A man does what’s right when no one is watching. He upholds his commitments to his family and neighbors. He doesn’t lie, cheat, & steal his way through life. Real men serve others. Weak men serve themselves.
This week’s featured post is “All Americans Need Pride Now“.
Ongoing stories
- Trump’s assault on American democracy. To me the week’s most disturbing quote was from DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Testifying before a Senate committee, Mullin was asked (by Chris Murphy) whether he would commit to following court orders. Mullin could not say yes. Instead, he said he would follow orders he believed were legitimate, but not politically biased ones. In other words, he will be the judge of what the law says. That’s not how the rule of law works.
- Climate change. El Nino continues to build, threatening record heat this summer.
- Iran. Nothing new to report: Trump keeps saying Iran is defeated and a deal is at hand that will achieve all his goals. Iran keeps refusing to act like it’s defeated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed and the world’s oil reserves continue to sink.
- Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s biweekly updates continue to be the easiest good way to keep track of this conflict. Ukraine’s growing drone-and-missile campaign is making it increasingly difficult for Putin to claim that everything is OK.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about budgets
The Senate passed the Republicans’ reconciliation bill. It needs to go back to the House now, where there may yet be some snags. Prevailing opinion is that it will wind up on Trump’s desk by the end of the week.
If you remember, originally this was about whether Congress could stop ICE and the Border Patrol from being rogue agencies that terrorize American cities and run concentration camps. But as so often happens, once the train started rolling a lot of other controversial issues got attached to it. So it’s easy to forget that this all started when Trump’s storm troopers murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats then proposed tying funding to some common-sense limits, the kinds of limits all other law-enforcement organizations already follow, like not wearing masks and going to a judge to get warrants.
Republicans refused to compromise on this, so the funding had to be dropped from the big appropriation bills that funded the rest of the government and then the rest of DHS. By going the reconciliation route, Republicans no longer needed Democratic votes, so they added a nasty kicker to the bill: It funds ICE for three years rather than the usual one. So if Democrats retake Congress in the fall, they won’t be able to defund this rogue agency. In essence, the reconciliation bill puts ICE beyond the power of the voters.
For a while the bill included money for Trump’s White House ballroom and the fund to pay off the thugs who rioted for him on January 6. But those provisions were too toxic even for Republicans, so they were removed. Acting AG Todd Blanche went so far as to say that the administration was dropping the proposed thug-fund, but he wouldn’t put it in writing, and Democrats failed to get explicit language into the reconciliation bill disallowing the fund. Trump says he still loves the idea, so we’ll see it again, either after he signs the bill or maybe after the fall elections.
But that dispute is about the current year’s budget. By October Congress will need to pass next year’s budget, where Trump wants to raise defense spending from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Timothy Snyder observes that this kind of increase doesn’t make sense in any conventional frame.
Increasing the military budget from about a trillion dollars to about 1.5 trillion dollars makes no fiscal sense. We can’t pay for it without destroying basic government functions and soaking the American taxpayer. It makes no military sense. It is based upon no doctrinal innovation or review of technology. The “Trump-class” battleships it proposes are archaic, nonsensical, and more than a little embarrassing. The budget proposal makes no managerial sense. The Pentagon has never passed an audit, and Pete Hegseth has proven himself spectacularly unable to manage organizations of any kind. Putting an additional half a trillion dollars under his authority annually is superpower suicide.
It’s not like this is a Sputnik moment and we suddenly realize our potential adversaries are way ahead of us. It’s not like $1 trillion represented a whittled-down military that needs to be rebuilt. It’s also not like there’s an upswelling of public opinion demanding more defense. If you asked Americans what they want the Pentagon to spend $500 billion more on, you’d draw a blank from the vast majority of voters. And virtually nobody would volunteer to sacrifice their own benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. — to pay for a bigger military.
So why then? Snyder has a theory:
The military budget proposal … makes authoritarian political sense. It is designed to popular among the people with guns who Trump imagines will help him control the population at large (and they should realize this, and they should be offended.) It shifts taxpayer money to soldiers and officers in exchange for their personal loyalty to an aspiring dictator. It is a bribe to stay in power as part of an attempt to change the regime of the United States. It is not a military budget but a military dictatorship budget.
and 60 Minutes
The story so far: Skydance Media, controlled by the Trump-allied Ellison family, bought Paramount Global, giving them control of CBS. The merger raised anti-trust issues, so Paramount paid a bribe to Trump (and fired Stephen Colbert after he used the word “bribe” on the air) to let it go through.
