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Opinion
Israel, Iran, and the War Machine’s Global Lust for the Rapture
Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, was unable—or unwilling—to restrain Israel from genocide, lawlessness, and slaughter.
Jun 15, 2025
For a while, at least, Donald Trump talked a good game about diplomacy, including negotiations with Iran and Israel. But Israel is America’s id. We can’t restrain Israel because Israel is the skull beneath the American mask.
The “id” was Sigmund Freud’s term for the hidden reservoir of passions and desires that fuels the personality. The ego—“what we call reason and sanity,” as Freud phrased it—tries to restrain those passions by riding them “like a man on horseback.”
The horse has thrown its rider once again.
Read the newspaper today. Watch cable news tonight. See if they mention the plain fact that Israel’s attack is a violation of international law.
“Monsters from the id!” That's what Dr. Morbius shouts at the end of the 1956 science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet, as he tries to shut down the all-powerful alien engines he’s learned to control with his thoughts. His subconscious urges and desires have begun to destroy his deep-space paradise, and he’s powerless to stop them. The vast machinery is serving his true self, not the civilized veneer he presents to himself and others.
So it is with military might. Just as Israel is the American id, America is the id for a financialized planet driven by greed and exploitation. American war machinery is global lust made manifest: lust for power, lust for wealth, lust for more.
Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, was unable to restrain Israel from genocide, lawlessness, and slaughter. Both presidents aided and abetted snuff-movie violence on a massive scale, because that violence reflects the shadow self of the nation they represent.
If “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” we’ve been in a coma for a long time.
John F. Kennedy may have been an imperfect vessel for change, but he spoke often and well about the need for international law and world institutions. “We must create even as we destroy (nuclear arms),” he said, “creating worldwide law and law enforcement as we outlaw worldwide war and weapons.”
Read the newspaper today. Watch cable news tonight. See if they mention the plain fact that Israel’s attack is a violation of international law. The mass assassination of another country’s leaders and the under-reported deaths of civilians will be debated in tactical terms, while moral and legal questions receive little (if any) attention.
These attacks may temporarily serve Israeli and U.S. interests, but their benefits won’t last. Iran isn’t Gaza, impoverished and defenseless and populated primarily by women and children. Iran is home to 91 million people and possesses considerable resources. Trump was already forced to back down from a confrontation with the Iran-allied Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in the Red Sea, and they’re essentially desert fighters. This attack may weaken Iran, but what will happen if, and when, it regroups and retaliates?
The Israeli state isn’t acting rationally; neither is the American national security state. But how could it be otherwise?
Like the passions of Dr. Morbius, the drive to kill inevitably becomes self-destructive. “In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed,” Pew Research reports, “around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel.” That’s from a poll published June 3. Those figures may well be even lower now. Pew continues, “Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.”
In the United States, the percentage of adults with a negative view of Israel has risen 11 points since March 2022; 53% of Americans polled now hold “a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel.”
This trend represents an existential threat to both the Jewish state and the American military empire. The political consensus in Washington, however, remains unchanged.
The Israeli state isn’t acting rationally; neither is the American national security state. But how could it be otherwise? They are the manifestation of our own cravings. Our warlike impulses are leading us down the path of conflict and confrontation, seemingly oblivious to peaceful alternatives. By refusing to cooperate with China and the rising nations, we are surrendering our future to them.
That is, if we even have a future.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency tried to remind the world that “armed attacks on nuclear facilities could result in radioactive releases with grave consequences within and beyond the boundaries of the State which has been attacked.”
The world didn’t seem very interested.
Evangelical Christians—some of them, at least—are undoubtedly thrilled. With this development From the Bible (Matthew 24:6-7):
And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.
Meanwhile, Americans have forgotten the words of their fallen president. “Mankind must put an end to war,” said John Kennedy, “or war will put an end to mankind.”
