A lot of religious people are going to be really surprised when they get to the afterlife and learn what God and Jesus are really about

    Yesterday's Israel and Hamas: Apocalypse Now? post at this blog contained a war correspondent Chris Hedges Substack opinion bashing Israel, my comment that what's going over there is caused by three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Devil has everything to do with it, and God has nothing to do with it, and my round and round back and forth with an anti-Israel daughter of Christian theologians, who kept arguing religion has nothing to do with what's going in Israel and Gaza today.

    Later exchanges with two other readers went off in entirely different directions.    

Patris

A pox on all of their houses. No one on earth can claim the bloody high road. We’ve all been murderers. Always will be.

Sloan Bashinsky

Boink! :-)

Patris

Don’t you find these circular challenges exhausting? 

Sloan Bashinsky

Of course :-), but maybe there's a cosmic point to it, or perhaps I'm just making out a case to put me in a looney bin in the afterlife, if not sooner? Her parents are theologians, and she still can't see it's being fueled by religions? 

Patris

Theologians but not historians. If one without the other what’s the point of confronting the psychosis of fanaticism? 

Sloan Bashinsky

Theologians don't study the history of their religion? I don't know her parents, and I don't know what they might say. She seems really angry about what's going on in Palestine, and elsewhere, and I don't blame her for that. Maybe when she gets to my age, 81, she will be more resigned to accepting what's in plain view, even if it stinks to high heaven :-).

Patris

I’m not much far behind you so agree that may be it. Just tired of the incessant pearl clutching (do theologians even wear pearls?). I do know the first person to ask if I was an N-lover was studying for the priesthood. Maybe that started it.

Sloan Bashinsky

I spent my youth mostly sound asleep. I have a much younger running mate, who woke up early in life, and then angels got ahold of him after he had followed a blog I was publishing for several years. Then, he woke up again. We do a podcast where we talk about stuff that the right and the left don't seem to like. He recently was nearly killed by assassins over resistance work he did in his part of America, and then he received the Stigmata wounds of Christ on both of his palms, which freaked him out and got a couple of other people's attention, but since he don't spend time around churches, it's not likely the Vatican or Christendom are interested in him. 

Patris

Tell me more?

Sloan Bashinsky

More about what?

Patris

Your path to mysticism if that is what I may call it?

Sloan Bashinsky

It began, officially, in early 1987, my 45th year. I had moved to another state the year before, to start over. I realized the move had not worked, I was out of bright ideas and felt like I had failed in just about every way a man could fail. In that state, I prayed one morning, "Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed. Please help me." I paused, added, "I offer my life to human service." About a week later, I woke up in the wee hours and saw two beings hovering above me in the darkness. They were shaped like shifts and were white with a little blue. I thought they were angels. I heard, "This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give it to you." I remembered the prayer. I saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical, which happened twice more, quickly. The beings faded out. I was shaking physically, and sweating.

That's when it began. The changes came slowly, I was moved to another state. I met another woman. It was a long, mostly arduous journey, with some beautiful sprinkled in. I had a dark night of the soul, then a black night, which was unfathomably worse than the dark night, which was awful.

I was geographically moved several times. I was sent into churches, then I got into politics. I had money, and I didn't have money and lived on the street. 

I wrote quite a few books, some were non-fiction, some were fiction, some were stranger than fiction. Many can be read at archive.org, which is a free internet library. 

The podcast is called The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast, and we launched it first only in audio at Spotify, and it was ad-free there until Joe Grogan shat and sat in it and Spootify dumped a lot of its small subscribers, who were not making Spotify any money.

Later, we launched it ad-free at YouTube, and then we launched it ad-free into the Torrent system, where we found exponentially greater receptivity. Because of so much flack from the right mostly, and to preserve that YouTube channel, we started a new YouTube channel called The Redneck Mystic Podcast. All the while, everything was put into Torrent. The last two podcasts were declined by YouTube, but went into Torrent. There are about 60 different podcast episodes.

Also, there is redneckmysticforpresident.blogspot.com. It's a spoof campaign, but the issues addressed are graveyard serious. 

Patris

What a journey, Sloan. I’m going to look for your writings. I do not attend any church but I was raised in one both ancient and accepting of your experiences. We stand in one reality but no one knows how many others exist that we find ourselves dipping into.

