It’s December, and you know what that means–the War on Christmas has begun. As opposed to, you know, actual war, which is A-OK. Fox News’s latest outrage cycle brings us this spectacular headline from the Green Bay Press-Gazette: “U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher aims his ire at The Satanic Temple tree at National Railroad Museum”. Poet and journalist Natalie Eilbert reports:
As part of its Festival of Trees this year, the nonprofit museum included a tree from The Satanic Temple of Wisconsin, decorated in red lights, pentacles and ornaments extolling LGBTQ+ pride, bodily autonomy and the power of reading.
Gallagher, R-Green Bay, said it’s “impossible to overstate how offensive this is to Christians,” and equated the temple’s participation at the Festival of Trees with “waving a Hamas flag in a synagogue.”
The temple’s mission is “to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits,” according to its website. The National Railroad Museum is a non-religious, private organization focused on the history of locomotives…
…The exhibition at the National Railroad Museum is an exercise in optics. Take, for example, the event name itself: It is called The Festival of Trees. Nowhere in its description does it explicitly refer to the trees as Christmas trees, which invites all sorts of creative interpretations.
Speaking of that Hamas flag, I’m getting pretty fed up with right-wing Israel supporters waving the bloody shirt of anti-Semitism, when the biggest threat to Jews in America comes from white supremacists in the Republican Party. The memory of the Holocaust gets literally weaponized to justify ethnic cleansing of our Palestinian siblings.
According to a damning new report from +972 Magazine, the high civilian death toll in the current war was avoidable and arguably intentional. If you’re not familiar with this publication, their “About” page explains:
+972 Magazine is an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine. The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine.
Yuval Abraham’s feature story, “‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza”, was released yesterday.
The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.
The investigation by +972 and Local Call is based on conversations with seven current and former members of Israel’s intelligence community — including military intelligence and air force personnel who were involved in Israeli operations in the besieged Strip — in addition to Palestinian testimonies, data, and documentation from the Gaza Strip, and official statements by the IDF Spokesperson and other Israeli state institutions.
Inside sources told +972 that Israel’s new artificial intelligence system identifies precisely how many civilians will be killed by bombing a target. The current campaign intentionally hits high-rise apartment buildings and other heavily populated areas with low military value, on the pretext that a Hamas member is inside or has lived in the building recently. These sites, called “power targets” by the Israeli military, are hit without warning the residents to evacuate, a change from previous policy.
The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it…
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
This is absolutely grotesque. If this is the price of a “Jewish state,” I don’t want it.
You know who would be fine with it? Henry Kissinger, who went to his eternal reward (good luck with that) this week at age 100. May we all live in such a way that our obituary is less salty than historian Erik Loomis’ headline at Lawyers, Guns & Money: “Kissinger is Dead, Finally Something Good Has Happened in 2023”.
One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt.
Where to begin? The unnecessary prolongation of the Vietnam War to get Nixon elected, the bombing of Cambodia, replacing Allende with the dictator Pinochet in Chile, or backing Pakistan’s massacre of civilians during Bangladesh’s bid for independence? The only good thing I can say about Kissinger is that his longevity gives me hope that I’m not over the hill. I was feeling kind of down this week because I received an AARP magazine with Ringo Starr on the cover.
Let’s close on a hopeful note with Major Jackson’s poem “Let Me Begin Again” on the Academy of American Poets website. Oracular and colloquial by turns, this poem urges us to keep choosing wonder and joy, because our disintegrating world may depend on it.
…This time, let me circle
the island of my fears only once then
live like a raging waterfall and grow
a magnificent mustache. Let me not ever be
the birdcage or the serrated blade or
the empty season.
Hat tip to Sarah Sullivan, our 30 Poems in November fundraising coordinator, who sent this poem as one of her daily prompts for the writers raising money for the Center for New Americans. It’s not too late to donate to my page. I’m at $446 as of December 1–help me reach my $500 goal!