America is a great country! You can criticize the Government without any negative consequences to you or your family.*
In fact, you can criticize any government in the world
….except one!
You cannot criticize the Israeli governments over the past 75 years. If you do, you risk being fired from your job, labeled as an antisemite, a Jew-hater, anti-Israel and a Hamas-supporter and cancelled online, or denied jobs when you graduate college that is if you are allowed to graduate at all. The examples are too many to mention. Just ask Google. By the way this was all under Joe Biden. Under Trump this abusive behavior has expanded to also cancelling your student visa, to masked people snatching you off the street and disappearing you in some Louisiana Prison and then deporting you without being allowed any due process (Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk are some examples out of more than 800 where the Government has not charged them with anything and or presented any evidence that they actually supported Hamas. Think about this, the U.S has revoked hundreds of visas to just repress student activism!). By the way, the ICE agents are masked just like the Russian KGB because they do not want you to point their faces after they beat you or whatever else they do to you in prison or during processing.
Hamas are terrorists, animals and barbarians for killing about 1200 innocent people and taking 250 hostages in October 2023. But why is it taking us such a long time as a nation to come to terms with the fact that Israel is also not a real democracy and that Netanyahu and his government are also war criminals and terrorists for killing about 50,000, injuring over 200,000 mostly women and children, starving millions of people to death and almost to death and clearly engaging in ethnic cleansing? The International Criminal Court indicted Netanyahu as a War Criminal and the UN has ruled repeatedly that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. Even if these numbers are half of what is reported, it is still way too much. Certainly Israel has a right to defend itself but this is so out of proportion that it looks to me like intentional genocide and ethnic cleansing. And Israel even opened another front of this war by invading Lebanon and Syria as if Gaza wasn’t enough. The same people who screamed “sovereign integrity” when Putin attacked Ukraine are now strangely silent when Israel enters other countries.
Frankly, I am amazed that Mossad, the Intelligence Service of Israel claims they didn’t know that Hamas will enter Israel and kill and take hostages. Mossad has the reputation of being one the most intelligent of the intelligence agencies of the World right after the CIA (just look at their operation “exploding pagers and walkie talkies” in Lebanon). How is it possible they knew nothing about this? Or is it possible they allowed this to happen in order to create the outrage needed in order for Israel’s currently most ultra-conservative government to do to Gaza and the West Bank what they have been itching to do for decades? I guess we may know the truth in about 100-200 years when and if papers get declassified.
What has always bothered me is the lack of proportionality in responses. Over the past 40 years I consistently read the same headlines – “Palestinian teenagers throw stones, kill one Israeli soldier and in response Israel uses live ammunition and kills 12 Palestinians.”
The same lack of proportionality bothered me when George W. Bush killed about 300,000 Iraqis according to many public sources in response to 9/11 where over 2000 people died in NY in 2001 even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Does that lack of proportionality make someone a war criminal? In my opinion, it does!
We know that Muslims and Jews can live together in peace. Again, America is a great country because more or less the religious tolerance here allows different religions to live together in peace.
That is not to say that being religious is necessarily a good thing. Religious propaganda is trying hard to convince us that religion is all about love and the only problem is that it has been misunderstood and misapplied by people.
But many Jews in Israel still believe that about 2000 years ago Santa Claus promised them the land Israel sits on and allowed them to ethnically cleanse or drive out or kill anyone who lives on it. It’s written in Santa’s 2000 year old Book of Violent Fairy Tales:
“However, you must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them – the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite ….” (Deut. 20:16-18)
“Now go and attack the Amalekites and completely destroy everything they have. Do not spare them. Kill men and women, infants and nursing babies, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Sam 15:3)
“You must drive out all the inhabitants of the land ….” (Num. 33:52)
Muslims have their own Santa promising gifts in the afterlife and their own book that similarly orders believers to kill non-believers:
Surah 3:151: “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve (all non-Muslims) …”
Surah 2:191: “And kill them (non-Muslims) wherever you find them … kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers (non-Muslims).”
Surah 9:5: “Then kill the disbelievers (non-Muslims) wherever you find them, capture them and besiege them, and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush …”
Some say Islam’s Santa Claus means well and Islam is a religion of piece. Then why did the Ottoman soldiers say to the grandparents of my grandparents in the Balkans: “Convert to Islam right now or die”?
Both religions have it in their “holy” books to kill non-believers.
