Brian Doyle: God

Photo: shaunl 

God

By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten

Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven

Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they

Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God

And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the

Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to

See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception

Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,

Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m

Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.

Everyone babbles about God but I saw God this morning just as

The bus slowed down for the stop on Maple Street. God was six

Girls and one boy with a bright green and purple stegosaurus hat.

Of course God would wear a brilliantly colored tall dinosaur hat!

If you were the Imagination that dreamed up everything that ever

Was in this blistering perfect terrible world, wouldn’t you wear a

Hat celebrating some of the wildest most amazing developments?

By Brian Doyle 

EXCELLENT — Dr. Gabor Maté Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

The violent crisis and deadly assault on the Palestinian people, most of whom are children, has escalated to profound madness and insanity. And our American president continues to fully support Israel despite the extreme brutality and evil of the actions of the Israeli government. Infuriating! Horrifying! Heartbreaking! Everyone needs to watch this critically important overview of the crisis from a Holocaust survivor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrFzqu4QHk. Deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Gabor Maté. These truths need to be shared again and again and again! — Molly

Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan: Ceasefire in Gaza Now

Weeping. Yes, please. Ceasefire now......

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

The death toll in Gaza continues to climb as Israel inflicts collective punishment on the 2.4 million Palestinians trapped inside the occupied enclave, the world’s largest open-air prison. Palestinians in Gaza have lived under a complete Israeli military blockade since 2007, following Hamas’ victory in Palestinian legislative elections. Since then, Israel has decided how much food, fuel and water gets into Gaza, and completely controls the movement of Palestinians in or out of Gaza in a system of control that Human Rights Watch and numerous other organizations have called apartheid.

Since the brutal Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7th that killed more than 1,300 Israelis, mostly civilians and including many children, Israel has intensified its siege, unleashing a relentless bombardment on the narrow Gaza Strip. More than 3,800 Palestinians have been killed as this goes to press, with over 12,000 injured. These numbers are certain to increase as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises a “long and difficult war.”

Much of the western mainstream media on Wednesday was focused on who was responsible for the horrific explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital in northern Gaza, which killed an estimated 500 people. The attention was directed less at the carnage in the hospital. Given the apparent scale of the explosion, responsibility was first widely believed to lie with Israel, which has a vast arsenal with numerous types of bombs, missiles and other munitions. While en route to Israel, President Joe Biden and western mainstream media almost immediately embraced the Israeli military’s explanation that the explosion was caused by an “errant” Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile.

Forgotten were the thousands of Palestinians already killed by the more than ten days of Israeli bombardment and the unknown number buried, alive or dead, beneath the rubble.

“The atrocities are beyond description,” Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician and general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “We’re subjected now as Palestinians not only in Gaza but also the West Bank, horrifying war crimes. Ethnic cleansing. Acts of collective punishment against the population of Gaza where civilians are dying because they don’t have water, electricity, don’t have food, don’t have medicines. An active genocide. Every five minutes a Palestinian is killed in Gaza. Every 15 minutes, a Palestinian child is killed in Gaza. And it goes on.”

Across the Arab world, as well as in the United States and Europe, the protests are mounting, from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, to Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad, Iraq, and at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. There, a Jewish-led protest organized by the groups If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace brought thousands out to demand a ceasefire. Three hundred protesters were arrested inside the Cannon Rotunda.

Among those who attended the DC protest was Amira Hass, the renowned Israeli Jewish journalist with Haaretz who has lived in the Occupied Territories for decades. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she said on Democracy Now!, she was there, “as a Jew, not as a journalist…This pounding of Gaza, it has to be stopped right now.”

Another protest came from an unlikely quarter: from inside the U.S. State Department. Josh Paul served for 11 years as the Director of Congressional & Public Affairs, Bureau of Political-Military Affairs. This is the government office most directly involved with the delivery of weapons to foreign governments. On Wednesday, Paul wrote a 2-page resignation letter, which he shared publicly online, and deserves to be quoted at length:

“We cannot be both against occupation, and for it. We cannot be both for freedom, and against it. And we cannot be for a better world, while contributing to one that is materially worse. I believe to the core of my soul that the response Israel is taking, and with it the American support both for that response, and for the status quo of the occupation, will only lead to more and deeper suffering for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people–and is not in the long term American interest. This Administration’s response…is immensely disappointing, and entirely unsurprising. Decades of the same approach have shown that security for peace leads to neither security, nor to peace. There is beauty to be found everywhere in this world, and it deserves both protection, and the right to flourish, and that is what I most desire for Palestinians and for Israelis. The murder of civilians is an enemy to that desire–whether by terrorists as they dance at a rave, or by terrorists as they harvest their olive grove. The kidnapping of children is an enemy to that desire–whether taken at gunpoint from their kibbutz or taken at gunpoint from their village. And, collective punishment is an enemy to that desire, whether it involves demolishing one home, or one thousand; as too is ethnic cleansing; as too is occupation; as too is apartheid.”

Please go here for the original article: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19/ceasefire_in_gaza_now

John O’Donohue: Beannacht / Blessing

Photo by Molly

Beannacht / Blessing 

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

— John O'Donohue

Jack Kornfield: My Simple Prayer

Photo by Molly

My Simple Prayer

My simple prayer is that in all things I learn to love well.

That I learn to touch the ever-changing

seasons of life with a great heart of compassion.

That I live with the peace and justice

I wish for all earth.

That I learn to care fully and let go gracefully.

That I enjoy the abundance of the earth

and return to it from the natural generosity

that is our human birthright.

That through my own life,

through joy and sorrow,

in thought, work, and deed

bring benefit and blessings to all that lives.

That my heart and the hearts of all beings

learn to be free.

— Jack Kornfield

Joan Borysenko: A Prayer

Photo by Molly

A Prayer

May Respect crowd out the weed of Violence

and Community spring from the ashes of Isolation.

May the stories of our grandmothers and grandfathers

once again nourish the growing souls of our children.

May we see the Divine in one another and in nature

that the Earth may be healed and all her children

have an abundance of food, freedom, loving-kindness

as we give willingly and with heartfelt joy to one another.

May the music of shared laughter replace cries of suffering

as the Great Tree of Peace takes root in every heart.

May we offer a renewed and resurrected World

to the Creator with infinite gratitude and thanksgiving.

— Joan Zakon Borysenko

This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen

 This is an excellent article.

"Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control."

To be accountable — rather than complicit with genocide, with the longstanding Israeli apartheid regime, with massive suffering and destruction and death — I and all of us, I believe, must stand in fierce opposition to the unfathomable violence and genocide of the Palestinian people that is occurring right now. We must oppose this insanity with our strong voices of truth, with condemnation of our government's complicity with genocide, and with unwavering protest and illumination of all the forces of colonialism and ignorance and separation and violence that will always only breed more violence. 

Let us stand together instead with all of the victims of this madness that sets human beings against one another in unending war, oppression, dehumanization, and despair. There is another way. May we act in every way possible out of consciousness of the highest good for all. — Molly

The Chris Hedges Report

Washington and European governments are cheerleading Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. The failure to intervene to halt the carnage threatens to ignite violence throughout the region.

By Dwayne Booth, aka Mr. Fish

I have been in urban warfare in El Salvador, Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once you fight street by street, apartment block by apartment block, there is only one rule — kill anything that moves. The talk of safe zones, the reassurances of protecting civilians, the promises of “surgical” and “targeted” air strikes, the establishment of “safe” evacuation routes, the fatuous explanation that civilian dead were “caught in the crossfire,” the claim that the homes and apartment buildings bombed into rubble were the abode of terrorists or that errant Hamas rockets were responsible for the destruction of schools and medical clinics, is part of the rhetorical cover to carry out indiscriminate slaughter.

Gaza is such a small area — 25 miles in length and about 5 miles wide — and so densely populated that the only outcome of an Israeli ground and air assault is the mass death of those Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls “human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “human beasts.” Israeli Knesset member Tally Gotliv suggested dropping “doomsday weapons” on Gaza, widely seen as a call for a nuclear strike. Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday dismissed calls to protect Palestinian civilians. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible … this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true,” Herzog said. “They could’ve risen up, they could’ve fought against that evil regime that took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” He added, “We will break their backbone.”

The demand by Israel that 1.1 million Palestinians — nearly half of Gaza’s population — evacuate northern Gaza, which will become a free fire zone, within 24 hours, ignores the fact that given the overcrowding and sealed borders there is no place for the displaced to go. The north includes Gaza City, the most densely populated part of the strip, with 750,000 residents. It also includes Gaza’s main hospital and the Jabalia and al-Shati refugee camps. 

Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion military aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” This is not a war. It is the obliteration of civilians trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest concentration camp. Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help. Nearly 600 children are already dead.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to close 14 food distribution centers leaving half a million people without food relief. Gaza’s only power plant has run out of fuel. The United Nations says 12 of its staff have been killed by Israeli air strikes, 21 out of 22 UNRWA health facilities in Gaza have been damaged and hospitals lack basic medicines and supplies.

Israel, as it has in the past, will block the dissemination of independent reporting and images once some 360,000 soldiers launch a ground assault. It cut internet service in Gaza on Saturday. The brief glimpses of Israeli atrocities that make it out will be dismissed by Israeli leaders as anomalies or blamed on Hamas. 

The West refuses to intervene, as 2.3 million people, including 1 million children, are deprived of food, fuel, electricity and water, see their schools and hospitals bombed and are butchered and rendered homeless by one of the most advanced military machines on the planet.

