On September 15, 2003 American author, screenwriter and filmmaker Michael Crichton made the following remarks at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco, California.
We reprint this given that what he said in 2003 has come to pass in 2024 in America as the climate doomsayers are now in control of the current administration. They are now part of the Red/Green/Rainbow alliance. The green part comes in two shades of green. The green of the Islamic terrorists and the lighter shade of green of the Eco-terrorists. Both demand absolute power over us.
It is fitting that we publish this on Earth Day 2024 as we see Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. announce $7 billion in government grants for rooftop solar solar panels in his Earth Day message.
It is also fitting we recognize Dr. Michael Crichton, the creator of Jurassic Park and ET, whose passing on November 4, 2008 from cancer. Michael’s new book titled ERUPTION is set for release on June 3rd, 2024 and is based on his unfinished manuscript. ERUPTION is co-authored by James Patterson and is now available for pre-order. ERUPTION is described as:
The biggest thriller of 2024: A history-making eruption is about to destroy the Big Island of Hawaii. But a secret held for decades by the US military is far more terrifying than any volcano.
The master of the techno-thriller joins forces with the master of the modern thriller to create the most anticipated mega thriller in years.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn’t deep—maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let’s return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there—though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth—that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
MARC MORANO: Biden May Declare ‘Dictatorial U.S. Climate Emergency’ Bypassing U.S. The Constitution
/in Courts & Law, Elections, Energy, Environment, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Marc MoranoFox Business – The Bottom Line w/ Dagen McDowell & Sean Duffy – Broadcast April 19, 2024
Sean Duffy: The White House told Fox Business that it is now considering declaring a national ‘climate emergency.’ If the President declares a climbing emergency, what impact would that have?
Marc Morano: This is the serious story of the day. NBC News has reported that if Joe Biden declared a national climate emergency, he would have COVID-like powers under that emergency and NBC also compared the climate emergency powers to the 911 emergency powers. The Center for Biological Diversity has estimated Joe Biden would get about 130 wartime-like powers by which to bypass democracy and impose the Green New Deal on America without a single vote of Congress. This is truly a Halloween story, not a story for Earth Day. This is a truly frightening story, and he might just be desperate enough to declare it.
This is being widely reported in the media. The Biden White House is leaking this out. This might happen, and it is going to give Joe Biden these kind — you want to say the words dictatorial powers. He doesn’t need no stinking democracy to impose the Green New Deal if he does this.
Fox Business – The Bottom Line w/ Dagen McDowell & Sean Duffy – Broadcast April 19, 2024 – White House weighs declaring a national climate emergency: Climate Depot executive editor Marc Morano reacts to President Biden reportedly planning to block millions of acres in Alaska from oil and gas drilling on ‘The Bottom Line.’
Sean Duffy: Here now reaction, ClimateDepot.com, executive editor Marc Morano. Marc, good to see you so. As we talk about Joe Biden taking millions of acres out of exploration in Alaska. …
Marc Morano: They are doing everything possible to make our country more expensive to live in, disrupt supply chains, create inflation, harm economic growth, and impact our national security. In addition to just the obvious oil and gas drilling limits, this affects a copper mine access road that would have helped us directly compete with China, which has record copper production and is now a top-three country in the world with its copper Mining. The Republic of Congo is number four, which China largely dominates. And the Biden administration’s going after the rare Earth mining, oil, gas, at the same time, they’re claiming it’s all for the climate. The climate’s not going to notice one bit, but this is going to hammer Americans. I can’t imagine, other than cheap politics for their environmental base, why they thought this was a good idea six months before the presidential election. …
Dagen McDowell: Do these dumb asses know that an oil derrick here is the same as an oil derrick over there when it comes to well emissions and the climate because? It’s called global warming, not national warming, you deep dongs.
Marc Morano: Well, it’s even worse than that because if we’re outsourcing now to these other nations in the Middle East or Venezuela, the Biden administrations beg them for more oil, and whether it’s the Mining from China, they have lower environmental standards, lower human rights, so it’s actually not only are. We are outsourcing our emissions to virtue signal and say we meet our climate goals. Instead, we’re actually raising global emissions, much higher than they would have been had we done the energy production here in the United States — It takes half a million pounds of materials to make one 1000 pound EV battery. By shutting down oil and gas and shutting down this exploration of copper in Alaska, we just made energy a lot more expensive and made the U.S. much more reliant on China. Donald Trump’s 2000 2012 tweet about climate change benefiting China comes true every single day.
Sean Duffy: The White House told Fox Business that it is now considering declaring a national ‘climate emergency.’ If the President declares a climbing emergency, what impact would that have?
Marc Morano: This is the serious story of the day. NBC News has reported that if Joe Biden declared a national climate emergency, he would have COVID-like powers under that emergency and NBC also compared the climate emergency powers to the 911 emergency powers. The Center for Biological Diversity has estimated Joe Biden would get about 130 wartime-like powers by which to bypass democracy and impose the Green New Deal on America without a single vote of Congress. This is truly a Halloween story, not a story for Earth Day. This is a truly frightening story, and he might just be desperate enough to declare it.
This is being widely reported in the media. The Biden White House is leaking this out. This might happen, and it is going to give Joe Biden these kind — you want to say the words dictatorial powers. He doesn’t need no stinking democracy to impose the Green New Deal if he does this.
Dagen McDowell: Marc Morano, thank you so much.
End transcript
Background:
April 17, 2024: Bloomberg News: White House Renews Internal Talks on Invoking ‘Climate Emergency’ Before 2024 Election – ‘Could be used to halt exports, drilling’
2023: Watch: NBC News: ‘Biden urged to declare climate change a national emergency’ – ‘Can unlock special powers for a president in a crisis without needing approval from Congress’ – Similar to COVID & 9/11 Emergency Powers
Hallie Jackson of NBC – Aug. 22, 2023: “So what would that even do? Declaring an emergency can unlock special powers for a president in a crisis without needing approval from Congress, thanks to a law passed nearly 50 years ago. Since then, every President has declared at least one emergency during their time in office. Former President Trump for example, signing one in the pandemic. Former President George W. Bush declaring one after 911.”
2022: What it would mean for Biden to declare a national ‘climate emergency’ – ‘Triggers ability for him to deploy around 130 different powers’ – Center for Biological Diversity
Watch: The Weather Channel demands to know why Biden hasn’t declared a ‘climate emergency’ – Presses White House Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi
If Biden declares a ‘Climate Emergency,’ he would seize 130 new powers – Seeks repeat of COVID-style lockdowns with bypassing of democracy – Morano Responds
2023: LA TIMES EDITORIAL: Biden says he’s ‘practically’ declared a climate emergency. – ‘He should’ do it for real – ‘With GOP-controlled House blocking climate action, the country needs the executive branch to respond more aggressively’
August 27, 2023
Biden Admin Announces Massive Restrictions On Alaskan Oil Reserve And Hampers Key Mining Project In One Fell Swoop – The Department of the Interior (DOI) finalized a plan that will restrict future oil leasing and development on about half of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), an area in the state’s north approximately the size of Indiana first designated by former President Warren Harding as an emergency source of fuel for the U.S. Navy, according to Bloomberg News. The DOI also moved to all but shoot down the Ambler Access Project, a previously-approved proposal for a mining company to build a 211-mile long road needed to mine copper reserves potentially worth billions of dollars.
Copyright © 2024 Climate Depot, All rights reserved. Marc Morano.
Hold Obama-Biden Foreign Policy Responsible for Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel
/in Culture War, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research CouncilThe terrorist Iranian regime’s unprecedented recent attack on Israel, which included 185 drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles, is an unambiguous casus belli — an act of war — under international law.
Of course, Iranian proxies spread across the Middle East, such as Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Yemen-based Houthis, have committed countless previous acts of war against Israel. But last weekend was something different entirely: For the very first time since fanatical Islamists overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and took power in 1979, Iran launched such attacks directly from its own soil.
The regime’s attack against the Jewish state, a tactical failure in which 99% of Iran’s varying projectiles were successfully intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces and a U.S.-led multinational coalition, is highly revealing. No longer can anyone deny the Iranian regime’s role as “head of the snake” of Middle East chaos; nor can anyone now deny the regime’s genocidal intentions. It turns out that when they chant “Death to Israel” in the streets of Tehran, they really mean it. (They also chant “Death to America,” incidentally.)
The obvious question: How? How did we reach the point where Iran feels so emboldened, and so unafraid of any repercussions, that it lobs hundreds of offensive weapons from its own territory toward another sovereign nation — especially one so closely allied with the U.S. and interconnected with the broader Western order?
The answer is just as clear as it is troubling: The Middle East “realignment” so doggedly pursued by President Joe Biden, and by former President Barack Obama before him, got us here. Under the Obama-Biden foreign policy doctrine, an Iran so emboldened that it feels free to wage offensive war against Israel in such brazen fashion is not a bug; it’s a feature.
Steeped in pseudo-academic theories, such as postcolonialism and surrounded by left-wing ideologues who held America and Western civilization responsible for collective global sin, Obama sought to remake the Middle East map. On the one hand, he sought to hamstring the region’s sole outpost of Western civilization, Israel, as well as America’s traditional Sunni Arab allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. On the other hand, he bolstered those countries’ natural foes: Iran, Qatar, and the political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The apotheosis of the Obama-Biden Middle East “realignment” was the terrible Iran nuclear deal of 2015, laundered to a skeptical American people by failed novelist-turned-Obama White House apparatchik Ben Rhodes via a cynical, astroturfed “echo chamber” of a PR campaign.
In 2016, Obama secretly delivered $400 million in wooden pallets of cash to the mullahs — on the same day the nuke deal went into effect. More recently, the Biden administration agreed to cough up a whopping $6 billion in return for five illegally detained U.S. citizens — just weeks before the Iran-sponsored Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7. And just last month, Biden approved a fresh $10 billion sanctions waiver for Iran.
There are too many other examples to count. But it is all in service of the Obama-Biden doctrine: Punish America’s allies in the Middle East and reward its enemies.
Just as bad, the Iranian regime has also shown itself capable of infiltrating and co-opting America’s corridors of power: Last September, Semafor scooped emails revealing an Iranian regime-supported intelligence operation seeking to influence high-ranking government offices, think tanks and academic institutions in the U.S. The man at the center of it all? Robert Malley, Obama’s lead negotiator for the 2015 nuke deal and Biden’s now-suspended special envoy for Iran.
Most recently, Iranian reporter Vahid Beheshti revealed a stunning internal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps document this week that inculpates the Iranian regime in helping to orchestrate America’s day of anarchic, crippling, pro-Hamas “demonstrations” on Monday.
The Trump administration, something of an interregnum between the two “realignment” presidencies, pursued the precise opposite policies: Punish America’s enemies and reward its friends. That is what basic logic would dictate, and the results were historic: new peace deals forged between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco under the umbrella of the Abraham Accords.
It turns out that the obvious thing is often also the best thing.
The Hamas pogrom and the ensuing war in Gaza was the first real test for the accords — and the Iran-containment coalition they represent. Crucially, none of the Arab signees have severed relations with Israel. Even more remarkably, Saudi Arabia — not part of the accords — acknowledged on Monday that it assisted the U.S.-led coalition that foiled Iran’s weekend attack.
All of this is a tribute to the statesmanship of former President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shepherded the accords across the finish line. And it is a glimmer of hope that more peace — and less Iran-emboldening Obama-Biden foolishness —might be just around the corner.
Josh Hammer is senior editor-at-large at Newsweek.
This article appeared in The Daily Signal.
AUTHOR
Josh Hammer
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‘Blank Checks and Slush Funds’: House Passes $95 Billion Foreign Aid Package for Ukraine, Israel
/in Budget and Finance, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research CouncilMembers of Congress chanted “Ukraine!” and waved a sea of rippling, blue-and-gold flags across the House floor, as the House of Representatives approved a massive $95 billion foreign aid package that benefits Ukraine, Taiwan, and both sides of the Israel-Hamas war.
The aid package contained approximately $61 billion in additional funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia, which supporters say will pay for the military’s next year of efforts. The bill also contains $26 billion for Israel, $9 billion of which is constituted as “humanitarian aid” for the Gaza Strip. The Awdah Palestinian TV, owned by the Fatah Party, accused Gaza’s Hamas-controlled government of stealing and absconding with food and other vital supplies intended for its citizens “to their own homes.” The package also contains $8 billion for the “Indo-Pacific” region, primarily Taiwan.
The bill passed the House on Saturday by a 311-112 vote. While Democrats voted unanimously in favor of the bill, a majority of Republicans opposed additional aid (112-101). One congressman, Rep. Daniel Meuser (R-Pa.), voted present. The Democrat-controlled Senate is expected to pass the bill on Tuesday.
Raucous congressmen began chanting, “Ukraine! Ukraine!” and waving foreign flags in the lower chamber of the U.S. people’s House immediately upon the bill’s passage, putting off critics of continued aid. “Too much Ukraine. Not enough USA,” remarked Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah).
The only member of the House born in Ukraine, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.), voted against sending more aid to her homeland, saying she would only vote to forward additional aid if it came with tighter oversight and provisions to secure the U.S. border. This aid package continues the Biden administration’s policy of “blank checks and slush funds,” Spartz declared on the House floor. “Unfortunately, this strategy has failed the American people. Biden has failed the American people.”
“If we don’t have proper oversight, we are not going to achieve our goals,” said Spartz earlier this month. “We cannot have these never-ending wars.”
House Republicans hoped to at least secure additional border enforcement from the aid package, but the measure failed to get the necessary two-thirds supermajority to be included in this bill.
House Democrats deemed the measure unnecessary. “Some say, ‘Well, we have to deal with our border first.’ The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border,” declared Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.).
Ultimately, insiders familiar with the process say, the Ukrainian aid package “would not have passed without Donald Trump.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told “Fox News Sunday” that “President Trump has created a loan component to this package that gives us leverage down the road.”
The legislation allows the U.S. to ask Ukraine to repay $10 billion in aid. But Ukraine is not expected to pay back U.S. taxpayers.
Controversially, the bill gives the president the ability to absolve Ukraine of half of that remaining $10 billion debt after the next presidential election but before the next president takes office.
“The ‘loan’ for Ukraine is all smoke and mirrors,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) posted on the social media platform X. “It allows the president to cancel up to 50% of funds owed after November 15, 2024, and all remaining funds owed after January 1, 2026. No bank would allow this.” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) dismissed the loan as “a joke.”
The deepening fissure within Republican ranks had been signaled during a procedural, rules vote on Friday. “What was significant about it is that the Democrats actually joined Republicans in voting in favor of the bill,” reporter Victoria Marshall told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm shortly after that tally.
That bipartisan support may have cost Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) vital support among his own House caucus, as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) doubled down on their threat to vacate the chair, terminating Speaker Johnson’s short and embattled tenure in office. Observers say that could result in a unified Democratic caucus overpowering a fractured Republican bloc to hand far-Left Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) the speaker’s gavel — and its attendant powers to move, or block, legislation.
“One of the things that’ll be interesting to track is how this plays in the Republican caucus that Speaker Johnson continues to try to hold together,” said Backholm on Friday. This weekend’s vote holds “lots of political ramifications for him personally and certainly for the caucus, as they head into November.”
Alongside the aid package, Congress passed the REPO Act, which allows the Biden administration to freeze, seize, and redistribute an estimated $6 billion in Russian assets, sending the proceeds to Ukraine. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has already promised “retaliatory actions and legal proceedings” if Washington follows through with its threat.
An ebullient Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told “Meet the Press” the fresh injection of U.S. taxpayer funds gives his nation “a chance for victory” over Russia. Likewise, CIA Director William Burns insisted the additional resources were aimed at “puncturing Putin’s arrogant view that time is on his side” during a speech at the Bush Center Forum on Leadership in Dallas on Thursday.
But military experts say Ukraine’s defeat is inevitable.
“This aid does not enable Ukraine to win the battle,” Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst now with the America First Policy Institute, told Newsmax TV on Monday morning. “It simply keeps Ukraine in the fight.”
“The best option, which Zelensky and Biden won’t talk about, is to end the war — to start a ceasefire and a process to end the killing,” said Fleitz. “Because Ukraine will eventually lose this war of attrition.”
AUTHOR
Ben Johnson
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
RELATED ARTICLE: Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Scolds Dems Waving Ukrainian Flags After Vote – ‘Put Those Damn Flags Away!’
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
The Largest Christian University in the U.S. Was Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack?
/in Culture War, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research CouncilA dust storm of political madness is brewing in Phoenix, Arizona as Grand Canyon University faces the continued threats of Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Christians have watched as the Biden administration attacks biblical views left and right, with a particularly vehement disregard of the sanctity of life and marriage. As such, it can’t be too surprising that Cardona, a part of this leftist administration, has “vowed” to shut down America’s largest Christian university.
In late October, GCU was hit with “a $37.7 million fine brought by the federal government over allegations that it lied to students about the cost of its programs,” AP News reported — an accusation GCU President Brian Mueller described as “ridiculous.” Around the same time, Liberty University, America’s second largest Christian university, was also fined $37 million “over alleged underreporting of crimes.” GCU appealed its fine in November even though a hearing is not expected until January 2025. But the question Mueller has is one of integrity. Is this genuine consideration for the well-being of students, or is this a targeted attack against religious institutions?
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the two largest Christian universities in the country, this one and Liberty University, are both being fined almost the identical amount at almost the identical time?” the college president speculated in a speech. “Now is there a cause and effect there? I don’t know. But it’s a fact.”
This April, the House Appropriations Committee held a hearing specifically about the administration’s decision to “crack down on GCU and other universities like it.” During the proceedings, Cardona and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), made their disapproval for GCU and similar universities obvious. “[W]e are cracking down not only to shut them down, but to send a message to not prey on students,” Cardona emphasized.
Supporters of GCU agree the fine seems unprecedented and motivated by ideological bias, including American Principles Project Policy Director Jon Schweppe, who said, “The federal government’s education agenda is punishing schools that do not conform to their progressive ideology. It’s time we take a stand against this egregious abuse of power.” Another conservative think tank, the Goldwater Institute (GI), sued the Department of Education for “refusing to turn over” public “documents that explain why” they’re fining GCU. The goal of their lawsuit is to unmask the reason behind the fine.
“With its motto of ‘private, Christian, affordable’ and its track record of graduating students into high-demand and high-paying jobs, GCU is a success story by any metric. And it stands apart from universities across the country that are facing declining enrollment, that are indoctrinating students with radical politics, and that are under attack for failing to defend the First Amendment,” GI wrote. “So then why are the feds targeting GCU, a popular university that seems to be doing everything right? That’s exactly what we’re going to find out.”
While there is still immense uncertainty surrounding this case, GCU president took the time to share with The Washington Stand how his staff, faculty, and students are fairing in these troubling times and how believers everywhere can help. Mueller emphasized that GCU has faced various issues over the years. But despite the government’s action, he wanted people to know that “interestingly enough, “it has had zero impact on anything that we’re doing.”
He continued, “The enrollments are just continuing to grow … [and] the morale is very high in terms of our faculty and staff. The campus is extremely vibrant. I mean, the students absolutely love this place. They’re extremely loyal to it, and so we just keep marching through it.” And while the fine they’re being dealt by the Department of Education is “a problem,” Mueller is just thankful that GCU remains optimistic.
The Christian “mission, not politics, is our motivation and it is our hope,” he told TWS. As a university, Mueller explained how they exist to “pour into” the community around them. He added, “[O]ur reach into the neighborhood and caring for disadvantaged populations has been a way to live out our faith” in a way “that has risen above … political divide.” Ultimately, with support from “both sides of the aisle” in Arizona, he noted, “[A]ll the issues we have are with a very small number of people in Washington D.C.”
“We encourage people to be involved politically and vote,” Mueller said. “… But our faith will stand above the politics always, and our politics will never become our religion.” Because, for “many people in our country today, their politics have become their religion, and that’s when things … go really bad in our society.” He pointed out that GCU is “trying to be an example of a Christian community that can rise above those things and focus on helping people” through service, as Scripture calls believers to do.
Mueller concluded with a request for prayer as they work through these troubling times and for “the hearts of certain people in Washington, D.C. to be softened,” adding that “it’s hard to make progress and resolve differences when people just … don’t want to talk to each other.”
AUTHOR
Sarah Holliday
Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
‘That Is Not a Religion’: DeSantis Bars Satanists from Florida School Chaplaincy Program
/in Courts & Law, Education, Elections, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Science, Social Issues/by Family Research CouncilThe Sunshine State is now welcoming chaplains into public schools, but Satanists need not apply. On Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law allowing chaplains to volunteer to offer counseling at public and charter schools. However, the Catholic governor warned that Satanists would not be accepted into the program, as some Christian and conservative groups had feared.
“Now some have said if you do a school chaplain program that somehow you’re going to have Satanists running around in all our schools,” DeSantis said in a press conference. “We’re not playing those games in Florida. That is not a religion. That is not qualifying to be able to participate in this. We’re going to be using common sense when it comes to this, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
The Florida Senate version of the Bill was approved in February and the House version approved early last month. The legislation’s text states, “Each school district or charter school may adopt a policy to authorize volunteer school chaplains to provide supports, services, and programs to students as assigned by the district school board or charter school governing board.” The new law requires volunteer chaplains to pass a background check and would require school administrators to publicize each volunteer chaplain’s religious affiliation and obtain parental consent before a student begins counseling.
“Any opportunity that exists for ministers or chaplains in the public sector must not discriminate based on religious affiliation,” said The Satanic Temple’s (TST) “Director of Ministry” Penemue Grigori in February. “Our ministers look forward to participating in opportunities to do good in the community, including the opportunities created by this bill, right alongside the clergy of other religions.” Ryan Jayne of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Action Fund added, “I think there is a 100% chance you see satanic chaplains, and also of course other religious minorities that the majority-Christian population might not be a fan of. The Satanic Temple is a church, whether people like it or not.”
“It is wonderful to have such a strong statement denying the legitimacy of Satanism as a religion or church from Governor DeSantis. But I worry that appeals to common sense will not hold in the most ideological school systems, even in Florida,” Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Education Studies Meg Kilgannon commented to The Washington Stand. “Regardless, this is an important step in acknowledging the role that faith plays in our lives and how important it is that the big questions students have about morality, life and death, and God’s plan for their lives are best answered by a parent or priest, pastor, or chaplain.”
DeSantis has criticized Satanism in the past, arguing that it is not a religion. In December, after military veteran and outspoken Christian Michael Cassidy toppled and beheaded a Baphomet idol erected in the Iowa state capitol building by TST, the Florida governor declared, “Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government. … Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.”
On its website, TST responds to the question “Do you worship Satan?” The organization states, “No, nor do we believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural.” TST adds, “Satan is a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds. … Our metaphoric representation is the literary Satan best exemplified by Milton and the Romantic Satanists from Blake to Shelley to Anatole France.”
Now that it has been signed by DeSantis, Florida’s new law goes into effect on July 1.
AUTHOR
S.A. McCarthy
S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
RELATED ARTICLE: The Largest Christian University in the U.S. Was Fined $37 Million. Coincidence or Targeted Attack?
EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
A Female Jewish Yale Student Stabbed in Eye By Male Terrorist Student
/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, National Security, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportHitler youth have taken over college campuses. Horrific.
Where did America think all this jihad porn and islamophilia would lead would lead?
Geller Reader commenter, ‘Will National and Conn. Jewish Federation, ADL, AJC demand appropriate punishment – or just have another meeting to tell parents and students how to “handle” antisemitism? Think how powerfully the establishment Jewish organizations would act if the victim was part of any other minority group other than a Jew.’
Jewish Yale student stabbed in eye with PLO flag
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Pro-Hamas hunger strikers at Yale have drag queen speak, he doesn’t condemn Hamas
/in Culture War, Education, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Jihad WatchThese people’s balloon never lands. Let Tifa Wine/Ryan Persadie visit Tel Aviv and see what happens to him there, and then make his way to Gaza City.
Facts, however, seldom trouble the left.
Drag performer speaks to anti-Israel Yale hunger strikers — without condemning homophobic Hamas
AUTHOR
ROBERT SPENCER
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
On Earth Day 2024 we remember Michael Crichton’s revelation that ‘Environmentalism is a religion’
/in Elections, Energy, Environment, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Rich SwierOn September 15, 2003 American author, screenwriter and filmmaker Michael Crichton made the following remarks at the Common Wealth Club in San Francisco, California.
We reprint this given that what he said in 2003 has come to pass in 2024 in America as the climate doomsayers are now in control of the current administration. They are now part of the Red/Green/Rainbow alliance. The green part comes in two shades of green. The green of the Islamic terrorists and the lighter shade of green of the Eco-terrorists. Both demand absolute power over us.
It is fitting that we publish this on Earth Day 2024 as we see Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. announce $7 billion in government grants for rooftop solar solar panels in his Earth Day message.
It is also fitting we recognize Dr. Michael Crichton, the creator of Jurassic Park and ET, whose passing on November 4, 2008 from cancer. Michael’s new book titled ERUPTION is set for release on June 3rd, 2024 and is based on his unfinished manuscript. ERUPTION is co-authored by James Patterson and is now available for pre-order. ERUPTION is described as:
The biggest thriller of 2024: A history-making eruption is about to destroy the Big Island of Hawaii. But a secret held for decades by the US military is far more terrifying than any volcano.
The master of the techno-thriller joins forces with the master of the modern thriller to create the most anticipated mega thriller in years.
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we’re told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
There was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white man’s invention to demonize the indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) It was some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all during this time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eat the brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It’s all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it’s uninformed talk. Farmers know what they’re talking about. City people don’t. It’s all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the number of people who die because they haven’t the least knowledge of how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo, for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in dicey weather without proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf on holiday because they can’t conceive the real power of what we blithely call “the force of nature.” They have seen the ocean. But they haven’t been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want it to be. They think all life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn’t give a damn about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it will demand that you adapt to it-and if you don’t, you die. It is a harsh, powerful, and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross. It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast, but it wasn’t deep—maybe three feet at most. My guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the last big town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back double time to get help, it’d still be at least three days before he could return with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And in three days, I’d probably be dead from my injuries. So that was why everybody was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slip could be deadly.
But let’s return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it’s interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there—though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they’re human. So what. Unfortunately, it’s not just one prediction. It’s a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won’t impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
Most of us have had some experience interacting with religious fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the contrary, they believe their way is the right way, everyone else is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism.
First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It’s not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth—that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won’t. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There’s a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren’t true. It isn’t that these “facts” are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all—what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don’t know any better. That’s not a good future for the human race. That’s our past. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
Thank you very much.
EXPLORING THE WORLD OF MICHAEL CRICHTON
Michael Crichton’s legacy—as the man, the author, the filmmaker, the doctor, the teacher, the visionary, and more—is very much alive and important today.
This website is an entrance into that world. As the Official Site for Michael Crichton, we invite you to explore the many facets of the man behind the genius. Michael’s work, whether in books, television, or film, is revolutionary and timeless, speaking to all generations. We want to honor his life and continue to reveal his words, ideas, influences, and diverse interests to you.
As we excavate Michael’s Archives, we will periodically crack open the vault doors for you to peek inside, unveiling his explorations within the spheres of human behavior, morality, modern medicine, technology, and scientific breakthroughs, to name a few. The most exciting part is rediscovering the prolific nature of Michael’s work and how it compels us to revisit his world and continuously be curious.
The importance of this website is to fully express the vision of the man behind the characters and stories we have all come to love. Michael Crichton, the Jules Verne of our modern era, was a true Renaissance man, ahead of his time, and relevant to all generations.
Welcome to the World of Michael Crichton.
©2024. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.
The Republican In Name Only Socialists Just refilled the Corrupt Ukrainian government Pensions
/in Commentary, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Geoff RossThe do nothing Socialist Republican Party continued its reckless spending of our hard earned tax money by handing the corrupt Ukrainian government $69.84 billion dollars. This means the Ukrainian government officials will still be able to take their vacations to Italy and Greece this summer and get their pension funds refilled. Also the Ukrainian fire department and basket weaving grandmothers will also get paid.
Does anyone know what happened to all the past tax payer money our republican socialist and communist democrat party gave to Zelensky the president of Ukraine? A man who has blocked new future elections in Ukraine which is on par with the communist dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela.
What’s interesting is that our own government contractors like Lockheed Martin and others only received $23 billion to restock our republic’s weapons for self defense. So House Speaker Johnson and his pal Comrade Joe Marxist Biden continue to put Ukraine “first” and America “last”.
This is the norm for the worthless fraud republicans working with their communist democrat pals in congress. Inflation will never get under control with these low IQ cockroaches running the republic. Which means the value of my house will continue to rise exponentially. Which is good for me but not for our economy.
As an after thought note – The U.S. Army is requesting $185.9 billion for fiscal year 2025 budget request an increase by a dismal $400 million. Not that the Army needs the money considering nobody is joining the ranks of this once powerful patriotic branch of the armed forces.
Patriotic Americans who once considered a military career do not want to take showers with guys who think they are women playing soldier, nobody is interested in the woke indoctrination, even our Space Force is led by a guy wearing a thong and red lipstick.
Americans are also sick and tired of watching the dismantling of history with the renaming of army bases. Even our powerful diesel tanks are being converted into green new deal battery powered shells so we don’t pollute the air of our enemies.
The Republican party has pretty much dissolved into an abyss of Socialist ideology by refusing to block all this garbage as they wander far off the conservative path thumbing their noses at their constituents who elected them.
The real grass root conservative republicans are hard working Americans that have been stabbed in the back multiple times by these scum liberal Republican in Name Only socialists.
Rep. Mike Gallagher has just quit Congress. His final act was to vote in support of giving our hard earned tax dollars to the corrupt Ukrainian government. Good riddance to him.
Rep. Jake LaTurner, R-Kan., has also announced that he will not seek re-election this fall. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, announced in October 2023 she would not seek re-election. She has been collecting a tax payer paycheck since 1997. A career politician indeed.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee and has served for nearly 20 years, she announced in February 2024 she would not run for another term. Lastly Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has thrown in the towel.
So the fake news media will no doubt announce the republicans are losing their grip on power by a thin margin when in all reality nothing has changed in the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no ideological difference between the Republican and Democrat members of Congress. So losing republicans changes nothing. The Communist agenda continues to advance.
I estimate during my 40 year affiliation with the GOP before terminating my R to the Conservative Party of Florida I spent over $250,000 of my own money helping republicans get elected plus I helped raise over a million dollars with my political affiliations in Texas and Montana during the Bush year’s and thereafter after.
My hard work got me some nice invitations such as breakfast in the White House with the Bush administration folks. It was a nice experience to meet Condoleezza Rice but looking back all I did was help advance the socialist destruction of our republic.
Not anymore. We can make a difference though by electing Trump in November 2024. If you want to secure our republic and give Trump the authority to veto all the crap expenditures being pumped out of the Congress vote Trump. Stay strong patriots.
©2024. Geoff Ross. All rights reserved.
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The final sellout? Uniparty devils sending $95 billion to corrupt foreign governments – $300 million goes to prevent Ukrainians from escaping military draft by fleeing to Poland
/in Budget and Finance, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Leo HohmannThe House voted on Saturday to betray America and American interests. As sellouts go, this was a big one, even by Washington Uniparty standards, as these members of Congress basically flipped their collective middle finger at America’s working poor and its increasingly struggling middle class.
These globalist sycophants, led by the globalist Speaker Mike Johnson, passed three separate foreign-aid bills that will provide funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, transferring a total of $95 billion from the U.S. Treasury directly to foreign governments. The massive foreign-aid package now heads to the Senate, where it will be rubber-stamped and signed by Joe Biden.
According to Just the News, the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act was passed 311-112. The bill contains $61 billion for Ukraine.
This bill is not only anti-American, it’s anti-Ukrainian. Even more so, it’s anti-human because it will result in many more dead Ukrainians and Russians.
Included in the package is $300 million to protect Ukraine’s border with Poland. This $300 million will be used to keep Ukrainians from fleeing into Poland to escape the military draft, which sends them into the meatgrinder and certain death at the front with a superior Russian military. No matter how hard they try to serve it up on a pretty platter, it doesn’t get any more evil than this.
Watch Steve Poplar’s report on the bill below.
Democrats cheered after the foreign-aid bills were passed, according to CNN. Some celebrated by raising Ukrainian flags in the House chamber.
The House then passed the Israel Security Supplemental with a vote of 366-58. It contains $26.4 billion to aid Israel. Taiwan will get $8 billion.
Some of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s GOP colleagues have threatened to oust him as speaker if he moved forward with Ukraine aid. He ignored them. Johnson is now so popular with Democrats that some say they will prevent Republicans from ousting him.
Congressman Thomas Massie, R-Ky., told reporters, according to The Washington Post:
“To send $100 billion overseas without reinforcing our own borders shows that we put America last.”
Ya think?
Massie and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., have cosponsored a motion introduced by Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s to vacate the office of the Speaker, while Democrats including Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have pledged to save Johnson if that attempt to oust him arrives, according to the New York Post.
Congressman Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., on Thursday called the foreign aid package that funds the Ukraine war “America Last.”
I would call it something even worse: America’s betrayal.
And, by the way, you can bet your last dollar that the U.S. Congress will approve funding for securing U.S. borders, only after they have reinstituted the military draft.
I’ve been predicting this for some time, that a wall will be built, but only to keep us in, not to keep anyone out. They’ve already set the precedent with $300 million to secure Ukraine’s border with Poland.
The Gateway Pundit reports that Virginia Democrat Rep. Gerry Connolly declared, in an unhinged speech on the House floor, that “the Ukrainian-Russian border is OUR border.”
Connolly was raging at Republicans opposing the aid package to Ukraine before Saturday’s vote.
“Some say, well, we have to deal with our border first,” Connolly claimed. “The Ukrainian-Russian border is our border! It’s the border between depraved autocracy and freedom-loving people seeking our democratic way of life! Do we have a stake in that outcome? Yes. Undeniably, yes.”
This is the twisted talk of a deranged Luciferian-influenced globalist. He’s no longer even capable of seeing the interests of his own people, and his definition of protecting America centers on how much of our hard-earned tax dollars he can ship overseas to foriegn governments to fritter away on new war-making mischief. It matters not that this policy of endless war is killing more than 1,000 Ukrainians per day, and their government is now kidnapping middle-aged men off the streets to send them to the front.
And any foreign government that acts to discourage or repress the worst aspects of humanity is labeled a “depraved autocracy,” while encouraging mankind to live in actual depravity is called “freedom loving” and “democratic.”
When the Uniparty operatives in the Democrat and Republican parties refer to “our democracy,” they’re referring to their version of a demented and perverted ideology that operates like a death cult. Their idols are abortion on demand (they only argue now over how old of an unborn baby it’s OK to kill), LGBTQ obsessions, toxic injections for all, and perpetual war.
As the Bible says, woe to those who call good evil and evil good.
Our politicians are on a mission to crash and burn what’s left of Western civilization. Will you let them offer up your child or grandchild to the globalist death cult? Let me know in the comments below.
©2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.
RELATED ARTICLES:
House Bursts Into Pro-Ukraine Chant During Foreign Aid Vote
House Adjourns Without Forcing Vote On Mike Johnson’s Speakership
‘Disastrous Foreign Policy’: Biden Admin Funded Both Sides Of Growing Israel-Iran Faceoff
Here Are The 30 GOP Senators Who Voted To Reauthorize Warrantless Spying Tool
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VIDEO: On June 7, 1981 Israel attacked Baghdad here’s IAF General David Ivry’s Story about ‘Operation Opera’ with Tom Trento
/in Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Video/by Defend The BorderOn June 7, 1981, Israel Israel launched “Operation Opera” (Hebrew: אופרה) and destroyed Saddam Hussain’s nuclear bomb capability. Operation Opera prevented Saddam Hussein from developing and using nuclear weapons to destroy the state of Israel.
On June 7, 1981 Israel launched “Operation Opera” (Hebrew: אופרה) attacking Baghdad.
Here’s General David Ivry the IAF commander of Operation Opera’s story with Tom Trento from the United West.
Reread that sentence because the globally condemned actions of Israel in Iraq have proven to be the right decision, at the right time and those countries which condemned, soon after, praised Israel for their bold, daring, very dangerous attack, that has kept the world safe from a madman’s apocalyptic delusions.
Did I say, “a madman’s apocalyptic delusions?”
Clearly, that description causes your brain to see the insane, satanic leaders of Iran, specifically, the Ayatollah Khamenei.
Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei is an Iranian Twelver Shia and politician who has been the second supreme leader of Iran since 1989
Ayatollah Khamenei wants to destroy all of Israel because Allah told him to do that and he can’t go against Allah & Mohammad.
Give this Saddamesque madman a big bomb and the World is in a helluva mess.
So, here are a few questions to ponder as Muslims worldwide, energized by Iran, continue destructive demonstrations against Jews and Israel, especially here in America.
QUESTIONS:
If you answered “NO” to these questions, then shut your mouth!
When the 7.5 million Israeli’s, once again, risking their blood and treasure, attack and destroy Iran’s nukes, which should really be done by a coalition of the billions of citizens in the free countries, too afraid to fight unadulterated evil.
WATCH BONUS 2.00 MINUTE VIDEO!
In 2015, The United West tried to STOP, President Obama’s “deal” with Iran, designed to slow down their nuclear bomb program but in fact, did the opposite. Instead of a bogus deal, the West (and several Arab countries) should have bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. If that was done in 2015, The World would NOT have the problem of Iran as the number one global terrorist threat.
RELATED ARTICLE: Iranian Regional Strategy Moves Forward While the West Sleeps
EDTORS NOTE: This United West column with videos is republished with permission. Copyright © 2024 Defend The Border, All rights reserved.
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‘Barbarians at the Gates of Israel’ by Fiamma Nirenstein
/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics/by Harold RhodeOne of the most moving pieces I have ever read.
Fiamma Nirenstein in her “Barbarians at the Gates of Israel” takes the reader into the mindset of both the terrorists who committed the October 7th atrocities, and into the mindset of the victims, their families and the people of Israel.
Barbarians at the Gates of Israel published by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs is a must read.
Here is an excerpt:
The Descent into Barbarism
It was the morning of October 7, 2023. The sun shone gloriously on the yellow sand, the grass of the kibbutzim, the swing chairs beneath the veranda, the lopsided sculptures, the children’s bicycles, the’ grandparents’ electric cars, the shells threaded onto string swinging in the wind and tinkling in front of the houses. The sea nearby. Everyone was sleeping. It was six o’clock on Shabbat morning. Not far away, a crowd of thousands of young people was dancing to pounding rave music at a festival called Nova, lightheaded with youth and peace until collapsing into sleep.
In the kibbutzim of southern Israel, among the Israeli families, this was the beginning of a holiday; nobody knew of the reality of roaring white pickup trucks breaking through the mesh fences and walls to invade. The inhabitants of Be’eri or Kfar Aza had wanted to create in the south one of the most utopian pictures of the homeland of the Jewish people, in the style of the early twenty-first century: a little socialist, very loving, ecological, and pacifist as well as technological, even holding a daily dialogue with the inhabitants of Gaza, neighbors across the yellow space, with gifts to the children, cookies, and health care.
At six-thirty, the legion of children, about three per family, princes, and princesses, masters of all, were sleeping before a new royal awakening of kisses and cookies. The grandparents
had left the Friday-night tables half laid, with the traces of the large families who had eaten the foods of their Polish or Moroccan past. They would sleep a little longer, as would the longhaired post-army youngsters, with the guitars propped in the corner, the cell phones already buzzing with all the TikToks trying vainly to warn them: “Wake up, something’s going on!” But it was already too late. In the houses overflowing with books and flowers, the many peace ideals would be incinerated with the special thermobaric RPG grenades, large black spindles (we saw dozens of unexploded ones) that explode at 2000 degrees and carbonize everything, leaving the victims and the houses, objects, and people, unrecognizable and unidentifiable. This is precisely what happened. I have seen photographs of the carbonized victims, like the victims of Pompeii.
As missiles began to rain everywhere, much more than the usual barrage of the southern communities constantly shelled by Hamas, I received a call from my shocked friend Ruthie: “Do you maybe know why they’re shooting so much and everywhere?” I didn’t know, nobody knew, nobody was expecting it. As in 1973, when the Yom Kippur War took a toll of about 2,700 Israeli soldiers, Israel had believed that its moral and technological superiority, its mythical powers of survival against all and everything, nullified any warning, any forecast. Instead, everything would soon be ashes and blood. In the 1920s and 1930s, in Europe, Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and others relied on the refinement of advanced German thought without an inkling that anything was brewing in the country. They did not know, precisely because of their sophistication and hope in life joined with materialization, that a monster was lurking in the shadows, planning how to kill all the Jews, one by one, and bury them under the ruins of Europe.
[ … ]
The genuine wish for peace is only that which understands patience, namely long and difficult support for a painful but necessary war against Hamas. This was the case with Al Qaeda and ISIS. Moreover, it should be understood that, just as to achieve peace, it was necessary to fight the Nazi menace until its eradication, including Hitler, his officials, and governing infrastructure, so today this must be repeated because it has been demonstrated again that cruelty can go beyond the bounds of the most demonic imagination.
Therefore, let us hope for a victory over evil, a triumph of what we love and believe in. Let us hope for democracy and common sense, not for a premature ceasefire, but only when evil is stamped out. Peace will be achieved only with the patience and courage of today’s soldiers on the battlefield…
Click here to read Fiamma’s entire 34 page treatise
About Dr. Fiamma Nirenstein
Dr. Fiamma Nirenstein was a member of the Italian Parliament (2008-2013) where she served as Vice President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Chamber of Deputies, served in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, and established and chaired the Committee for the Inquiry into Anti-Semitism. A founding member of the international Friends of Israel Initiative, she is the author of 13 books, including Israel Is Us (2009). She is a Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
©2024. Harold Rhode. All rights reserved.
Biden Regime To Announce Sanctions Against IDF Unit
/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportThe Biden regime is expected to announce sanctions against IDF unit for human rights abuses. This is a punishing break with our most devoted and stalwart ally, all while continuing to fund Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and it’s vicious jihad proxies in Gaza (Hamas), Syria and Lebanon (Hezb’allah) and Judea, Samaria (‘Palestinian’ jihad) in their genocidal jihad against the tiny Jewish nation.
It beggars belief, too gruesome to contemplate. The United States of America is rewarding savage jihad terrorists unimaginable bounty for the most unspeakable massacre and monstrous atrocities against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
The message the Biden regime is sending to jihad terrorists is clear. We will break with and punish our allies and you will reap untold wealth and legitimacy for the most monstrous brutality and obscene savagery against the Jewish people.
The US is expected to announce sanctions against IDF unit for human rights abuses
The IDF unit operates in the West Bank and is mainly composed of haredi men and extremist youth who hold-far right views, and were not included in other combat units in the IDF.
By Baral Rabid, Jerusalem Post, April 20, 2024:
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to announce sanctions against the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda Battalion in the next few days, according to three American sources.
The sanctions are a result of human rights violations against Palestinians in the West Bank.
This will be the first time that the United States government has imposed sanctions on an Israeli military unit for its activities in the West Bank.
The sources stated that the American sanctions will prohibit the transfer of US military aid to the Netzah Yehuda Battalion, will prevent its soldiers and officers from taking part in training with the United States military, and will prevent the soldiers from this unit from participating in activities that receive American funding.
The sanctions are based on a 1997 law by former Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, which prohibits the United States from providing military aid or training to security forces, the military, or the police when there is reliable information about human rights abuses.
A senior US administration official told Walla! that Blinken’s decision is based on incidents that occurred before October 7 and occurred only in the West Bank.
This was the only unit Blinken decided to sanction
One of the sources stated that Blinken decided not to impose sanctions on several additional units in the IDF and the Israel Police that were also under investigation because they had corrected their conduct.
On Thursday, the American investigative website ProPublica reported that a special committee of the American State Department, which investigated allegations of human rights violations in the West Bank, forwarded recommendations a few months ago to Blinken to impose sanctions on several units of the IDF and the Israel Police and to prevent them from receiving American funding.
At a press conference in Italy on Friday, Blinken was asked about these recommendations, and claimed that he had made a decision on the matter and that an announcement about it would be made in the coming days.
Israeli officials condemn sanctions
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed outrage at the reported intention to sanction the unit, writing on X that “sanctions must not be imposed on the IDF!”
Netanyahu added that in recent weeks he’s been working against the imposition of sanctions on Israeli citizens.
“At a time when our soldiers are fighting the monsters of terror, the intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low,” wrote Netanyahu. “The government headed by me will act by all means against these moves.”
The Netzah Yehuda Battalion was originally established as a special military unit for haredim (ultra-orthodox), in which all of the soldiers and officers were men.
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
RELATED ARTICLE: Maher: This year’s DNC will be a repeat of 1968 with pro-Hamas protesters
RELATED VIDEO: Palestinian children taught to hate Jews, encouraged to kidnap and kill them
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Mayorkas Shrugs Over Americans Murdered By Illegal Aliens
/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Immigration, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportAnd Senate Democrats killed his impeachment trial.
The ruling party hates you.
Hawley Blasts DHS Secretary Mayorkas Over Americans Killed By Illegals
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
RELATED ARTICLE: Stolen Lives: Victims of Illegal Alien Crime
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
Democrats Move to Strip Trump of Secret Service Protection
/in Courts & Law, Election Fraud, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by The Geller ReportNow the Democrat party of treason wants to kill Trump. Just to be clear, all living former presidents (and their spouses) after receive lifetime Secret Service protection.
Democrat Rep. Bennie Thompson on Friday introduced legislation that would strip Secret Service protection from ‘convicted felons’ sentenced to prison, a bill clearly aimed at President Donald Trump.
How long do good people stand by and do nothing?
Democrats Move to Strip Trump of Secret Service Protection
AUTHOR
Pamela Geller
RELATED ARTICLE: GOP Wins ‘Crucial’ Mail-In Ballot Case In Critical Swing State
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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.