Donald Trump and Republican oligarchy will exploit immigrants to create a permanent labor class like slavery

Although this opinion is a little difficult to understand, I fully appreciate and support the premise, in short, the anti-immigration movement is, in truth, being manipulated by oligarchs to create a permanent low cost labor pool, akin to slavery. 

Actually, I have been thinking about this exploitation for quite a while and now the concept is explained, if you can grasp it, in this essay, by Jean Guerrero, in the The New York Times.

This spring, 2026, the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes decided that the war on immigrants was a lost cause. “Country’s over,” he said on his Rumble show. “We’re already a nonwhite country.” Earlier this year, he declared immigration a “dead issue,” arguing that President Trump “blew it” by linking arms with oligarchs and waging war on Iran.

“Immigration is becoming one of these issues that is used almost exclusively just to trick white people,” he said, a rare display of clarity for a man whose many bigotries tend to orient him toward confusion. In an anti-semitic post on X/, he argued that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim talk was a distraction. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel,” he wrote. And last month, he wrote on X: “The populist Left has all the energy now. Trump’s broken promises over immigration, Iran & Epstein have completely deflated any enthusiasm on the Right.”

Fuentes is just one of the influential figures in the anti-immigrant movement who are criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, which has set in motion a refugee crisis within Iran as his interventions in Latin America create the conditions for a long-term increase in mass migration to the United States from that region.

The discontent among immigration restrictionists emerged despite Trump’s crackdown on immigrants living in the United States. The administration muted the performative cruelty of its mass deportations after its deadly, unpopular actions in Minneapolis; however, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement surged to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest single monthly arrest total of Trump’s second term. Pundits and provocateurs who dread demographic change have spotlighted the contradiction with his foreign policy.

Disillusionment among immigration restrictionists can be traced to late last year when Trump began illegally blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, a performance of cartel warfare that was a prelude to his capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. (Maine Writer: By the way, where is that Venezuelan oil❓)

Trump endorsed a Honduran candidate whose party has been tied to cartels, protecting a start-up city there for tech billionaires. “Efforts to transform other societies end up remaking our own,” warned Mark Krikorian, an immigration restrictionist, in an article for Compact magazine, “Intervention Leads to Immigration.” Mr. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that appeared to have influenced Trump’s first-term immigration policies. He cited examples such as the Vietnam War and years of U.S. interference in Central America that drove a million people to leave.

The anxiety from leaders in the anti-immigrant movement has received less attention than the outcry from Trump’s isolationist voters. But it could be more consequential because immigration is the president’s signature issue — the one he relies on to divide and conquer. The disillusionment reveals an extraordinary, if uneasy, window of possibility: Working-class white Americans who are anxious about immigration could awaken to the fact that their interests are aligned with those of people of color across the world who want to stay in their homelands. They share an enemy: corporate and political elites who extract, exploit and expel across borders.

There have been moments in American political history when working-class solidarity briefly cut across racial and national lines. There was the Rainbow Coalition, a class-based multiracial alliance that the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton created in Chicago in 1969, the year he was assassinated. It included white Appalachian migrants and other white workers from the Young Patriot Organization, who renounced racism to unite with Black and Latino activists in opposition to shared economic oppression and who wore Confederate flag patches with Black power symbols.

In the late 1970s, labor organizers in Arizona split with the United Farm Workers union over its attacks on undocumented immigrants and established a more radical, transnational model of labor organizing that refused to distinguish between documented and undocumented farmworkers and built solidarity across the U.S.-Mexico border. “We are all subject to the same underlying disease: the inhumane and ethereal transnational corporation that has regard only for profit,” wrote union organizers in 1981.

People like Mr. Fuentes are too racist to embrace cross-border or multiracial organizing. But his declaration that immigration is a “dead issue” is a sign that Trump’s most powerful spell could be breaking. If working-class white Americans can be persuaded that their real enemies are the oligarchs and warmongers enriching themselves at everyone’s expense, not the migrants fleeing the chaos those oligarchs create, a different kind of politics could become possible. And Fuentes, like others on the right, is beginning to point the finger at the transnational tech billionaires behind Trump and Vice President JD Vance, like Peter Thiel. In fact, Fuentes often uses the term “globalist” to advance anti-semitic, racist and false propaganda about Jewish people controlling everything and replacing white populations with immigrants of color. In fact, transnational oligarchy benefits from race-based divisions that distract everyone from the oligarchs’ exploitation of all people. Americans all along the political spectrum are beginning to turn against parts of that oligarchy. In an era of extreme polarization, opposition to A.I. and protests against data centers are strongly bipartisan.