The Ellisons then turned CBS News over to Bari Weiss, whose experience was mainly as a opinion writer for print media. So she begins her career in broadcast journalism at the top, as head of the organization made great by people like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. I don’t have to summarize Weiss’ career, because John Oliver already did.
Weiss’ career has centered on claims of “liberal media bias”. So since taking over, Weiss has shifted CBS Evening News to the right, which has been disastrous for its ratings: CBS is never going to win over Fox News viewers, so all they have done is alienate the viewers they already had.
This week, she brought her wrecking ball to 60 Minutes, the most popular news show on television. Of course, she had already messed with 60 Minutes before, in December. Hours before its scheduled airing, she pulled Sharyn Alfonsi’s outstanding report on the CECOT prison in El Salvador that Trump was deporting people to. After the episode was leaked by a Canadian broadcaster, garnering Weiss a lot of bad press, she relented and let the episode air (with a few changes) four weeks later. Stephen Miller demanded that the people responsible for the report be fired, which Weiss at the time did not do.
But a week ago Thursday, heads began to roll, beginning with Alfonsi, but also including correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich. Last Monday, correspondent Scott Pelley told the executives what he thought about their moves, and was subsequently fired himself. (Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Anderson Cooper had left the show voluntarily in mid-May.)
Friday, the remaining correspondents — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim — said they plan to stay on. But their joint statement was hardly a vote of confidence in the new leadership.
We want to express how sorry we are that these principled, fair and honest journalists were treated so shabbily, with such indecency. Tanya deserves to be celebrated, not cruelly cast off. Draggan too. It’s been heartbreaking. But, we have decided to stay on. We feared that our returning might be construed as an endorsement of the existing power structure. That is simply, categorically not the case. Here’s why we’re are staying: We don’t want to see 60 Minutes die.
Pelley gave an interview to the NYT where he fleshed out some of his previous claims of political interference from Weiss.
[A]bout four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.
This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.
We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.
Jay Rosen is an insightful observer of journalism. Here’s his take: Maybe CBS looks so chaotic because no two executives are playing the same game.
If you follow the mess at CBS, don’t dismiss the possibility that Ellison thinks he’s been clear about playing nice with Trump, while Bari Weiss thinks she can get by with “Center Right,” while Nick Bilton thinks it’s Mike Wallace all over again— but super digital. All at once.
and the SpaceX scam
Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX) will become a publicly traded company on Friday. This is sketchy for a bunch of reasons.
- If the stock trades at anything like the asking price, it will be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising $75 billion for the company and valuing the full enterprise at $1.75 trillion. That would launch SpaceX into the top 10 corporations by market capitalization, roughly the same size as Saudi Aramco and ahead of both Facebook and SpaceX’s sister-company Tesla.
- Elon Musk’s stake will be worth over $800 billion, making him the world’s first trillionaire.
- The asking price wildly overvalues the stock. The company is still losing money hand-over-fist, with a $4.3 billion loss in the most recent quarter. With no profits to go by, investors might evaluate the stock by its revenues. SpaceX’s asking price clocks in at 95 times revenues, compared to 20 times for a hot tech stock like Nvidea.
- Musk has occasionally used SpaceX as a piggy-bank for Tesla. In 2025 SpaceX bought $131 million worth of Tesla Cybertrucks, representing 6-9% of the total sales of that marketing disaster.
- Stock exchanges have bent their rules to get SpaceX into their indexes. That means that index funds (which are considered safe investments for retirement accounts) will be forced to buy the stock, no matter how overvalued it is.
- Due to owning higher-vote shares, Musk will control 80% of the votes in any shareholder decision, so he can do anything he wants with the company. Fine print in the SpaceX prospectus means that minority shareholders have very little recourse if he mismanages the company.
When you put it all together, Musk is essentially defrauding America’s retirees. Here’s how the fraud works: Musk has a small-but-loyal following of investors who think he can do no wrong. By only offering a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares in the IPO, he has created a situation where their opinion of SpaceX’s worth can become the market price. Then, index funds will be forced to buy some sizeable percentage of all the shares available, creating an artificial demand that will pop the stock higher — at least temporarily.
The whole scheme is self-referential: People want to get in on the over-valued IPO, because they anticipate being able to sell at an even higher price to the bigger fools in the index funds.
When the market manipulation is over and the stock collapses, your 401k will be left holding the bag.
At the moment, here’s what you need to do: Check your retirement accounts to see if you have any Nasdaq or Russell index funds. If you do, sell them and move the money to an S&P 500 index, because that index hasn’t changed its rules to let SpaceX in prematurely.
In pro-capitalism propaganda, the great entrepreneurs’ quest for wealth creates more wealth than they can capture for themselves, so all of society benefits. This may have been true at certain points in capitalism’s history, but we’re past that now. Our current oligarchs are so powerful that they not only capture all the value of their innovations, they suck wealth away from the rest of us.
It’s worth noting that Musk has profited in the past by scamming the public. Remember DOGE? Musk was going to save the taxpayers $2 trillion in a single year by finding and eliminating government waste. In reality, he saved nothing.
What did the people in America actually get as a result of DOGE? Chaos at Social Security field offices, uncertainties about veterans’ access to critical care, the end of civil rights enforcement in schools, limited staff to go after corporate billionaire tax cheats, an unstaffed consumer complaint database leaving people vulnerable to bank scams, the end of foreign aid programs that led to the death of hundreds of thousands across the globe, and so much more. And that’s only what we’ve seen so far…as time goes on, we will see the impacts of the loss of expertise and capacity across federal agencies.
But in the process Elon walked away with more government contracts and untold quantities of illegally procured government data. Not a bad return for the $290 million he spent getting Trump elected.
and you also might be interested in …
I usually minimize Trump-acting-out stories, because they happen so often and get a lot of coverage without me. But the last few minutes of his Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker stand out. Trump makes a series of unfounded claims about Democrats cheating in elections, both his 2020 loss to Joe Biden and this week’s California primary. Welker keeps insisting that he provide evidence for those claims — which he does not have because his claims are false. Trump responds by getting angry, insulting Welker, and leaving the set.
It amazes me the deductions many people never make. If you ask a guy for evidence and he starts sputtering insults, it seems obvious to me that he has no evidence. Similarly, if a detention center keeps out people who are legally entitled to inspect it, they must be up to no good in there. How can anyone deny that?
Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who turned against Trump and has consequently been prosecuted, will plead guilty to retaining classified information. Bolton appears to be one of the rare Trump enemies who is actually guilty of something, unlike E. Jean Carroll, James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell, Jack Smith, and a host of other people Trump’s Department of Injustice has been investigating and/or prosecuting simply as harassment.
The cartoon points out the irony of Bolton going down for something that Trump did much worse, but got away with after he won the election and took over the government.
Another crime Trump commits himself is insider trading. This week Trump pardoned a former Republican congressman convicted of insider trading. He made hundreds of thousands by trading stocks based on his inside knowledge of upcoming mergers.
A study says that deploying the National Guard to Washington D. C. has had very little effect on crime.
This doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve been to D. C. recently. The Guard seems to be there for show. I saw some troops deployed on the National Mall in daytime. That’s a high-traffic area that has got to be one of the safest places in the city. However, one night after dinner in a restaurant, I had to walk across the Mall after dark. This actually did make me nervous, though nothing happened. But the Guard was nowhere to be seen.
I concluded that the point of the deployment is for a lot of people to see the guardsmen and think “Trump is protecting us.” If nobody is around to see them, though, they don’t need to be there.
The NYT reports on Israel’s use of white phosphorus in Lebanon. I had thought this was a war crime in itself, but apparently the substance is itself legal, and only becomes illegal when it’s used in populated areas.
The Times does its best to tip-toe around accusing Israel of war crimes, but the photos in the article show white phosphorus plumes with buildings in the background.
After the first half-dozen happened with no political consequences, the Navy’s strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs have started to seem normal. It’s easy to forget that these are murders. Now we’re up to 200 or so of them.
Fascinating article about how America’s huge national debt interacts badly with the problems Trump caused in the world economy by attacking Iran. First, Jay Martin explains why the debt is not a problem in normal times:
Countries around the world – Japan, the UK, China, South Korea, and dozens of others – hold roughly $9.4 trillion worth of these American IOUs. They bought them because Treasuries are safe, liquid, and denominated in dollars. For decades, this system worked beautifully. The U.S. borrowed cheaply. Foreign governments parked their savings in a safe asset. Everyone won.
But the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created a situation where lots of our creditors need to cash out at the same time: Oil exporters like the United Arab Emirates have seen their revenues drop without any corresponding drop in expenses. Oil importers like Japan need to pay more for imported oil. They all need to sell their Treasury bonds to raise cash.
Meanwhile, the US also needs to sell Treasuries because we don’t pay enough tax to cover our spending. (The government is running about a $2 trillion deficit this year. If a Democrat were president, this would be a big deal.)
So what happens when the number of sellers go up and the number of buyers doesn’t? Prices fall. Or (saying the same thing another way) buyers are in a position to demand higher interest rates. And if the world economy seems fragile now, picture it operating with higher interest rates.
There’s tough competition to be the least qualified person in a Trump cabinet meeting, but we’re about to have a new leader: Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.
Pulte is a third-generation real estate guy and has no experience in intelligence. (The legislation establishing the DNI position lists experience as an essential qualification.) He has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency where he pleased Trump by cooking up mortgage fraud cases against Trump enemies like Letitia James and Adam Schiff. The James case was dismissed by the judge and Schiff has not been indicted.
We can expect Pulte to do two things as acting DNI: fire a lot of people and use the awesome powers of the intelligence agencies to harass more Trump enemies. We can only imagine how happy China and Russia will be to see America’s intelligence agencies masterminded by this bozo.
Most of us have heard about the leveling off of American life expectancy. Lately it has had some negative years and positive years, but the overall trend has been flat: up only a quarter of a year in the 2010s, compared to an average of 1.75 years per decade in the previous five decades. A variety of explanations have been floated: Covid, deaths of despair, bad diet, and so on.
A recent study looks deeper than the year-by-year mortality stats. It tracks generational cohorts and how their death rates compare to previous cohorts at similar ages. They found something interesting and worrisome: The cohort born in the 1940s had the lowest death rates per year. The 1950s cohort (mine) was only slightly worse, but marked a turn-around.
Among all the findings, the most alarming concerns Americans born after 1970. At the ages these people have already reached, roughly 30 to 49 depending on the cause of death examined, they are already dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, and external causes than people born just before them were dying at those same ages. Colon cancer, strongly tied to obesity and diet, is a particular concern, with death rates rising at younger ages beginning with cohorts born around 1955 and worsening from there.
Because the post-1970 generations are still relatively young, they represent a small percentage of total deaths, and so their effect on the nationwide life-expectancy averages hasn’t really shown up yet. But it will. Whether anything similar is happening in similar countries isn’t part of this study, but in recent decades they have been pulling away from the US averages.
and let’s close with a stunt
In honor of the NBA Finals, Jimmy Fallon recaps recent news while using the names of all 30 NBA teams.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Another thing we got from DOGE was the return of New World screwworm to Texas. Not the right time to be having an ivermectin shortage.
How nice, to see Fallon do a little political humor. As rare as a pelican sighting in Oklahoma!
My theory about why Trump is doing all these destructive things to the US is that it’s intentional. He’s working for Putin who wants the US destroyed.
–Kim
Putting the current Iran war into context … Iran’s war today – not an isolated eruption; but the latest phase of a century‑long struggle over Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. Zionism, not a romantic project; but rather a response to existential threat repeatedly exposed by church and mosque inherited racial criminal insanity. The UN today continues this tradition where external powers have long repeatedly attempted to engineer the demographic and political fate of Jews. Iran adopts and amplifies this narrative, positioning itself as the champion of “resistance” to Zionism. Tehran’s ideology fuses Shi’a revolutionary theology with the older Arab rejectionist line: Israel is a colonial imposition that must be undone. After the fall of Nasserism and the decline of pan‑Arabism, the Islamic Republic of Iran positioned itself as the central patron of anti‑Israel forces.
Theodor Herzl wrote in “Der Judenstaat”: “The Jewish question is a national question, and to solve it we must establish a home for the Jewish people.” … Jews have equal rights to achieve self determination in our own country. To do this Jews must partner with a great power who likewise endorse a Jewish state…”We shall need the patronage of a great power; and if we can secure that, we can realize our purpose. We must therefore appeal to the great powers of the world, and we must address ourselves to the Jewish question in these terms.”
The White Paper explicitly framed its goal as preventing Palestine from becoming a Jewish state and ensuring an Arab majority in any independent Palestine that would emerge post war. Its deliberate restrictions on Jewish immigration to mandate Palestine, based upon the European racism which directly and indirectly contributed to the slaughter of 75% of Western European Jewry proves Herzl’s estimation of Europe’s racial insanity toward Jews. The Iran–Israel war, to state it plainly: not new. Rather, simply the modern extension of the same struggle over Jewish self‑determination that Herzl identified in the 1890s and that the region has fought over ever since.
Chamberlain’s White Paper serves as the basis for the European attempt to declare and validate a Palestinian state today; the White Paper explicitly stated this goal: “the establishment within 10 years of an independent Palestine State”. London favored the establishment of an Arab majority, which would rule Palestine; Chamberlain repeated the Czech betrayal, and limited Jewish immigration capped at 75,000 over five years (April 1939–April 1944) and further immigration requiring Arab consent.
The White Paper’s restrictions deliberately imposed – at the moment when Nazi Germany and fascist Europe were carrying out the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews (75 % of Western European Jewry). The paper was issued while the Shoah – already under way, and while Britain itself – still neutral in the European war against the Jews. Its framers chose to freeze Jewish immigration at a level that would prevent the Jewish population from ever reaching majority status in a future independent Palestine.
The policy was rooted in the same 19th–20th-century European political and demographic anxieties that had already produced racial antisemitism (the “Jewish Question” as a perceived racial/cultural threat). The White Paper’s language of “absorptive capacity,” “economic conditions,” and constitutional guarantees of Arab majority rule echoed the same underlying worldview that had justified pogroms, expulsions, and later the Nuremberg Laws. It was not a sudden invention of the 1930s; it was the logical culmination of the Mandate’s earlier pro-immigration framework having produced the very demographic shift the White Paper now blocked. Herzl’s entire project rested on the recognition that European societies were racially and culturally “insane” toward Jews; Zionism represents his prescription for a rational exit from that European-Shoah-guilt insanity.
The post ’48 Nakba narrative, not a neutral “national trauma story”. Nakba bemoaned the Arab failed war of annihilation to destroy the Jewish community in the territory of the defunct British mandate. The term “Palestine” reintroduced consequent to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’s’ economic bankruptcy, did Sultans hire cheaper French cartographers in the 18th Century; that European ‘great power’ reintroduced Palestine upon Ottoman maps of the Middle East. Prior to that time no Ottoman map listed “Greater Syria” as Palestine nor Istanbul as Constantinople.
After the Battle of Yarmouk (636 CE) Arab forces defeated the Byzantine field army and took control of much of the Levant. The territory became part of the rapidly expanding Rashidun (and later Umayyad) Caliphate and administered as the Jund Dimashq, Jund Filastin, Jund al-Urdunn; “wilāya/walayāt” (provinces), a separate term used in different periods. Jund al-Urdunn: first instituted under the Rashidun Caliphate (reorganization under Caliph ʿUmar, c. 639). Jund Filastin: organized soon after the Muslim conquest in the 630s — established during the Rashidun period and continued under the Umayyads. Jund Dimashq: likewise created during the early (Rashidun) reorganizations after the conquest and continued under the Umayyad administration. Modern scholarly syntheses conclude the ajnad framework – established by the Rashidun reorganization (traditionally attributed to ʿUmar c. 18 AH / 639 CE) and consolidated under the Umayyads. Modern scholarly syntheses conclude the ajnad framework – established by the Rashidun reorganization and consolidated under the Umayyads.
Throughout the years of the British colonial-mandate, Arabs fundamentally rejected the Balfour Declaration to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. The post ’48 Nakba narrative, not a neutral “national trauma story”. Nakba bemoaned the Arab failed war of annihilation to destroy the Jewish community in the territory of the defunct British colonial-mandate. No great power Ottoman map listed “Greater Syria” as Palestine nor Istanbul as Constantinople.
Throughout the years of the British mandate, Arabs fundamentally rejected the Balfour Declaration to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine. Nakba – not “we lost our homes” but “we lost the war which we launched to prevent Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Nakba not free-floating “national trauma” as UNWRA propaganda depicts.
Historically there exists a regional concept of Filastin in early Islamic and later periods. But never sovereign Arab “Palestinian nation-state” as UN propaganda votes which condemn Israeli violations of “international law” harp and sing as if the UN exists as a heavenly voice. European cartography re‑standardized “Palestine” as a territorial label, which later became the basis for post ’67 UN fart: which bemoans the crimes of Israeli “occupied territories”. While its Resolution 3379 ignores the PLO Charter of ’64 which denounces only ’48 Israel as “occupied territories”.
Herzl stated that the Jewish question – fundamentally a national one. He advocated for a homeland, based upon the inherited European racism; that only through Jewish self-determination can Jew overcome racial inherited European hatred.
He emphasized that achieving this goal requires the support of a great power. The term “Palestine” – reintroduced on Ottoman maps due to changes in regional governance and economic Ottoman bankruptcy, Ben Gurion rejected when he named the new nation Israel. Prior to WWI, the region – commonly referred to in the context of “Greater Syria” without the designation of “Palestine.” This change reflects the evolving geopolitical landscape of this region.
Throughout the British Mandate period, Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration highlighted a rejection of the notion of a Jewish homeland, arguing that their struggle emphatically fought against Jewish self-determination. Therefore the term Nakba – not simply characterized through the UN propaganda distortion as – simply as a loss of homes. Rather, the fallout consequences of a failed war; specifically aimed at preventing Jewish self-determination. These facts fundamentally reject UN attempts to inject revisionist history which fundamentally denies the right of Israel as a nation state to determine its own international borders with other Arab states, specifically with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
European permanent Security Council members repeatedly publicly declare: “That Israel has the right to self defense”. But they equally declare that the UN has the right to declare a “Palestinian State”; which they demand come from East Jerusalem, Samaria, and Gaza. Neither the Security Council members nor the General Assembly states possess the might of “international law” – despite their obtuse propaganda otherwise – to determine the borders of the Jewish State nor create the borders of a Palestinian state. Wars throughout history, Poland for example, shape and determine the borders of nation-states.
Consequent to the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-136 CE) the Romans forcibly expelled Jews from Judea and renamed the conquered territory Palaestina, a term derived from “Philistine” – to permanently destroy the Jewish nation state of Judea; which achieved national Independence celebrated and remembered through the mitzva of lighting the Hanukkah lights. The consequence of this Jewish defeat – Jews endured a stateless refugee status till post Shoah! Today Arab refugees who fled from Judea, and Arab refugee populations captured by the IDF post ’67, no different from post Bar Kochba Jews.
UN resolutions simply political, not some pie in the sky divine law decreed from Mt. Olympus. No GA vote or SC statement has the inherent power to fix Israel’s borders or magically conjure a Palestinian state. Attempts to do so, they directly compare to UN GA Resolution 3379 or UN SC Resolution 2334. UN moral theater does not determine the international borders of the Jewish State of Israel. The UN did not “create” Israel. Israel like the American Revolution won its national Independence against colonial British imperialism and French pre-’67 perfidy – through war. Attempts by the UN to recognize a “Palestinian State” simply the hallow echo chamber of Rome renaming Judea Palaestina.
Herzl’s answer to the Jewish question—a sovereign Jewish state backed by great‑power recognition—remains a legitimate national solution. Arab rejection of that solution, the 1948 war, the Nakba narrative, and all of subsequent UN/European condemnations which denounce Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. Such stinking backside noise directly smells like long, sophisticated UN attempt to undo Herzl’s solution; to re‑cast a war against Jewish self‑determination as pure victimhood, to retro‑invent a sovereign “Palestine” that never existed, and to deny Israel the same right every other nation has had—to let history, war, and nation-states treaty agreements determine its borders. Not by external powers repeating Rome’s old trick with new legal language, and pretending that Palestine as a UN Protectorate territory ceased to exist in 1948 – which categorizes the backside stench made by both the ICJ and the ICC.
Zionism a response to pogroms, exclusion, and the collapse of Jewish emancipation in Europe; a legitimate national movement grounded in Herzl’s analysis of Jewish self‑determination and inherited Goyim racism. “Palestine” as a sovereign Arab nation-state never existed. European cartographers standardized the term “Palestine” in the 18th-19th centuries which reflected European great power interests which later carved up the Ottoman empire between England and France. Despite Arab sources Filastin, never a sovereign Palestinian state ever in Arab and Muslim history. The Nakba narrative today stands as a politically constructed propaganda; no UN resolutions can dictate Israel’s borders or undo the outcome of any Israeli war victory – fought since the Independence war.
During colonial British mandate the 1936–39 Arab Revolt fought explicitly against the establishment of any Zionist-entity in colonial British Palestine. The popular Arab propaganda of Nakba today – simply propaganda lies – it fails to acknowledge the some 850,000 Jewish refugees forcibly expelled from all Arab countries after the Arab Nakba defeat in 1948. This UN propaganda which routinely catagorically slanders 3379 Israel – pretends that Chapter VI recommendations = to Chapter VII ultimatums like issued to North Korea.
The Israeli 1949 Armistice lines shaped by war, not by UN fiat. The push for a Palestinian state is political, not legal. The propaganda which condemns Israel breaking “international law” simple a fart and nothing more. The UN aint the Pope. Post Shoah the UN failed to try Pius XII for war crimes which include the post war rat-lines and pogroms in Catholic Poland. Furthermore the church criminal slanders which culminated in the Shoah totally undermine the church and the UN as vicar from heaven moral authorities.
The modern “Palestinian national identity” is a result of 20th-century political developments, particularly in response to Zionism and British rule. While not a pre-1948 sovereign state, the Arab population in the region developed a distinct national consciousness. Most international bodies and historians view the current conflict not as a fight over a lost ancient state, but as a clash between two national movements (Zionism and Palestinian nationalism) over the same land.
The problem with this smelly revisionist history, Arabs lost their repeated attempts to throw the Jews into the Sea. Actions have their consequences. The repeated Arab defeats to duplicate the ways of Hitler, Chamberlain and Pius XII definitively proves that Arafat’s ’64 PLO “Balestinians”, never merited the “mandate from heaven” to rule as an Independent nation – not in past Arab/Muslim Ages nor today. Just as Jews post Bar Kochba lost our national Independence following that disastrous “Nakba” defeat; how much more so Arab refugees who never ruled Muslim Ottoman Greater Syria as an independence nation – post ’48 lost all claims to self determination claims. No different than post WWI & WWII Germany who lost all claims to Prussia as Germanic self determination.
The attempt repeatedly made by post ’67 UN Resolutions (242, 338, 446, 2334) to make a טיפש פשט limitation to “the conflict as indeed a clash between two nationalist movements” what an utter farce! Iran some 1000 miles distant from Israel. Hezbollah Shiites in Lebanon have no connection what so ever with Arab Sunni refugee populations within the borders of the Jewish State. Post Shoah “NEVER AGAIN”, means that mentally deranged racists shall never again decide for the Jews their racist versions of their “FINAL SOLUTIONS”.
For nearly 2,000 years of exile (since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE), this phrase L’shanah haba’ah b’Yerushalayim, spoken by Jews in every corner of the globe, from Spain to Persia to the Americas. It served as a constant reminder that the Jewish people had not abandoned their claim to the land, nor had they assimilated into the lands where they lived as minorities. The fact that this prayer survived the horrors of g’lut and recited every Pesach by millions who had never seen the city, proof that Jews never surrendered our Torah oath brit inheritance, which explicitly excluded both Yishmael and Esav. The 1948 establishment of the State of Israel and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967, viewed by Jews as the historical fulfillment of this centuries-old Torah brit oath.
The post war Israeli victory starting in ’48 … after the fact couch potato quarterbacks … they do not determine Israeli identity. Britain returned the mandate after the Irgun blew up British headquarters in the King David Hotel. France lost WWII and thereafter its colonial empire in both Vietnam and Algeria disintegrated. The De Gaulle reversal of the French military alliance, just prior to the expected Nasser obliteration of the Jewish state definitively proved Herzl’s analysis as correct.
Trump 1.0 Abraham Accords rejects as hog-wash the notion of clash between two national movements with deep historical roots, both claiming legitimacy over the same land. Israeli strategic foreign policy seeks to integrate Israel into the community of nations of the Middle East and North Africa. Arab refugee populations and the failure of Arab and Muslim state to repatriate their refugee populations – an Arab/Muslim problem NOT an Israeli problem. Israel eventually gave ’48 Arabs Israeli citizenship. UN Resolution 194 does not apply across the board to as yet unfought Arab Israeli wars like 1967! That PA criticized the Accords does not amount to squat; that treaty cut with nation states and not minority populations scattered across the Planet Earth.
Moshe Kerr needs to have his own blog rather than leaving long unrelated comments on this blog. Thank you.
Interesting to note that the US had the biggest drop during COVID than other comparable countries.
Trackbacks
[…] Doug Mouder at The Weekly Sift: “Self and Others“ […]
[…] Elon Musk’s net worth crossed $1 trillion (due to the SpaceX IPO I warned you to avoid last week). And after a bunch of legal flailing by Trump’s puppet board, his name came off the Kennedy […]