Pope Leo XIV Calls for Peace in First Easter Mass as Pontiff as Christians Celebrate Worldwide

This Pope's embodiment of truth and justice, integrity and courage, and peace and love deeply touches my heart. Deepest gratitude for his powerful messages to the our nation and the world. 🙏 Molly

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV celebrated his first Easter Mass as pontiff with a call Sunday to lay down arms and seek peace to global conflicts through dialogue, but he departed from a tradition of listing the world's woes by name in the Urbi et Orbi blessing from the loggia of St. Peter's Basilica.

Leo, the first U.S.-born pope, emphasized Easter's message of hope as a celebration of Jesus' resurrection after being crucified.

READ MORE: War is reducing international law to 'ashes,' Pope Leo laments in Ash Wednesday liturgy

"Let us allow our hearts to be transformed by his immense love for us! Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!" the pope implored.

With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in its second month and Russia's ongoing campaign in Ukraine, Leo acknowledged a sense of indifference "to the deaths of thousands of people ... to the repercussions of hatred and division that conflicts sow … to the economic and social consequences they produce.''

Without mentioning the wars by name, Leo quoted his predecessor, Pope Francis, who during his last public appearance from the same loggia last Easter reminded the faithful of the "great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day.''

Francis, weakened by a long illness, died the next day on Easter Monday.

The Urbi et Orbi blessing, Latin for "to the city and the world,'' has traditionally included a litany of the world's woes. Leo followed that formula during his Christmas blessing. There was no immediate explanation for the shift.

READ MORE: In his first Christmas Day message, Pope Leo XIV calls for 'justice, peace and stability' in war-torn areas

Earlier, Leo addressed some 50,000 faithful from an open-air altar in St. Peter's Square flanked with white roses, while the steps leading down to the piazza where the faithful gathered were filled with spring perennials, symbolically resonating with the pope's words.

He implored the faithful in his homily to keep their hope in the face of death, which lurks "in the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth's resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.''

Speaking from the loggia, the pope announced a prayer vigil for peace April 11 in the basilica.

Small shifts in traditions

Leo greeted the global faithful in 10 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Latin, reviving a practice that his predecessor Pope Francis had let lapse.

Before retreating into the basilica, Leo stepped forward out of the loggia's shadow and waved to the cheering crowd below. He later greeted people in the piazza from the popemobile that took him all the way down Via della Conciliazione toward the Tiber River and back.

READ MORE: Pope Leo XIV urges Monaco residents to use wealth for good, reject "idolatry of power and money" fueling wars

During the marathon that is Holy Week, Leo also reclaimed the tradition of washing priests' feet on Holy Thursday, a gesture of encouragement toward clergy, after Francis had chosen a more inclusive path, traveling to prisons and homes for the disabled to wash the feet of women, non-Christians and prisoners.

The 70-year-old pontiff also became the first pope in decades to carry the light wooden cross for the entire 14 stations during the Way of the Cross on Good Friday.

Christians in the Holy Land mark a subdued Easter

Traditional ceremonies at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, revered by Christians as the traditional site of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, were scaled back under an agreement with Israeli police. Authorities have put limits on the sizes of public gatherings due to ongoing missile attacks.

The restrictions also dampened the recent Muslim holy month of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr holiday, as well as the current weeklong Jewish festival of Passover. On Sunday, the Jewish priestly blessing at the Western Wall — normally attended by tens of thousands — was limited to just 50 people.

READ MORE: Pope Leo XIV prays for peace at tomb of Lebanese saint revered by Christians and Muslims alike

The restrictions have strained relations between Israeli authorities and Christian leaders. Police last week prevented two of the church's top religious leaders, including Latin Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, from celebrating Palm Sunday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Gaza's tiny Palestinian Christian community celebrates first Easter since ceasefire

At the Holy Family church in Gaza City, Catholics young and old gathered for a traditional Easter Mass. Singing, they formed a queue in the aisle, waiting for their chance to kiss a sketch of Jesus held by a member of the clergy who wiped the glass frame between turns.

"There is great joy, especially after the ceasefire and after nearly three years of suffering and being unable to celebrate all the holy holidays," said George Anton from Gaza City. "People are somewhat relieved and more stable."

Armenian Christians try to show normalcy by celebrating in Iran

Armenian Christians observed Easter at a church in Iran's capital on Sunday, striving to maintain a sense of normalcy five weeks into the war.

READ MORE: Pope Leo XIV prays for peace as U.S.-Russia summit over Ukraine war gets underway

Families embraced and children exchanged painted eggs at the St. Sarkis Cathedral in central Tehran. Iran's capital has been targeted by daily airstrikes since the United States and Israel launched the war on Feb. 28.