If anything can heal the rupturing body politic, it may be opposition to what the journalist Gil Durán details in his new book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.” He writes: “All around the world, Silicon Valley oligarchs are scheming to acquire land, resources and power. They see a world in decline and seek to profit by hastening its collapse — and remaking it in their own image.”

The Trump administration already revealed that the goal is not a strong American work force, but a forever exploitable one in service of transnational elites — which requires unregulated expansion of extractive technologies like artificial intelligence and locking immigrant laborers into a vulnerable state. Trump’s Labor Department has quietly restructured the H-2A guest worker program to make foreign farmworkers cheaper to hire, cutting hourly wages by up to $7 and allowing employers to count housing in their compensation. The United Farm Workers has sued, arguing the rule will depress wages for American farmworkers and push them out of the labor pool. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the changes were illegal, and ordered the Labor Department to redraft them.

Congress has also tried to expand this architecture of exploitation. 

A bipartisan bill would broaden H-2A eligibility to year-round employers currently excluded, like dairy farms. Other policies reveal the shift: Trump’s effort to revoke birthright citizenship would help create a hereditary underclass with fewer constitutional protections.

Trump’s immigration policies are not intended to eliminate immigrant labor; they are intended to strip that labor of bargaining power and rights. Trump’s foreign policy is perniciously symbiotic with that system. As he deports immigrants with jobs, with homes and with children who are American citizens, he is laying the foundation for the long-term displacement of newly marginalized people who will be more exploitable because they have no roots here.

What began as a push to expel and exclude dark-skinned immigrants from the United States has become something more sprawling and sinister: a transnational project of population control in service of elites. Call it transnational oligarchy — the strategic use of immigration policy and foreign interventions to manufacture and maintain an exploitable labor force. This is not compatible with white nationalism or any nationalism. It does not believe in borders. It believes in constraining the political and economic power of an ever-expanding category of undesirables.

“Various societies have tried sourcing cheap labor from non-functioning states,” wrote Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his most powerful advisers, in February on X. “The West is the first to import failed-state labor with full political rights: welfare, voting, and citizenship for the migrants and their families. When citizenship is global, self-rule is impossible.” It was one of his most revealing posts to date; the main problem, according to Mr. Miller, isn’t the sourcing of cheap labor. It’s the extension of rights to that labor.

Why would Miller defend Trump’s machinery of cross-border displacement❓ Miller is arguably the most radical anti-immigrant ideologue in U.S. history, but he has also been passionately defending Trump’s destruction overseas. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN in January.

As I documented in “Hatemonger,” my 2020, biography of Miller, he has long worked to strangle legal pathways into this country for nonwhite people. He is one of the main reasons federal agents are rounding up people of color with no criminal records, and it is his aggressive enforcement strategy that has led to anti-ICE protesters being shot in the streets. He is a longtime ally of Krikorian’s center, which influenced his views. For years, he has argued that mass migration hurts American workers, while benefiting corporate elites. Now his boss is embracing a foreign policy that is the fondest wish of those elites.

The administration’s war on immigrants is a Trojan horse for the eradication of equal protection under the law to create a permanent caste of laborers without rights.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders have pursued transnational oligarchy at the expense of immigrants and working-class Americans; it is not a one-sided evil. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have mastered it in one of the most perverse acts of political gaslighting, convincing working-class Americans to see them as the opposite of wh“Mass migration is a wealth (and political power) transfer from the American working class to migrants and to corporations,” Miller said in a post on X/ last year, conflating immigrant rights and corporate profits, as he often does, when in fact the inverse is true: corporations increase profits by offering low wages. It’s the war on immigrant rights, which Miller has pursued with zeal, that harms working-class Americans and entrenches inequality.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign and fighting for an economic bill of rights, which sought to amend the Constitution to establish a natural human right to be free from poverty and involuntary servitude. He wrote that it would help poor whites, whom he called “derivative” victims of slavery. “As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the Black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth,” he wrote. “It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market.”

Now, the subjugation of immigrants has taken the place of slavery in depressing the base of the labor market. Miller wants us to blame immigrants and those who advocate a pathway to citizenship — as if slavery were the fault of the enslaved and abolitionists.

It is time for a political movement that rebuilds economic dignity across borders — one that unites the white worker in Appalachia and the Indigenous land defender in Honduras, and exposes the war on immigrants for what it is: a war on labor here and across the world.at they are.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are not telling Americans the truth about the failed war in Iran

Editorial opinion published in the The Virginian-Pilot:

Americans deserve honesty from White House about Iran war

It’s called the fog of war — the uncertainty and confusion that can proliferate during the physical and emotional demands of combat operations. Orders and directions can be muddled, communication can break down, and those in the thick of it can struggle to find their footing.

For the Trump administration, though, events in Iran are more akin to a fog machine of war — from the shifting justifications for attacking in February, to the moving goalposts of what it hopes to achieve, to the deliberate obfuscation of the number of service members harmed.

Americans don’t need access to classified intelligence or after-action reports to better understand what’s happening in this conflict, certainly not anything that could put members of our military at greater risk. But the nation does deserve frank, honest talk from its leaders in order to properly assess the purpose, status and cost of a war it is being asked to support and to fund.

The United States, in partnership with Israel, launched a war against Iran on February 28. Donald Trump, speaking the morning of the initial strikes, called on the Iranian people to take control of the government and urged the armed forces to surrender, saying that “America is with you.”

What Donald Trump promised would be a limited campaign has subsequently proved to be way more complicated than he expected, reflecting why his predecessors never launched such a massive undertaking. His rationale has shifted in the weeks and months since, from halting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, to removing its leadership and, lately, keeping the Strait of Hormuz open to international shipping.

Trump asked Americans to follow this scattered logic and to trust in his handling of the war. But most aren’t buying into his arguments; polling this month by The Washington Post-Ipsos found 68% said the Iran war was not “worth fighting,” while just 28% said it was. The conflict is more unpopular than the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were at any point.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified before Congress that the Pentagon needs $67 billion in emergency funding to pay for operations, despite also claiming that Iran’s military was decimated. NBC News, citing internal DOD numbers, reports the cost of the war is already between $80 billion and $100 billion. Taxpayers will foot that bill, in addition to paying higher costs for gasoline, fertilizer and other goods due to disrupted trade in the Middle East.

And then there are the casualty numbers. This White House isn’t the first to obscure the number of service members killed and wounded in combat operations, but Trump and his allies painted the Afghanistan withdrawal — which Trump negotiated — as a colossal failure when an attack amid that chaotic exit claimed the lives of 13 Americans.

That was unquestionably a tragedy, so how can administration officials square their outrage with this action in Iran, where at least 18 service members have died, including four in the last week❓😔😡😢

One extricated our nation from a decades-long conflict while this campaign seems to be dragging the U.S. further into one.

The Pentagon finally admitted Monday that more than 100 troops were injured in recent attacks, but only when pressed by journalists to release that information to the public. 

A Defense Department spokesperson told The New York Times that “the ‘vast majority’ of … casualties since July 7 involved ‘mild concussions,’ and 96% of those service members have returned to duty.”

That is, indeed, welcome news. But Hampton Roads needs no reminder of the long-term consequences of injuries sustained in battle and the cost of caring for wounded service members, having endured those challenges for decades due to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Americans need a clear-eyed view of Donald Trump's illegal war, as do lawmakers making decisions about how — or whether — to pay for ongoing operations. That responsibility rests with the president, who should turn off the fog machine and level with the public about his war of choice.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans were overconfident about U.S. military power while cheap drones and A.I. are advancing war strategies

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas L. Friedman: Trump Is the One Without the Cards at the Poker Table

Donald Trump often falls back on poker metaphors. 

He told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he had “no cards” when it came to standing up to Russia. 

Trump told Iran’s leaders that they had “no cards” when it came to standing up to him.

Would somebody please tell me when it’s poker night at the Trump White House, because I’d really like a seat at that table❓🃏

Trump is betting that by blockading Iran to prevent it from exporting its oil he can force Tehran to negotiate on his terms. But some experts think Iran has enough income and can store enough oil to hold out for at least several months.

Meanwhile, Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump Always Chickens Out.

This is painful to watch. Trump and Tehran are each saying: “I will hold my breath until you turn blue.” We’ll see who gasps first.

The real question is: How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America? The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years.

Let's cut to reality. I don’t want to be too hard on Trump.  Afterall, he is not alone. Iran is to Trump what Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, what Hamas and Hezbollah have been to Benjamin Netanyahu and — wait for it — what the next generation of cyberhackers will be to China and America and every other nation-state.

Think about it: Last June, Ukraine smuggled 117 cheap drones into Russia hidden inside trucks and destroyed or damaged about 20 of Russia’s strategic aircraft, including multimillion-dollar long-range, nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

This year, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps used $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to strike two Amazon Web Services data centers, costing tens of millions of dollars, in the United Arab Emirates (a third Amazon data center, in Bahrain, was damaged in a nearby strike), knocking them offline and disrupting banking and other services across the Persian Gulf region.

