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