Trump Inherited Peace Deals But Torched Them For More War, And Other Notes

Reading by Tim Foley:

We’re seeing more US airstrikes on Iran, joint US-Saudi strikes in Iraq, surging military escalations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Israeli drone strikes in Lebanon, all just in the last couple of days. The middle east is becoming more and more of a powder keg, and it all could have been so easily avoided.

Trump inherited a perfectly functional Iran nuclear deal in his first term and ceasefires between Yemen and Saudi Arabia and between Israel and Hezbollah in his second term. He had the possibility of peace in the middle east handed to him on a golden platter, and he actively torched it.

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Boy George has released a shockingly awful reggae song called We Will Dance Again defending Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the opening lines “You say genocide, I say war / When you’re attacked, that’s what the army’s for / Does it get ugly? You bet it does / When I know you wanna kill every last one of us.”

In 2026. This was released in July motherfucking 2026.

You’d be a piece of shit for releasing this in 2023, but to release it in 2026 after looking at the moonscape of Gaza with all its bombed-out hospitals and systematically demolished civilian infrastructure, you’ve got to be an outright psychopath.

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CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten recently ran a segment discussing the mammoth shift in public approval of Israel in the United States, noting that there has been “a 67-point shift against Israel in just eight years.”

“Israel used to be a consensus issue in American politics, and that was a pro-Israel position. Now the consensus has actually shifted, and now when it comes to the general electorate, it is a minus,” Enten said.

This right here is why we’re being force-fed so much hot garbage about “antisemitism” these days. You’re being told there’s a dangerous explosion of Jew hatred to cover up the fact that there’s actually a very healthy explosion of Israel hatred.

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It’s so creepy how evangelical Christians fetishize Jews and Israel. They treat the modern state of Israel like a magical fantasy land and talk about Jewish people like fairy folk, because those words happen to appear in some ancient book of made-up stories.

They regard today’s genocidal apartheid colonialists in the state of Israel as biblical Israelites, and think some dentist in New York City is the same sort of person as the fictional characters they read about in the book of Exodus. It’s like if someone took over New Zealand and named it “Middle Earth” and started calling all the Kiwis “hobbits”, and then all the Tolkien nerds started oohing and ahhing about it and planning expensive trips to go see the land where Gandalf and Frodo once walked, and started organizing lobby groups and voting blocks to promote the foreign policy interests of “Gondor” (formerly Wellington).

And the modern state of Israel is built around facilitating this exact type of fetishization. They resurrected a dead language that hadn’t been spoken conversationally anywhere on earth for centuries and changed the name of their currency from the lira to the “shekel” in order to facilitate this Bible-LARPing and build on the illusion that their brand new ethnostate is the same as the nation that Jews and Christians have been reading about in their ancient scriptures. All to ensure that a western political support base will push western governments to pour modern war machinery into propping up this ridiculous apartheid state with the nonstop violence required for its perpetuation.

It’s so fucking insane. “Ooh, we’ve got to send bombs and attack helicopters to the magical Jew kingdom so that the magic Jesus prophecy can come true and make us all go to Eternal Paradise!”

Fucking freaks. Stop doing this.

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We make movies about saving the world as the real world hurtles toward ecological collapse.

We make movies about defeating diabolical villains while letting the real diabolical villains rule the world.

We make movies celebrating heroic acts while real heroes are imprisoned.

Somehow fighting the bad guys and saving the planet only ever stays in movie land. We are handed fictional triumphs in lieu of real victory.

And the problem is that far too many of us are content with this. Give us bread made by PepsiCo and circuses starring Robert Downey Jr, and that’s good enough for us.

We can’t keep doing this. We need to find our true heroism. Our world is in peril, and we can’t let its rescue remain a decorative flicker on the silver screen.

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Feature image by The White House — https://www.flickr.com/photos/202101414@N05/54822870395/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=182655873