Trump, Israel, White Racists, Blood Libel, Myths and Storms on the Horizon

Emboldened American racists feel free to act out and display
antipathy towards those with dark complexions. The crowd
at the Make America Great Again rally in Minnesota on
June 22, 2018 joined the president in jeering and outrage.
Photo by Tom Brenner, the New York Times

Updated - America's chief racist pulled the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a nemesis of the worst human rights abusers such as Israel, the United States and the Gulf monarchies. But pick a state outside of Scandinavia and it's not clear world history is bending towards human rights.

Trump's asinine act is preceded by world criticism of the latest Israeli border massacre and the Israeli blood sport of shooting the legs off of Palestinian teenagers for laughs. The withdrawal also follows Trump's expansion of caging children and families and the United Nations calls for human rights for refugees seeking asylum in America, (Richard Falk, New York Times).

Since Trump began campaigning for president in 2015, his anti-Semitic tropes and myriad blood libels against selected groups have repulsed the narrow majority of Americans who can still be counted in the company of the decent. But the blood libel is escalating, (Krugman, New York Times).

Paul Krugman is alarmed:

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

And you know what this reminds me of? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.

An open question is whether the logical extension of Trump's white supremacist blood libel — a Holocaust, a war — is on the horizons as Trump presents his evolving and incoherent warrant for genocide to American whites, Evangelicals, local municipal police and every Republican officeholder, all of whom comprise his base.

The former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper warned this week Trump's new and still-strong "zero-tolerance" policy is harming America's "international image," (CNN).

It's a ridiculous statement by Clapper who discusses moral atrocities by accessing effectiveness in transmitting public relations messages. Trump's detractors in the intelligence community are perhaps not the most effective human rights activists.
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Trump's public relations messages at some point will not be enough for his base that will quickly veer out of Trump's control. The mindless mania of Trumpists require feeding, a blood sugar-high with screams, dismemberment and tangible displays of cruelty. Trump, from his perspective, was wrong to halt the emission of images of suffering and cruelty. His people love it.

Evangelicals and cops take to social media with malice, relishing the assaults against a black athlete like Sterling Brown with seven squad cars full of racist Milwaukee Police for a parking ticket infraction. Brown has filed a federal civil rights action against the cops and the city of Milwaukee, (Mal Contends).

Trump knows the appetites of his base and he seems to be enjoying the resulting spectacle of chaos and dehumanization that he daily feeds our country.

This is not the time to be on the sidelines.

History may show the Summer of 2018 as one of the most consequential periods in the life of America.

Trump's unite-the-right project has targeted human beings for banishment, imprisonment and extermination, no less.

The capacity of decent people, people like Steve Schmidt, to speak out, to act is the margin of mitigation and is necessary for the reversal of Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) project.

MAGA fascists are like Trump, a fearful people. Blacks, Browns, Muslims, anything different from their limited experience and alien to their closed minds are feared.

Attempts to study human nature to explain the human susceptibility to fascism and authoritarian political movements are doomed. Psychology as a discipline has not advanced sufficiently to address the human condition.

Each individual mind must access the bellicose and malicious and the condition of others and make a decision on the relevancy of human suffering to one's life.

Consider the words of the British thinker, Bertrand Russell, on the objectives of a liberal education, an endeavor feared by Trumpists and MAGA minds of all stripes:

 "... to give a sense of the value of things other than domination, to help create wise citizens of a free community, and through the combination of citizenship with liberty in individual creativeness to enable men [and all genders] to give to human life that splendor which some few have shown that it can achieve." (Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1938) p.319. Cited in Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, The Russell Lectures - (delivered in 1971), (New York: Pantheon Books, Random House) Introduction).

For a movement like MAGA dedicated to conquest and demonization following the worst traditions of America, human splendor, creativeness and liberty are to be feared in all realms of the human condition.

Trump and Israel Belong Together

Photo by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús CC BY 2.0

The white supremacist Trump administration and apartheid Israel make a contented couple.

Throw is the gulf monarchies abroad and the local police and Evangelicals at home, and one can see the recipe for Trump's ad hoc axis of repulsives.

From Saree Makdisi at CounterPunch:

Two spectacles unfolded in Palestine on Monday. In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot and killed 58 Palestinians—including six children—and injured almost three thousand others amid scenes of smoke, fire, teargas, dust, agony and blood. At exactly the same time, to the tinkling of champagne glasses at a glittering reception barely fifty miles away in Jerusalem, Jared Kushner and an elegant Ivanka Trump oversaw the opening of Donald Trump’s new embassy there. The juxtaposition of these two contemporaneous scenes encapsulates at a single glance the entirety of Zionism’s murderous conflict with the Palestinian people.