Previously, Hamas commanders said that they fashioned small rockets from piping from abandoned Israeli settlements, unexploded Israeli bombs and other munitions and even parts from a sunken British World War I warship off the Gaza coast. Israel was forced to use Patriot missiles costing $4 million each to intercept them.

In other words, we’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages.

“We have always thought of power in terms of the ability to create mass destruction,” John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming “Troubled American Way of War,” told me in an interview. In an interdependent world, “the many and the small now have the ability to create ‘mass disruption’ in the physical or the virtual world” — from the Strait of Hormuz to cyberspace.

Trump recklessly started this war without allies, without any scenario planning and, obviously, without any real understanding of Iran’s assets in asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, it would be a disaster for the region and the world if Iran’s malign regime emerges from this war intact and unreformed, because an even more powerful asymmetric tool kit for bad guys is just arriving.

Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing: We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on “information-age tools” that can wreak mass disruption to what my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, calls an age of asymmetric warfare based on “intelligence-age tools” that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand.

My translation: You’ve read a lot about how Iran has used cheap $35,000 drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. Wait until you see how it can leverage large language models and their A.I. agents at a very low cost.

How will Iran gain access❓ Just recall the story that broke a few weeks ago: The A.I. giant Anthropic announced that its newest artificial intelligence model, Mythos, was simply too good at finding vulnerabilities in the operating systems and other software programs that so many companies and utilities run on. Days later, OpenAI made a similar announcement about its own cybersecurity-focused model, GPT-5.4-Cyber.

As Bloomberg reported, the flaws Mythos has discovered are the kind that “often represent a gold mine for hackers because they offer a window of free rein inside vulnerable systems.”

Anthropic and OpenAI both elected to restrict the release of these A.I. systems to only the most critical and responsible software generators so they could find and patch their vulnerabilities before these tools might one day be released more widely. But guess what happened❓

Unauthorized users got hold of Mythos anyway.

Bloomberg reported last week that a few outsiders gained access but that Anthropic said it had no evidence that the access impacted any of its systems. The group of unauthorized users “is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them,” Bloomberg reported, based on information from an unidentified source.

It is hard to exaggerate how destabilizing these rapid advances in A.I. sophistication could become, and it is why Mundie and I have been arguing for a while now that the two A.I. superpowers — the United States and China — need to figure out how they can (and surely will) continue to compete strategically while also cooperating to neutralize these new asymmetric intelligence-age threats — not unlike the United States and the U.S.S.R. did to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

Otherwise, neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must put an end to hate speech. Tragically Donald Trump has normalized the ugliness of "hate"!

Echo opinion by Armstrong Williams, published in The Baltimore Sun with a follow up reader's letter*

Hate is ugly- full stop❗❗

Like sex, hate sells. Possibly even more so. 

Unfortunately, the modern economy of outrage rewards those who can turn resentment into revenue. To denounce another as the worst possible type of person is to buy a ticket to fame. It pays dividends, gets clicks, builds audiences and keeps people listening. In the digital marketplace of ideas, indignation is the only currency that never devalues.

Truth, however, is bankrupt. We have grown so addicted to emotional certainty that facts are now treated as inconveniences. Few care to examine whether their assumptions are wrong, or whether the person they loathe is not, in fact, a monster. The only “facts” that matter are the ones that affirm what we already believe. Those who control the levers of information — media outlets, social media platforms, activists and politicians — understand this perfectly. They’ve learned that rage keeps people watching, sharing and donating.

It’s a strange moment in our culture. Good news no longer travels. Even when there is progress — record charitable giving, declining global poverty, medical breakthroughs — few seem to care. Hope is quiet; hysteria is loud. What sells isn’t the story of a community rebuilding, but the image of that community burning. We are not drawn to calm, but to chaos. We crave villains because they give shape to our anxieties. We want to see the boogeyman.

But here’s the truth: There are very few boogeymen left. At least not the kind that once haunted America. Rarely do we see organized, racially motivated killings in the United States today, though there has been a distressing rise in antisemitic attacks since the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel. 

But the days of the Ku Klux Klan marching in the open or white supremacist cells bombing federal buildings have long passed. What remains are small, miserable, irrelevant groups — pale imitations of what once terrified the public. Yet they dominate our airwaves.

