Let’s see if I have this straight.
Donald Trump set a deadline of 8pm April 7 for Iran to stop attacking ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Over the Easter weekend, Trump posted an obscene threat to Iran promising Iranians will be “living in hell” if they do not comply by the deadline. On the morning of April 7, Trump posted another threat, promising, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
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The post above was made on his personal social media account by the man 77 million Americans sent back to the Oval Office. It was repeated by the official account of the White House. It is literally a declaration of war by Donald Trump on a major America City. MAGA apologists have been scrambling to pass it off as a joke, a cute and meaningless quip. It is not.
This is simply disgusting.
The meme Trump posts is a take on a scene from the movie Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic set during the war in Vietnam. That’s the war Trump sat out, having found a doctor to write him a medical excuse saying he could not serve because he had “bone spurs.” Fifty-Eight thousand Americans died in that war. Most had been involuntarily drafted.
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It has become routine. Every two- or three-days Donald Trump does something more atrocious than before and it interrupts whatever I was doing and prompts a cycle of disgust, fear, and rage and often provokes one of these blogs, forcing me to put side something I thought was more interesting. I have come to hate the fact that he sucks all the oxygen out of the room.
But despite that, I find myself unable to get upset about Trump’s recent decision to bomb Iran‘s nuclear facilities. In fact, my initial thought was simply, why did it take so long?
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Take a good look at the picture above. We have never seen anything like it.
It comes from the web site of the British news service Reuters. It is a still image taken from about a minute of video. The video and the accompanying reporting should set off warning alarms across the United States. Read the Reuters article and see the full video here. I’m ready to nominate the Reuters’ team for a Pulitzer Prize.
Reuters says the video shows U.S. Marines deployed to Los Angeles detaining an American citizen. This, it is believed, has never happened before.
Read moreThere are about one hundred hostages still being held in Gaza.
I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of that fact. It should be the first thought for anyone commenting on the conflagration burning though the Middle East. But I do have to remind people because it is often not the first thought. It is often not a thought at all.
There are about one hundred hostages still being held in Gaza.
They were captured one year ago today, October 7, 2023, when a horde of Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, coming over, under and through the barrier separating Israel from the Gaza Strip. They marauded across Israel, murdering, maiming, kidnapping and sexually abusing any Israeli they could get their hands on. They slaughtered 1,200. They dragged 250 back into Gaza. They had no goal, other than to destroy the Jewish state. More than 300 victims murdered by Hamas terrorists were teenagers attending a music festival.
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Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi.
Say their names. Say them out loud. Think of them as individuals, not simply as six hostages, abducted during the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by terrorists from Gaza.
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Photo: Iranian missiles over Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, courtesy of Mehr News Service under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
There was significant activity on the military front in the Mideast last week. The events changed the calculus for diplomacy in the region and could lead to new opportunities for peace, if the principals are willing to consider them.
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