75% of the World (146 of the 193 member states of the United Nations) have recognized Palestine as a sovereign state and are mostly waiting only on one country – the USA (and her disobedient teenage son Israel) to recognize that if Palestine cannot learn to tolerate freedom of religion then full separation is the only way to peace. Killing Palestinians is not going to solve it because (unless you kill all of them) for every brother, sister, mother, father, child killed you create five times more “terrorists” in the future who cannot forgive and forget and seek revenge until their last breath. Palestine needs to be established as a separate country ASAP and by that I really mean separate – Israelis should no longer be allowed to control the airspace or to enter into Palestine and kick people out of their houses on the West Bank and build new Israeli settlements there or stop the water or electricity to Gaza as a punishment to something Palestine or Palestinians did or did not do to them. There needs to be built a permanent wall between the two countries, no need for oppressive checkpoints at all. What’s needed is just a wall where Israelis can never go to Palestine and Palestinians can never go to Israel. I am not a fan of walls but in this case, there needs to be a wall until someday in the future maybe 1000 years from today people realize that religions are brainwashing and pointlessly killing them and realize that Santa Claus is not real.
Several months ago the Oscars had the courage to award the Oscar for the Best Documentary to “No Other Land” – a joint Palestinian/ Israeli production that documents the way Israeli “settlers” come and demolish Palestinian houses and terrorize inhabitants of the West Bank who have lived there for centuries while the Israeli army looks the other way or sides with the “settlers”. Well, I tried to see it but I can’t. You can’t see an Oscar winning film in America? I found it only on YouTube but the subtitles were not in the right place so I couldn’t quite follow. No distributer in America found the courage to buy and distribute this movie – keep in mind this is after it won an OSCAR for Best Documentary Film!!! One movie theatre in Miami Beach dared to show it and the mayor of that city threatened to evict the small cinema. Eventually he backed down after city hall was packed by residents that schooled him on Free Speech.
After winning the Oscar the co-director Hamdan Ballal was beaten by Israeli settlers in the West Bank and then detained by the Israeli military.
After being detained for more than 20 hours, Ballal was released. He and two other Palestinians were accused of throwing stones at a settler, allegations they deny. After being released, Ballal told The Associated Press a settler kicked his head “like a football” during an attack on his village.
“I realized they were attacking me specifically,” Ballal said at a West Bank hospital after his release Tuesday. “When they say ‘Oscar,’ you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”
MAKE-RUSSIA-GREAT-AGAIN LITTLE TINY DONNIE with his IUUGE HANDS (WELL, IUUGE IN HIS MIND AT LEAST)
It’s been about 80 days since this convicted felon was elected President of the United States by 77 million voters and ALSO by many millions of people who stayed home and refused to vote against him.
What has he accomplished so far? First thing he did was let out of prison all those criminals who attacked the Capitol and injured and killed police officers on January 6, 2021. Then he turned friends into enemies (people in Canada, 27 countries of the European Union, Mexico and Greenland now hate America, they cancelled trips to America depriving our economy of hundreds of billions, instead, choosing to vacation somewhere else) and he encouraged dictators all over the world. When he and his Vice President JD Vance (pictured here)
publicly attacked Zelensky who was their guest in the Oval Office and who is a true hero, if he had left Ukraine the first 3 days as he was offered, there will be no Ukraine now, a man who is 100 times a bigger man than Little Donnie, Little Marco and Little JD combined will ever be, telling him that he has no cards, therefore he needs to do what he is told and give away all precious and rare earth Ukraine minerals not to Putin but to them, I wondered if Trump would publicly talk to Putin the same way if he was his invited guest in the oval office.
A lot of people were asking themselves “Why does he seem not to like Zelensky and seems to like Putin?” For me the answer is simple – he hates Zelensky because he was impeached when Zelensky refused to provide him dirt on Biden after which Trump illegally withheld pre-approved by Congress weapons to “punish” Zelensky and he likes Putin because Putin helped him get elected in 2016, something, of course, Trump will never admit because it interferes with his narcissistic image of himself. Remember, Mueller couldn’t prove “collusion” but he proved Russia heavily interfered in the 2016 election on the side of Trump.
After this fiasco Putin got emboldened and increased attacks on Ukraine, Netanyahu broke the Ceasefire and Erdogan arrested his main political opponent, the mayor of Istanbul, only days before the Mayor was going to declare his candidacy for President of Turkey . Elections have consequences and the consequence of electing Trump is that America is sliding into a fascist dictatorship – Trump is not following court orders, he is disappearing intelligentsia just like Lenin and Stalin did for nothing more than speech and by the way what happened to the most peaceful president in history, remember that was a main argument by the low-information voter as to why they were going to vote for this idiot – “I am voting for Trump because while he was president there were no wars in the world and he did not attack any country.” Well, what do you say now when this Orange Orangutan is openly talking about invading and annexing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal?
And I haven’t even mentioned the price of eggs which he was going to bring down on day one. Eggs cost more now than during Biden which is very sad because we need eggs to throw at Teslas. Joking aside, not only did he not keep his promises about lowering grocery prices but with his on again and off again tariffs and threats of tariffs he has made the markets so nervous that they lost about 5 TRILLION dollars in February and March and now in April after his tariffs got into effect the market lost another 5 TRILLION! That’s IRAs, Pensions and 401K accounts of ordinary Americans that have lost money.
