The last 24 hours has seen two special moments of madness that should terrify us all.
The First is Trump’s insane comments asking Russia to attack European Nations that haven;’t paid him money.
I.
Kid.
You.
Not.
Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little
Donald Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers to have not met their financial obligations.
The Joe Biden White House immediately rebuked the former president’s comments, saying in a statement: “Encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability, and our economy at home.”
Jesus wept, this orange fascist is an obscenity to all that is decent.
The march of white christian fascism continues and it is now impossible to not conclude Trump will be the Republic nominee.
Despite the huge money interest backing her, Trump’s appeal to the working classes who have been left behind by 30 year of neoliberalism is too great.
Those resentful working classes love that the elites who despise them hate him, because that is what modern politics has mutated into thanks to social media hate algorithms, personally offended voting blocks seeking vengeance upon those they hate.
All eyes are now on Trump.
His possible re-election is the momentum for every other power to try it on and take as much as they can before he is elected and then ‘negotiate’ a symbolic peace while keeping what they want.
If Trump wins, he will bring a level of isolation and internal fascism never seen before. His militarisation of ICE with massive detainment camps is the effective creation of an internal secret police with vast unchecked powers.
It’ll be the worst bits of the Handmaids Tale mixed with Toxic White Christian Nationalism.
He will refuse to leave office if he is elected.
This is who we have allied ourselves with in the Red Sea War.
The second moment of madness over the last 24 hours is Netanyahu’s apocalyptic desire to invade Rafah…
Biden to Netanyahu: Ensure Palestinians’ Safety in Rafah; Egypt Warns Israel of ‘Dire Consequences’
Egypt threatens Israel, Hamas as IDF Rafah ground incursion looms ■ Netanyahu: ‘No alternative in the foreseeable future’ for Israel’s security control over Gaza Strip ■ Biden, Netanyahu to speak amid U.S. warnings over Israeli military conduct in Gaza ■ Germany: Israeli Rafah offensive would be ‘humanitarian catastrophe’
…Netanyahu has no choice other than escalation and permanent conflict.
That has been his entire political career. Enrage Palestinians into violence and then using disproportionate overwhelming violence to smash the threat he created while appealing to the most damaged and frightened elements of a people still living in the memory shadow of the worst Genocide of the 20th Century.
I argued January last year that all the ingredients for a third intifada were in place after Netanyahu aligned with radical Zionists to form the most extreme right wing Government in Israel’s history.
This toxic Far Right Radical Zionist Government wanted to over rule their Judiciary to allow Zionist Settlers to illegally steal Palestinian land in the West Bank and make the lives of Palestinians prisoners held by Israel even more cruel and draconian.
The Abraham Accords sidelined Hamas and left them with desperate conditions and no hope for the future.
While Hamas has blood on their hands for their butchery on October 7th that murdered 1200, so too does Netanyahu.
Jon Oliver’s Last Week Tonight did a special on Netanyahu and pointed out how many times over his corrupt career in power he had enflamed and enabled Hamas.
From the chants of “In blood and fire we will expel Rabin” that radicalised the assassination of Rabin that Netanyahu had championed, to the huge donations of cash paid to Hamas to fuel inter-Palestinian blood feuds…
Netanyahu “has always been hard right”, Oliver emphasized, “but it’s worth taking a minute to underscore just how extreme his current government is”. In his most recent election, Netanyahu assembled the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, with a cabinet “stocked with extremists”. One top minister has said “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” and advocated for a massive expansion of settlements – seizing Palestinian land – against international law.
And Netanyahu has covertly funded Hamas to play them off their more organized and legitimate rival, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Netanyahu took the risk of betting that he could control Hamas, and use them to his own ends, and he was horribly wrong about that,” Oliver explained.
…blame corrupt Netanyahu as much as Hamas for this inhumanity!
The most tormented irony in this latest regurgitation of sadism between Hamas and Israel is of course Israel helped enable Hamas into the force it is now!
BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT
Did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.
…Israeli tactics to fund the most radical and extremist groups to topple enemies is a game the Americans played with Al Qaeda and saw resources going to Osama Bin Laden to play the exact same role with the blowback of 9/11.
The problem with the brutal use of tactics like this is that it generates unforeseen consequences, the CIA term this ‘blowback’..
Hamas is one such unforeseen ‘blowback’.
Peace is our only option because the War Gods are interested only in the profit of blood loss, not the prevention of it.
These were the share prices of the war lords as violence exploded in the Middle East.
To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, ‘they got folk out there working for war, we have to go to work for peace’.
Beyond the immediate, there has to be space for both of these furiously angry neighbours to bond and find common ground in this parched desert of hate.
Peace Academy’s are a genuine attempt to foster these social oasis.
If NZ wants to champion peace, we need to support the NZ Peace Academy concept with grants to help organise and bring Israelis and Palestinians together to find that common ground.
I am not someone who wants the State of Israel wiped from the face of the earth! I despise Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people, the outrageous 17 year blockade of Gaza and the ongoing theft of land in the West Bank, but I see Israel as a global responsibility and obligation after the obscenity of the Holocaust.
I stand with the Palestinian people AND the Israeli people!
The idea that Jews around the world are now under attack for their State’s deplorable war crimes and group punishments is as irrational as attacking Russians for Putin violence.
Muslims are not our enemy, Jews are not our enemy, Russians aren’t our enemy.
Authoritarian Muslim Regimes propped up by America’s Military Industrial Complex abusing their own faith to exert control over their own people are the enemy!
The far right Zionist Government in Israel is the enemy!
Putin is the enemy!
Hamas is the enemy and so is Netanyahu!
27 840 Palestinians have been killed, 67, 317 wounded, the vast majority are women and children, 1.9million displaced and an entire people traumatised and tortured beyond dignity.
Israel has killed as many civilians in 6 weeks as Russia has in 22 months!
Israel dropped more bombs on Gaza in a week than America did in 1 year of war with Afghanistan.
This isn’t a proportional response, it is an ethnic cleansing war crime that the UN have now ruled against Israel.
The only solution is an immediate ceasefire.
Now!
Meanwhile…
…Warmongers Uncle Winston and Aunty Crusher have instead of using our Independence and Peace diplomacy have decided to sign us up to a pointless American war against the Houthi with counter productive military action that will only empower them!
Pretending there is no connection between the Houthi attacking commercial shipping and the ethnic cleansing war crime that Israel is carrying out is simply bullshit!
We are escalating which is what Netanyahu needs, because the moment there is a ceasefire the Israeli people are going to turn on him and demand justice against his legacy of provocation that ended up dangerously destabilising Israel rather than defending it.
New Zealand should not be helping bomb one of the poorest people in the Middle East.
Where the hell has our moral compass gone?
How could our values dissipate so quickly once a hard right Government gets elected?
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The issue is that we elected a far right government in NZ *because* we didn’t have strong values in the first place Bomber.
So the question isn’t “How could our values dissipate so quickly once a hard right Government gets elected?” – We elected them precisely because we lack values of compassion, egalitarianism, and kindness to fellow humans.
The question is what can be done about it?
How about we fight the IDF and Russia until the last Palestinian and Ukrainian. That’s what every respected commentator is asking for they have no idea commentator are so stuck on ideological devides that they can not choose any other solution than budget cuts and tax cuts they have no idea how to wage war. The only other solution is negotiate wage, tax and budget increases at home and two state solutions abroad. And make sure New Zealand stays right out of it you have no idea how to wage war, general.
Agreed, but you missed the bit about there being an awful lot of stupid people in this country as well
No we didn’t.
This may be the result of an incurably byzantine thought process, but could this be Trump lampooning the actions, and bullying behavior of the current admin..
To be fair, the only reason the republicans weren’t as murderous as Bidens bitches was because Trump wouldn’t play ball…
His statement is absurd enough to trigger debates/arguments/criticism across the country(USA), Which reminds me of that old saw “there’s method in his madness”..
I’m not stating this as fact BTW, but it does make sense if all you want is people talking about you, and actually making the effort to educate themselves on the reality that is Europe today, even if only to be able to argue with authority.. Then this is a good start..
Of course, the last thing the current leaders want is open dialogue, and an informed electorate.. That would see them exposed for both the craven toadies they are to their owners, and the obvious pantomime that is being foisted upon them as truth..
This is not an endorsement of Trump at all, but I’ve known what Biden is ever since I started to research John Key… The man is a bona fida monster.. The world would be safer with Chucky as president…
Trump will do what he always does. Make an outlandish statement, get all the attention of the media, suffocate his opposition for air time, and then quietly “clarify it” in a couple of weeks. Any POTUS or potential POTUS can say whatever the hell they like, it doesn’t mean they have the power to do it.
He is pretty much a master of this.
Thank you Nick. You’re someone who reads history. Reagan did it as well as the democratic darling JFK, remember the missile gap??
All potential Presidential candidates play the go hard card. Let’s also count how many wars the ‘war monger’ Trump started…hmmm none.
I wouldn’t mistake Trump for a peacenik. For example the media gushed about how much he admired Putin, but he didn’t really say that. Plus most of that aid spending is being done in the USA. He may not want to start any new wars, but it doesn’t mean that he will suddenly withdraw from conflicts. Also he can say “I’d have them all around a negotiating table” but of course that’s a nonsense as well. I think he’d try to resolve the conflict but that doesn’t mean he’ll support capitulating to Putin.
He’s just a master at manipulating the media. He knows what buttons to press knowing that people will scream. Look at this latest one – people are now saying ‘Trump is going to leave NATO!’. No he’s not. He just (rightly) wanted the other members to get off their collective arses and pay their share.
I don’t like the guy as a person, but I admire his skill at times.
“Tipping Point”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvVHDhNDalY
Bloody hell…This is serious…Imagine if Europe had to finance and defend themselves from Russia….There would be no budget for refugees or cycle ways…unbelievable…How the hell can we get Putin to realise that drinking coffee in downtown areas , with diversity , is more important than war…
I’m very confused as to what Trump is supposed to be doing wrong here. NATO, under Operation Gladio, is well known to have been involved in the murder of at the very least hundreds of citizens of NATO member states through terrorist bombings, as well as the foundation of terrorist groups in NATO-subverted countries like Sweden and Switzerland (P-26).
The end of NATO, and freedom for Europe from American filth, can’t come soon enough.
Heard of gulags?
” Where the hell has our moral compass gone?
” How could our values dissipate so quickly once a hard right Government gets elected? ”
And Hipkins and his colleagues stayed silent in the weeks after October 7th until he no longer spoke on behalf of many kiwis who were reacting to the horror of what the IDF were doing in the limited coverage they got when he became the leader of the opposition.
Our moral compass no longer gets represented at government level. Even the MSM are under orders from Washington to not report on Israel’s war crimes or be critical in their reporting , so foreign powers call the shots when it comes to what we can read and listen to in our free liberal democracy. Only through the web can you be educated to what is actually happening in the Palestinian territories through Al Jazeera and the Palestinian WAFA news agency.
For a country to have a moral compass is impossible when you are dictated to and held hostage by foreign powers , sell your sovereignty by allowing big corporates like Warner’s to amend your labour laws in their favour and continue to support the current neo liberal oligarchy.
Trump calling for Europe to actually spend 2% of GDP on MIC weapons…how can he fail to pick up enough campaign money to get re-elected. And in that scenario the MIC still gets sales while the US taxpayer gets tax relief.
The Palestinians are being bombed and herded into the Sinai. The Gaza offshore gas field cannot be developed by non-Palestinians while Palestinians remain in Gaza with ability to bomb rocket and drone gas infrastructure just off the coast of Gaza.
Less of the ‘Christian fascism’ Martyn. There’s nothing remotely Christian about it! And that goes for Putin’s‘Orthodox Fascism’ as well. There is nothing Christian about that either. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch has compromised himself as an KGB/FSB agent. Christianity is a scapegoat here.