President Joe Biden thinks giving Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel billions of dollars in direct military aid is a “good day for peace.” His statement is irrational. U.S. military aid is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the past year, and millions of deaths since the inception of our nation. Many of these deaths were children and civilians.
Colorado coach Deion “Prime Time” Sanders is a bully. His treatment of Colorado’s football players shows he has no regard or respect for them as men.
Social Security is not broken, contrary to what Congress tells us. Congress owes the Social Security Administration the 2.7 trillion dollars it “borrowed” from the fund. Repay this first before saying the fund is insolvent.
According to Evangelical megachurch pastor and grizzled culture war general John MacArthur, there’s no such thing as mental illness, especially PTSD. Someone should sue MacArthur for not only being an asshole, but practicing medicine without a license.
President Joe Biden supports “peaceful protest.” Evidently, “peaceful” means doing what you are told or we will send in the police to arrest you. Biden is clueless when it comes to war, peace, civil disobedience, and nonviolent resistance.
Atheists, agnostics, and nones overwhelmingly support Joe Biden. Why, then, does the president and the Democratic Party pretend we don’t exist?
Kristi Noem shot and killed her fourteen-month-old puppy. She also killed a goat that she deemed unworthy of continued life. Noem is a bad person, yet she is being considered for vice president on the Republican ticket. The Republican Party lacks a moral and ethical foundation. Trump is their God, and whatever he says is law.
Evangelicals think Taylor Swift’s latest album is Satanic and anti-Christian. Good job, Taylor! Anyone that pisses off Evangelicals is good by me.
Childhood immunization should be required before students enter school. No religious exemptions, and that includes students in private religious schools.
God did not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah due to homosexuality. It’s in the Bible. Look it up.
Bonus: Churches should be required to run annual state and federal background checks on all clerics. staff, and volunteers. Churches that refuse to do so should lose their liability insurance coverage.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
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, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
The Biden Administration says the United States is not at war with the Houthis. We are bombing the hell out of them, but that’s not “war.” Sure . . .
G-Poem is not a surgical procedure, even though it is invasive, done under general anesthesia, and takes 2 hours to perform. G-Poem, which I hope to have done soon if my insurance pays for it, is considered by doctors to be a “procedure” or “intervention.” I learn something new every day.
Electric vehicles are not ready for prime time — especially in rural areas. Terrible actual battery life (especially in cold weather), high repair costs, lack of parts, and sparsity of charging stations that work make owning an EV a no-go for most rural people.
PayPal donations in 2023 dropped significantly, while Patreon supporters stayed steady. I know I don’t push asking for donations, but I wonder if I should be more aggressive in this regard.
Creon, a pancreatic enzyme replacement made from pig pancreases, is used for the treatment of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency — a rare disease. I take nine capsules a day — three with full meals, two with smaller meals. Cost? Almost $3,000 a month. Fortunately, the drug company is paying most of the cost. How long this will last remains to be seen.
Gastroparesis, another rare disease, affects stomach/bowel motility. Food doesn’t transverse the bowel as it should. I’ve had food take 4 days to make it through my digestive system. Food will stay in my stomach for hours before emptying, leading to nausea, vomiting, pain, and a plethora of bowel problems. Gastroparesis is incurable, with few treatments available. Drugs, Botox injections, G-Poem, feeding tubes, and nerve stimulators are the only treatments available for gastroparesis.
I received some free light bulbs, night lights, and a power strip from First Energy (Toledo Edison). I wonder how much “free” is going to cost me on my electric bill.
Income tax time. Kill me now.
Winter is taking its toll on wildlife. Last night, we had three deer in our yard scrounging for food. This afternoon we had thirteen cardinals at our feeders — beautiful red birds against a white snowy landscape.
New year, new insurance company: Aetna Blue Cross, Blue Shield. My therapist is not in network. 🤬 We need universal, single-payer health insurance for all. This will not happen in my lifetime.
Bonus: New network programming is back. I’m already bored. We are rewatching Treme onMax. Now there’s an awesome show.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
“Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. This sentiment is a form of racism, and a person who harbors it is called an antisemite.” Wikipedia
I have no hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. Not one scintilla. I have never uttered one word that could be considered antisemitic, yet in recent weeks I have been accused of hatred for the Jewish people. Evidently, unless you blindly and without reservation support the military, political, and religious objectives of Israel, you are guilty of antisemitism.