Sloan Bashinsky

It's there, and you don't have to go to church to experience it, for when are we ever not in church? :-)

Patris

Very true. Very wise.

Julio

Sloan, what did you drink the night before you talked to the Archangel Michael? I'm an agnostic and agree that the biggest mistake that man made was to create God (religion) and the biggest mistake that God made was to create man, like Nietzsche said.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

I didn't drink anything but water, actually. Michael has told me many things over the years since he and another angel showed up in early 1987, in my 45th year, and then they started turning me every which a way up loose and upside down and inside out, and stood me before endless mirrors, and it wasn't a whole lot of fun, and then it got a lot worse at times. You are in good company, Christians wonder what I've been drinking, or smoking, too. I don't do either. :-)

 

Julio

Good that you don't drink or smoke the good stuff. I hope your celestial relations will improve and make you happier. I do drink and enjoy my bone and flesh friends but I have not had any revelations which makes my life easier.

Sloan Bashinsky

Can't drink beer, wine, whiskey, tequila, etc., which make my liver and my gut yell at me. I never took psychedelics grown by Nature or made in labs, but I did smoke marijuana for a while, until I realized it was giving me a bad headache the next day, and it didn't matter whose batch of weed I used. I live near a city park, which has an earth vortex in it, and I can go there and sit on a bench and ask God, Nature, the trees and shrubs to give me whatever they have to give to me, which is okay with God, and nearly every time, including today, after a little while I go into an altered state, which isn't like what I felt when I drank or smoked weed. I felt something similar when I meditated years ago. Mostly, I get information in my dreams, and sometimes in just plain English. Every now and then, information comes when I'm awake. I've been getting steered, corrected and advised by angels since early 1987. It's like being from another planet, and yet here I still am. I've met a few people having similar experiences. 

 

Julio

I understand your experiences, I myself have frequently entered into an ecstatic trance while watching a sunset by the beach. But I have never been contacted by extraterrestrials. Since you keep communication with the angels and they know God, could you ask them this theological riddle: Can the Almighty God create a rock so heavy that not even himself can lift it? If you or any of your theologically inclined friends here know the answer I would appreciate it, if you could share it with me.

 

Sloan

Never heard that riddle, but it is said, With God, all things are possible. 

The other angel that life-changing night was Jesus, which perhaps explained why I was stood before endless mirrors looking at the endless beams in my own eyes, and that's still happening. 

Riddles are important, but living is where we are tested and measured. In one of his letters. Jesus' brother James said to ask him not about his faith, but look to his works and see his faith there. Many times I heard Christians say works do not get anyone into heaven, but only believing Jesus is the son of God who died on the cross for our sins, etc. is the only way to get there. I think they might be really surprised when they get to the afterlife to learn that, to the extent they lived as Jesus lived and taught others to live, they were saved by him, even if they were atheists :-)

I don't live a lot of time in parallel dimensions, but what's there comes to and affects me in the human dimension. I am in this world, I have friends. I have had quite a few very serious relationships with women, one at a time, who just showed up. Each woman opened up, or woke up, something in me, which I did to know was there. They enriched my life, and being in my life was not always easy for them.

I ran 10 times for public office in Key West and the Florida Keys, or was put up to do it, to help me learn about politics, which I still detest. I spoke at hundreds of government meetings. I participated in candidate forums. I was interviewed by the media. Sometimes I was told, l would have gotten elected, if I had not said angels and God made me run for office :-).

I wrote three novels, in which the central figures are a man and a woman walking back into paradise together, or trying to, through lots of flames and passion and ups and downs. You can read them at archive.org. I suggest in the order they were written. Kundalina, Alabama; Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale; Return of the Strange. 

In a different forum yesterday:

Vision

By: Wendell Berry

 

POETIC OUTLAWS

NOV 5, 2023

 

Art: Homer Winslow

If we will have the wisdom to survive,

to stand like slow growing trees

on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...

then a long time after we are dead

the lives our lives prepare will live

here, their houses strongly placed

upon the valley sides...

The river will run

clear, as we will never know it...

On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down

the old forest, an old forest will stand,

its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.

Families will be singing in the fields...

Memory,

native to this valley, will spread over it

like a grove, and memory will grow

into legend, legend into song, song

into sacrament. The abundance of this place,

the songs of its people and its birds,

will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

This is no paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its reality.

Sloan Bashinsky

It looks to me that what actually is happening is each generation is a little more deteriorated than the previous, reminding of clones of clones of clones.

 

David

Must reverse that flow!

Sloan Bashinsky

Some people are moving forward, evolving, but most of humanity is going backward. It's on each person to go one way or the other, or stand still, if that's even possible :-)

David

All my hope, such as it is, relies on people under 40. There’s a lot there. My son will be six in June….I believe the young see more clearly the mistakes of older generations than we baby boomers did.

Sloan Bashinsky

I hope you are right. I'm 81 and have no contact with young children and my only real contact with people under 40 is my grandchildren. I think it is really important for people to chart their own course and not get stuck in any kind of herd, which isn't easy to pull off. 

Elizabeth

And can be lonely 

Sloan Bashinsky

Very

 

David

No, but that kind of agency is the most important thing to pull off, and I ain’t putting’ you on!

Sloan Bashinsky

A guy in the Gospels said, the way to life is difficult and few enter the gate; many are called, but few are chosen; the work is great and the laborers are few. A poet named Robert Frost, who hung out a good while in Key West, wrote that he was walking in a wood and came to a fork in the path and he took the one less traveled by, and that had made all the difference.

David

Jesus, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, and Alan Watts: the baddest good company.

Sloan Bashinsky

:-), and Bob Dylan, William Blake, Rumi, and Shams, Kahlil Gibran, Herman Hesse, etc.

Then there's Goddess Kali over yonder India way. The art piece of her standing on Shiva's chest, holding a man's severed head in one of her four hands, a sword in another hand, a string neckless of men's severed heads around her pretty neck, and behind her a legion of angry bare-breasted women holding swords aloft, gave the distinct impression Kali and her legion do not like how men think.

David
Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Alanis Morisette…

Sloan Bashinsky
Yep, I'm especially fond of Gloria's quip, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." 

 

David
I definitely cannot argue with that! 

 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Israel and Hamas: Apocalypse Now?

    Chris Hedges is an internationally respected war journalist, who has put his life at risk many times. He writes a newsletter, to which I recently subscribed. From what I have read, Hedges is very anti-Israel. Unlike Hedges and a lot of people, I lay the blame for what is going on in Gaza on the three religions that descended from Abraham: Judaism, Christendom and Islam. After I commented under Hedges's article, a woman of Japanese-American descent had at me, and I responded, and she had at me again, and I responded, and that went on for a while.

Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians 

When Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, religious zealots, ultranationalists and crypto-fascists in the apartheid state of Israel say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, believe them. 

CHRIS HEDGES

NOV 3, 2023

 

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish fundingfrom rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. 

Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.” 

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Ammonites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged. 

A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13, 2023 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. 

It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” 

These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.

“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.

The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt. Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque - the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army - to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call "Judea and Samaria," will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.

It is a short step to total Israeli control over Palestinian land. Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements, restricted military zones, closed highways and army compounds have seized over 60 percent of the West Bank, turning Palestinian towns and villages into ringed ghettos. There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land will explode. Over 133 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army and Jewish settlers since the Oct. 7 incursion by Hamas and thousands of Palestinians have been rounded up by the Israeli military, beaten, humiliated and imprisoned.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the horrific violence of the state. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are already being targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Fascists do not respect the sanctity of life. Human beings, even from their own tribe, are expendable to build their deranged utopia. The zealots in power in Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them. 

“Several new testimonies by Israeli witnesses to the October 7 Hamas surprise attack on southern Israel adds to growing evidence that the Israeli military killed its own citizens as they fought to neutralize Palestinian gunmen,” Max Blumenthal writes in The Grayzone.

Tuval Escapa, a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, Blumenthal notes, set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli army. 

Escapa told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that as desperation began to set in, “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

The newspaper reported that Israeli commanders were “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control. That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers.

Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured by the Romans, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians. 

The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on Aug. 1, 2014 captured an Israeli officer, Lt. Hadar Goldin. In response, Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles and shells on the area where he was being held. Goldin was killed along with over 100 Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.

Gaza is the start. The West Bank is next.  

Hundreds of Palestinians have been driven from their homes, with herding communities the most vulnerable.

Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.

Israelis who cheer on the Palestinian nightmare will soon endure a nightmare of their own.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

It's a horrible mess over there. I think Hamas hoped its murderous raid and hostage taking would cause Israel to invade Gaza. Time will tell if Gaza is a trap, a kill zone, a graveyard for Israel's soldiers, as well as for lots of other people. I doubt Hamas gives a tinker's damn what Israel, America, Europe, etc. think about it. They are terrorists. The way Israel is going about it looks like terrorism to me. Who has a solution for it? I don't see anyone with a solution. I don't think there is a solution. Unless, say, Israel nukes the whole place and there is no more so-called holy land to fight over, and Armageddon has arrived, and the three religions that believe they are God's chosen people are finding out that God has nothing to do with any of it.

nosey parker

Hamas is a resistance movement, not terrorists. You cannot be terrorists if you are being illegally occupied and you resist. Hamas is legal; Israel is not.

Sloan Bashinsky

What people do determines what they are. The Hamas murderous attack and hostage taking in Israel was a terrorist attack. It was no different from 9/11. It was bait, to get Israel to do just what it is doing now. Hamas doesn't give a shit about Palestinians who simply want to live a decent life. I am no fan of Israel. I think the worst possible thing that could have happened over there was the creation of Israel. Western Europe and America blew it, showed their true colors, when they did not offer WWII Jewish refugees safe harbor in their countries. The entire mess over there is rooted in the three Abrahamic religions claiming they are God's chosen people, thus whatever they do over there, God is on their side. The Devil loves it, God has nothing to do with it.

dorothy slater

I am not a conspiracy person, but there is something off about the ease with which Hamas got into israel. Israel is one of the most secure countries in the world in terms of safety and yet no one was at the secure fence even though Hamas supposedly had been planning this incursion for a year no one was there to stop them the entire Fiasco sounds an awful lot like the Epstein suicide when all the cameras were off and the guards were either asleep or gone away. I wouldn't put it past Netanyahu from wanting this as a good excuse to get rid of Gaza as he has always wanted to do. Otherwise how is it that guards are all over the place all the time and yet missed this. It just doesn't make sense to me

Sloan Bashinsky

I can't imagine Israel's generals being on board with something like that, if they knew a great deal of Gaza was underground Hamas tunnels buffered by heavily populated civilian shields. Look at how it went for America in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

nosey parke

I agree with several of your points, Sloan. Religion, for example. I hate to tell you (well, that's actually a lie: I am DELIGHTED to inform you) that 9/11 was an inside job, as I said when it was happening. It was obviously an inside job and only many decades of anti-Arab/anti-Muslim propaganda in your news and entertainment industries prepared you to believe the official story of terrorists, blahblahblah. And Israel was clearly involved. You aren't a terrorist if you are resisting an illegal occupation, which is what Hamas is doing. And the U.S. and quite a few other countries including Australia offered land for a Jewish homeland during WWII. In fact roughly one million Jews were murdered in the death camps who needn't have been--the U.S. offered them asylum but the friggin' Zionists in Palestine said NO, they have to come to Palestine because they wanted more land. You could not make this shit up. 

Sloan Bashinsky

I have no doubt the American government somehow was involved in 9/11, but the hijackers were Saudis, and they were under Osama bin Laden's command. I read in an American news media article, a letter from Osama to America, maybe in 2003?, in which Osama told Americans their president was easy to bait and they needed to replace him. America had no way to stop the killings in the Nazi death camps, before Hitler and his military were defeated. America indeed declined to accept the European Jewish refugees. I wonder if the wonderful pro-Israel patriotic Americans today ever will offer the people in Israel safe harbor in their red, white and blue cities, counties an states? I wonder if the people in Israel would accept that offer? You remind me of the fanatics in the American right and left. You are so sure you are right. Anyone who takes a side in this mess is missing the whole picture, for which we have the three Abrahamic religions to thank.

 

nosey parker

You sound pretty self-assured yourself. A lot of Israelis have dual American citizenship. In fact a lot of Israelis were born in NYC. And I grew up in the M.E. so know a bit more than your average American. But 9/11 most definitely was an inside job. Don't be so naive. Do some research. There are new reports that have been published recently. Didn't they just pass a bill whereby Israelis don't even need visas to come here? Maybe it's not true. I heard it on--you guessed it!--NPR!

Most recent report I watched indicated Cheney and Rumsfeld were behind the 9/11 caper. Bush Jr. obviously knew about it, as did the Secret Service. He just carried on reading a children's book about goats. Yup. American citizens killed by their own government just as Israeli citizens were recently killed by the Israeli government. Nothing new. And then, ooh, let's go decimate Iraq and maybe Afghanistan while we're at it. But first we need to destroy Iraq. That makes a lot of sense, don't you think? Now they want to use Hamas taking POWs as an excuse to destroy Iran. Our aircraft carriers are in the PERSIAN Gulf. Did you notice I called it the PERSIAN Gulf??? Believe what you want, Sloan. 

he Israeli/Palestinian thing is not about religion. Give it a rest.

Sloan Bashinsky 

Unfortunately, the I/P thing is completely about religion. If I were President Biden, or the Speaker of the U.S. House or Senate, I would propose that America cut off all money and military aid to Israel pronto, with an offer for all people in Israel to come live in America and end the religious war in the so-called holy land, which began in Old Testament times. Make no mistake, Hamas started this recent conflagration. Make no mistake, if Israel feels sufficiently threatened, It will unleash is nuclear arsenal on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. 

nosey parker

And they will all die. Nuclear weapons are useless in this situation. FYI, you are talking to a Japanese-American. So don't fucking tell me about dropping nuclear bombs on anyone. Israelis or Jews aren't the only ones who have suffered in this world. You do NOT know what has been happening in Gaza for the past 16 years. Hamas did not do this out the blue. This has been a very long time coming. Israel has been killing Palestinians every day, including shooting little kids in the head for no reason except they are Palestinian and are more fertile than Jewish kids, for a long, long time. God help us if they all come here. We have our own psychopaths.

Sloan Bashinsky

I think Vladimir Putin is a monster, but he seems to understand Israel better than Islam and America. He knows Israel will use its nukes, if it feels it has to. Japan had its kamikaze pilots and banzai soldiers. Islam has its suicide bombers. Israel will do whatever it thinks is necessary to survive. I'm not defending Israel, which you seem to keep implying. I'm trying to explain where Israel is coming from, because there is no reasoning with religious fanatics, there, in America, anywhere.

 

nosey parker

You don't need to explain Israel's point of view. I've heard it ALL before. So many times it puts me to sleep. You are defending Israel, whether you admit it or not. You are not the first person to yammer on in a racist manner to me either. It's not shocking. It's just a bore. 

It's not about religion. It's about land. (Oh, and oil.)

 

Sloan Bashinsky

There's oil in Gaza? In Israel? I have felt America should have abandoned Israel since 9/11. Instead, America fought two winless wars against Islam, and kept supporting Israel, which Islam radical hates as much as it hates America. Meanwhile, if Hamas had not done what it did in Israel, Israel's army would not be in Gaza. I think Hamas hoped Israel's army would invade Gaza, and suffer horrible losses. I think Israel didn't want that to happen, and it was willing to kill a lot of Palestinians, who were not Hamas, to kill Hamas.

nosey parker

https://unctad.org/news/unrealized-potential-palestinian-oil-and-gas-reserves

GAS and OIL: The real reasons of the Israel-Gaza War, page 1   

You do not understand this conflict. Many Israelis will die and the military will be stuck in this fight for a long time, just as the Russians were stuck in Afghanistan for a long time and the Americans were stuck in Vietnam for a long time. Russia and the U.S. lost those wars and Israel will lose this one. They have never done hand-to-hand urban fighting with a guerilla force who knows the land the way the Palestinians do.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Thanks for the link, I did not know about the oil and gas reserves there. Good luck, Israel getting at them under Gaza :-)

What you describe is precisely what I see happening, if Israel tries to fight in the cities and in the tunnels, and that's precisely the trap Hamas has laid for Israel, and I can't imagine Israel cannot see that, and that's a hell of a Catch-22 for Israel. I don't see a solution, other than America offers all of Israel's people safe harbor in America. You can beat up Israel until hell freezes over, it won't change anything. They are long suffering. They actually believe they are God's chosen people, and they are supposed to be where they are. Islam actually believes they are God's chosen people, and they are supposed to rule that region, and the world, too. Christendom views Israel as entitled to be where it is, based on the Christian Old Testament. I cannot understand why people do not see this is entirely about religion, which makes it impossible to resolve.

nosey parker

This is my last response to you. Christianity follows the New Testament. You don't know shit about Islam or Christianity either.

Bye.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Christians I know quote the Old Testament a lot. I grew up in Christianity, I got worn out listening to sermons in Baptist churches about Moses and so forth. I attended a Presbyterian prep school, 2 required courses were Old and New Testament. Hamas views the Palestinians being killed by Israel as Martyrs, assured of Paradise. Sometimes I wonder if humanity would be a lot better off if there were no religions.

   
Parallel, Nosey Parker had posted her own comment thread. 

nosey parker

American Jews need to tell Congress to take a fucking stand and stop giving Israel the freedom to do anything they want. Enough already.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Congress, President Biden, and President Trump before that have had no control over what Israel does. Where America keeps screwing up is giving Israel lots of money and weapons. Israel would not exist, but for what's in the Bible's Old Testament. This is all about three religions that descended from Abraham. Judaism and Christendom from Isaac, Islam from Ishmael. Each of those religions claim they alone are God's chosen people. Good luck resolving that with reason, common sense, prayer, hope, beliefs, mediation, etc. The closest anyone came to it was Jimmy Carter, and look at how the American Christian war hawks, who never heard of turn the other cheek and do good to and pray for your enemies, thanked him.

nosey parker

OY VEY!!!

Christianity comes from Christ, not Isaac. And Islam comes from Mohammad, not Ishmael. Don't try to teach me theology. I apparently know more about THAT than you do.. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Jesus was a Jew, who descended from Moses, who descended from Abraham's son, Issac. Muhammed descended from Abraham's other son, Ishmael This is in the Jewish scriptures, the Bible's Old Testament, and the Koran - except Islam believes Ishmael was the son God promised Abraham, and, if you read Genesis, you see God told Abraham that Ishmael's seed would become a great nation and would cause Isaac's seed trouble. Islam apparently took that to heart. There is no way to understand what is going on here, if you ignore the Scriptures of Judaism, Christendom and Islam. 

nosey parker

Sloan--I'm the daughter of theologians. Enough.

Sloan Bashinsky

Then, you know this history, if your parents taught it to you. 

I wonder what your parents would do with this?

Three nights before 9/11, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep, "Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?" I woke up, wondered what that was about, made the prayer. On 9/11, my concern was America would get into an another Vietnam-like war it could not win. It didn't occur to me that America would get into two such wars. But I get ahead of myself. A few days after 9/11, as I walked out of U.S. Post Office, Michael told me, "America should get out of the Middle East altogether and let Islam and Israel work it out, or fight it out, and in that way learn which, if either, are God's chosen people.

I do not attend church. I belong to no religion, nor to any political party. If Americans and/or Christians heard what angels tell me and a friend of mine about America, religion, etc. they just might convince themselves it was the Devil talking to them :-).

nosey parker

They would be politely noncommittal.

It's not a religious war.

Julio Santos

Sloan, what did you drink the night before you talked to the Archangel Michael? I'm an agnostic and agree that the biggest mistake that man made was to create God (religion) and the biggest mistake that God made was to create man, like Nietzsche said.

 

Sloan Bashinsky

I didn't drink anything but water, actually. Michael has told me many things over the years, since he and another angel showed up in early 1987, in my 45th year, and then they started turning me every which a way up loose and upside down and inside out, and stood me before endless mirrors, and it wasn't a whole lot of fun, and then it got a lot worse at times. You are in good company, Christians wonder what I've been drinking, or smoking, too. I don't do either. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky the next day

This morning, I saw in my Apple news feed:  

REUTERS: Netanyahu disciplines Israeli minister who voiced openness to hypothetical nuclear option in Gaza — Reuters 

Netanyahu disciplines Israeli minister who voiced openness to hypothetic... Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disciplined on Sunday a junior member of his cabinet who appeared to voice ope...

There's no way that minister said that, if it wasn't being discussed at the highest level inside Netanyhau's circle. They want Iran, etc. to know Israel might use its nukes.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com