By Michael Gillespie, April 2024
Before the enemies of peace conspired to assassinate him in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas, on Nov. 23, 1963, President John F. Kennedy famously said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
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Have you asked yourself, "Who makes peaceful revolution impossible?" Or, put another way, "Who profits from war?"
A friend, a retired member of the Christian clergy and a longtime peace and social justice activist, sent to me a link to an insightful and thought-provoking article by Michael Brenner titled "Morality Challenged", published recently by ScheerPost. In it, Brenner opines, ". . . convenient self-distancing from the arena of moral combat is evident even among church leaders. In America, their silence is deafening. Among the Catholic Establishment, there has been little if any echo of Pope Francis’ heartfelt plea for an end to the Gaza carnage. The mainstream Protestant denominations have acted as passive onlookers – with very few exceptions. They seem to have exhausted their reserve of moral passion .... Indeed, the names of brave rabbis appear more frequently on petitions for peace than do those of Christian churchmen."
The quote elicited this reply from me:
As members of a once-persecuted minority group with a tragic racial history marked by deadly violence, American rabbis are perhaps a bit more likely than are American establishment Christian churchmen to recognize that it is very much in their own interest to avoid a mass public reaction to Israel's horrific crimes that might result in a serious upsurge in anti-Jewish feeling and violence in the USA. For decades American Jews generally speaking have been able to rely on the wealth of, the political power and influence of, and the control of mass media narratives concocted and approved by the reflexively pro-Israel Zionist establishment to protect Jews. With Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza center stage for six long and bloody months, Zionism's crimes and excesses are, finally, beginning to seriously stress some of the means and methods employed by the Jewish Zionist establishment even as the wealthiest Jews continue to prosper financially. Well, not all of the wealthiest Jews are continuing to prosper so handsomely in their chosen fields of endeavor. For instance, many Jewish-owned and -operated big legacy media corporations are hemorrhaging money and cutting staff. Not only are Big Media corporations struggling to effectively manage technological changes that are affecting their bottom lines, but those challenges come at a time when growing numbers of people are waking up to a variety of unpleasant realities that Big Media's talking heads can no longer ignore or spin away. Big Media corporations are losing their audiences. The violence at the center of the Big Media business model and many socially-destabilizing Big Media products and product lines have long been a causative factor in real world violence, from perpetual war to mass shootings. Today, many Americans are tired of war and the raging river of violence flooding into American popular culture through screens large and small, fantasy violence that produced the buckets of fake blood and gore that were so popular in prime time regularly capturing millions of eyeballs and billions of advertising dollar$ only a few years ago, well, not so much any more.
The attention of the entire world is now focused on a horrific genocide committed by Israeli Jews against a captive civilian population, mostly defenseless Palestinian women and children. The Israeli leader most responsible for the slaughter is picking a fight with an American president who is already in over his head in a fight with the leaders of both Russia and China, and Americans are realizing that their own future is in some doubt. This is probably not a good time for a once-persecuted minority group to give free rein to its most vicious, militant, and rigidly ultra-nationalistic leaders' worst instincts. Sadly, perhaps tragically, Bibi "the Butcher" Netanyahu doesn't give a (darn) what American rabbis think or say. If he is allowed to, he will launch his nukes rather than go to jail for the crimes his own government indicted him and tried him for, never mind the much worse crimes he has committed since. That's what the recent deadly Israeli rocket and bomb attack on the Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, Syria, was all about. Netanyahu is desperate to gin up a war in which he will have an excuse to use Israel's nuclear weapons.
Many members of the peace and social justice community have warned again and again that Israeli Zionist leaders were and are determined to provoke a major regional war in order to advance their plans for a Greater Israel. Far-Right Israeli leaders have been the Israeli tail wagging the American dog of war for decades.
This Christian supports all Jews, all Muslims, all those of any and every religious or spiritual tradition and all non-believers who are against war and who are devoted to diplomacy and nonviolent solutions to mankind's problems.
Where is a Henry Wallace, a Dwight
"Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as a part of the social system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization; and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality."
Michael Gillespie resides in central Iowa and has work which has appeared in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, CounterPunch, Disside
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