There we go again. Slaughtering civilians in a country that presents absolutely no danger to our ourselves, our military bases, or our international hegemony. It is hard not to think about what a bully our nation has become. We obey no international rules about killing women and children, or destroying any number of hospitals and colleges. We are the Death Star home of Darth Vader, that ominous murderer of peace on earth.
For people like me who always cheer for the underdog, disliking one's own country has become inescapable. I think about those 20,000 children killed by US bombs and drones. Or about the hundreds of reporters assassinated. I think about how racist and criminally insane our one true friend in the world really is. The people of the earth understand what we have become. In fact we have been coming to that conclusion ourselves.
Can we disarm Israel, and end its 75 years of Palestinian extermination? Would that be enough to regain our basic humanity? Would our grandchildren forgive us when pictures of starving children came up in their Social Studies books? Will their beloved nation ultimately do the right thing? Or will we as a people join the dark side, and take our place with the monsters of the Death Star?
We can start with shaming any member of Congress who takes Israeli bribes. How about Pat Ryan, who talks about human rights but received a quarter of a million in Death Star funds last year?
Fred Nagel
Reclaiming our basic humanity
The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians
To the NYT Editor:
Thank you so much for publishing Nicholas Kristof's piece The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians. The sexual violence Palestinians who fall into the hands of the Israeli military and/or the prison system is almost never discussed, but is deeply felt in Palestinian society. I shared your article with a friend who was subject to 14 months of administrative detention and ultimately released with no charges. He shared with me some of his experiences which included sexual abuse with pictures taken by his abusers (as well as his losing 1/3 of his body weight from starvation). His wise comment to me, "The shame is not mine, it is theirs."
The Israeli prison authorities' immediate and furious denials responding to the article are just par for the course for a government that rarely investigates abuses of power and never actually holds anyone accountable.
And thank you for pointing out that our tax dollars support these abuses so we are complicit. I would add that state treasurers and controllers like NYS' Tom DiNapoli who have purchased large amounts of Israel Bonds are also complicit.
Again, Thank you. It won't be easy to stand up to the response but if you can, it will be an important demonstration of what journalistic integrity looks like.
Sincerely,
Felice
The Last Chapter
No matter where a Social Studies curriculum starts, it always ends up in the same place. It can begin with Athens and Sparta, or the fall of the Roman Empire. It can explore the Industrial Revolution, the Renaissance or the Holocaust. But no matter where these courses start, they all culminate in the ascendance of the United States. At the end, students and teachers join in hoping that the mass murders of history will somehow melt away under our country's benevolent world order.
In the spirit of human advancement, students explore the end of slavery, but not the 100 years of Jim Crow that followed. They celebrate the American flag on Iwo Jima, but not the two nuclear explosions that wiped out hundreds of thousands. We can all agree that the barbarism of the past will certainly give way to the American dream of human rights and world peace. Our Judeo-Christian leaders fill us with thoughts of a better world.
Except that Israel and the US are perpetrators of the worst genocide of the twenty first century. Hundreds of thousands are being slaughtered, a godless crime against humanity. Is this the Judeo-Christian alliance we are urged to glorify? The empire makes the bombs, and the colony drops them on its helpless victims. The empire manufactures the bullets that the Israel Defense Force shoots through the heads of Palestinian reporters, doctors, and ambulance drivers. And through the heads of the children. Perhaps Moloch, the ancient deity of child sacrifice, is really the last chapter of our curriculum.
Fred Nagel
Rhinebeck, NY 12572
845 430 4676
Kleptocracy
No matter how crazy Trump gets, the DNC (Democratic National Committee) wants to keep him in power. Instead of taking its cues from the vast majority of Democratic voters, the committee refuses to consider ending military aid to Israel. And despite an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the committee won't condemn the bloodbath. This despite polls that show 77% of Democratic voters think that Israel is the cause of the slaughter.
Is the majority of the DNC just keeping Trump around long enough to run against him in the next election? Palestinians be damned, as long as the Democrats gain control of the Congress?
I think the truth is worse than that. To understand what really motivates the DNC, we have to learn the meaning of an unusual word: "kleptocracy." It is really a combination of two Greek words, one for "thief" and one for "ruler." Of course, no one fits that definition better than our current scoundrel in chief. But we can identify other elected official much closer to home.
Representative Pat Ryan thrives in our current kleptocracy. He talks endlessly about human rights, despite spending most of his career in the US military occupying foreign countries in the Middle East. He was also a contractor for Palantir, an AI company linked to the killing of 120 school children in Iran. Not surprisingly, Ryan's top two campaign contributors were the Israel Lobby and Palantir. Together, they lined Ryan's pockets with about 269,000 dollars for the last election. Our hometown grifter is doing very well.
Fred Nagel
8 Clay Ct.
“Woodstock Company Expands For War Work”
Woodstock, NY, is a tiny town with an outsize global brand. As the town’s largest employer approaches its 80th anniversary of war profiteering, we pause for a vignette of a history that somewhat belies the peace-and-love associations.
June 28, 1973: Hippies, tourists and assorted pilgrims graced the Village Green. And the front page of the Ulster County Townsman led with a photo of the President of Woodstock’s largest employer, Rotron, proudly receiving a Special Award from Rockwell International, maker of the Minuteman nuclear missile.
“Year after year,” the award said, “the Rotron fan has performed on the Minuteman missile program without a single instance of failure.”
Next to a model of a Minuteman, the award displayed a replica of the pirate and slaver Sir Francis Drake’s ship, likening Rotron’s contribution towards keeping a Soviet attack at bay to Drake’s turning back the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The early 1970s were a boom time for this mainstay of Woodstock’s economy. The Vietnam War and the Cold War were raging — Rotron’s Woodstock plant was providing “components critical to the success of nearly every U.S. military missile program,” as the company’s promotional material proudly stated. “Minuteman, Poseidon, and Spartan all carry the Rotron logo within their shells. Custom-designed Rotron fans are also contained in the Cruise missile and in the Trident [submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missile].”
Six months before Rotron received its Minuteman award, its Made-In-Woodstock fans had been busy over Vietnam in the “Christmas Bombings”, the largest heavy bombardments by the US since World War II, with heavy civilian casualties. Woodstock’s production lines were turning out components for B-52 bombers, B-58s, nuclear-armed F-102 and F-106 fighter aircraft, nuclear submarines, and tanks.
From its earliest days the company concentrated on the military market. In the early 1950s a local paper reported: “The Korean emergency [a euphemism at the time for the Korean War] ... keeps Rotron’s business going at full tilt.” And another local newspaper shouted: “Woodstock Company Expands For War Work.”
Meanwhile (although this only became known in the 1980s) TCE and other highly toxic byproducts of Rotron’s weapons production were poisoning the groundwater and wells of neighborhood homes and creating the town’s only Superfund site. To this day the poisons remain on site, although supposedly contained, and neighbors can’t grow their own vegetables. Two satellite Rotron plants in nearby towns, Olive and Saugerties, also left legacies of toxic spills. A reminder that war is bad for the environment in all of its phases.
The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars provided another bonanza for Rotron, now owned by Ametek Inc. And business is surely booming just now for the plant whose production is 80% military.
In 2020 the factory completed another in a series of expansions for more war work, with the aid of $600,000 of New York State taxpayer money. (Throughout the Covid closures of that year, the factory remained open as an “essential business”.)
More recently, the widespread horror at the atrocities in Gaza has focused more attention on companies like Rotron that supply the tools of genocide and apartheid. While information is scarce, we know that Rotron has supplied the Israeli Defense Ministry directly as well as selling to Israeli war manufacturers like IAI and Merkava, and has continued to do so since 2023 – and Made-In-Woodstock parts are in all the F-35s and F-15s delivering the genocide.
We don’t mean to imply that Woodstock, or Rotron, or Ametek Inc, are unusually evil – on the contrary, we see here a microcosm of the military-industrial complex, whose tentacles reach into every congressional district. What if the great skills and the hard work of this company’s employees had been devoted 100% to peaceful, green, job-creating, infrastructure-strengthening technologies rather than machines of destruction and death? What if the community could help them make that happen?