Some Americans consider Matthew’s prophecy a harbinger of deliverance—for them, not for the rest of us. They’re counting on eventual, if selective, salvation through rapture.
The rest of us, believers and nonbelievers alike, will have to conclude with the verse that follows:
All these are the beginning of sorrows.
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I Want My Taxes to Fund Climate Solutions, Not the Detention of My Neighbors
If we redirected just a fraction of the money we are wasting on ICE to transition our energy grid to clean energy, we could save billions of dollars in healthcare and disaster recovery costs every year.
Jun 15, 2025
The New Hampshire state and U.S. federal budgets are disasters for families, working people, and, frankly, anyone who isn’t independently wealthy.
President Donald Trump’s bill cuts Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and funding for infrastructure, public schools, and renewable energy—just to name a few. In New Hampshire, our state budget bills (HB1 and HB2) make similar cuts to healthcare, public schools, renewable energy, and housing. When we zoom in on what these bills do want to fund, however, the image is devastating: abundant funding for detention centers, border patrol, and immigration enforcement.
We’ve seen the videos and reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) encounters all over the country: Masked ICE agents grab people off the street, only for the government to admit later in court that they grabbed the wrong person. Legal immigrants kidnapped and sent to foreign countries, without due process or evidence of threat. International students persecuted for exercising their rights to free speech and protest. In Los Angeles, the military is being deployed against peaceful protestors who were trying to protect their neighbors from ICE raids.
Refusing refugees and detaining immigrants while fueling the climate crisis is a disgrace.
Our neighbors are disappearing around us, and our tax dollars are paying for their inhumane treatment. The Federal budget bill adds $160 billion to immigration enforcement operations. The current New Hampshire state budget for 2024-2025 allocated $1.4 million for the Northern Border Alliance to monitor the 58-mile border between New Hampshire and Canada, despite the fact that in October 2022 through December 2023, there were only 21 apprehensions by Border Patrol.
We’re seeing the devastating impacts of bloated budgets for ICE here and now. In recent months New Hampshire residents have had to watch their town’s police sign up one by one to partner with ICE to kidnap and terrorize their neighbors—including immigrants and refugees who are here legally, contributing to our communities after fleeing war zones or domestic violence. In New Hampshire, ICE operates in the Strafford County jail, where some of our neighbors are being held without due process. Government funding from ICE operations is set to expand the prison in Berlin, New Hampshire, where conditions are notoriously inhumane and immigrants are unlikely to be treated with dignity. Merrimack County and Hillsborough County have both requested to detain immigrants for ICE. My friends and I do not want this to be what our taxes pay for.
Instead, I’d rather have my tax money going to fund climate action: clean energy, resilient green housing, healthcare to care for people impacted by pollution and climate disasters like heatwaves. If we redirected just a fraction of the money we are wasting on ICE to transition our energy grid to clean energy, we could save billions of dollars in healthcare and disaster recovery costs every year. If we stopped spending money to imprison our immigrant neighbors, we could cover the costs of cleaning up the pollution at every fossil fuel facility in the country. If we stopped giving government handouts to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs, we could transition all the dirty fossil fuel facilities to clean energy and battery storage.
The United States contributes approximately 12% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions despite being only 4.2% of the world’s population. Those greenhouse gasses are fueling climate disasters around the world—creating climate refugees. People living along the coasts of countries around the world are being forced inland. People living in places more susceptible to drought or other climate fueled crises are making hard decisions to uproot their family and move someplace more resilient.
Refusing refugees and detaining immigrants while fueling the climate crisis is a disgrace. The United States is actively contributing to climate change by increasing our use of dirty fossil fuels, ignoring climate scientists, and eliminating environmental justice programs. By ignoring this issue we are costing our communities billions of dollars from storm cleanup and pollution impacts. The health costs of pollution and climate change alone cost more than $800 billion per year in medical bills and other downstream health costs—and that doesn’t include the billions of dollars it takes to clean up in a community after a hurricane or tornado. Yet when advocates for climate justice ask for more investments in clean, renewable energy, we are asked where that money will come from.
Our federal and state budgets have their priorities backwards. If we redirected our focus and tax dollars, we could solve an actual crisis that is hurting our economy and our health: climate change. It would be a much more useful avenue for our tax dollars than vilifying our neighbors who, by the way, also contribute taxes to the government.
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RFK Jr.’s Guide to Making America Sick Again
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a multi-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Jun 15, 2025
Someone should have told Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the last pandemic probably cost him the presidency in 2020.
Building on his longstanding anti-vaxxing crusade, Kennedy has followed a three-step program that will worsen the next outbreak.
Step 1: Reduce vaccine availability. Three weeks ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—one of Kennedy’s HHS agencies—announced that for healthy Americans under 65, Covid-19 vaccines will not be approved until they pass large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That is a daunting obstacle.
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite.
Step 2: Reduce vaccine eligibility. The following week, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend the Covid-19 vaccine for children and pregnant women. Within days, the CDC had to walk it back somewhat, stating that whether to vaccinate a child should be the product of “shared decision-making” involving parents and physicians. But pregnant women remain in the limbo world of “no recommendation.” In any event, the negative impact on overall public health will be enormous.
Step 3: Eliminate vaccine expertise. On June 9, Kennedy fired the entire CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all 17 of them. This committee of outside experts reviews the most recent data on all vaccines to assess safety, efficacy, and clinical need. It develops a recommended guidance schedule for all vaccines, including seasonal flu shots and Covid-19 boosters. Physicians rely on that guidance in counseling patients, and insurance companies and government programs use it to determine the vaccines they will cover. Committee members received their termination notices via email sent two hours after Kennedy announced their firing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
With Kennedy’s selection of his first eight replacements on June 11, we’re getting a sense of the disaster that will accompany Step 4.
Action Based on Lies
Kennedy’s stated justifications for terminating every member of the vaccine advisory committee are a combination of lies, half-truths, and misinformation.
Fact: Committee members are screened for major conflicts of interest. They cannot hold stock or serve on advisory boards or bureaus affiliated with vaccine manufacturers. If members have a conflict of interest, they disclose it and recuse themselves from related votes.
Lie: But Kennedy asserted falsely that most members of the committee had received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies. “The committee has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine,” he said falsely.
Fact: Individual working groups may meet in private, but committee meetings and members’ materials are public. Over several days of meetings, they review safety and effectiveness data, debate policy, hear from experts, and entertain public comment.
Lie: Kennedy asserted falsely that the committee worked secretly “behind closed doors.”
Misinformation/half-truth: According to The New York Times, “Kennedy claimed that 97% of financial disclosure forms from committee members had omissions. But the statistic came from an inspector general’s report in 2009, which found that 97% of the forms had errors, such as missing dates or information in the wrong section, not significant financial conflicts.”
Kennedy said that the firings were necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. They do the opposite. Thanks in large measure to Kennedy’s years of anti-vaxxing leadership, support for vaccinating children is eroding. Now he can stack the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee—the key medical and scientific body responsible for determining which vaccines protect and promote public health.
Seen Enough Yet, Sen. Cassidy?
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the physician who reluctantly provided the key vote that resulted in Kennedy’s Senate confirmation, sees the mess. He was instrumental in creating it. Cassidy could have killed Kennedy’s nomination and thought seriously about doing so.
But like almost all Republicans in the Senate, his spine failed him. Before voting on Kennedy’s nomination, Sen. Cassidy took the Senate floor to explain his decision. He said that Kennedy had assured him that, if confirmed, he would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes.”
Reacting to Kennedy’s mass firings, Sen. Cassidy posted on X:
“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion…”
Two days later, Sen. Cassidy’s fears came to life.