Why❓ Because fear is profitable. Networks, influencers and political campaigns have discovered that outrage converts into engagement, and engagement converts into money. The algorithm rewards anger, not reason. The more you hate, the more you scroll. The more you share, the more they earn. The villains we see on our screens are not reflections of reality, but of the market.

Meanwhile, the countless good people who make this country function go unnoticed. The teacher who stays late to help a struggling student, the firefighter who risks his life in a burning home, the small business owner who employs people in his community — these are the quiet heroes. But they don’t trend. They don’t drive ratings. And so, we barely see them.

We’ve inverted our moral priorities. The destructive are celebrated; the constructive are ignored. Outrage has become a form of entertainment, and the producers of hate are its most successful showrunners. This is not to deny that real hatred still exists — it does — but to point out that much of what we now consume as “hate” is curated theater, engineered to sustain attention.

The result is a nation that increasingly mistakes anger for virtue. We’ve come to believe that the louder we condemn, the more righteous we are. But moral noise is not moral clarity. It’s a performance. And as long as we reward it, the performance will continue.

If we truly wish to weaken hate, we must stop buying tickets to its show. Stop amplifying 📣 those who profit from division. 

Stop feeding the algorithm of outrage. Start sharing what is good, noble and constructive about this country — because there is much of it left.

The real rebellion in an age of hate is not to hate back. It is to refuse to be manipulated. The media cannot manufacture outrage without our participation. The demagogue cannot rise without our applause. And the hate-peddler cannot sell without our attention.

America’s greatest strength has always been its capacity for renewal — for rediscovering its decency after moments of darkness. Perhaps it’s time to rediscover that again. Not by pretending evil doesn’t exist, but by refusing to make it our entertainment.

Until we do, hate will remain one of the most profitable products in America — and we’ll keep paying for it with our peace of mind.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

*The recent column by Armstrong Williams, “Armstrong Williams: Why has hate become so profitable?” (Oct. 11), was a beautifully written and thoughtful commentary on the profitability of hate. 

His opinion is a welcome acknowledgement and description of a serious issue in today’s civil discourse.

Williams outlined a simple correct strategy for disarming the trend — “not to hate back.”

Perhaps someone should impart it to the person who said “I hate my opponent and don’t want the best for them.” That would be President Donald Trump.

From — Nick James, in Baltimore

Antisemitism language includes Anti-Zionism

 An echo opinion published in the Chicago Tribune by Kenneth Seeskin.

Demonstrations protesting Israel’s role in the war in Gaza claim that Zionism is racist, colonialist, even genocidal. The response among many Jews has been to accuse the demonstrators of thinly veiled antisemitism. Lawsuits charging universities with antisemitism are pending and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened numerous investigations.

Are antisemitism and antizionism the same or different?

In 2010, the U.S. State Department proposed the following as a working definition of antisemitism: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

The State Department tried to clarify its position by providing numerous examples of the kinds of actions that would count as antisemitic. Unfortunately, their examples raise more questions than they answer. Chief among them: what is the relation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? Or more precisely: what exactly is Zionism and how is it related to Judaism?

Is Zionism (A) commitment to a Jewish homeland, (B) some level of support for current Israeli policies such as the Israel-Hamas War, or (C) active involvement or total support for the war? I will take them up in turn.

The State Department tried to clarify its position by providing numerous examples of the kinds of actions that would count as antisemitic. 

Unfortunately, their examples raise more questions than they answer. Chief among them: what is the relation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism? Or more precisely: what exactly is Zionism and how is it related to Judaism?

Beginning in the 19th century, the need for a Jewish homeland became a hotly debated topic among world Jewry. 

Thinkers on the political left argued that in an enlightened age, Jews would be accepted as full citizens in the countries where they lived, making a homeland unnecessary. By contrast, many Orthodox thinkers opposed the idea that a homeland for Jews could be created by secular means and put their trust in divine intervention instead.

It is also worth noting that unlike Christianity, Judaism is defined by birth rather than belief. A Jew is someone born to a Jewish parent (traditionally a Jewish mother) or someone who wishes to join the Jewish people by converting.

For example, if one were to list the various nationalities in the world, there would be Greeks, French, Koreans, English, Brazilians, Chinese, Italians — and Jews. If, on the other hand, if one were to list the great world religions of the world, there would be Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism — and Judaism. Jews are listed twice, which means they are both a nationality and a religious community.

Although one of the examples of antisemitism listed by the State Department is “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist,” there were and still are Jews who reject the idea of a homeland. A prominent Hasidic rabbi once claimed that the Holocaust was divine punishment for the sin of Zionism. ❓ (Makes no sense❗) ✡️

Pundits on both side of the conflict say that it is unrealistic to think that after centuries of hatred and violence, Jews and Palestinians can live side by side and retain their respective identities. Perhaps so, but what does such alleged “realism” offer us other than endless brutality?

If it is realistic to continue fighting without ever stopping to ask what a more humane alternative would be like, then I say that being realistic amounts to moral bankruptcy.

To be sure, these people are a minority. According to a 2020, survey undertaken by the Pew Research Center, 8 out of 10 American Jews thought that Israel was either essential or important to their identity. Most synagogues include a prayer for the State of Israel as part of their worship service.

But the tide may be turning among younger Jews. A Pew Research Study in 2022, showed that 41% of Jews aged 18 to 29 had a favorable opinion of Israel while 69% over 65 did. As the war in Gaza drags on, that gap has surely increased.

Regarding (B), many Jews oppose the occupation and the war in Gaza but still feel a tie to Israel. Huge crowds of Israelis have demonstrated against the Netanyahu government prior to October 7. According to the 2020, study, only 1 in 3 American Jews thought Israel was sincere in its pursuit of peace.

That brings us to (C), whose adherents support Netanyahu’s goal of “total victory” regardless of the consequences. Although I don’t have exact figures, I suspect that in America, they too are a minority.

In sum, the relation between Judaism and Zionism is complicated depending on what era one is talking about and how one understands key terms. Criticism of Israel is not necessarily antisemitic. But one thing the State Department got right is that there is no basis for holding the Jewish people as a whole responsible for the actions of Israel.

The problem is that those who demonstrate against Israel rarely take the time to study history or consider definitional questions. Not surprisingly many contain slogans calling for a worldwide intifada, or complete elimination of the State of Israel, where half the world’s Jews now live.

Should the world tolerate a Jewish state? At present it tolerates more than 15 states which are officially Christian and 23 which are officially Muslim. As for me, I support a cease-fire in Gaza, humanitarian aid, release of the Israeli hostages and the creation of a Palestinian state to exist alongside a Jewish one; in short, a two-state solution.

For most Jews, the debate over Zionism ended after World War II. The idea that Jews would be accepted as full citizens in an enlightened age seemed to go up the smokestack at Auschwitz. 

Main entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. This photograph was taken some time after the liberation of the camp in January 1945.

While reliance on divine intervention might be a comforting trope in the prayer book, it did not answer the question of what to do with the thousands of Jews left homeless by Nazi devastation or who were expelled from Islamic lands.

Kenneth Seeskin is professor emeritus of philosophy and the Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Professor of Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University.

Pope Francis messages to people and the human condition- strong anti ISIS message

"May Christmas bring them hope, as indeed also to the many displaced persons, exiles and refugees, children, adults and elderly, from this region and from the whole world," the Pope said.

Although Pope's speak formally from Scripture, I'm probably typical about not following Papal communications out of the Vatican in Rome. Pontiffs strive to speak in inspiring narrative, yet their messages don't usually have an impact on our daily lives.

Pope Francis has certainly broken the Vatican's Roman Catholic communications mold. Beginning with his vernacular greeting "buonasera", when he was presented as the newly elected Pope on March 13, 2013, he opened a new era of Papal communications. 

Throughout his public life, both as an individual and as a religious leader in Argentina, Pope Francis has been noted for his humility, his concern for the poor. He is dedicated to dialogue as a way to build bridges between people of all backgrounds, beliefs and faiths.

As Pope Francis continues to capture the world's attention because of his charisma, he applies his aura to some cutting edge messages.

The Pope's Christmas message on 2014 has put the evil forces of the Islamic State aka "ISIS" on notice for a forthcoming avalanche of Christian wrath. As a matter of fact, ISIS has given the Pope a bully pulpit, whereby all people who are vitriolic against the Islamic extremist group's terror tactics are in awe of his spiritual leadership.  Pope Francis wears the white Papal robes of hope.  This is in brilliant contrast to the ISIS extremists, who drape themselves in totally black robes and burkas. The contast is extraordinary because Pope Francis definitely captures the light of enlightenment, compared to the medieval repressiveness of ISIS.

In his Christmas message, Pope Francis spoke directly to ISIS about the group's persecution of Christians.

Vatican City (Reuters) - Pope Francis condemned the "brutal persecution" of minorities by Islamic State insurgents in his Christmas message on Thursday and urged people not to be indifferent to the suffering of so many around the world. 
 
In his second "Urbi et Orbi" - to the city and the world - Christmas message, the pontiff highlighted the plight of victims of conflict in Syria and Iraq.  
"Too many people are being held hostage or massacred" in Nigeria, he added.

Pope Francis also urged dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians and condemned Taliban attacks in Pakistan.

Tens of thousands of people turned out on St Peter's Square to hear the Argentine Pope deliver his annual message.

He said Christians in Iraq and Syria had endured conflict for too long, and "together with those belonging to other ethnic and religious groups, are suffering a brutal persecution".
"May Christmas bring them hope, as indeed also to the many displaced persons, exiles and refugees, children, adults and elderly, from this region and from the whole world," the Pope said.

Tens of thousands of people turned out on St. Peter's Square to hear the Argentine pope deliver his "Urbi et Orbi" (to the city and the world) blessing and message, marking the second Christmas since his election last year.

Pope Francis also appealed for an end to conflicts in African countries, urged dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, condemned the attack by Taliban militants that killed more than 130 students in Pakistan last week, and thanked those helping the victims of the Ebola epidemic.

But he reserved his toughest words to defend the victims of Islamic State fighters who have killed or displaced Shi'ite Muslims, Christians and others in Syria and Iraq who do not share the group's ideologies.

Moreover, Pope Francis also does the unexpected.  On Christmas Eve, he made a surprise telephone call to refugees in a camp near Irbil, in Iraq's northern Kurdistan region. "You are like Jesus on Christmas night. There was no room for him either," he told them.

It's likely the Pope doesn't often hear from the people who are touched by his personal messages. Therefore, in the unlikely event he happens to read this blog, I would like to be sure and close by saying,  "God Bless You Pope Francis".  

Civilian airliner Malaysian flight 370 as new age terrorism

I've been calling it "terrorism of unknown etiology". Malaysian airline flight 370 is a civilian Boeing 777 aircraft and it has disappeared because somebody with extraordinary flight expertise hijacked the airplane for a specific purpose. What's the purpose of this terrorist act?

Of course, conspiracy theories already about about how and why the flight disappeared. Any reasonable or logically thinking person would surmise the obvious, being the airplane is now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, having run out of fuel. But, that logic is too simple. Whoever hijacked the flight had a very nefarious purpose beyond sabotage, murder and suicide. At the outset, I maintained an Iranian connection to the hijacking. In the absence of evidence to counter my opinion, my theory is as reliable as any other. Somebody wanted the airplane to use for a strategic purpose. Suppose Iran could use the civilian airplane to slide past Israeli security and, like the proverbial Trojan Horse, land a missile right in the Ben Gurion Airport. 

At least one report is describing an Israeli response to the disappearance of the Malaysian aircraft.  

ISRAEL PREPARES FOR POSSIBLE ATTACK BY HIJACKED MALAYSIAN PLANE

As the possibility--however remote--grows that Malaysia Airlines flight 370 may have been hijacked and taken to a hidden location, Israeli authorities are preparing for the possibility that the hijackers might attempt to use the Boeing 777 to mount an attack. 

Times of Israel, Israel's Channel 2 has revealed reports that Israeli air defenses have been boosted, and approaching civilian aircraft will be asked to identify themselves far earlier.

Though the flight was presumed at first to have crashed, whole or in pieces, into the ocean, passive satellite transmissions from the aircraft suggest that it made a deliberate course change and may have headed north into central Asia.

Pakistan has said the flight never registered on its radar, but at least one expert suggested the flight could have landed in Bangladesh, whose air defenses presumably would be weaker.

Though the possibility that the Boeing 777 could be used in a terror attack is mere speculation, it is evidently being taken seriously by Israel. A plane filled with nuclear material would not need to be in Israeli airspace long to do catastrophic damage, even if shot down. There are no reports yet that the U.S. is taking similar measures, and U.S. officials have suggested recently that the likeliest fate of flight 370 was a crash into the Indian Ocean.

Nevertheless, the disappearance of flight 777 has opened a new error in terrorism surveillance. This terrorism with no known etiology will evolve until the world finally unites in opposition to the evil lurking among radical zealots, intent on killing people without regard for how civilization will be destroyed as a result of their heinous acts.

President Obama Gets High Marks During Mid East Visit: Did American Mainstream Media Miss This? I Think So.....

Where was the American press?  Thank you Frida Ghitis.

A CNN Twitter post shed light on the extraordinary reception President Obama received during his recent Mid East diplomacy. Although the President's visit was given second tier coverage (in my opinion), this CNN.com news story should have received many more headlines.
So, I'm posting the entire coverage from CNN in my blog:

In Mideast, Obama knocks it out of the park

By Frida Ghitis, Special to CNN

updated 8:18 AM EDT, Mon March 25, 2013

 

"...He made a persuasive case that the U.S.-Israel alliance is, in his words, 'eternal, it is forever'."

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer and correspondent, she is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television." Follow her on Twitter: @FridaGColumns

Amman, Jordan (CNN) -- They're bringing down the American flags in Jordan and Israel and putting them back into storage after they got slammed in a sudden sandstorm during the last part of President Barack Obama's visit. Perhaps it was nature's way of keeping Obama from feeling he had gained the upper hand in this famously unpredictable region. Sandstorm or not, the president had reason to feel good about his trip. After deliberately lowering expectations about what he might achieve on the trip, Obama knocked it out of the park.  

He even managed to take the skeptics by surprise, helping broker the restoration of relations between Israel and Turkey.

Bolstering friends, strengthening alliances and sending everyone in the Middle East a clear picture of America's vision and priorities for the region -- this was the common thread in everything the president did in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan.

He made a persuasive case that the U.S.-Israel alliance is, in his words, "eternal, it is forever." He spoke passionately and effectivelyin favor of Palestinian statehood and the need to restart the peace process. He made it clear the United States will not tolerate a nuclear Iran but prefers to prevent it through diplomacy. He reiterated his call for an end to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria and showed his strong support for Jordan's King Abdullah, a moderate king who says he is trying to democratize his country without the need for bloodshed.

As Obama returns to Washington, not everyone is happy about what they heard. But, if power is the ability to influence the behavior of others and the course of events, then he managed to make America a bit more powerful after a mere three days in this turbulent region.

In a visit filled with poignancy, symbolism and, yes, substance, one of the most dramatic and unexpected moments came minutes before Air Force One departed Israel for Jordan. As the milky white sky gave signs of trying to clear, Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stepped inside a trailer on the tarmac and made a historic call to Turkey's prime minister.

When the call was over, Israel and Turkey had restored diplomatic relations. After an acrimonious three-year dispute over a botched and lethal 2010 Israeli raid on a Turkish-flagged flotilla trying to break the Gaza blockade, Netanyahu apologized.

The reconciliation was not all Obama's doing, but he gave the final push that allowed two pivotal Washington allies to work out their differences at a time when events in Syria and Iran demand the United States and its friends work closely together.Opinion: Obama goes over Netanyahu's head to the Israeli people

A major objective of the trip was to convince Israel and its enemies that the United States is committed to Israel's survival. The goal is fundamental to regional stability, because as long as anyone has any doubts, those who advocate destroying Israel will continue pursuing the objective and gaining followers while making Israelis more hesitant to take risks for peace.  From the moment he landed, Obama alluded to 3,000 years of Jewish history on the land. He told Israelis -- in Hebrew, lest they miss it -- "Atem lo levad," "You are not alone." "You are not alone." He talked about Israeli tourists recently murdered in Bulgaria, about threats from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, about chemical weapons from Syria. And then he made an impassioned call for Israelis to take the perspective of Palestinians, for the sake not only of their own security but also of justice. Israelis cheered.

 

It was a masterly performance.
By spending time in the West Bank, Obama raised the profile of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas relative to that of his rival Hamas. And when he declared that those who seek Israel's destruction "might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above," his words threw a punch against Hamas and Hezbollah, whose stated objective he was labeling a hopeless cause.

 

When he arrived in Jordan, America's most reliable Arab ally, he widened the lens to the growing crisis in Syria, which is spilling over, sending more than 400,000 refugees to a country practically devoid of natural resources. He pledged an additional $200 million to King Abdullah for the sustenance of the refugees still fleeing Syria by the thousands every day.

Opinion: The empathy president

 

Standing with the Jordanian king, with the knowledge that Israel and Turkey had healed their rift, Obama projected an air of confidence and achievement, even if events in Syria seem to spin out of control; even as King Abdullah warned the West has become naïve about the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest winner so far in the so-called Arab Spring.

This was Obama's first visit to an Arab country since 2009. Back then, Egypt was America's strongest Arab friend. Today, the Middle East is undergoing a violent and unpredictable transformation.

During barely 72 hours in the region, Obama reasserted a measure of influence. He laid out America's vision and gave a vote of confidence to America's friends. It was a subdued but visible show of U.S. influence and power in a time and a place of unexpected sandstorms and ferocious revolutions, where no man, no nation, has full control over the course of history.  Twitter @CNNOpinion.