Defenders of Israel love to use the “antisemite” label to cut off all discussion about Israel’s eight-decade-long apartheid practices. During the United States’ immoral wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush famously tried to cut off all discussion and debate by saying “You are either for us or against us.” Who wants to be considered un-American during a time of war, right? This is exactly what is happening now with Israel’s war against Palestine. Either you are on Israel’s side or you are an enemy of the Jewish people.
I am against all war. As a pacifist, I see war as a failure of human imagination; an inability to solve conflicts without violence. While I grudgingly admit that self-defense is, on rare occasions necessary, few wars are prosecuted for self-defense reasons. When nation-states wage indiscriminate war, the result is always failure. There are other ways to settle conflicts, but we humans tend to take the easy way out by using violence, bloodshed, and carnage to settle our disagreements. That’s what Hamas did, and that is what Israel is currently doing.
Peace in the Middle East is possible, but until the West sees Israel as part of the problem, peace is impossible. Israel must be held accountable for their crimes (as must Hamas), and as long as they are given a pass, blood will continue to flow in the streets. Driven by Bible verses, Israel will not stop until they take ALL the land God promised to Israel in the Old Testament. There’s no room for a two-state solution, and as long as that is true, Palestinians will continue to push back against Israel’s apartheid practices.
As long as dead children keep piling up in Gaza, I will not turn a blind eye to Israel’s murderous behavior. Further, I hold the United States and President Joe Biden responsible for the war. As long as Israel has the U.S. standing with them and funding their military, they will continue to do what they are doing. Cut off the money and tell Israel that we will NOT defend them if they expand this war to Lebanon and Iran. As long as their bully big brother stands behind them in support, the bloodshed will continue and could lead to the deaths of American soldiers.
Call me an antisemite all you want, but I will continue to care about the deaths of children and other innocents far more than I care about being labeled a Jew-hater.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Over the weekend, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a stirring speech to the Israeli people about Israel’s war against Palestine. Netanyahu made it clear that the conflict is a religious war.
“The biblical reference to Amalek is genocidal,” noted one theologian after the prime minister invoked an ancient enemy. “The Bible commands to wipe out Amalek, including women, babies, children, and animals.”
Human rights defenders on Monday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of an “explicit call to genocide” after he delivered a televised address calling Israel’s imminent invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked an ancient mythical foe whom the God of the Hebrew Bible commanded the Israelites to exterminate.
Declaring the start of a “second stage” of Israel’s war on Gaza—which he described as a “holy mission”—Netanyahu said that “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”
According to the Hebrew Bible, the nation of Amalek was an ancient archenemy of the Israelites whose extermination was commanded by God to Saul via the prophet Samuel.
Netanyahu believes that Israel must do to the Palestinians what the genocidal God of the Old Testament commanded Saul to do to the Amalekites:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. (I Samuel 15:3)
Is this not exactly what Israel is presently doing in Gaza? How then, does their slaughter of Palestinians not constitute genocide or war crimes?
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
“As for evidence, you might be aware of Israel. That nation has been in the news much of late. So, without being flippant at all, I present Israel as evidence. Think about it. They are living the script written thousands of years ago. Not by chance.“
— Don, A Christian Apologist
Israel as evidence for the existence of God. I’m thinking about it as Don suggests.
Where did it all begin, this bizarre notion that one tribe in the Middle East was chosen by God to be his special people? According to the Genesis myth, it was when YHWH promised Abraham he’d be his best buddy forever and ever, so long as he mutilated his body and those of his sons in perpetuity. They would also have to keep every one of this bullying god’s 365 rules and regulations, including the petty and piffling ones. So far so good, apart from the fact it was all very one-sided, and the mutilation of course. You’d think this would’ve been a sign that things weren’t quite kosher, but no; Abraham and his descendants buy into it and almost straight away, YHWH begins to let them down.
God’s Chosen Ones soon find themselves slaves in Egypt. A second mythical character is needed – up pops Moses – to get them out of this scrape. Unfortunately, after Moses has finished chatting with YHWH, who identifies as a burning bush on the top of a mountain, the sulky deity feels slighted by something the Israelites are doing. As is his way, he has many of them slaughtered and the rest he forces to troop around the same small plot of land for 40 years. This is how best buddies treat each other!
