God, Science And Civilizational Destruction: US-Israel’s Pursuit Of Domination – OpEd |
On 7 April, last Tuesday, US President Donald J. Trump put the moral majority amongst us, including millions of Americans across the ideological spectrum on a psychological roller-coaster, with his two depraved, and criminal tweets on his Truth Social propaganda platform.
The first tweet he sent out one on Easter Sunday, the holiest Christian day of Christ’s resurrection, wherein he “desecrated Christianity”, by resorting to profanity – as his friend Tucker Carlson screamed disapprovingly – and, in the same breath, threw unmistakable insults at Allah (God) that the 1.5 billion faithfuls of Islamic religion. More ominously in the here and now world, he sent out a second tweet, having unveiled his unmistakably genocidal intent to make “an entire civilization die”. That is, a 6,000-years-old Persian civilization with its current population of 90+ million Iranian people of diverse cultures and ethic backgrounds, including Persian Jews, who choose Iran as their home, rather than relocate to the Jewish Supremacist Israel.
Most everyone, with conscience and empathy, who has been following the excruciatingly painful developments in West Asia where the USA and Israel have been waging the Hitlerite war of aggression since 28 February the possibility either Israel or USA nuking Iran was both real and nerve-wrecking.
For both Trump and Netanyahu are discovering, what some of the world’s leading military strategists with the depths of expertise on Iran (for instance, Alastair Crooke of Conflict Forum, former UN WMD inspector and ex-US Marine Intelligence Scott Ritter) have been saying: it is simply inconceivable for the “US-Israel tag team”, as John Mearsheimer has labelled the two rogue or pariah states, to defeat Iran through the use of conventional weapons. And putting ground-troops on the ground, that is, the invasion of a country the size of Western Europe, fortified by its physical geography of rugged mountains, narrow sea lanes, deserts and forests, not to mention 2-decades of meticulous and single-minded self-defence planning, will make no difference at all.
In the face of their joint-mission of brining Iranian leadership – and nation – on their knees, un-accomplished after 40 days and un-achievable in any foreseeable future, the nuclear sabre-rattling was getting louder, and Trump’s second tweet on 7 April, his deadline for Iran’s surrender put the concerned world on the cliff’s edge. Like many I knew I was beginning to feel very jittery and start to lose sleep over the scenario of millions of fellow humans -called Iranians – being vaporised in a fraction of the first minute of the nuclear detonation.
It was almost 40 years ago that I first heard of the “the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 – the Cubans themselves referred to it as October Crisis in Cuba (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre).
The crisis was, I was told, the scariest Cold War-era confrontation between Washington and Moscow, threatening the nuclear war. The crisis lasted from 16 through 28 October, triggered by the secrete American deployment of nuclear missiles on Turkey and Italy (aimed at Moscow) and the retaliatory Soviet deployment of Moscow’s missiles off the coast of Florida – on Castro’s Cuba.
Here I beg for the readers’ indulgence as I make the following brief personal detour about the tellers of this Cuban Missile crisis tale. Because the storytellers’ personal and professional backgrounds are worth recording. And their humanity remains inspiring, to me.
This cliff-hanger story of the nuclear scare in October 1962, a year before I was even born, was as important as the persons who told me, Gordon and Barbara Langlois, the late parents of Marilyn Langlois, my fellow TRANSCEND editorialist. I cannot not acknowledge how their humanistic activism influenced my own activism as a young Burmese learning about US affairs.
Staunch de-segregationists deep in the civil rights activism in the East San Francesco Bay area, they were great supporters of the young John F. Kennedy. They recounted how the two cool heads of their slain American hero and his Soviet counterpart Nikita Khrushchev, prevailed as they found an off-ramp, rather than allowed themselves to be trapped in the nuclear escalation ladder, in order to prevent the mutually assured mass destruction of both countries, and possibly life as we know it.
In the summer of 1988, when I arrived as a young foreign student in Northern California, I was “adopted” into Marilyn Langlois’ extended American family of largely scientists based at the University of California at Berkeley.
Remarkably, this family produced more than their share of scientists directly involved in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Lab in the mountain rage of Los Alamos outside Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Laurence Livermore National Lab a short drive from their home in Lafayette, California. Marilyn’s wonderful father himself was a chemist who headed Chevron’s Research Division at Chevron and led the team that created Octane. He socialized with the likes of Glenn T. Seaborg, the 1951 Nobel Prize co-winner and Berkeley professor who discovered transuranium, a chemical element heavier than uranium – subsequently named “seaborgium. Perhaps equally important, Marilyn’s maternal aunt worked as Robert Oppeinheimer’s personal assistant at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppie” walked her aunt down the aisle at a freshly built chapel as she married a young nuclear physicist, a member of his team.
