The Middle East is complicated because it’s not just Israel vs everyone else. Many Arab states do not like Iran and deep down some are not as interested in helping the Palestinians as they pretend to be. Different agendas are driven by religious affiliation, tribal loyalties, ethnicity and economic interests. Trump wants to solve the Iran problem. Israel provides some of the leverage and impetus to achieve a solution to the Iran problem. Ultimately, all the Middle East players will have to decide how they want that region of the world to look if they desire a lasting peace, which will include neutralising Iran (ie no nukes) and resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I am not greatly hopeful they can achieve this given the history, even if we could eliminate the Anglo-Zionist interference, US interventions, colour revolutions etc. But Trump will certainly be doing everything he can to encourage them to do so.
How is Iran a problem? Iran doesn't have nukes--although it could have attained that long ago. Any cursory reading of the history of Persia/Iran will show a history not unlike that of Russia, of being constantly invaded and attacked. Name one country that Iran has attacked by choice in modern history.
How is Israel NOT a problem? Israel was created in war and lives by war. Israel has nukes that it uses to threaten its neighbors, whom it has attacked regularly over the decades since 1950. Virtually all of Israel's wars--contrary to the propaganda narratives--have been wars of choice driven by expansionist ambitions.
They want seaside homes along the Gaza coast for ‘gorillionnaires’ (someone made up that beauty) and, of course the gas off the coast, and a genocide is simply the price that we have to pay for it to happen. We know who the ubermenschen schemers are. Why do we do nothing about them?
It seems impossible that Trump is so bright, look what he has accomplished
via his business and candicacy etc... Yet too stupid to understand Russia Ukraine situation
eg: # of Russian soldiers KIA
and impossible to believe Trump is too stupid to inquire before speaking and making public statements addressing Putin.
I read alot of people stating Trump is being misled Trump is being given the wrong figures - But again I find it difficult to believe Trump is foolish enough to believe anyone giving him figures or relying on Biden administration left overs given his experiences in his first 4 years
The US has sent over 14,000 2,000-lb. MK-84 bombs to Israel since Oct 2023.
From Wikipedia:
"The Mark 84 can form a crater 50 feet (15 m) wide and 36 ft (11 m) deep. It can penetrate up to 15 inches (38 cm) of metal or 11 ft (3.4 m) of concrete, depending on the height from which it is dropped, and causes lethal fragmentation to a radius of 400 feet (120 m)."
Here is a video that shows the destruction that these these bombs can do:
"Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday thanked Trump for lifting the hold, writing on X, “Thank you President Trump for yet another display of leadership by releasing the crucial defense shipment to Israel. The region is safer when Israel has what it needs to defend itself."
The Israeli FM's words gall me:
Israel is "defending itself"?
Israel is "making the region safer" by dropping the giant bombs on civilians and their communities?
"It's literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there..."
Israel is GUILTY of demolishing and killing in Gaza! but Trump won't say that. Instead, Israel will have the USA move the remaing civilians out of Gaza, and Israel will continue to take delivery of bombs and money from the USA.
The Zionists are making President Trump and his administration look like shmucks.
Trump will be/is complicit in the Zionists' murdering, land-grabbing plans.
Has anyone speculated that Trump repeating war propaganda is about getting Tulsi Gabbard as his DNI? What I mean is: what would happen if Trump said what all the "Putin sympathizers" want him to say? There would be massive media storm calling Trump a Putin Symp, a traitor, an anti-American, stupid, easily duped etc. Then they would go even harder against Tulsi because they are already doing that to her, they would call them two peas in the dictator loving pod--and it would be blasted non-stop not only in the American and Euro liberal media, but also by bot farms on social media. He can avoid that by simply repeating their propaganda, it makes sense as a practical measure for now.
Saw the headline this morning about relocating the people from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan. I’m not too clear on my history, but I believe that both Egypt and Jordan had terrible issues with displaced Palestinians in the past. They don’t want them. It will create incredible instability within their own countries and become a threat to their own governments. What could possibly be in it for them to help out Israel like that?
Post-WWII Allies carried out extensive ethnic displacement of Germans and nobody complained, so I guess the process is normalized in the American/global moral perspective.
Trail of Tears 2.0
Episcopal Bp. Mariann Budde is moving from strength to strength. Several prominent Episcopal churches in DC praised her chastisement of Trump, and further noted that Budde announced the Episcopal diocese's Resolution to continue acknowledging "harms done to [various Indian groups] over time in the Washington diocese." Good to know Budde will acknowledge the local version of Trail of Tears even as Trail of Tears 3.0 is to take place.
Budde has 'shot her wad' -- hard to imagine she & Episcopal diocese will have the ability to influence Trump against his apparent plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Here is a scorching piece published at Unherd on how the Anglo Catholics (Canterbury) have succeeded in losing communicants (note: a picture is worth 1,000 words!). A job well done. And where was Welby or Budde on the subject of trans surgeries or unchecked immigration (UK version), or, more recently the coverup of the Rotheram gang rape scandal? What of the untold suffering of these people? The brazen hypocrisy of this church, both in the US and UK, and the one I was raised in, is there for all to see.
Agreed, ML. Thanks for posting. The comments are also quite good, and easier for an American layperson to understand. Here's one that I thought was particularly good.
Kirk Susong
15 days ago
UnHerd regularly publishes articles like this about the CoE: articles which treat the CoE as another contemporary business institution, with standard managerial problems – funding challenges, customer satisfaction, staffing problems, shifting priorities, conflicting strategic visions, etc. But it seems bloody obvious to me (and many others) that these are merely symptoms of the real problem – the refusal of the CoE (or UnHerd writers, for that matter) to take religious truth seriously. Christianity is not a form of therapy, but a set of factual claims about the world. Those claims must be tested and either accepted or found wanting. How silly to think we must remain studiously neutral about whether Christ was resurrected and whether Mohammed ascended and so forth… these claims – no less than claims about Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties or what happened in Wuhan in 2019 – have actual repercussions on how people live and govern themselves and evaluate their condition.
The CoE has been dying and dwindling for a very long time – loss of belief will do that to an institution whose motivating principle is (allegedly) belief. But it seems like a major tipping point, at least from CoE as ‘guardian of cultural heritage’ to CoE as ‘utterly irrelevant on every level,’ was the decision to admit hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims into the UK. That radically changed the dynamic of state-sponsored ecumenism that the CoE had come to represent. Previously the CoE’s official stance was something like uneasy but official broker among Christians of varying stripes who agreed on 95% of those truth claims and disagreed about some seemingly minor ones.
But after these demographic changes, the CoE had to balance it’s supposed role as bulwark of the faith with the its role as ‘national’ church to millions who don’t even accept its cultural role, much less any actual religious one. In other words, some modest percentage of native-English atheists, agnostics and ‘nones,’ still want to sing hymns on Christmas and Easter and talk about the nativity and the King’s role as Defender of the Faith. But a much much smaller percentage of Hindus and Muslims want to do that. On the contrary, they would like official recognition of the significance of their own mutually-exclusive religious celebrations. The result is a watering down of the meaning of Christian holidays, in a futile attempt to make them congruent with other faiths’ holidays – Christmas becomes ‘a season of reflecting with gratitude on our many blessings.’ This is representative of what has happened to all forms of Christian worship under the auspices of the CoE – note the comment here pointing out how grateful Hindus, Muslims and Jews are when bishops in the Lords speak about the importance of some non-specific ‘faith.’
The reality is you cannot have a state church in a state formally committed to religious neutrality. That should be pretty obvious. So the CoE will just continue to die off until it once again starts to do what it started off doing, so many years ago: actually converting people – something most CoE priests are embarrassed to even consider doing. It’s been a good ride, but so long and thanks for all the fish, CoE…
The Middle East is complicated because it’s not just Israel vs everyone else. Many Arab states do not like Iran and deep down some are not as interested in helping the Palestinians as they pretend to be. Different agendas are driven by religious affiliation, tribal loyalties, ethnicity and economic interests. Trump wants to solve the Iran problem. Israel provides some of the leverage and impetus to achieve a solution to the Iran problem. Ultimately, all the Middle East players will have to decide how they want that region of the world to look if they desire a lasting peace, which will include neutralising Iran (ie no nukes) and resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I am not greatly hopeful they can achieve this given the history, even if we could eliminate the Anglo-Zionist interference, US interventions, colour revolutions etc. But Trump will certainly be doing everything he can to encourage them to do so.
How is Iran a problem? Iran doesn't have nukes--although it could have attained that long ago. Any cursory reading of the history of Persia/Iran will show a history not unlike that of Russia, of being constantly invaded and attacked. Name one country that Iran has attacked by choice in modern history.
How is Israel NOT a problem? Israel was created in war and lives by war. Israel has nukes that it uses to threaten its neighbors, whom it has attacked regularly over the decades since 1950. Virtually all of Israel's wars--contrary to the propaganda narratives--have been wars of choice driven by expansionist ambitions.
They want seaside homes along the Gaza coast for ‘gorillionnaires’ (someone made up that beauty) and, of course the gas off the coast, and a genocide is simply the price that we have to pay for it to happen. We know who the ubermenschen schemers are. Why do we do nothing about them?
It seems impossible that Trump is so bright, look what he has accomplished
via his business and candicacy etc... Yet too stupid to understand Russia Ukraine situation
eg: # of Russian soldiers KIA
and impossible to believe Trump is too stupid to inquire before speaking and making public statements addressing Putin.
I read alot of people stating Trump is being misled Trump is being given the wrong figures - But again I find it difficult to believe Trump is foolish enough to believe anyone giving him figures or relying on Biden administration left overs given his experiences in his first 4 years
The US has sent over 14,000 2,000-lb. MK-84 bombs to Israel since Oct 2023.
From Wikipedia:
"The Mark 84 can form a crater 50 feet (15 m) wide and 36 ft (11 m) deep. It can penetrate up to 15 inches (38 cm) of metal or 11 ft (3.4 m) of concrete, depending on the height from which it is dropped, and causes lethal fragmentation to a radius of 400 feet (120 m)."
Here is a video that shows the destruction that these these bombs can do:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/100000009208814/israel-gaza-bomb-civilians.html?smid=url-share
I am angry, and I am shaken.
And this, from The Times of Israel:
"Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday thanked Trump for lifting the hold, writing on X, “Thank you President Trump for yet another display of leadership by releasing the crucial defense shipment to Israel. The region is safer when Israel has what it needs to defend itself."
The Israeli FM's words gall me:
Israel is "defending itself"?
Israel is "making the region safer" by dropping the giant bombs on civilians and their communities?
"It's literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there..."
Israel is GUILTY of demolishing and killing in Gaza! but Trump won't say that. Instead, Israel will have the USA move the remaing civilians out of Gaza, and Israel will continue to take delivery of bombs and money from the USA.
The Zionists are making President Trump and his administration look like shmucks.
Trump will be/is complicit in the Zionists' murdering, land-grabbing plans.
Has anyone speculated that Trump repeating war propaganda is about getting Tulsi Gabbard as his DNI? What I mean is: what would happen if Trump said what all the "Putin sympathizers" want him to say? There would be massive media storm calling Trump a Putin Symp, a traitor, an anti-American, stupid, easily duped etc. Then they would go even harder against Tulsi because they are already doing that to her, they would call them two peas in the dictator loving pod--and it would be blasted non-stop not only in the American and Euro liberal media, but also by bot farms on social media. He can avoid that by simply repeating their propaganda, it makes sense as a practical measure for now.
100% agree.
Please come here more often, Pam
Saw the headline this morning about relocating the people from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan. I’m not too clear on my history, but I believe that both Egypt and Jordan had terrible issues with displaced Palestinians in the past. They don’t want them. It will create incredible instability within their own countries and become a threat to their own governments. What could possibly be in it for them to help out Israel like that?
el-Sisi views the importation of Palestinians as destabilizing and dangerous to the continuation of his own regime. Thus:
https://www.sis.gov.eg/Story/190173/President-El--Sisi-Deportation-of-Palestinians-is-a-non-negotiable-red-line-for-Egypt?lang=en-us
Also interesting in light of that:
https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/274978235/egyptian-russian-presidents-discuss-establishment-of-russian-industrial-zone-in-suez-canal-area
Leverage against Trump? Insurance? We should also not forget about Egypt's invitation to join BRICS.
Jordan on the other hand is an anglo-Zionist patsy.
Post-WWII Allies carried out extensive ethnic displacement of Germans and nobody complained, so I guess the process is normalized in the American/global moral perspective.
Trail of Tears 2.0
Episcopal Bp. Mariann Budde is moving from strength to strength. Several prominent Episcopal churches in DC praised her chastisement of Trump, and further noted that Budde announced the Episcopal diocese's Resolution to continue acknowledging "harms done to [various Indian groups] over time in the Washington diocese." Good to know Budde will acknowledge the local version of Trail of Tears even as Trail of Tears 3.0 is to take place.
Budde has 'shot her wad' -- hard to imagine she & Episcopal diocese will have the ability to influence Trump against his apparent plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Here is a scorching piece published at Unherd on how the Anglo Catholics (Canterbury) have succeeded in losing communicants (note: a picture is worth 1,000 words!). A job well done. And where was Welby or Budde on the subject of trans surgeries or unchecked immigration (UK version), or, more recently the coverup of the Rotheram gang rape scandal? What of the untold suffering of these people? The brazen hypocrisy of this church, both in the US and UK, and the one I was raised in, is there for all to see.
https://unherd.com/2025/01/justin-welbys-hollow-legacy/
Agreed, ML. Thanks for posting. The comments are also quite good, and easier for an American layperson to understand. Here's one that I thought was particularly good.
Kirk Susong
15 days ago
UnHerd regularly publishes articles like this about the CoE: articles which treat the CoE as another contemporary business institution, with standard managerial problems – funding challenges, customer satisfaction, staffing problems, shifting priorities, conflicting strategic visions, etc. But it seems bloody obvious to me (and many others) that these are merely symptoms of the real problem – the refusal of the CoE (or UnHerd writers, for that matter) to take religious truth seriously. Christianity is not a form of therapy, but a set of factual claims about the world. Those claims must be tested and either accepted or found wanting. How silly to think we must remain studiously neutral about whether Christ was resurrected and whether Mohammed ascended and so forth… these claims – no less than claims about Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties or what happened in Wuhan in 2019 – have actual repercussions on how people live and govern themselves and evaluate their condition.
The CoE has been dying and dwindling for a very long time – loss of belief will do that to an institution whose motivating principle is (allegedly) belief. But it seems like a major tipping point, at least from CoE as ‘guardian of cultural heritage’ to CoE as ‘utterly irrelevant on every level,’ was the decision to admit hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims into the UK. That radically changed the dynamic of state-sponsored ecumenism that the CoE had come to represent. Previously the CoE’s official stance was something like uneasy but official broker among Christians of varying stripes who agreed on 95% of those truth claims and disagreed about some seemingly minor ones.
But after these demographic changes, the CoE had to balance it’s supposed role as bulwark of the faith with the its role as ‘national’ church to millions who don’t even accept its cultural role, much less any actual religious one. In other words, some modest percentage of native-English atheists, agnostics and ‘nones,’ still want to sing hymns on Christmas and Easter and talk about the nativity and the King’s role as Defender of the Faith. But a much much smaller percentage of Hindus and Muslims want to do that. On the contrary, they would like official recognition of the significance of their own mutually-exclusive religious celebrations. The result is a watering down of the meaning of Christian holidays, in a futile attempt to make them congruent with other faiths’ holidays – Christmas becomes ‘a season of reflecting with gratitude on our many blessings.’ This is representative of what has happened to all forms of Christian worship under the auspices of the CoE – note the comment here pointing out how grateful Hindus, Muslims and Jews are when bishops in the Lords speak about the importance of some non-specific ‘faith.’
The reality is you cannot have a state church in a state formally committed to religious neutrality. That should be pretty obvious. So the CoE will just continue to die off until it once again starts to do what it started off doing, so many years ago: actually converting people – something most CoE priests are embarrassed to even consider doing. It’s been a good ride, but so long and thanks for all the fish, CoE…
Tx Cass for your typically generous and informative reflection on this dismal state of affairs! Wholeheartedly agree.
Haha “baffle em with bullishit” Perfect. I didn’t know how to explain his policy approach to people until now. Thank you.