Later, the Jews find themselves defeated by the Babylonians and are carted off into exile. This exile, which YHWH does nothing to prevent, lasts 70 years. Still, it leads to a pleasant song made famous by Boney M in 1978 so I suppose it was worth it.
For the next few hundred years, Israel fell under the rule of other nations more powerful than itself. Not to worry though, YHWH is still ‘looking after them’, particularly those who are slaughtered in the rebellions that ensue. As Robert Conner says in a recent comment on Debunking Christianity, ‘If Yahweh ever threatens to bless you and your children, just kill yourself and get it over with.’
Fast forward to the Roman occupation of Israel. YHWH, having undergone a makeover, reneges on his promise to take care of his Chosen Nation forever and ever and comes up with a different plan to save people from his own cussedness. Now, if they want to continue as his friend, they have to believe a supernatural being has returned from the dead.
Abandoned by God, as he now wants to be called, Jews who haven’t defected to the new faith see their sacred, eternal temple destroyed by the Romans in AD70. Thousands of them are massacred and the Jewish nation ceases to exist.
This sets the pattern for the next two millennia in which God’s new friends organise pogroms, massacres, and vicious persecution of Jews. This culminates in the Final Solution of the Third Reich which seeks to eliminate the Jewish people entirely. While awaiting extermination in a concentration camp, Andrew Eames scrawls on the wall of his prison: ‘If there is a God, He will have to beg for my forgiveness.’ God allows six million of his Chosen People to die at the hands of the Nazis.
Following the Second World War, Israel took possession of the area surrounding Jerusalem, then occupied by Palestinian Muslims who are themselves descended from earlier immigrants. Thousands on both sides are slaughtered in the conflict that follows. In 1948, after almost 2,000 years, Israel became a nation once again; not through any miracle of God but as a result of human endeavour and bloodshed.
Tension and further skirmishes followed, leading to the present day when Israel finds itself under attack by Hamas terrorists. Thousands of innocents – women, children, and babies – have been slaughtered without mercy. Israel is, as I write, retaliating and intends to enact further vengeance. And where is God in all this? You guessed it: nowhere to be seen.
According to some – including the naive writer at the top of this post – all of this serves as evidence of God’s existence. That Israel has persevered for so long, despite opposition, persecution and the holocaust is not, however, evidence of God, any more than the great cathedrals of the world are. It is instead testimony to the resilience, resolve, and sheer bloody-mindedness of the people themselves. Perhaps their belief in YHWH (they don’t, of course, recognise his Christian counterpart) has fuelled their persistence, as it has their territorial claims.
Jewish beliefs and history are not evidence that YHWH exists. If anything, his apparent abandonment* during their many trials and tribulations is evidence to the contrary.
*Of course a non-existent entity can’t actually abandon anything, any more than it can lend its support or favour one group of people over another.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Children have always suffered the most from human thirst for dominance, power, and control. Governments and political leaders regret their deaths in war, but see them as necessary collateral damage in their quest for real estate. Fundamentally, the war between Israel and Palestine is about a promise the Jewish God allegedly made to a storybook character named Abraham. Thousands of years later, Israel demands the world accept as fact that God gave them all the land (and more) that currently makes up Palestine and Israel. Countless people have died and will continue to die as Isaac and Ismahel continue to fight over whom the land belongs to.
Israeli and Palestinian children bleed and die without difference. Yet, for some reason, many Americans think Palestinian children “deserve” suffering and death; that they must pay the price for the sins of others. Of course, this should not surprise us. The Old Testament is a written record of God commanding his chosen ones — Israel — to slaughter his (their) enemies. Why should we expect Israel to do anything differently today? Hamas can be brought to justice without destroying Palestine, but Israel has no interest in doing so. Much like the United States did after 9-11, Israel plans to kill anyone and everyone — including children and civilians — who stands in their way of destroying Hamas (and by extension, Palestine).
And so Israeli and Palestinian children will continue to die.
Thousands of miles away, Ukrainian and Russian children will continue to die.
Syrian children will die.
Yemeni children will die.
African children will die, both from war and starvation.
The world says it cares about children, but the actions of major world powers and militia leaders alike suggest that children are an inconvenience; their deaths are a necessary consequence of humankind’s endless fight over real estate.
Americans wept over the children killed on 9-11, yet when it comes to Afghan, Iraqi, and Palestinian children, their deaths are considered necessary consequences of the war.
As long as the blood of innocents flows in the streets, don’t tell me about the justness of your war and the greatness and rightness of your God. All I see are bloody hands.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Evil is a word bandied about these days, used to describe people, groups, and institutions that commit violent, vile, abominable acts against innocents. The word evil is also used to describe offending political and social beliefs. In Evangelical circles, the word evil is used to describe human behaviors that run afoul of their interpretations of the Bible or standards. Thus, two people of the same sex engaging in sexual intercourse are evil. Both the person and the act are evil.
Scores of Evangelicals have emailed or messaged me to let me know that I am “evil.” Never mind the fact that I have never committed evil. My beliefs and/or behavior offend these riders of the high moral plains, so I am given the “evil” label.
Evil is used so often that the word has lost a lot of its power and meaning. There was a time when we reserved the word evil for Hitler and Stalin. Today, a person is evil just because he wrote a blog post that denied the existence of God.
Israel and Hamas are currently at war. Hamas attacked Israel, killing over 1,200 people, many of whom were innocent men, women, and children. Hamas’ wanton slaughter of innocents certainly meets the qualifications for the label “evil.” I have listened to and watched a lot of programs over the past two days where Hamas was called evil. I have yet to hear a podcast host, news anchor, or Middle East expert, say the same about Israel. Oh, I heard the voices of people who recognize Israel’s barbaric response to Hamas’ attack, but none dare utter the word “evil.” To do so would be professional suicide.
Let me be clear, Hamas is evil; its murderous actions against Israel are evil. What I refuse to ignore is the fact that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is evil too; that its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is every bit as evil as the violent, murderous actions of Hamas insurgents. The West seemingly wants to give Israel a pass on its war crimes, much like they did to the United States when it invaded Iraq and Afghanistan — killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
Fundamentally, war is evil. How can it be otherwise? The goal of every war is to inflict maximum violence on your opponent, hoping that the bloodshed, carnage, and death will cause them to surrender. There’s no such thing as a “good” war. As a hypocritical pacifist, I recognize that war is inevitable; that as long as humanity is divided by race, ethnicity, economic status, resource availability, and geographical borders, men and women will kill each other, hoping to either maintain the status quo, gain power, or financially profit. That said, there’s no moral high ground when it comes to war. Calling a war “just” as Christians often do doesn’t change the fact that the machinations of war run contrary to all that is just, holy (for the religious), and good.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
U.S. President Joe Biden informed the American people that he personally contacted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today, reminding him that Israel must play by the “rules of war” when they attack, level, and destroy Gaza.
The “rules of war?” Really? There are no rules of war. Oh, there are conventions, treaties, and agreements, but nation-states rarely abide by them. When it comes to war, there are no rules. States agree to abide by rules until they don’t.
In the present conflict between Hamas and Israel, both parties have already ignored the “rules of war” and committed horrific war crimes. It is certain that both Hamas and Israel will continue to commit war crimes in the days and months ahead. As of today, Israel turned off the electricity and water in Gaza. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are under siege. Told to flee the rage bombing of Israel, Palestinians literally have no place to go.
Let’s stop with the talk about the “rules of war” and “war crimes.” Such rules may exist on paper, filed somewhere in the bowels of government, but practically speaking, these rules are ignored with nary a thought. War crimes? Let me be clear, “war” itself is a crime against humanity. The governments of the world have spent most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries slaughtering one another. And to what end? Hostilities cease for a time, something will provoke a military response, and war returns with a vengeance, with no thought given to the rules of war or whether their actions are crimes.
To President Biden, I ask, “Israel has already committed war crimes and will continue to do so as God’s chosen people turn Gaza into a rubble-strewn parking lot. Will you commit to holding them accountable for their crimes against innocent men, women, and children?” No need to respond, I already know the answer. It’s no; it is always no. The United States has a long history of committing war crimes — both intentional and accidental. We have no moral high ground on this issue — or any other, for that matter. If President Biden wants to do something that will save lives in Palestine, how about ending U.S. military funding to Israel? Instead, the President plans to give Israel billions of dollars more in military aid. The United States is funding multiple wars across multiple fronts. According to Reuters, the U.S. is the largest arms exporter in the world — $206 billion in 2022. In 2021, that number was $138 billion. War is certainly good for business, with no thought about the war crimes men and women will commit with these weapons of mass destruction.
Rules of war? There are no rules of war, only carnage and death. There are no winners, only losers.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
Horror on all sides. What is there to say on the conflagration consuming Gaza and Israel? As the US and much of the Western world denounce the Hamas “terror,” millions more acknowledge its savagery but painstakingly insist we see nuance and context in desperate acts of resistance by a people who have long had done to them what they, now, have done in turn – in the only way they feel they can avow, “Palestine will not be buried.” The awful lesson: “Ultimately, the dispossessed will rebel.”
Hamas’ armed Al-Qassam Brigade said they launched their largest rocket attack against Israel in over 15 years, and its unprecedented, accompanying infiltration by land, sea, and air “deep into the heart of Israel,” in response to “the crimes of the Occupation.” After firing up to 5,000 rockets toward Israel in the first 30 minutes, they urged all Palestinians to join the battle, declaring, “Today the people are regaining their revolution.” In what’s been widely deemed “an intelligence fiasco,” the “Al-Aqsa Flood” took Israel’s “invincible army” and famed surveillance system by surprise, leading to clashes in up to 50 locations even as sirens sounded across a stunned Israel and Palestinians in disbelief freely walked around abandoned IDF bases. To date, Israel’s death toll has climbed to 900, including 260 young people at a music festival; Israeli strikes have killed 700 Palestinians in Gaza, home to 2.3 million people with nowhere to flee; thousands more are injured on both sides; Hamas has taken over 100 Israelis captive, reportedly including many officers of Israel’s Southern Command; and, in an ultimate irony, video showed thousands of Israeli settlers running away in helpless terror of the kind of violence often experienced by Palestinians at their hands.
Amidst the chaos, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu raged that Israel will “take mighty vengeance,” that we “will strike them,” “will annihilate terrorism,” will turn Gaza “into cities of ruins” in a pitiless war that has “only started.” Of such rhetoric, along with its barbarous actions, was the current carnage born. “These developments did not occur in a vacuum,” noted the Palestinian observer to the U.N. The violence is a “chilling reminder that occupation and oppression bear a price,” the “apotheosis of what happens at the end of a road of exhausted options,” the inevitable result of a decades-long Israeli rule that “demanded the unquestioning surrender of its victims, refused to accept defiance in any form, and produced a generation of Palestinians who have lost faith in nonviolent resistance.” It’s also a likely “turning point” in the struggle between Israel’s apartheid system and the Palestinians who live under it. Years after creating “a pressure cooker” in the world’s largest open-air prison and periodically “mowing the lawn” to keep its lid on, writes Mitchell Plitnick, “Israel would have us believe it was because Hamas are just vicious killers who have a bloodlust for Jews. In reality, it was the actualization of what anti-apartheid activists have been warning about for many years.”
Tipping the balance, many argue, were “the provocations of the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history.” This year has been deemed the deadliest for Palestinians since the height of the Second Intifada, with 248 civilians (40 of them children) killed this year (almost the same number as at the music festival). The number of IDF raids, arbitrary arrests, home demolitions, random shootings and killings, settler mobs left free to burn villages, evict civilians, and attack holy sites has soared as far-right Israeli officials call for Palestinian genocide and expulsion. In the West Bank, 3.5 million Palestinians live packed into segregated cantons between Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land, an “Apartheid Wall” and new “Apartheid Road,” and endless checkpoints. In Gaza, over 2 million survive in cramped refugee camps under unlivable conditions, constant air strikes, and a suffocating 16-year-long blockade with contaminated water, sporadic power, and so few jobs that 80% depend on international aid. A recent report found that four of five children say they live with depression, grief, and fear, and yet Israeli officials have seemed intent on perpetuating a brutal, longstanding, counter-productive, doom cycle: “Cage, smother, subdue, repeat.”