And by the way he is not only extorting Ukraine, the Mafia Don that he is, for its minerals, not caring or understanding that Ukraine paid with blood so that we don’t have to pay with blood. We only paid with money to degrade Russia’s army and economy and half of it stayed home to pay military contractors and weapons manufacturers, that’s a great investment if you ask Mitch McConnell, and by the way America did not pay 360B like this liar claims but more like 115B and America did not pay more than the European Union like this criminal is telling us but actually Europe paid more than us – something like 130B so far not to mention housing millions of displaced Ukrainians too. The point I was making is that Little Donny not only extorts Ukraine but also our own Universities and Major Law Firms by stopping any federal money they receive until they start licking his ass and surprisingly they quickly settle and capitulate. It’s been amazing to watch how quickly American institutions fold.
Talking about licking ass, the Republicans in Congress have completely abdicated their power to Trump as a co-equal branch of Government and are totally worthless as defenders of the Constitution. And by the way one of the most dangerous things Trump did (in addition to undoing with dozens of executive orders everything Biden had achieved especially anything that has to do with equity, fairness, respect for disadvantaged minorities and Global Warming) was to purposefully fire anyone who criticize him and hire and surround himself not with competent people but only with people who can answer YES to the following question: “Would you support me if I did something illegal”? Trump’s non-DEI “merit-based” picks are so incompetent, just look at the Signal app fiasco where they discussed classified information online for anybody to see, then when they got caught they denied it was classified which forced the reporter to publish it to prove they were lying. These are the same people who were screaming about Hillary’s emails.
Trump often says: “I love the poorly educated.” Well, I am sure he does because they are the ones who elected him and now they will be paying a heavy price at the groceries, when buying a car or anything else related to tariffs, electricity, etc even though I am sure they will find a way to blame it on the Democrats. And by the way the real reason why he is abolishing the Department of Education and trying to defund NPR and PBS is so that he can double and triple the poorly educated voters. The problem is they are not the only ones who will suffer. We all suffer because we are losing our democracy. I blame them for this. I don’t know what happened in Trump’s childhood but something bad must have happened. He is stuck mentally around the age of 12 and 13 with the pre-pubescent narcissism, drama, vindictiveness, bulling, name calling, lack of impulse control, etc but in addition he also appears to be clinically…mentally…ill! So I don’t blame him for anything because I can’t blame a mentally ill person for being mentally ill. I blame the 77M poorly educated in History and Science people who voted for him and the millions others who stayed home instead of voting against this clown. And by the way, just because you purchased a college degree does not mean you were not poorly educated! If these people hadn’t voted for him, this elderly almost 80 year old fat man would have stayed home yelling “get off my lawn’ to neighborhood kids. In other words, he could have been totally irrelevant.
Trump has initiated an aggressive assault against Science. All that federal money he is cancelling for university cancer research, etc will bring the American life expectancy even further down and will Make China Great Again because they are not slowing down investing in new medical and other technologies. The problem is this will be felt 10-20 years from now after this crook has dined and dashed.
Trump has initiated an aggressive assault against the rule of law. He is looking for any lawyer who represented someone who was suing him or represented causes he does not approve and barring them from entering Federal Court Buildings until they agree to represent for free the causes near and dear to the Fuhrer. Also he is not following court orders – take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia who even though entered illegally into the United States is married to an American Citizen and has 3 children. There was a court order that he cannot be deported to El Salvador but the Trump Administration accused him of being a member of a gang and just based on these accusations and allegations (NOT ANY PROOF IN COURT!) they not only deported him to El Salvador but also put him into El Salvador’s maximum prison for terrorists even though he has no criminal history in El Salvador or the USA, then when they got caught that they had violated a judge’s order they admitted to violating it and when told by the Supreme Court of the United States to facilitate his return back to the USA, they pretended powerless to even ask El Salvador to return him cynically pulling the “El-Salvador-is-a-sovereign-nation” card even though everyone can see that El Salvador is basically their employee/contractor because they are paying El Salvador to house each of the 261 people they sent there! Now they are threatening to do that to citizens as well – allege a crime, skip proving the crime in front of a court and just ship them to a foreign prison by paying that prison to hold them and then when caught claim they have no power to return them even after admitting their mistake! All of these 261 or so people need to be immediately returned to the USA to face a judge before being deported anywhere let alone placed in a maximum security prison. It doesn’t matter how they entered this country. You are still a human being and have certain unalienable rights just by being a human being. One of them is due process. Some of these people could be found to be violent but that truth can only be uncovered in court not just by the Executive Branch claiming it. Only if they are found by a court of law to be violent or entered the country illegally at that point they should be deported.
