from the river to the sea” is frequently used both by both Palestinians and Israelis. The movement for a free Palestine and the Israeli peace movement (small but important) should demand that that language be rearticulated so that it applies to both peoples.
Efforts to repress the student movement for a free Palestine will never succeed. It is too big and too broad. It is part of a worldwide struggle for justice. It is a working-class and poor people’s movement. It is an anti-racist movement and a feminist movement. It is an anti-colonialist movement, connected to the long struggle against European empires and the U.S. empire. It closely resembles the movements against South African apartheid and the Black Lives Matter movement, among many others.
It is not an accident that attacks on the movement have concentrated on repressing student voices. As they have so many times before, students have shown that they are our leaders in struggles for freedom, equality, and democracy. As has been true so many times before, opposition to the movement is concentrated among the wealthy and the right wing. It is wealthy donors who play the most significant role in opposing freedom for Palestinians, pressuring universities to prohibit pro-Palestinian speech and seeking to curtail nonviolent student protests. It is right-wing politicians who have become the new “snowflakes,” madly canceling students and faculty for the “antisemitism” of criticizing Israel. Not just the students, but the university itself is their frequent target.
Notably, universities were already under sustained attack before October 7, indeed long before that awful day. Universities are one of the most central institutions in society. They have not yet effectively been brought under the control of the wealthy, of anti-democratic governments and political parties, of racist and sexist power structures, and of repressive religiously based groups. This is because universities are institutions where knowledge and culture are produced, where democratic debate happens, where the wisdom of the past is preserved and studied, and where youth are able to develop their ideas and skills. Even though attacking universities is attacking their own children and destroying the futures of their own country, U.S. holders of wealth and power are willing to carry out those attacks, because they feel threatened by their own children’s views of the world. They fear the future they themselves are creating: one of permanent warfare, global heating and ecocide, and planetary apartheid. They hate being reminded, especially by their own kids, of their hypocrisy and violence.
The movement for freedom in Palestine shows us what a different future looks like. The movement demands university divestment from the Israeli warfare state and from Israeli apartheid. It calls out the oligarchs who threaten their own type of divestment, threatening to withdraw their funding from Penn, or Harvard, or the University of California, my own professional home. Let them go! Let them support Bob Jones University or Bari Weiss’ ridiculous University of Austin. Let them subsidize notorious political hacks like Christopher Rufo and political poseurs like Rep. Elise Stefanik (D-N.Y.). By and large rich donors’ funding is based on a hunger for prestige, not on any commitment to education. They seek tax write-offs. They subsidize their businesses through their donations. They hardly care about poor or working-class students, and even less about the humanities, arts, and social sciences, which are the fields where most undergraduate students major, and where the future of civilizational knowledge resides. Higher education is a public trust; it cannot be entrusted to the rich. As elsewhere in the world, it should be financed by the public, not greedy and blind billionaires.
The movement for freedom in Palestine is a new kind of movement, because it is not siloed. Students supporting freedom in Palestine have learned from Palestinians. Many have noted the connections between the Black Lives Matter movement and Palestinian freedom struggles. For example, in 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Palestinians who had long experience with the repressive police tactics of the Israelis taught Black protesters how to resist militarized police repression. (Meanwhile the Anti-Defamation League ferried U.S. cops to Israel to learn torture techniques practiced upon Palestinians.)
Movements resisting U.S. ecocide, like the Oceti Sakowin water protectors in the Standing Rock reservation, as well as anti-pipeline protesters and other climate justice activists, have learned from the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank defending their land against settlers who cut down their olive groves and destroy their water wells. U.S. feminists have learned from Palestinian women, like the then 17-year-old Ahed Tamimi, who in 2018 slapped an Israeli soldier as he tried to enter her family’s house in the occupied West Bank town of Nabi Saleh. U.S. LGBTQ activists have repudiated Israeli “pinkwashing” to express their support for Palestinians. U.S. doctors and nurses are supporting their Palestinian counterparts, reacting in horror as Israel has destroyed every hospital and health facility in Gaza. U.S. educators are supporting Palestinian scholars and teachers as Israel has blown up every university in Gaza, and has razed schools in the West Bank. People in the U.S. who take their religion seriously, rather than using it to score political points, recognize that Israeli policies imposing mass starvation would make Jesus weep. And Rabbi Hillel, and the Prophet Mohammed, and Mohandas K. Gandhi too. What would Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. say about Israeli policy in Gaza?
The movement for the freedom of Palestine, led by students, has emerged at long last as the leading political current in the worldwide struggle for freedom in general. Just as the student-led Black freedom movement led the global freedom struggle in the years after World War II, joined by anti-colonial movements and the student-led anti-Vietnam War movement, the movement for the freedom of Palestine has taken its place in the struggle’s leadership today. Or course the movement has its flaws: There are unsavory allies like Hamas and Iran whose politics hardly coincide with those of the student movement; Jewish students get harassed on campus just as Muslims do; not only Islamophobia but antisemitism lives on in the U.S., notably on the Christian right where the Quran is defiled and Rev. Hagee praises Hitler as an avatar of the Rapture.
But we have to look at the big picture: Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. Israel/Palestine can become a safe home for both Jews and Arabs. The student movement for the freedom of Palestine teaches us that the people of the world demand social justice everywhere, including in the Middle East. Mass murder solves nothing.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