Decent people should oppose all support of Israel in American policy, as Israel's continual assault against civilization persists.

Israel is not worth another Palestinian life, another massacre of real human beings, regarded as sub-human in the raciology of the lunatics of the Trump administration and apparently a solid majority of Israel's population.

Notes Makdisi at CounterPunch:

The demographer Arnon Sofer of Haifa University is the architect of the current isolation of Gaza.  In 2004, he advised the government of Ariel Sharon to withdraw Israeli forces from within Gaza, seal the territory off from the outside world, and simply shoot anyone who tries to break out. 'When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,' Sofer told an interviewer in the Jerusalem Post (11 November 2004); 'Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.'  He added that 'the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.'

This imperative to kill and kill and kill human 'animals' explains the violence taking place at the gates of Gaza.

Kill, kill, kill "animals" all day, every day.

It's a historic irony, Israel has become the inheritors of the Holocaust as perpetrators, with Trump and religious Evangelicals scurrying to keep up to the slow-motion destruction of 2.5 million people.

Meanwhile, at home, here at the homeland, Trump is carrying on his white supremacist dreams.

Note Juan Cole at TruthDig:

So Wednesday Trump again called some undocumented migrants in the US 'animals.' Calling people animals has been a parlor sport with Mr. Trump, and he has often gotten things wrong, as when he used his wealth to persecute the falsely accused Central Park 5.

Calling people animals is not just the use of an ugly epithet. It is not merely impolite.

It is a call to mistreat the class of people so designated, to fear them and blame them and ultimately to seek to wipe them out.

Animal functions similarly in this regard to the Nazi technical term Untermensch or underman, subhuman.

Richard A Etlin in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich translates passages from the infamous SS pamphlet of 1941, entitled Der Untermensch:

It is a frightening creature, a mere shadow of a man, with humanoid racial features, yet spiritually and psychologically more base than any animal. Within this being rages a vile chaos of wild, uncontrolled passions, a nameless desire for destruction, the most primitive desires, and naked vulgarity.

The pamphlet goes on to be more specific about the identity of this horrible category of apparent human beings, who are actually animals or worse. It specifies eastern Slavs (Russians and Poles) and Jews, among others. Not even some members of those groups, but all of them. The pamphlet functioned as a call for and a justification for the genocide against the Jews, Gypsies, gays and other groups as well as the slaughter of Russian boys at the eastern Front.

The question for Americans is how well have we become the inheritors as by-standers.

Called a Satanist, Mikey Weinstein Makes U.S. Defense Community's Top 100 Most Influential People

100 Most Influential People in U.S. Defence

'Constitutional conscience' of the U.S. military gets end-of-year notice by military press

A civil rights activist has been named as one of the most influential people in the U.S. defense community by editorial staff working at government sector press outlets, collectively comprising the world's largest military newsroom. This inaugural list of the top 100 most influential people is based upon perceived "leadership, innovation, technology and vision" in our country with an annual defense budget of some $740 billion.

Mikey Weinstein, the founder and chief of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, founded the civil rights organization in 2006, and represented and continues to advocate for 10,000s of American servicemen and woman.

Weinstein is an author, an attorney, and has been nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize for the fifth consecutive year, a year seeing Weinstein draw headlines for working for human rights amid death threats and anti-Semitic slurs.

The list "was compiled over five months by more than two dozen reporters" at the Gannett government media’s sector-leading publications: Defense News, Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times, Armed Forces Journal and Federal Times.

As reported on its website, the "Military Religious Freedom Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that all "members of the United States Armed Forces fully receive the Constitutional guarantees of religious freedom to which they and all Americans are entitled by virtue of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment."

Weinstein has so disturbed the Christian-Dominion religious infrastructure ingrained in the U.S. military that top serving brass as recently as 2008 publicly accused Weinstein of engaging in a "demonic” agenda," as described by Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin.

Jeff Sharlet in Harper's Magazine has written extensively about the "powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officer corps" against whom Weinstein, a committed army of civil libertarians, cadets, veterans, troops and Marines fight.

Writes Sharlet of the dominionists: "They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors—'ambassadors for Christ in uniform,' according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship; 'government paid missionaries,' according to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry."

What has the Dominionists and assorted Christian nationalists feeling aggrieved is the effectiveness of Weinstein that these Christian avengers can no longer ignore, along with the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights.