Veterans’ Day Highlights a National Crisis

Posted on November 10, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 10, 2023

My state is celebrating Veterans’ Day today. That naturally brings up the challenges currently facing our military. In an unusual twist, this year, those challenges go hand-in-hand with challenges facing every aspect of American life. Our military is arguably the only thing protecting the western world from domination by the expansionist ambitions of Russia and China, and militant Islamic extremists who are bent on destroying everything the Judeo-Christian world represents.

The Biden administration has been building new alliances in the South Pacific, the region around the South China Sea, and South America, partly because that’s the best way to prevent Chinese and Russian incursions, but also because America doesn’t have the resources to protect everyone. Without alliances based on common interest and economic benefit, individual nations are not likely to be able to stand against Chinese expansionism, for one. Based on the effort and resources it’s taken to defend Ukraine for the last twenty-one months, it’s difficult to imagine even NATO and a united Europe being able to defend themselves against Russia without American support.

America’s role as defender of freedom and democracy has never been clearer than it is today. Two of our eleven aircraft carrier groups are in the Mediterranean as a deterrent to anyone trying to expand conflict in Gaza. NATO forces, including American military personnel are on alert in every country bordering Russia and Ukraine. And while all this is happening, right-wing extremists within our own government are doing everything they can to hamstring our military.

Tommy Tuberville, whose vast experience as a football coach won him one of Alabama’s Senate seats, has been a one-man wrecking crew standing in the way of hundreds of overdue military promotions, many of which were to fill critical vacancies. Tuberville exposed a serious flaw in the way our government functions. How is it possible that one Senator out of a hundred, with no background in military planning, has enough obstructionist power that the other ninety-nine can only watch helplessly as the Joint Chiefs tear their hair out?

The situation in the House is worse, with the country only a week away from a complete government shutdown. The Republicans who are supposed to be using their slim majority to govern decided that the best way to avert a serious crisis was to take an extended weekend break. The extremists in charge of their caucus, who include Speaker Mike Johnson, have likened any kind of bipartisan solution to treason, and although they make up less than ten percent of their own caucus, they are determined to prevent any reasonable solution that doesn’t meet every one of their demands from being voted on.

Republican extremists, whom many of their colleagues refer to as political terrorists, might as well be taking their cues from Hamas. Hamas is using two hundred plus innocent hostages to prevent the Israeli military from punishing them for their murderous assault on defenseless Israeli civilians. The MAGA wing of the House Republican Caucus is holding the entire United States government hostage, and with it the engines that drive our economy and keep us secure.

Their putative leader, Donald Trump, will spend most of the year before the 2024 election standing trial on nearly a hundred felony and civil counts. In his spare time, he eggs on the extremists and threatens defectors’ careers and families, while running for president on a platform that could have been drafted by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Yesterday, he advocated framing political opponents that get in his way and using the criminal courts to neutralize them. I was shocked that even Trump would say something like that – until he added, “That’s what I would do.”

A former president who is a raging narcissist with no moral compass believes that anything he would be willing to do ought to define the rules of the game for everyone. Nothing is too craven or unethical. Whether it’s recklessly attacking anyone who opposes him, having no respect for truth, or subverting the Constitution, Trump would set the bar for competition so low our elections would look like mafia gang wars.

I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t see any way the country enters the holiday season without being in a serious crisis that worsens daily. Imagine this horror show: the 2023 holiday season is projected to be the busiest travel period we’ve ever had. Consider the strain on an air traffic control system that is already short 3,000 people, operating under a government shutdown – no new positions, no respite, no training, no resources available for anything except daily operations for one of the most stressful jobs in the country. Add in a blizzard or two, and would you want to be flying over the holidays?

On this Veterans’ Day, the MAGA crew are threatening not only our service personnel, but every American who believe in our Constitution.

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No One Predicted This

Posted on November 8, 2023 by alanpzendell

November 8, 2023

This week’s election should be a wake-up call for everyone who thinks polls are valid predictors. The best we can hope for from polls, especially a full year before a presidential election, is a sense of the current trends, whether momentum seems to be shifting. But none of the major polls taken over the last few months accomplished even that.

By any objective measure, the 2023 election was both a big win for Democrats and a big loss for politicians who tied themselves to Donald Trump’s rhetoric. If you want evidence, consider two governors who are being watched as rising stars and future presidential candidates.

Republican Glenn Youngkin of Virginia had confidently staked his future and reputation as a leader on his promise to sign a law outlawing most abortions after fifteen weeks if voters delivered a Republican trifecta (control of the Assembly, Senate, and Governorship.) Before the election, Democrats controlled the state Senate by a slim margin, and Republicans controlled the House, but voters gave Democrats victories in both chambers. Polls had suggested that Youngkin’s momentum as a generally pro-Trump leader was on the rise, but support for abortion rights killed it. Ever since the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v Wade, voters in states that put abortion rights on their ballot unanimously protected them in state laws and Constitutions. Still, pollsters didn’t seem to get the correlation between the positive momentum on that issue and its effect on statewide elections.