On June 11, Kennedy named eight replacements. Among them are anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, vaccine misinformation promoters, a co-author of and a signatory to the pandemic-era Great Barrington Declaration that recommended widespread exposure to Covid-19 as strategy for dealing with the outbreak (instead of widespread vaccination), and individuals who lack the expertise required for the board’s task. One new member testified as an expert witness in a case against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine (for HPV)—mass tort litigation that Kennedy played a key role in organizing.
Steps 5, 6,…
Kennedy included 4 of the 8 new members in the dedication of his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a physician and scientist who reviewed it for the Claremont Review of Books, observed, “When I looked up at random five of the medical papers Kennedy cites, I found that he had misrepresented all of them… He asserts things that are simply not true.”
Kennedy is at it again. Announcing his selections on X, he wrote, “The slate includes highly credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians.”
Do you agree, Sen. Cassidy?
Kennedy’s vaccine advisory committee meets on June 25-27. We should all fear the outcome.
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Palestinians Do Not Need to Learn Land Cultivation Elsewhere
What a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before?
Jun 15, 2025
“Uruguay aims to ‘bring some young Palestinians from the West Bank’ to train them in agriculture through a FAO program, said Lubetkin” (Channel 12, Uruguay, June 6, 2025)
On Monday, May 12, 1919, the British Minister of War, future Prime Minister and hero of World War II Winston Churchill, referring to his own practice of gassing Arab protesters and rebels, wrote:
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: Gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror…
Of the Hindus, he said they were animals who worshipped elephants. Consistent with this, he was directly and knowingly responsible for the famine that killed millions in Bengal in 1943, shortly before he signed an alliance agreement with Stalin in Iran to fight against Nazism.
These words from the British hero and defender of freedom and human rights, these supremacist ideas and actions were not new at the time and did not provoke any scandal. Supremacist and messianic racism, like the “Manifest Destiny” of John O’Sullivan and “The White Man’s Burden” of Rudyard Kipling, which in the 19th century justified and promoted the slaughter of “uncivilized peoples” and “inferior races,” were the precursors to Hitler and Nazism. Hitler plagiarized entire paragraphs from Madison Grant for Mein Kampf and thanked him for the inspiration. The popularity of Nazism in countries like England and the United States was deep and widespread, especially among wealthy businessmen and powerful politicians, until they began to lose World War II, and suddenly the Nazi criminals were just a handful of lunatics, not a complicit and cowardly mass of beautiful and superior civilized people with sudden amnesia.
A hundred years later, the history of suppressing the uncivilized, inferior races and peoples cursed by God is a thousand times worse, and, as then, it seems like it’s not such a big deal. But the real-time information available is also a thousand times greater, so the responsibility and shame (or shamelessness) are multiplied a thousandfold.
Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble.
Currently, Uruguay is one of those examples that do not quite reach the level of tragedy solely due to its military and propagandistic inability to do much harm. Not because we are a superior people, as our government so kindly insists on making clear with its own example. Which does not exempt us from the shame of the cowardice of denial or moral wavering in the face of the most tragic events of contemporary history. Cowardice and denial from which are exempted those Uruguayans who do not bow tremblingly before the fascists of the moment—those fascists who terrorize with total impunity from right to left—in that order.
After Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi refused his party’s (the left-wing coalition Frente Amplio) request to define the massacres in Gaza as genocide, he defended himself by saying that his focus is on actions, not words, and that he prefers not to talk about “the war” and instead offer “concrete solutions,” such as sending powdered milk and rice to Gaza… The Israeli Embassy in Uruguay labeled the Frente Amplio’s criticism of the genocide in Gaza as “expressions of disguised hatred” and warned of “dangerous consequences.” B’nai B’rith called the FA’s brief statement a “grave moral failure.”
Due to prior criticism from artists and left-wing activists regarding the wavering of their own government, the president once again tried to put out the fire with more fuel. In a new statement to the newspapers, he said he condemned the “military escalation” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offensive “fuels antisemitism” and generates “weariness” in “important sectors” of the Israeli people.
It is quite obvious that the Zionist genocide can fuel, among other things, antisemitism, as it has always been the Zionists themselves who, for political, geopolitical, and ideological reasons, have strategically confused and identified Zionism with Judaism (like identifying the KKK with Christianity), which is why even the hundreds of thousands of Jews who actively oppose the massacres of Palestinians and apartheid in Israel can end up being blamed for something they condemn.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians massacred, mutilated, traumatized, and starved? Are they not the direct victims of the hatred and violence that insists that “in Gaza there are no innocents, not even children,” which justifies exterminating them before they become “terrorists”? Could it be that the European settlers who claim to be descendants of a man named Abraham who lived 4,000 years ago in what is now Iraq are the real antisemites? A man who first had a child with his slave at the request of his infertile wife. But the son of Abraham and the slave produced the lineage of the Arabs. When something went wrong, Sarah had her son at the age of 90 by a miracle of the Lord, the one who produced the lineage of the Israelites (according to the same tradition that identifies those Israelites from 3,000 years ago with the current ones) as an improved version of his brother’s race. But let’s leave this surreal line of reasoning, which is only obvious to fanatics in perpetual trance.
The mere idea of sending milk and rice to Gaza under the slogan of “actions, not words” hides a profound ignorance of what happens with humanitarian aid in Palestine or, more likely, denialism and a well-known fear of criticizing the powerful who are committing genocide—let’s say massacre, so as not to offend the sensitivity of the killers and their apologists.
Of course, if you mention it, the automatic argument is “I haven’t seen you condemn the October 7th attack.” Which is false and paradoxical, since it is always said by those who have never condemned and will never condemn the repeated massacres and systematic violation of human rights against Palestinians and other neighbors since World War II, when the same Zionists proudly identified themselves as terrorists.
Uruguayan Foreign Minister Mario Lubetkin (former director of institutional communication for Food and Agriculture Organization in Latin America) has come out to put out the fire (now a blaze) of criticism from his political base by announcing plans to allow “some young Palestinians from the West Bank” to come to the country to train in sustainable agriculture. In another radio program, he stated that the Palestinian youth could “think about the day after” by becoming entrepreneurs and starting their own start-ups.
The day after what? Why do we, the Western masters, have to tell them what they must do to civilize themselves, how to indoctrinate themselves and adapt to progress and submission to Anglo-Saxon capitalism? Of course, to exile them again, far from their land and their own sovereign decisions as individuals and as a people.
Beyond the murky conscience of Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry, many do not understand or imagine that in Palestine there are thousands of bilingual professionals and academics whose schools and universities were bombed to rubble. In Israel, they are considered beasts of burden, and in the West, they believe they can teach them how to plant olive trees.
At the beginning of 2024, I met with the International Affairs officers at my university in the United States to propose the creation of “humanitarian scholarships” for students affected by armed conflicts. While the idea was very well received, it sank into the apathy of donors. But what a great idea, that of taking Palestinians out of Palestine to teach them how to cultivate other lands! How had it not occurred to them before? It’s not about giving scholarships to the youth who lost everything under the bombs so they can prepare and wage an international struggle for the sovereignty of their people, but so they can learn to cultivate the land, other lands that have nothing to do with their own, which they know like the back of their hand and have cultivated for thousands of years in a more than sustainable way.
Where is the mantra we Western professors hear with toxic frequency about the need to “train global leaders”? Every time I criticize this colonialist slogan in a meeting, many struggle to understand me.
Displacing Palestinian youth to learn “sustainable agriculture” in Uruguay is such a good idea that it resembles the “Final Solution,” which members of Netanyahu’s cabinet—and the majority of Israelis—talk about so much; according to a survey by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 82% of the population supports the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
At this point, I don’t know what’s worse, having a Trump in Argentina or a Biden in Uruguay.
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