In addition to losing our democracy we are headed for a Recession because the Republicans are in charge. Every time they are in charge since 1988 they have tanked the Economy. It’s what Republicans do. Then down the line Democrats get elected and have to fix everything. Then the media characterizes these first responders as tax-and-spend liberals and then Republicans get elected again to wreck it. Net jobs created under Clinton, Obama and Biden: 33.5 million. Net jobs created under Bush H, Bush W and Trump: 3 million! The numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and after reading about it I personally logged in and re-checked the numbers and you can do too, here is the link – https://data.bls.gov/toppicks?survey=bls
*This article was written partially when Biden was president. I started by saying that America is a great country one of the main reasons being the constitutional freedom of speech (except, strangely, when you criticize Israel’s governments) but under Trump I am not sure there is freedom of speech anymore. I kept the title because I believe America will eventually overcome Trumpism. But currently there are reports by NPR that Customs are preventing some people from coming back from vacation at the airports even if you are a permanent resident with a green card, they demand that you unlock your phone so they can read your social media for anything critical of Trump or Netanyahu and if you don’t agree to share your passwords they detain you indefinitely without any charges. This is un-American and it must stop and we all need to say something about it. A lot of people around the world will cool when it comes to America, sell their Treasury Bills, stop buying our services, stop buying our movies, stop coming to our universities and will stop admiring America the way things are going and we are all going to be worse off. Trump is doing a lot of unconstitutional things – the way he treats undocumented immigrants, international students, legal green card holders and permanent residents, citizens, courts, universities, law firms and all Massachusetts Landlords, citizens and non-citizens inside and outside of the USA need to be very concerned and need to stick together and organize. I hate to say “I told you so” but I DID tell you so!
And finally, I want to share a personal encounter with death I had several months ago at 55 years old. Last year I have been feeling a burning sensation in my chest during exertion. The angiogram showed a 90% blockage at the top left side of my heart affecting two major arteries, the so called “widowmaker” arteries, and while my cardiologists said that this was most likely hereditary they also said that eating animal-based products like butter, eggs, milk, cheese and meat clogs arteries. Most of us are pre-conditioned to eat animal-based food since childhood by all the ads on TV. They said it was an urgent situation beyond inserting stents and that I needed a bypass surgery and so a week later I had a double bypass open heart surgery at Mass General in Boston which is a teaching Harvard University hospital along with Brigham. I want to thank my surgeon who is originally from Nigeria! (By the way, this is what makes America Great not what Trump is doing so bravo to Harvard University for telling Trump to go…entertain…himself and refusing to eliminate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. To me DEI plus tolerance and acceptance of immigrants are the essence of America and DEI does not mean hiring incompetent people, it just means widening the pool of diversity), the doctors, nurses, supporting staff at ICU and the Hospital, my family, of course, and our family friends who were amazing. Even though I was told I was “young” and I was otherwise healthy, it was a tough recovery. The first 5 days in the hospital are the hardest but the first month you can’t breathe or sleep well, you need help getting in and out of bed and you can barely move. My body was brought down to freezing 32F during the operation, heart was stopped, I was put on a heart and lung machine to circulate blood and breathe for me, about 20 pounds of water was put into me, I was intubated, tubes were coming out of my neck, chest and I was peeing through a catheter, I had an IV into my left hand and a needle into my right hand artery. The surgeons used my left mammary artery and a vein from my left leg to do the bypass. I feel better now several months later. I am alive…for now. (: The price settled for the insurance company was about $54K (out of about 215K billed) but for self-pay the price was around $400K! Why is there such a huge difference I don’t know. But it is re-assuring to know that our wise leader Trump has “concepts of a plan” on how to fix our health insurance system and medical and insurance costs even though for the past 80 days he has been busy with other things…like destroying democracy in America. Now he is even talking about a 3rd term – “a possible scenario in which Vice President JD Vance would run for office and then pass the role to Trump. The media reported that Trump responded that “that’s one” method. “But there are others, too,” Trump added.” By the way, my roommate in the hospital room was a Trump supporter from Maine who kept telling me how much he hates MA. I was thinking “Well, but you come to MA for your heart surgery, why not go to a republican state hospital?”
Tariffs hit the fan several weeks ago. Trump calls it “Liberation Day”. Well, Happy “Liberation” Day!
He wants to make us afraid. We can’t be afraid. Don’t agonize, organize and most importantly vote against Republicans! Don’t forget – America is already a great country due to its Constitution with all of its amendments. “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” is a scam. I hope at some point in the future we don’t find ourselves in the situation depicted in the extraordinary Oscar and Emmy nominated Netflix Documentary “Winter on Fire”.