The gruesome images of Israelis gunned down by Hamas is the currency of death. It trades carnage for carnage, a macabre dance that Israel initiated with the massacres and ethnic cleansing that allowed for the creation of the Jewish state, followed by decades of dispossession and violence meted out to the Palestinians. The Israeli army, before the current assault, had killed 7,779 Palestinians in Gaza since 2000 including 1,741 children and 572 women, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. This figure does not include Gazans who died due to drinking contaminated water or being denied access to medical treatment. Nor does it include the rising number of Gazan youth who, having lost all hope and struggling with deep depression, have committed suicide.

I spent seven years reporting on the conflict, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bodies of Israeli victims of bus bombings in Jerusalem by Palestinian suicide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, including children, in the corridors in Dar Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. I watched Israeli soldiers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then callously shot in the Khan Younis refugee camp. I sheltered from bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes. I climbed over the rubble of demolished Palestinian homes and apartment blocks along the border with Egypt. I interviewed the bloodied and dazed survivors. I heard the soul crushing wails of mothers keening over the corpses of their children.

I arrived in Jerusalem in 1988. Israel was busy discrediting and marginalizing the secular, aristocratic Palestinian leadership of Faisel al-Husseini and driving Jordanian administrators from the occupied West Bank. This secular and moderate leadership was replaced by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat. But Arafat, very likely poisoned by Israel, and the PLO were also ruthlessly pushed aside by Israel. The PLO was replaced by Hamas, which Israel openly fostered as a counterweight to the PLO. 

The escalating savagery of Israel against the Palestinians is reflected in the escalating savagery of the Palestinians. The resistance groups are Israel’s doppelgängers. Israel believes that with the eradication of Hamas the Palestinians will become docile.  But history has shown that once one Palestinian resistance movement is destroyed, a more virulent and radical one takes its place.

The killers feed off each other. I saw this in the ethnic wars in Bosnia. When religion and nationalism are used to sanctify murder there are no rules. It is a battle between light and dark, good and evil, God and Satan. Rational discourse is banished. 

“The sleep of reason,” as Francisco Goya said, “brings forth monsters.” 

The Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists and religious bigots in the current Israeli government need Hamas. Revenge is the psychological engine of war. Those targeted for slaughter are rendered inhuman. They are not worthy of empathy or justice. Pity and grief are felt exclusively for one’s own. Israel vows to eradicate a dehumanized mass that embodies absolute evil. The maimed and dead in Gaza, and the maimed and dead in Israeli towns and kibbutzim, are victims of the same dark lusts.  

“From violence only violence is born,” Primo Levi writes, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”

The Biden administration has promised unconditional Israeli support and weapons shipments. The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group has been deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to “deter any actor” who might widen the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The carrier group includes the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford; its eight squadrons of attack and support aircraft; the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy; and the Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt, according to a Pentagon statement.

The U.S., as in the past, ignores the far greater death and destruction, as well as the illegal occupation, meted out by Israel to the Palestinians or the periodic military campaigns — this is the fifth major military assault by Israel on Gaza in 15 years — against civilians. 

Israel says it recovered 1,500 bodies of Hamas fighters after the incursion. This is a number greater than the 1,300 Israeli victims. Nearly all the dead Hamas fighters, I suspect, were young men born inside the Gaza concentration camp who had never seen the outside of the open-air prison until they burst through the security barriers erected by Israel. If Hamas fighters possessed Israel’s technological arsenal of death, they would be able to do their killing more efficiently. But they do not. Their tactics are cruder versions of those Israel has used against them for decades. 

I know this disease, the exaltation of race, religion and nation, the deification of the warrior, the martyr and violence, the celebration of victimhood. Holy warriors believe they alone possess virtue and courage, while their enemy is perfidious, cowardly and evil. They believe they alone have the right to revenge. Pain for pain. Blood for blood. Horror for horror. There is a fearsome symmetry to the madness, the abandonment of what it means to be humane and just. 

T.E. Lawrence calls this cycle of violence “the rings of sorrow.”

Once these fires are lit they can easily become a conflagration.

Israeli tanks and soldiers, to thwart an attack by Hezbollah in support of the Palestinians, have been deployed to the border with Lebanon. The Israeli forces killed fighters from Hezbollah, as well as a Reuters journalist, which saw Hezbollah fire a salvo of rockets in retaliation. Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir announced he would distribute 10,000 assault rifles to Israeli settlers, who have carried out murderous rampages in Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Israel has killed at least 51 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since Hamas launched its attack on October 7.

Psychologist Rollo May writes:

At the outset of every war…we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the daimonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome and spiritual questions that the war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. 

The killing and torture, the more they endure, contaminate the perpetrators and the society that condones their actions. They sever the professional inquisitors and killers from the capacity to feel. They feed the death instinct. They expand the moral injury of war. 

Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.

Please go here for the original article: https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/this-way-for-the-genocide-ladies?r=1ifxu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email