They were evidently so intent on upholding their status-quo oppression that they missed what media have called “Israel’s 9/11” in the most catastrophic intelligence failure since the last October surprise, almost precisely 50 years ago, of 1973’s Yom Kippur War. Both times, observers charge, Israeli hubris played a part. Then, its leaders ignored peace offerings from Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and intelligence of an attack; now, Israel’s “invincible” military remains overly confident, somewhat disorganized, and beholden to an ultra-nationalist government incapable of choosing any alternative solution to any problem except military violence – and secure in the knowledge a complicit U.S. will fund their bad choices. Thus did their American friends leap to condemn Hamas “terrorists,” rushing to declare their support for “our incredible ally” “defending” itself against what J Street called “murderous” Palestinians. The GOP rushed to blame Biden’s “weakness,” but none came close to a rabid Stephen Miller’s “Straight-up Seig Heil shit” as he raved Biden “turned calm into calamity” with his “rules-based international order” – like no genocide – in contrast to Trump’s “clear-eyed realism (and) raw projection of national strength” when “our world was at peace.” (What the Goebbels-loving fuck).
Democrats joined in to condemn Hamas; so did Bernie Sanders, but at least he recognized that “innocent people on both sides will suffer hugely” as a result. His former foreign policy aide Matt Duss also noted the attack destroyed the idea that “we can just bottle up the Palestinians and it won’t matter,” insisting the right of people to live in security “includes Israelis and Palestinians.” Declaring “there is no excuse (for) what Hamas has done,” he added, “Palestinians have continued to suffer under an occupation and blockade that is decades old. That is absolutely necessary context.” Startlingly, CNN also let Palestinian advocate Dr. Mustafa Barghouti cite the context of “the longest occupation in modern history” and a system of apartheid that has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. The U.S. “cannot say that Israel has the right to defend itself, but we the Palestinians don’t have the right to defend ourselves,” he said, citing 560 Israeli military checkpoints, 5,300 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the charge that any Palestinian who resists occupation is terrorist, violent, provocative, or anti-Semitic. “We should all have equal life, we should all have peace, we should all have justice, we should all live in dignity,” he said. “The way to achieve that is to end the occupation.”
Movingly, Israelis have spoken out to acknowledge blood only begets more blood, to concede their dread “is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis.” “We need to act with sensitivity,” said the father of a girl taken captive from the music festival, asking she be rescued but “only by peaceful measures.” “(Palestinians) also have mothers who are crying.” Israeli journalist Orly Noy dismisses the bellicose threats by a corrupt Netanyahu: “Rightfully he is now seen as personally responsible. He seeks to save his own political skin.” She understands a desire for revenge, but fears “the erasure of any moral red line,” arguing “it’s important to remind ourselves that everything inflicted on us now” – shootings to civilians taken captive – “we have been inflicting on Palestinians for years.” “Ignoring this context is giving up a piece of my own humanity,” she writes. “Because violence devoid of context leads to only one possible response: revenge…the opposite of security, (of) peace, (of) justice. It is nothing but more violence.” While “terrible crimes were committed against Israelis this Saturday…in this time of dark grief, I cling to the one thing I have left to hold onto: my humanity. The absolute belief that this hell is not predestined. Not for us, nor for them.”
Still, the devastation goes on. An Israeli airstrike killed 19 members of one Palestinian family in Rafah; said Abu Quta, 57, “There were screams. There were no walls.” As Israelis beg their government for help finding captive relatives – “They are not telling us anything” – the IDF’s “Swords of Iron” operation has fired 3,284 no-warning rockets at “Hamas targets” that are in fact often apartments, houses, mosques, schools where Palestinians huddle in terror: “We do not know what fate has in store for us.” In response to the relentless airstrikes, Hamas has said any time Israel targets civilians in their homes without warning, they will “regrettably” execute one captive Israeli civilian. Israel has recovered the bodies of over 1,500 Hamas fighters, and escalation looms: Gazans try to flee south fearing an Israeli ground assault, Hezbollah militants have been killed at the Lebanon border, as was at least one Israeli commander, among 85 IDF casualties. Israel’s U.N. Ambassador, without irony, accused Hamas of “war crimes…The era of reasoning with these savages is over.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a yet more draconian “complete siege” against Gaza’s “human animals” (see below): “Nothing is allowed in or out. No electricity, food, water. (Also a war crime). And Netanyahu has vowed “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price” from attacks “with neither limitations nor respite.” “What we will do to our enemies,” he said, “will reverberate with them for generations.” True, and tragic, for all of us.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen 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.