"Whether we like it or not, we have young children who do not understand what's going on," said Juanita Arakel, 40, an English language teacher. "They just need to feel normal."

The Islamic Republic, with a population of around 90 million, is home to some 300,000 Christians, mostly Armenians, and three seats in parliament are reserved for Christians.

"Our calls and prayers are that we will be able to end this war," said Sepuh Sargsyan, the archbishop of the Armenian Diocese of Tehran. "Our calls and prayers are that we will be able to end this war."

____

Barry reported from Milan. Associated Press journalists Josef Federman in Jerusalem, Wafaa Shurafa in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, and Bassem Mroue in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pope-leo-xiv-calls-for-peace-in-first-easter-mass-as-pontiff-as-christians-celebrate-worldwide

Cristina Breshears: What Resurrection Really Looks Like

 Thank you, Cristina Breshears. 

Beautiful, prescient, wise, and deeply loving.

💜🙏 Molly

Yesterday, a friend and I walked through the neighborhood park and saw what resurrection actually looks like.

Everywhere I turned, people were emerging from their winter cocoons. I saw heads resting on the laps of their beloveds, families lying on the gentle slopes, and neighbors leaning against the ancient elms to soak in the spring sun. It was a scene of quiet, collective renewal; a neighborhood exhaling together.

Then came today's headlines. A "Bridge Day" defined by threats. A "Power Plant Day" promised for Tuesday. A vision of "living in Hell."

The contrast couldn't be sharper.

To "practice resurrection" is to look at those people on their blankets, vulnerable, peaceful, and connected, and decide that this is the world worth building and protecting and cherishing.

While the headline focuses on the power to destroy infrastructure, resurrection focuses on the power to sustain life. It's to be an intentional bridge-builder. It is the slow, often quiet work of restoring what is broken and choosing the difficult path of peace over the instant gratification of destruction. It is the persistent determination to hold things together.

We practice resurrection when we choose the gentle slope of the park over the steep climb of conflict; when we trade the "Power Plant" of destruction for the quiet energy of spring growth; when we build understanding where there is animosity; when we offer mercy where there is a demand for "Hell" and plant seeds of life even when the forecast says "Tuesday will be nothing like it;" when we protect the "bridges" of our own neighborhoods and the simple acts of resting, leaning, and embracing.

Today, we can choose a different kind of power. We can choose to stay in the sunshine. We can choose to be the bridge. Let’s be the kind of people who make every day a "Bridge Day." Not for tearing down, but for reaching across.

— Cristina Breshears

EXCELLENT — Chris Hedges: Trump Has No Soul

So excellent, well articulated, and chillingly spot on. Illuminated here is the truth of the profound danger that we are all in when those in power are soulless and locked in the tortured prison of self-loathing and the malignant narcissist’s inability to love. Tragically for us all, Trump — and his sociopathic fascist administration — is the embodiment of the root causes of suffering: hatred, greed, and delusion. There is a deep need for this understanding to be spread far and wide and to serve as an impetus to gather together in ever growing numbers of solidarity and dedication to the great universal struggle for peace, equity, sustainability, and a just and caring nation and world.

And deepest gratitude to Chris Hedges for always bringing us the truth. Chris is a national and international treasure. — Molly

The Emperor Has No Soul - by Mr. Fish

Trump is dangerous not simply because of his imbecility and unbridled narcissism, but because he lacks the core attributes of empathy and understanding that define the human soul.

By Chris Hedges

The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.

But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?

Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.

While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.

The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.

Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.

I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.

This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.

Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality.

Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece “Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue” — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.

The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice. Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls. Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.

The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.

Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.

Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together. It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.

“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”

Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments. He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom.

He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang.

He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself. His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners.

He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks holding a photos of the new ballroom during a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office on October 22, 2025. (Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless. Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.

The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.

When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.

Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.

“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.

---

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/trump-has-no-soul

I highly recommend the work of Chris Hedges to everyone.

A TEXAS MOM STRUGGLES WITH WHAT TO TELL HER CHILDREN

This Texas mom illuminates the extremely delusional, dangerous, and breathtaking madness, insanity, and psychotic evil of the current President and his pathological enablers. — Molly

I was making pancakes.

That's what I was doing when I saw it. Standing at the stove, still in my robe, Jake's got cartoons on too loud, Lily's fighting with her brother about God knows what, and I've got my phone propped against the coffee maker like I always do, just scrolling, just checking in on the world.

And I read it three times.

Three times, because I'm a former history teacher and I know how to read a primary source carefully and I wanted to make absolutely sure I was understanding what I was looking at.

Power Plant Day. Bridge Day. Open the Fuckin' Strait. Just Watch. Praise be to Allah.

I stood there with the spatula in my hand and the pancakes started burning and I just. Didn't move.

My youngest looked up and said "Mommy the pancakes are burning" and I said "I know baby" and I still didn't move.

Because I'm trying to figure out how to explain to my three kids, one of whom is doing a civics project right now, an actual school assignment about how the executive branch works and why it matters, how to explain to him that the President of the United States posted a war threat to 90 million people that read like a voice message from a drunk guy who just got eliminated in the first round of a video game tournament.

I taught the Geneva Conventions. I taught them. To sixteen year olds. Who understood them. Who could tell you that deliberately targeting civilian power infrastructure during a conflict isn't a bold strategic move, it's a war crime. Sixteen year olds in a public school in Texas got that. First read.

And I keep thinking about Jennifer.

Jennifer has a "God Bless the USA" sticker and a "No Sharia Law" bumper sticker right next to each other on the back of her Tahoe. I have seen that Tahoe. I have stood behind it in the school pickup line for three years. Jennifer forwarded me seventeen emails between 2012 and 2016 about how Obama was secretly Muslim and why that was terrifying and disqualifying and basically the end of Western civilisation.

Jennifer liked this post.

I checked. 2.63 thousand likes and Jennifer was in there, I'd bet my good casserole dish on it, absolutely unbothered, probably already telling her group chat that Trump is playing 4D chess.

He ended a bombing announcement with Praise be to Allah, Jennifer.

He named the air strikes like a school sports day, Jennifer.

He told a country to open a strategically critical international waterway or else, at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning, on a social media platform he owns, like he was leaving a voicemail for someone who owes him twenty bucks, Jennifer.

I scraped the pancakes into the bin.

Made a new batch.

Helped Jake with his spelling words.

Smiled at the right moments.

And I thought about the fact that this is the man with the nuclear codes and I thought about my civics kid's project and I thought about what I'm supposed to tell him when he asks me if the President is supposed to sound like this.

And I've got nothing.

I've got absolutely nothing. ~Texas Mom

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A VITAL HISTORY TO KNOW ABOUT IRAN

This history and the tragic impacts of the profound violence of imperialism is so vital to know and understand, absorb and expose, and act to intervene on and end. It is truly essential to know our history and take into our deepest hearts and souls the wisdom which empowers us to not be complicit with this insane madness generation after generation after generation. — Molly

“Next time someone says that Iran is dangerous and they need to be stopped…here’s some history to share.

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1901: A British businessman secures exclusive rights to Iran’s oil. Iran gets almost nothing from its own resource.

1908: Oil is struck. Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is formed. It later becomes BP. The British Royal Navy converts from coal to oil, making Iranian petroleum a strategic military asset for the British Empire.

For the next 50 years, Iran’s oil is extracted by a foreign corporation. Iran receives a fraction of the profits. Saudi Arabia negotiates a 50-50 profit split with ARAMCO. Iran asks for the same terms. Britain refuses.

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1951: Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalizes Iran’s oil through a unanimous vote in parliament. Completely legal. Completely constitutional. His argument was simple: this is our oil.

Britain responds with an international blockade. No negotiation. No compromise. They want their oil back.

1953: The CIA (Operation Ajax) and MI6 (Operation Boot) overthrow Mossadegh. They bribe politicians, clerics, journalists, and military officers. They fund fake protests. They run disinformation campaigns through newspapers they secretly own. MI6 operatives kidnap and murder Iran’s chief of police and dump his body in public as a warning.

They reinstall the Shah — a monarch who serves Western oil interests. The CIA officially acknowledged its role in 2013.

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After the coup, BP retains a 40% stake. American oil companies including Exxon and Mobil get significant shares. Iran’s democratic government is gone. Its oil is back under foreign control.

1953-1979: The Shah rules for 26 years as a Western-backed authoritarian. His secret police, SAVAK, is trained by the CIA and Mossad. SAVAK tortures and kills political dissidents systematically. Iran becomes one of the largest purchasers of American weapons. The Shah lives in extraordinary luxury while much of the population remains poor.

During this entire period, Israel and Iran are close allies. SAVAK and Mossad share intelligence. Israel sells weapons to Iran. Nobody in the West calls Iran a “terrorist state” because the dictator is their dictator.

1979: The Iranian people overthrow the Shah in a popular revolution. This is where your list begins — as if the revolution appeared out of nowhere, motivated by nothing but religious fanaticism.

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Now let’s talk about the US embassy that was attacked.

The US news likes to paint the 1979 hostage crisis as an unprovoked attack on America. The revolutionaries seized the embassy because the last time there was a democratic movement in Iran, the CIA ran the coup to crush it from that same embassy. They weren’t being paranoid. They were being historically accurate.

Britannica’s own assessment: “It is generally agreed today that the 1953 coup sowed the seeds for the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the encyclopedia.

——————————-

Now let’s ask a couple more questions.

Why are there U.S. military bases in Iraq? Because the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on claims of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Over a million Iraqi civilians died. No American official was ever prosecuted.

Why is there conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon? Because Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years.

Why are Houthi rebels attacking ships? Because a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition bombed Yemen for years, creating what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Over 150,000 dead. Famine. Cholera outbreaks.

Why does Iran pursue nuclear capability?

Possibly because Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal estimated at 80-400 warheads, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, faces zero international inspections, and has never been sanctioned for it.

Iran signed the NPT. Iran agreed to inspections. Iran signed the nuclear deal in 2015. The U.S. pulled out of that deal in 2018.

Every single item on your list is framed as Iranian aggression against “the West.” But none of them exist without the West’s 70-year campaign of overthrowing Iran’s democracy, installing a dictator, extracting its oil, arming its neighbors, invading the countries on its borders, and maintaining military bases throughout the region.

Now trace who benefits.

The 1953 coup was about oil. BP and American oil companies got the oil.

The Shah’s 26-year reign was about strategic positioning. The U.S. and Israel got a compliant ally on the Soviet border and in the Middle East.

The post-1979 framing of Iran as a “terrorist state” serves a specific function: it justifies permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East, billions in annual arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states, and unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s regional dominance.

Every “Iranian attack” on your list occurred in a country where the U.S. had no legal right to be in the first place — Iraq, Syria, Jordan. American troops are stationed across the Middle East not because those countries asked for protection from Iran, but because the U.S. positioned itself there to control the region’s resources and protect its strategic architecture.

—————————

When someone punches you for 70 years — overthrows your government, installs a dictator, trains his secret police to torture your people, extracts your oil, invades the countries on your borders, surrounds you with military bases, and sanctions your economy into the ground — and then you punch back, the question isn’t “why are you violent?”

The question is: who threw the first punch? And who’s been profiting from the fight ever since?

That’s not a defense of the Iranian regime. The theocracy that replaced the Shah has its own record of brutality against its own people, especially women. But that regime exists because the CIA destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953. The West created the conditions for the very thing it now claims to oppose.

——————————

The history continues.

HAMAS (October 7, 2023)

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” said Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, to the Wall Street Journal in 2009.

Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told the New York Times that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the PLO. “The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques

Initially, Hamas was discreetly supported by Israel, as a counter-balance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

And it didn’t stop in the 1980s. According to the New York Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled into Gaza with a Qatari official carrying suitcases filled with cash to disperse money.

In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, currently the finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, summed up the strategy: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden. Hamas is an asset.”

Netanyahu told journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. Having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu penned a letter to Qatar in 2018 asking the Qatari leadership to continue funding Hamas.

——————————-

HEZBOLLAH (1983 Beirut bombings, kidnappings):

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 — the same year Israel invaded Lebanon. It didn’t exist before the invasion. Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO headquarters there. The invasion killed approximately 20,000 people, mostly civilians. Hezbollah was born as a direct resistance movement to that invasion.

The 1983 Marine barracks bombing on the commenter’s list killed 241 Americans. But why were U.S. Marines in Lebanon? Because the U.S. had intervened in the Lebanese Civil War, positioning itself as a participant in the conflict rather than a neutral peacekeeper. The Marines were shelling Druze and Shia positions from naval vessels before the bombing.

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IRAN’S PROXY NETWORK (Houthis, Kataib Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and Syria):

Every proxy on that list operates in a country where the U.S. or its allies intervened first.

Iraq — the U.S. invaded in 2003 on false WMD claims. Iranian-backed militias formed to resist the occupation.

Syria — the CIA ran Operation Timber Sycamore, spending billions arming Syrian rebels, many of whom were jihadists. Iran backed Assad. Both sides were proxies in someone else’s war.

Yemen — the Houthis fight against a Saudi-led coalition that the U.S. armed and supported. The Saudi bombing campaign created what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

———————-

The United States propaganda machine goes hard. The enemy is not a republican or a democrat.

For all of history people knew their governments were evil. Don’t forget that it’s true today. The enemy is not the one vilified by billionaire owned media dynasties.”

~~~Andrew Sterling Ansley

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The tragedy with most people who argue ignorantly, is that most of this information is open source intelligence and not classified information.

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