U.S. needs to rethink relationship with Israel
The Israeli government has miscalculated with its latest war on Iran, particularly Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s dragging Donald Trump and the United States into the war.
U.S. military facilities in several Persian Gulf nations are being damaged and destroyed, with worse perhaps yet to come.
The war has spread to more than 10 nations, many of whom are rethinking their strategic U.S. relationship.
Israel’s goal may be to transform Iran into a failed state. Trump’s demand for Iran’s unconditional surrender shows his ignorance of Iran.
A little country like Israel could not wage large-scale sustained violence in the occupied Palestinian territories and multiple other nations without massive U.S. military and diplomatic aid.
Mr. Netanyahu and his former defense minister are fugitives, having been indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC has issued arrest warrants.
The United States needs a new Israel policy, including a declaration of independence from Israel and Zionism, and an end to U.S. weapons sales and gifts to Israel.
As supply constricts, oil, natural gas and gasoline prices are increasing in many nations, as will inflation rates in the United States.
Hopefully, sanity and international law will soon prevail and the United States and Israel will discontinue their unprovoked war before it becomes a world war with catastrophic consequences.
Tom Ellis
Germany Over All in the World
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt." So begins the German national anthem, which was used by the Nazis as a declaration of world hegemony. No international laws could hold Germany back. No sense of decency or morality would alter its drive for military dominance.
The same ultra nationalist thinking now controls our own White House. We bomb, we starve, we invade any country that gets in our way. We laugh at the rules that have held us back since World War II. Any world leader who resists will be assassinated or captured. With 800 military bases in the rest of the world, we will crush all dissent both home and abroad.
How did Germany think it could control the world? Racism convinced Hitler that Germany would prevail against all other ethnicities. Also, Hitler ruled by hunches and constantly went against his own generals. By the time he invaded Poland, there was nobody in the press, or the courts, or the universities who could stand up against him.
Our own Hitler is busy crushing dissent and destroying our Constitution. His billionaire class has bought up all the media. He controls what is taught in our colleges, and simply ignores the courts when they urge caution. Finally, he is deeply racist and has energized the white Christian nationalists.
He is talking about taking a third term, and has ICE as his private Storm Troopers. Unless we stop Trump now, we will have to fight him in the streets.
Fred Nagel
Sweet Land of Liberty
Sweet land of liberty. These were the words sung to our elementary school class as the US flag went up the pole, snapping in the morning breeze. Maybe it was Memorial Day, or Flag Day. It doesn't matter. I remember thinking that my country must be an amazing place if grownups choke up about it. I was proud to be part of a country that even sang these words.
So many years later, my basic beliefs in these words and the country that still sings them, are gone. The US is the mightiest nation the world has ever seen. We are starving two million people in Palestine. We are bombing Iran. We are kidnapping world leaders, or assassinating them along with their families. We threaten the rest of the world with endless wars, and our implacable war machine is on the move, looking for more victims.
Is there anything sweet about US militarism? Is there any liberty after the US and its reprehensible ally in crime, Israel, have murdered millions of people? Those stars and stripes don't bring me any assurance. The reasons for our perpetual invasions of other countries have turned out to be transparent lies. Were they always? Was there ever a time when our country was a sweet land of liberty, free from Zionist manipulation and its million dollar payoffs to members of Congress?
I don't think that the US and Israel can conquer the rest of the world. Their heinous crimes against humanity will be our epitaph.
Fred
The brutality Israel has visited on Palestinians
Dear Editor:
The last No Kings march drew millions demanding accountability from our government. The result so far – not so much. We recently learned that the Trump administration simply ignored Congress and sent $8 billion in basic weaponry to Israel. Not many whimpers from Congress. What has Israel done with our gift? Israel has violated the ceasefire it signed with Hamas more than 1,500 times as of this writing killing 581 people and injuring more than 1,500. In the midst of the emergencies created by our government attacking our own people, have we forgotten Gaza? Have we forgotten the millions of people living through a harsh winter in tents, lacking sufficient food, clean water, and medical care? Have we forgotten that Israel has killed or injured 1 out of every 10 Palestinians living in Gaza? The brutality we see from ICE here is a fraction of the brutality Israel has visited on Palestinians in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank. We don’t want our government to fund a police state in the USA and we don’t want our government to fund massacres in the Middle East.
If you want to learn more about how Israel uses our tax dollars to enforce its will on Palestinians and how they fight back, come to Old Dutch Church on Wall Street in Kingston, this Sunday, February 15 at 2 pm to see the documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom and stay for discussion. If our government didn’t squander our tax money on killing Palestinians, invading Venezuela, threatening Iran, etc. perhaps we could afford universal healthcare, or pre-K for all, or a transportation infrastructure…
Felice Gelman
Faster than anyone could have guessed
The US attack on Venezuela takes us back to the 1930s, when a pretentious and histrionic buffoon somehow become the head of the most powerful military in Europe. He claimed that other sovereign nations (Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally Poland) really belonged to him and his Third Reich. Somehow Germany's richest industrialists (Krupp, I.G. Farben, Siemens, BMW, and Volkswagen) were there to fund his dream of making the Germanic race great again.
So is Trump now moving in a similarly dangerous direction? Like many authoritarians, Trump has moved much faster than anyone could have guessed. He has destroyed freedom of speech on most college campuses with his demands that criticism of the genocidal state of Israel is antisemitic. His Billionaire buddies have bought up a great deal of the nations' newspapers and TV stations (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdock, Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, and John Henry). He has taken control of ICE, a private army paid for by the public. And Trump has greatly benefited from the weakest and most corrupt of any modern day opposition party. They are all on the same Israeli payroll.
Now the tyrant is making his list of the next countries to attack. He wants the military to increase its budget by half a trillion next year. And ICE has begun shooting protesters and calling them terrorists. We don't really need to understand the rise of fascism in the 30s. The takeover and destruction of our precious democracy is already upon us.
Fred Nagel
The genocide is not over
In these terrible times of ramped up political violence, including the murder of a protester in Minneapolis, it's extraordinary to open HVI and see a letter that seems to threaten lethal violence against the Women in Black who stand outside the library each Saturday. This letter is in line with the verbal and physical bullying carried out by the pro-Israel counter-protesters across the street--obvious to any observer, and serious enough that WIB has had to request police protection.
The claim that WIB does not protest wars other than Israel's is manifestly untrue. An example: last week's vigil included signs protesting the bombing and kidnapping in Venezuela and demanding an end to this reckless aggression.
Over the years WIB has stood against injustice on many different fronts including climate breakdown and reproductive rights. Since October 2023 the group has focused on the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank because the US is bankrolling it, making US taxpayers directly complicit in these horrendous massacres (not the case, for example, in Ukraine or Sudan). It is our responsibility--yours and mine--to do all we can to end it.
And no, the genocide is not over: as of early January over 400 people have been killed in Israeli bombings since the so-called ceasefire, including at least 70 children. Hundreds more have died from starvation, exposure, and disease. The numbers grow daily.
Jo
To the Editor:
The Empire and Its Ruling Class
The United States is in a time of transition, from democracy to imperial rule. Of course, the overthrow of Venezuela was a long time coming. Trump wasn't the only president to shred international law and proclaim that anything the empire wants is fair game. No, our two party, one military industrial complex has been waging illegal wars for years.
Trump's overthrow of yet another country, however, is without the usual nuance or pretense. Perhaps he doesn't have the vocabulary to say things in more than one way. The US wants all the world's oil, so it is willing to destroy the Middle East to get it. Israel is our partner in crime, and no slaughter of the Palestinians is too much. No subterfuge here.
One change in US imperialism is the level of profiteering that our president is willing to take part in. He will be building gambling casinos on the bones of six million Palestinian people. A Gilded Age charnel house.
Another aspect of this different direction seems even more dramatic. The rest of the world has come to expect naked imperialism from our country, so there is little change in their expectations. The "land of the free" will continue taking what it wants. No, this transition is about who runs the empire once it has committed itself to crimes against humanity. Like various authoritarian regimes in the past, the US will now be run by its billionaire class, freed from all the complexities of representative democracy. Welcome to a fascist America.
Fred Nagel