The vote to protect abortion rights in Ohio wasn’t shocking but the margin of victory in a state that has become continuously redder over recent decades was larger than anyone expected. Another serious momentum shift that polls should have detected but didn’t.

Then there’s Andy Beshear, the Democratic Governor of Kentucky. In 2020, Trump won Kentucky by a two-to-one margin. In 2023, Beshear ran against a powerful Republican coalition that included Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Yet, his margin of victory this week was twelve times larger than his first term win in 2019. The increased margin of victory is attributed to support for abortion rights and the money pouring into Kentucky from the infrastructure bill promoted and signed by President Biden last year. The polls failed to predict either the degree to which abortion lifted Beshear in one of the reddest states in the country or the general rise in his popularity. Finally, there’s the Mississippi Governor’s race. Republican incumbent Tate Reeves beat Elvis Presley’s cousin Brandon, but the margin was smaller than both Reeves’ victory in 2019 and Trump’s win over Biden in 2020.

By any measure, these results imply a rising Democratic tide, which seems to contradict the national polls that suggest Trump and Biden are running about even in the 2024 election. That’s a very serious matter, because voters are victims of our polarized media. When poll after poll suggests that the country is tending to Trump, most people believe them. But the great majority of people who unquestioningly swallow poll results really have no idea of how polls work or whether they’re likely to be accurate, and the major media outlets do little or nothing to educate their viewers. Instead, poll reports are presented like sporting events. The jargon used sounds like an account of a horse race because that builds ratings.

My years of experience with statistical sampling and prediction models leave me skeptical about the way polls are conducted today. We’re told almost daily that Trump is a shoe-in for the Republican nomination and that his popularity continues to grow in spite being on trial for ninety-one felonies, including those stemming from the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol and the obvious phenomenon that American women are furious over the Dobbs decision, which they properly, closely associate with Trump. Are the polls correct?

I ask whether the thousand or so people sampled in a typical poll are representative of America’s electorate. Who are they? Think about how we use our phones and email accounts. They are the sources of polling data. Do you answer calls from unknown callers? Do you respond to polling emails knowing that nearly all of them are just bait for fund-raising? Most of us answer “No” to both questions these days. If that’s true, how can polling results accurately reflect the view of the electorate as a whole. The notion violates every rule of statistical sampling.

This week’s election should give every voter and pollster pause. It’s a serious problem, but one that’s easily fixable, at least in part. Polling organizations are generally professional and nonpartisan, but the media they work for make no effort to provide meaningful background for voters. They all need to put political biases aside and do their jobs, informing the public accurately, and making sure we all understand that relying on polls can be dangerous.

Dewey did not beat Truman in 1948, no matter what the polls said.

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The Reality of Modern Religion

Posted on November 2, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 2, 2023

As a child, I put myself through years of religious training at a strict orthodox synagogue. It was my choice, one that horrified my parents, but it was something I had to do. My maternal grandmother, who’d fled the Cossacks in Eastern Europe and emigrated to the United States before World War 1 was a wonderful, honest woman who seemed truly devoted to her faith, but the other adults who had a hand in raising me always seemed to be faking it. Long before I could spell “hypocrite,” I was well aware of its meaning.

Of all my studies, one passage in the Old Testament made the greatest impression on me. Genesis 22 tells the story of God testing Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac (cutting his throat as if he were a goat) to proof his faith. Only after Abraham raises his knife to do the awful deed, an angel intercedes and offers a ram instead.

I insisted that our rabbi and teacher explain how the story of Abraham and Isaac was a moral lesson. I’ve had that conversation with several rabbis since then, and none offered a reasonable answer. As an adult, today, it sounds like an ISIS terrorist forcing a false confession out of a hostage with a knife at his throat. Reading about Sodom and Gomorrah, and Noah and the Great Flood made it worse. The same God who terrorized Abraham murdered millions of people simply because they disobeyed him.

I concluded that the Old Testament God who I was told loved me was a psychopath, and nothing I experienced since then has changed my mind. Why is this relevant, now? Consider that all modern primates – humans, apes, orangutans, monkeys – had a common progenitor. They have a lot in common, including nearly 99% of their DNA, but it’s amazing how such different beings evolved from the same source. The Abraham of the Old Testament can be thought as the progenitor of three major religions that are followed by countries that contain more than half the world’s population.

Both Christianity and Islam grew out of Abrahamic teachings, one of which was that some day a Messiah would come. To Christians, the Messiah was Jesus, who in a twisted way re-tells the story of Abraham as God Himself sacrifices his own son to prove his love of mankind, in the process, transforming from a single entity to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Six hundred years later, the same God who whispered in Abraham’s ear whispered in Mohammed’s, telling him that while Jesus was truly the Messiah, the Christian trinary God was blasphemy. Thus, was born Islam, a religion that seems to preach peace and love, but is interpreted by many as a call to Jihad, to cleanse the world of defilers.

As a child, I was taught that humans were created in God’s image. I was told that meant we must ascribe to a creed based on generosity and faith, when in fact, we seem to have mostly inherited His psychopathy. Christianity and Islam, or Judaism and Islam have been in a state of religious war for 1,500 years, and Jews have been persecuted by both for even longer.

Religion is the tilapia of human belief systems. Have you ever tried to eat tilapia when it wasn’t dressed up to be something else? It has no character of its own. Everyone prepares it the way that suits them, and many people reject it completely no matter how it’s presented. But unlike an unpalatable fish, organized religion is a powerful force that has been used to control and suppress people ever since terrified, ancient savages invented it. Its roots are based in fear, mysticism, and a belief in magic, much of it dark. If you belong to a small powerful elite, and you want to preserve your wealth and power, there’s no better way than weaponizing religion and using it to control the ignorant masses.

The result is the Crusades, the wars between Catholics and Protestants, the seventy-five year war that has existed between Israel and its neighbors. Even World War 2, which was a war of conquest, imperialism, and revenge, used religious hatred, mostly against Jews, to create unity among the Fascists.

The same thing is happening in the Middle East. The people driving the religious fervor of radical Islam are too venal and smart to care whether we worship Yah-weh or Allah. It’s all a paper tiger, but one with potential to destroy civilization. What if one of those crazies get their hands on a nuclear weapon? You don’t hear it mentioned much, but Israel is a nuclear power. Set one off in an Israeli city, and Israel will retaliate against Iran and all of its clients. Do you think that Hamas, which is using a city of more than a million as human shields, wouldn’t use them as nuclear hostages?

When the current war between Israel and the terrorists sponsored by Iran finally ends, and decent people try to figure out how to prevent the next one, they should take a hard look at the real symbolism of Jerusalem. As the seat of all three major religions, it should be a unifying force, not an excuse to lob rockets at each other. Whichever side they’re on, everyone who lives in the region is a victim of out-of-control religious despots, and I reluctantly include Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu as a wannabe member of that group. How about we just get rid of all of them and behave like adults?

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A Disgraceful Legacy

Posted on October 29, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 29, 2023

Judging by how historians have analyzed the rise and fall of prior civilizations, it’s possible to begin to frame the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. Whether he ultimately wins the 2024 Republican nomination for president or is convicted of any of the shocking number of felonies he is accused of committing, one part of his ultimate legacy is already clear. It’s the kind of thing cliches are made of, not something for which he will be remembered fondly. The Emperor Nero may or may not have fiddled while Rome burned, but what’s the first (and perhaps only) thing you thing of when you hear his name?

Trump will always be thought of as the politician who lowered the bar for acceptable behavior to the point where it is submerged out of sight. His narcissism will be a warning to future Americans that no one who cares more about themselves than our Constitution or the lives and well-being of all Americans can ever be allowed near the White House again. His divisiveness and appeals to the dregs of our society – neo-Nazis, White supremacists, heavily armed extremist militias – revealed a dark, shameful seam in our self-image that we may never live down.

His decisions that unnecessarily sacrificed more than a half million American lives to COVID exposed his ignorance, callousness, and a dangerous disdain for science. His personal values, fraudulent business practices, public treatment of women, pandering to assault weapon advocates, the religious right, and billionaires, and his obvious lack of respect for our military and its combat veterans paint a picture of a small, hateful human being. But the part of his legacy that will be continue to plague us long after he’s gone was his ability to redefine of the meaning of truth.

The undoing of facts, the promulgation of lies, and the self-serving work of “influencers” whose only priority was the shifting of wealth and power was well underway before Trump became a politician. Futurists, psychologists, and sociologists have long understood the risks of an unregulated internet that allows everyone from a terrorist cult leader to an immoral politician to grandma posting her favorite recipes to say whatever they please, unchecked by facts, common sense, or any sense of public responsibility.

Yet, despite their warnings, which recently morphed into a fear of Artificial Intelligence, we have allowed the things we most needed to have confidence in to erode. When every extremist point of view has its own media machine run by people skilled at tapping into hate and grievances, logic and rational thought take a back seat to slander, libel, and outright lies. We only watch news channels that agree with our biases, we don’t answer our phones or open our emails unless we recognize the caller, and even with constant vigilance, our best hope for privacy is the massiveness of the internet.

Remember when Americans respected authority figures, educators, and scientists, when there were trusted sources we could turn to for truth and fact-checking? There may not ever have been a time when money didn’t trump justice in America, but the ability of someone with millions to spend on bribes, influence peddling, and controlling Congress has never more blatantly influenced our lives … which brings us to what may be the most dangerous aspect of Trump’s legacy. Take a step back, forget your biases for a moment, and consider the spectacle we have made of ourselves before the world since Trump hijacked the Republican Party.

A man who served as president, who demonstrated that he has no regard for the Constitution he swore to defend, who is under ninety-one indictments by the federal government, one red state and one blue one, and who was impeached twice, once for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol aimed at overturning his 2020 election defeat is now the odds-on favorite to win his party’s nomination again. Add to that his oft-demonstrated adoration for autocrats and murderous dictators, and imagine how all this looks to people around the world.

How must our NATO allies feel about the real possibility that Trump could again be president? How must Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un relish the prospect of wrapping the ultimate narcissist around their fingers? Does the prospect of another Trump presidency and the worsening of the divisiveness he brought to America give Xi Jinping pause when he sets his sights on Taiwan? Do Trump supporters’ ability and willingness to paralyze our government strike fear in the hearts of Ayatollahs and the terrorists they sponsor?

Finally, there is the issue of moral leadership. How are we to teach our children moral values and common decency when our president sets exactly the opposite example, when our children’s textbooks are being censored and sanitized in an ever-more Orwellian reality? That’s the real legacy of Donald Trump. It reeks of dishonor and disgrace.

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Hostages

Posted on October 25, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 25, 2023

As the sun rose on October 25, 2023 America was dealing with two hostage crises, one three weeks old and one that has lasted nine months. In the former, more than 200 hostages, including children and the elderly still languish in the tunnels that house Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza. In the latter, 350 million Americans are being held hostage by a small group of MAGA terrorists in the House of Representatives.

In each case, the hostage crisis is the result of years of strategizing. Both terrorist groups are comprised of people who believe they are a persecuted minority, and both are now betting their existence on their ability to direct the future for millions of people that they neither represent nor care much about. As different as Hamas appears to be from the handful of right-wing extremists who have paralyzed our government, they have important things in common.

Hamas feels aggrieved by what they perceive as decades of occupation by Israel; the MAGA minority in the House believe they are restoring America to its rightful owners: white, male Christians. Both are self-righteous about their beliefs, and both seem to expect a huge, dormant groundswell of support to erupt and sweep them into power.

There are differences, of course. Hamas is committed to eradicating Israel and killing Jews wherever they find them. Only a few MAGA types seem hell-bent on murder and lynching – Hang Mike Pence! – but they would happily re-institute slavery and relegate everyone who opposes them to deportation, exile, or life in some form of ghetto or concentration camp. Their hero and spiritual leader, Donald Trump, has loudly advocated imprisoning his political opponents and executing some of his senior military leaders.

The most important thing these two groups of terrorists have in common is that both pose existential threats to America. The religious wars that ravage the Middle East, awful and brutal as they are, are also proxy wars for the major powers. Russia and Europe have huge stakes in the oil-rich region, with China opportunistically sniffing around for areas of weakness they can capitalize on. With Iran stirring the pot as they work toward building nuclear weapons, the Middle East poses an existential threat to the entire planet.

The MAGA threat, rather than exposing its opposition to mass killing and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, promises a long, slow death of strangulation if it is not neutralized. Their stated goal is to weaken our central government so the states they control can return to what they call traditional American values – what the rest of us call misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and fascism. They reduce our status as a world power, weaken our military, and undermine our international trade and alliances.

What CNN’s Jake Tapper refers to as the clown show in the House is no laughing matter. It is Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to control and weaponize his political base as his legal problems worsen in the courts. That means not only attempting to recapture both the White House and the Senate, but undermining the Biden administration’s attempts to support Ukraine against invasion by Russia and prevent the Israel-Hamas conflict from exploding into a wider, deadlier war.

Controlling the level of violence in the Middle East is a Herculean task under any circumstances, but with MAGA Republicans showing the world that the most powerful nation on Earth can be reduced to a paper tiger by a handful of extremists, our leverage in the region evaporates. Moving two full carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean was a powerful show of force, but if the Trump crazies in Congress are able to shut down the government next month, all that military power might as well be my grandkids’ toy boats in their bathtub.

Hamas has demonstrated what most careful observers already knew. The Palestinian people are not backward, uneducated Arabs wandering around the desert on camels, worshipping oil wells. Their purported leaders are a smart, sophisticated enemy who are willing to risk their existence on one final attempt to eradicate Jews from the Middle East. Neither they nor their hundreds of millions of potential supporters in the region, manipulated by hate-mongers and religious fervor, can be taken lightly. Only our best effort will defeat them, but our own home-grown terrorists are either blinded by their lust for power or unable to see past their ambitions. It’s up to the rest of us to re-establish a government based on bipartisan cooperation and the strength that comes from being united.

When Trump first adopted Make America Great Again as his motto, America was flawed, but much closer to being the great nation it aspired to be than it had been in previous decades. Now that Trump has reduced us to the Jake Tapper Clown Show, I agree with him. Let’s make American great again by excising Trump and his influence before he destroys us.

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American Presidents in War Zones

Posted on October 19, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 19, 2023

Joe Biden isn’t the first American president to travel to a war zone, but his October 18th trip to Israel was different. Visiting an active war zone is precarious for a U. S. president, because POTUS always wears a bulls-eye on their back, particularly when Islamic jihadists are involved. Under generally accepted rules of war, national leaders do not target each other, but when the enemy is a loosely controlled band of terrorists who believe in suicide attacks, the rules don’t apply.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all visited American troops in the field, and Richard Nixon traveled and met with the president of South Vietnam in Saigon. Those trips weren’t entirely without risk, but they were to highly secure areas and carefully coordinated with allies on the ground. While Bush never seemed daunted by his six trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, including his famous landing on an American aircraft carrier, the trips he, Nixon, and Obama made to those countries all took place in “safe” areas. And Trump’s two trips were holiday photo ops in the safest possible locations.

Some presidential trips required a higher level of courage. Johnson’s visits to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, were huge political risks, as they were made amid angry opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Abraham Lincoln visited the battlefield just outside Washington when it was attacked by Confederates in 1864, and actually came under fire, standing only a few feet from an army surgeon who was shot.

Biden’s trip to the Middle East wasn’t his first to an active war zone. Last February, he visited Ukraine on the anniverary of Russia’s invasion amid erriatic and unpredictable missile attacks. That trip and the one this week involved risks to his person, political future, and legacy. He did exactly what we expect an American president to do when the world is at risk of slipping into all-out war.

Biden had two principal goals – to assure Israel and the world that while everyone had looked away during the Nazis’ attempt at genocide of the Jewish people, America would never let that happen. At the same time, amid terrorist lies attempting to portray the Israeli military as indiscriminately killing civilians, he had to convince both allies and potential adversaries that he valued the lives of two million innocent Palestinians as highly as those of Israelis. No other world leader has either Biden’s stature or his ability to back up assurances and threats.

When an Islamic jihad rocket aimed at Israel accidentally killed hundreds of civilians at Gaza’s largest hospital, and Hamas blamed Israel, Arab leaders in Jordan, Egypt, and the West Bank whom Biden planned to visit canceled their meetings while he was already in the air on his way to Tel-Aviv to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Netenyahu. Media pundits predicted his trip would be a humiliating failure that right-wing media would trumpet into the 2024 election. But Biden was undeterred as he landed in Tel-Aviv with terrorist rockets overhead and air raid sirens blasting.

Once on the ground, Biden showed why he is so well respected by foreign leaders. No one else could have pulled off what Biden did in Israel. In front of live television cameras, he embraced Netenyahu, who for the past seven years has been a cheerleader for Donald Trump, There wasn’t even a hairline crack in American-Israeli solidarity as Biden promised Israel whatever support it needed to eradicate Hamas and protect its people in sincere, heartfelt terms. Then, he masterfully segued into an unsubtle warning to Israel not to give in to the justified rage it feels after a thousand of its people were massacred by Hamas. He made it clear to Netenyahu and the world that the plight of innocent Palestinians ranked as high in importance as protecting Israel. He also endorsed a “two state solution” for Palestine – a clear signal that he would not let Hamas disrupt the normalization negotiations he had initiated between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Finally, with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on the ground in Cairo, Biden convinced Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to begin delivering humanitarian aid to a million Gazans who had fled leave Gaza City for Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. The importance of that accomplishment cannot be overstated. If Israel and the United States are viewed as uncaring of the plight of innocent Palestinians, Israel’s war on Hamas will end in disaster, for Israel, its neighbors, and the world.

If ever a president looked competent, in control, and presidential, Joe Biden was all of those things this week. It’s time his self-serving political enemies recognized that a strong Biden is vital for America at times like this and behave like the loyal opposition they purport to be. Beyond that, Biden’s success underlines the danger of the House of Representatives being led by a shameless Trump clone like Jim Jordan at a time when we need unity more than ever.

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Truth As a Casualty of War

Posted on October 18, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 18, 2023

The worldwide popularity of the endless spinoffs of the CSI television franchise suggests that millions of people are fascinated by forensic crime investigations and the pursuit of truth. It also suggests a high level of credibility of the technology that allows investigators to dissect and analyze complex events after the fact and construct an accurate picture of what actually occurred. That’s critically important in figuring out what caused the explosion at the Al Shifa hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians.

The war raging in Gaza and Israel began when Gaza’s governing body, Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by most western countries, launched an unprovoked attack on settlements in southern Israel that killed more than a thousand Israelis. That truth is undisputable, since the attackers posted celebratory videos that show them indiscriminately murdering hundreds of innocent, defenseless people.

In a reasonable world, Israel’s right to defend itself would be a given, but there’s nothing reasonable about the Middle East. When people are aroused by long-standing religious bigotry, and caught up in the frenzy of Jihad, truth and verifiable facts are the first casualty, and that’s the kind of thing that turns local conflicts into major wars. When one side openly prods its people into suicidal behaviors based on a sickly distorted interpretation of their religious dogma, there is no limit to the damage that can result.

That is precisely the situation that exists today. Radical Muslim leaders have triggered anti-Israel and anti-American demonstrations in major cities throughout the western and Arab worlds, based on Hamas’ claims that the hospital explosion was caused by a bomb dropped from an Israeli aircraft. It’s not clear whether the people attempting to create a region-wide uprising against Israel believe Hamas’ claim or if they even care, as long as the event achieves their goal of destroying Israel. But to the rest of us watching all this unfold, it matters very much. Not only does the insane lust to kill threaten Israel, but the irresponsible behavior of leaders who support Jihad threatens the entire world.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) found verifiable evidence in surveillance videos, radar imagery, and intercepted conversations between Hamas terrorists, that the hospital explosion was actually caused by a misfired rocket launched by Islamic Jihad aimed at Israeli cities. It’s an impressive analysis that in the world of CSI would have viewers applauding the ability of forensic analysts to find the truth. But in the Middle East, truth is a variable commodity that is often trumped by religious fervor.

The jihadists have already achieved one goal: scuttling President Biden’s diplomatic effort to arrange humanitarian aid and relief for nearly a million displaced Palestinian civilians. Make no mistake – the reason they’re displaced is the action of their own terrorist government, who have a long history of hiding behind innocent civilians and using them as human shields. The last time Islamic terrorists caused this kind of destruction, when they killed more than 3,000 innocent people on nine-eleven, the result was a twenty year war in Iraq and Afghanistan in which there were no winners. Every entity involved, including the United States, suffered grievous harm. This time, with Iran pulling the strings of their terrorist clients, and Russia and China supporting their efforts, we could be witnessing the opening act of a third world war in which everyone on Earth loses.

Americans find all this very familiar. Since 2015, when Donald Trump announced he was running for president, truth and facts have been casualties of a different kind of war. The situations are different only in that we’ve so far been able to contain the resulting domestic violence. But with Trump supporters perpetuating lies and threatening civil war if they don’t get what they want, the future of American democracy is in jeopardy. Americans are finally realizing what’s at stake, as efforts to pacify our political terrorists have undermined our government’s ability to function.

The comparisons between our internal political crisis and the diplomatic crisis in the Middle East are chilling. Who would have imagined, ten years ago, that a small group of extremists willing to fall on their swords and take everyone else down with them could threaten our Constitution and totally disrupt the functioning of the government of the United States? We’re less surprised by what’s happening in Israel, because we should have seen it coming, but the situations are eerily similar.

Truth deniers at home used social media and technology to create the worst domestic crisis we’ve seen in 160 years. The same thing is happening on a global scale, as anger, hatred, and bigotry in the Middle East threaten to overcome reason with deadly consequences for everyone. If we’re to get through this intact, saner heads need to step up, or the fogs of war and politics might kill us all.

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Opiate For the Masses

Posted on October 16, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 16, 2023

Karl Marx said it first. As part of his philosophy that money and power should not reside solely in the hands of the wealthy, he described religion as a tool of the ruling class. Marx claimed religion pacifies the downtrodden, falsely promising succor in this life and an afterlife that is far better than our physical lives, which anyone can earn simply by following the dictates of their faith. By promulgating these beliefs, religion, especially Christianity, became a weapon of oppression.

Leon Uris described how the reactionary Catholic church in Ireland oppressed its people in his poignant novel, Trinity. European monarchs used religion to distract the masses from their real enemies – the rulers and other elites whose lust for wealth and power were limitless. Lest we forget, the United States was settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly by people seeking religious freedom and an end to persecution, as our Bill of Rights clearly implies. Today, the story is repeating itself in the Middle East. The two thousand year old universal persecution of Jews is at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Hamas are surrogates for the Shia prelates who govern Iran, who vow to kill Jews everywhere.

Researchers at Cornell University found that religious conditioning is more of an oppressive force than an opiate. Sociologist Landon Schnabel used the issue of abortion to illustrate how religion has shaped political views in America. He discovered that despite being affected far more by abortion policy, women are less likely than men to support abortion rights because they tend to be more religious. Similarly, he found that Blacks and Hispanics, especially at the lower end of the economic spectrum, are more susceptible to pro-life conditioning because they also tend to be more religious. This, despite the fact that the ability to control the growth of their families is critical to their well-being.

Then, there’s the current political crisis in the United States. As two wars rage, a small minority of political extremists have paralyzed our government for more than two weeks, and one extremist senator has blocked our entire military promotion apparatus. In the latter case, abortion is the sole issue; in the former, it is one of several that drive the so-called Freedom Caucus. The Republican Party’s majority in the House only exists because they used abortion rights to court Christian voters, despite having leaders like Donald Trump, who have no respect for religious values.

Religious intolerance and bigotry are what drive hate crimes. Anti-Semitic and anti-Arab violence are rising at an alarming rate throughout western nations, and anti-Semitic and anti-Christian rhetoric drive most of the anger in the Muslim world. Wars result from two basic causes: competition for economic resources and religious differences. Religion enabled and justified the genocide committed by individuals as diverse as Christopher Columbus and Adolf Hitler. I can’t prove it with numbers, but I believe that throughout history, more blood has been shed because of religion – the Crusades, the European conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, Northern Ireland, and the perpetual conflicts around the Holy Land – than any other reason.

At the individual level, most clerics use religion as a force for good. But far too many use it for predation and control. Witness our own recent history of murderous religious cults and people who use religious control to abuse women and children. Still, today, organized religion is both an economic and political weapon that reinforces poverty and limits the power and agency of the lower economic classes. That’s not Marx’s Communist Manifesto talking; it’s the reality most people live with. It’s also at the heart of the worldwide trend toward autocracy and divisiveness, like that promoted by Hungarian President Viktor Urban and Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

The evil in this drama is neither spirituality nor belief in a supreme being. Those are very personal matters, and our Constitution guarantees that everyone has the right to their own values and beliefs.

The true evil is the effect of human nature on organized religion. Power invariably corrupts most leaders, and religion has a unique ability to foster such corruption because we all contain remnants of the primitive terrors that made humans invent religion in the first place.

It’s time the human race grew up. A big step in that direction is distinguishing humanism from religion. Valuing each other, caring for those in need, and remembering that everyone has an equal right to health and happiness are much more powerful forces for good than edicts handed done by Ayatollahs or Popes.

We don’t need opiates. We need to end hate, greed, and envy and stop trying to control each other.

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Why Hamas Must Be Destroyed

Posted on October 14, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 14, 2023

It’s not complicated. When there’s a cancer eating away at your body, you employ every means available to excise and kill it. If you don’t, it will kill you.

Harsh words, but appropriate. Hamas’ charter says it exists for the purpose of killing Jews and destroying Israel. As the governing body of Gaza for eighteen years, instead of focusing on the health and well-being of more than two million Palestinians, Hamas devoted itself to killing Israelis. The attack on Israeli towns near Gaza that began ten days ago is unique only in its scale, scope, and inhuman brutality.

Palestinians and Israelis both have a long history of grievances. Half of the world’s thirteen million Jews (as of 1940) were murdered by the Nazis, with about half of the survivors still in Europe when the war ended. As to the territory that includes Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, we have the dying gasps of British imperialism to thank for today’s mess.

During WW1, the British guaranteed Arab sovereignty in the Holy Land in exchange for the uprising that ousted the Turks. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which guaranteed a Jewish homeland in the region, and in 1920, the League of Nations mandated all of Palestine to Britain. The British, with help from America and the rest of Europe secured the United Nations mandate that created the sovereign nation of Israel in 1948, but they reneged on their promise to the Palestinians who drove out the Turks. Instead, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank became protectorates of Egypt and Jordan.

Israel became the homeland for survivors of the Nazi holocaust and the Jews who staged a four-year long uprising against British occupation in 1943. In 1948, all of its Arab neighbors declared war on Israel, and a state of war has existed unabated for seventy-five years. Part of the problem is religious differences around the control of Jerusalem, which became part of Israel. Long-standing grievances exist on both sides, and religious extremists, both Muslims and Jews, exacerbated the situation, but two things are clear.

Israel built a society based on democratic principles and the rule of law, tamed a desert, and created a strong economy and quality of life for its citizens. It has never attempted to occupy its neighbors’ territories except when it has been invaded, while Israel’s neighbors have repeatedly attacked them, from firing rockets into civilian settlements to full-scale incursions. Even so, Israel reached peace accords with Egypt and Jordan after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE in 2022. The current normalization talks with Saudi Arabia are likely what triggered Hamas’ attack.

The war currently raging in Israel and Gaza has some interesting nuances. While it is heavily supported and supplied by Iran, Hamas appears to have acted on its own. Hezbollah, another terrorist client of Iran has not entered the war directly, and while it constantly provokes trouble in the Mideast, Iran’s leaders know better than to directly engage with Israel and its allies, militarily. They supplied Hamas with thousands of rockets and other munitions, but the bigger message is that whether Iran intended that they be used to kill innocent civilians, Hamas used them to murder indiscriminately.

Hamas is far more dangerous than other terrorist organizations. We’ve been reminded all week that on a proportional basis, Hamas’ massacre of more than a thousand Israelis is fifty times as significant as nine-eleven was to America, and it was only the first action in what Hamas hoped would be a general Arab uprising. Most terrorist acts are relatively localized, but Hamas would love nothing more than to initiate a region-wide war with serious global implications. Hamas is obsessed with destroying Israel and Jews everywhere regardless of the cost to Palestinians, and it is willing to imperil the entire planet to achieve its goals.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the most serious concern of the United States and Europe was what would happen to its nuclear weapons. While much of that problem was resolved by President Clinton and Premier Gorbachev, no one had illusions about how many might still be out there. Ask yourself, based on their eighteen years of ruling Gaza, what would happen if Hamas acquired one or more of them. Is there any doubt that they would fire them directly at Tel Aviv?

Hamas has no respect for either human life or the rules of war and diplomacy. Allowing them to exist in a world in which almost anything can be traded on the Black Market threatens the existence of everyone on Earth. They have lost all reason, and are being driven by pure hatred. Like an out of control gang rumble, it no longer matters whon started it or why. Israel must destroy Hamas’ ability to kill. We should be grateful that they’re undertaking the task for us.

And while our otherwise divided government seems united in defense of Israel, Donald Trump has seen fit only to criticize Israel’s leaders and praise Hezbollah, this week.

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It’s Time for Saudi Crown Prince MBS to Step Up

Posted on October 7, 2023 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 7, 2023

The United States and Saudi Arabia have been strange dance partners for several decades. Are they friends? Enemies? Business Partners?

The Saudis have always acted in their own interest, as has the government of Israel, although in the latter case it’s not clear that the actions of the various incarnations of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have acted in the country’s interests as much as in the interests of his Likud Party’s right-wing coalition. If that sounds like Donald Trump’s presidency, it’s not coincidental. A few years ago, when both leaders found themselves in serious legal jeopardy, they were each other’s principal supporters. They’re both populists, ruthless politicians, and seemingly willing to do whatever it takes to hold on to power.

Thirty years ago, two critical events impacted Israel’s future. One was the Yom Kippur War, in which a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria nearly overwhelmed Israel. The other was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Revolutionary movements like Hamas are big on symbolism. Thus, Hamas chose to attack Israel, today, on the 30th anniversary of the first Yom Kippur War.

The Soviet Union’s collapse shifted the balance of political power in Israel. Israelis were weary of forty-five years of war with their Arab neighbors, and a younger generation who favored accommodation with Arab governments were on the cusp of having a voting majority. In 1993, Israel’s population was about five million. But the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled millions of Jews to leave, and three million of them chose to emigrate to Israel. Having escaped from the oppression of communism, they were determined to never be under anyone’s heel again, and their militancy changed Israel’s politics from rapprochement to right-wing extremism. They solidified Netanyahu’s political base, and he’s played to it ever since.

Saudi Arabia has been the lynchpin of OPEC since its formation in 1960, which gave it enormous power to control the price and flow of the oil most of the world depended on. But as a Sunni Muslim nation, relations between them and the Shia Muslims, led by Iran, were almost as hostile as their mutual hate of Israel. That resulted in the Iran-Iraq war that lasted for nearly the entire decade of the 1980s, in which the United States sided with the Sunni Iraqis, and by implication the Saudis. In 1990, the relatively secular Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, which was a direct threat to Saudi Arabia.

Suddenly, the United States and Saudi Arabia were allies, flying bombing sorties together and making a public show of mutual support. A couple of years later, however, when Israel was attacked on Yom Kippur and the Saudis had an opportunity to play a constructive role in a peace settlement, they chose to sit on the sidelines in silent support of Egypt and Syria. Inserting itself into that conflict was not in the interest of their control of the world’s oil, on which their entire economy depended.

What a difference another thirty years made. The worldwide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy completely changed Saudi priorities. Demand for oil will decrease continually through 2050, and that will devastate the Saudi economy.

Knowing this, the Biden administration initiated accommodation talks between Saudi Arabia, Israel, and some other interested partners. Earlier peace agreements between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan had proved beneficial to all sides. But for years Washington had buzzed about the close relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi royal family, and we learned that most of the nine-eleven terrorists were Saudis, as was their leader, Osama bin Laden. Finally, there was the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which led straight to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known popularly as MBS.

The Saudis weren’t particularly helpful when Russia began reducing oil shipments to Europe; in fact, they’ve kept prices at near record levels for most of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Again, it’s reasonable to ask, are they our friends, our enemies, or a trading partner that always puts itself first? If the Saudis recognize that their best future includes a stable peace in the Mideast, along with the ability to benefit from Israeli technology, they must be aware that Politico and other sources believe Hamas may have timed its deadly attack on Israeli civilians specifically with the intent of scuttling any agreement with Saudi Arabia.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s record on Israeli-Palestinian relations has been abysmal. He has undermined or discouraged every proposed agreement put before him, which gives credibility to the Saudi claim that Israel has only itself to blame for the attack. Perhaps, but a terrorist attack that kills or injures thousands of innocent civilians has no justification and must be condemned by every neighboring nation. It’s time for MBS to stand up and accept responsibility for being a world leader whose goal is peace and stop supporting the destruction of Israel.

Whatever else he is, MBS is smart and well educated. He needs to make it clear that terrorist actions by Hamas (and Hezbolah) will not be tolerated, and the perpetrators will be treated as murderers and war criminals. Then he can go back to the negotiating table and save his country’s future, along with the entire Mideast’s.

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