Unlike the American and Israeli belligerents making war-policies or drumming up popular support for “bombing Iran back to the Stone Age”, all in the name of Christian messiah, or the genocide-condoning Old Testament God – heard of Netanyahu’s Amaleks? –, this American family of physicists and biochemists involved in defence or weapons research including the impact of radiation on humans and the Environment are unequivocally for peace among nations of diverse cultures, histories, civilizations and faiths, not simply this cliché of peaceful coexistence, but peacefully integrated human family.
They were raised in or well-exposed to, Christian traditions, and they partake in Christian holidays. But through their education and their pursuit of independent thought the family chose secularist life where they see the constitutional separation of church and state.
While the facts of their personal story registered with me and my memories of these conversations remain fresh, I didn’t fully appreciate the emotional or psychological depths with which Gordon and Barbara were recounting what they lived through during the Cuban Missile crisis.
That is, until Trump’s completely dark and unhinged threats to perpetrate the genocidal crime of destroying an entire civilization – not just an identity-based group, as spelled out in the Genocide Convention, along ethnic, racial, national or religious lines.
Civilizations encompass all of the above, and more.
Even Adolf Hitler who, according to SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, endorsed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (the accelerated mass extermination scheme for the Jews throughout the Nazi-occupied Europe) as Nazi Germany began to lose in the last 2-years of the World War II, confined his genocidal intent to largely Europe’s Jews, although there were other identity-based victim populations such as Roma and Sinti.
When Trump made this chilling threat to kill an entire civilization (of Persian Iran), he definitely made the 93% of pro-war Jewish Israelis happy.
As Gideon Levy, one of the few Israeli intellectuals and journalists with a crystal-clear moral compass and deep humanity, has pointed out that the overwhelming majority of his fellow Israelis fully support Netanyahu as the Jewish Supremacist Prime Minister manipulated successfully US President Donald J. Trump to join Israel into destroying Iran both as a society and a state. Mr Levy pointed out that Messianic Jewish Fascism permeates the Israeli public opinion, something the Israel Prize winner and esteemed Orthodox rabbinical scholar the late Professor Leibowitz observed as the direct result of the Occupation of Palestine in 1967.
Every informed American today knows that the United States is waging wars – there was a short one in June last year – against Iran at the behest of expansionist Israel, as Joe Kent, former Director of Trump’s Counter-Terrorism Center and US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, put it plainly. Irrespective of their ideological differences over left or right, millions of Americans, including many an American Jews oppose Trump-Netanyahu’s war of aggression against Iran, excepting God-fearing Christian Evangelical Zionists represented or led by Southern Baptist pastor and now US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and John Hagge
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what type of humans would wish nuclear calamity even on their worst enemies?
I wish to end this editorial with a lengthy quote from Jonathan Kuttab, the Palestinian founder and director of North American Friends of Sabeel and non-violence peace advocate, Kuttab writes, in the Friends of Sabeel North America newsletter (dated 10 April)
“Not onl is he (Trump) blatantly threatening to violate international law by going after civilian targets, in a massive way, but he is threatened to destroy an entire country of 90 million people in one fell swoop. “I can destroy all of Iran in one evening. Maybe, tomorrow evening,” he declared. Then, he followed this with a threat to “destroy an entire civilization “in one blow” if they do not meet his demands. Thankfully, he shifted the deadline and didn’t follow through on the worst of his threats. Yet, one wonders how far he can go with this insanity if he is properly manipulated and his ego is stroked correctly. He already believes he can do anything he wishes to do and that he should not be constrained by anyone or anything.
Those claiming divine sanction for war and destruction can be totally cynical politicians, like the President himself or Benjamin Netanyahu, who have little or no faith of their own and no religious credentials. More dangerous, however, are those who claim to be practicing Christians, even pastors and ministers, whose better knowledge of the Bible is used to offer a far more dangerous exploitation of holy language and sacred texts to provide a religious basis for war. They may be totally hypocritical and lack exemplary personal ethics (Hegseth, for example, is an alcoholic who is said to have cheated on his wife with a married woman) but they do attend church, pray in public, and are definitely more fluent with scripture than the President.”
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS)