Brian C Lockey

What did notable European writers and thinkers have to say about Palestine before 1948? (Map below is from Sebastian Muenster's edition of Ptolemy's Geography, depicting Cyprus, Syria, and Palestine (Basel 1540)

RIP-- and a helpful reminder that cancel culture began on the right, long before it emerged on the left. Steven Salaita and Norman Finkelstein being early victims around the same time as Churchill...And by the way, cancel culture has not gone anywhere. It's merely gravitated back to its original orientation.

Does it occur to anyone else that Palantir and AI battlefield targeting did not seem to help the US military whatsoever during this war? That Iran effectively prevailed with minimal use of battlefield AI tech?

Trump's really not too different from Biden/ Obama. This has always been the plan from Libya to Sudan to Syria. Meanwhile Bill Clinton tweets about the final four, and W. whiles away his retirement painting. All of them war criminals.

Guy works for Bloomberg news--has no idea what the definition of "human shield" is.

The problem is there's no precedent for this and the "Hague Invasion Act" has bipartisan support--used even to protect Israeli war criminals. At least in Britain, after the Iraq fiasco, they held the Chilcot Inquiry, which supposedly barred Tony Blair from ever returning to No. 10 Downing. Unfortunately even that didn't bar his cronies like Mandelson from returning... During and after Vietnam, there were at least attempts at this-- the Russell Tribunal, etc, but George W. and his cronies faced no consequences in the wake of Iraq. John Bolton, one of the main architects of the Iraq fiasco, remains an honored guest on CNN. The Anglo-American world with its prosperity gospel just seems beyond redemption at this point.

The question the rest of the world should be asking itself is where is the political opposition to all this? Where is the antiwar left in the US? Sadly it barely exists. Instead, over the past 30 years, competing strains of identity politics have captured both the US left and the US right brains. By 2026, identitarian navel-gazing has effectively become the entirety of politics within the US public sphere, leading to the most reductively Manichean forms of seeing the rest of the world. From this perspective, the mullahs have long been held as the enemy of feminism, the "gay and trans community," liberatory forms of self-expression, sexual liberation, i.e. everything the left imagines the US stands for (Obama's "the better angels of our nature"). You see it even in interviews with the highbrow intellectual left: during the Iranian protests (now revealed conclusively to have been fomented by the US and Israel), even nuanced geopolitical thinkers like Trita Parsi opened every interview with the MSM by condemning the oppressive "regime" along these lines. It's so pervasive that Trump cronies and even Trump himself are willing to invoke the well-worn "gays thrown off buildings" trope in order to justify his actions because he knows how effective it is in pacifying the left. Lessons for the rest of the world: reject the color revolutions-- the calls for liberation and "FREEDOM" are the siren calls for US imperialism and this is the end result, should you dare to resist.

Italians also have a saying that applies to this kind of exchange: "When an insult comes from the mud, it doesn't stain [Quando l'offesa proviene dal fango, non sporca.]"

It's hard to believe that the Iranians or anyone else in the Middle East still believe the US can negotiate in good faith. Even if the Trump administration comes to a deal with Iran, the Republicans in Congress have already indicated they will never ratify it.

Things look so bleak in the ME right now, but one thing I've become convinced of is that Saudi royalty don't care about the preservation of religious minorities in the Levant. In fact, I think they would be quite content if they could be eliminated altogether. It's the "nation-state" system that the British introduced into the Gulf that seems to be the driving force here--but what exactly does this "nation-state" model in the Gulf consist of? If we compare the historical moment of the retreat of the British empire from the Middle East to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) after the 30-Years War, the nation-state system was originally based on segregating fractious religious and ethnic identities in Germany behind national borders. In Europe and in the post-colonial context, this system did so putatively in order to eliminate ethnic and religious tensions. If you think of the Syrian revolution as the exportation of this "nation-state" model from the Gulf to the Levant, things make more sense. In other words, as in Israel, religious and ethnic minorities are the problem for the Saudi royalty, and the only solution is either to draw up new national boundaries or ethnic cleansing. And this is the reason why I think all ethnic and religious minorities in the Levant are in for a rough time in the future. In this respect, Israel's plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland also makes sense from the standpoint of the Saudis. So while they may make tepid expressions of support for the Palestinians, the Saudi vision of Westphalian "nation-states" exported from 17-18th c. Europe ultimately has no room for a bi-national state. Remember that this system has brought great wealth to the royals, and they will seek to butress it in any way that they can. The irony of course is that many of the ethnically-cleansed peoples from the Levant may end up in a Europe that has now abandoned the Westphalian model.

Everyone should be following @yashalevine, if for nothing else than his biting humor. These are all good points below, but let me point out what's missing here. Christian Zionism is in effect the official American religion in the eyes of its adherents. For them, it's the culmination of what began with Manifest Destiny. If westward expansion was a providential national-religious mission, what Israel and its supporters are doing now is likewise a religio-national crusade. It's in effect the culminating crusade of the entire theopolitical cause they serve. And similar to how the original crusaders of the 12th century wanted to make the Holy Land safe for Latin Christians and were willing to sacrifice and kill native Christians for that purpose, Christian Zionists don't really see Palestinian or Syrian Christians as true Christians. They view the Muslims there simply as human refuse that needs to be swept away. Catholic theologians will immediately recognize this logic as Machiavellian-- in the service of a good telos, namely facilitating the second coming of Christ, we may well wipe out some innocents (i.e. adherents to false churches), but it's all in the service of a pre-ordained eschatological vision. Along with the Church of Latter Day Saints, Christian Zionism is perhaps the most prominent of the new-age science-fiction religions. It's been heavily influenced by Hollywood films and TV series such as Stephen King's The Stand, the Omen, and the Left Behind series. Whereas its forebearers, the Puritans, saw the anti-Christ as an institution ( i.e. the Roman Catholic Church), or a series of institutions ( i.e. all the establishment churches), Christian Zionists perceive the anti-Christ as a diabolical Hitler-like superhero, i.e., an individual whose birth signals the beginning of the End Times. A relatively recent transformation of Christian Zionist thought is the realization that they can make common cause with Catholic Zionists like Joe Biden and Elise Stefanik. In the Southern Baptist circles I knew growing up, this would have been impossible since the pope was a tyrant with malign powers of conscience over his followers (sometimes seen as worshipers).

Sooner or later, more popular X accounts than mine are going to discover this painting from 1516-17, which depicts Leo III crowning Emperor Charlemagne in 800. The tendency of course will be to find Trump's subservience to papal authority somewhere here, but this will (partly) miss the point of this painting. And Americans will inevitably misinterpret this image by perceiving it through a nationalistic lens. This painting by Raphael commemorates what's known as the Concordat of Bologna between Pope Leo X and France, which granted the king of France limited authority over the French Church while preserving overall papal authority. In other words, for a brief time (before the Reformation kicked in), the Concordat preserved papal authority over both the spiritual realm and the temporal realm throughout the nations of Europe. So why is this important now? Because traditionally within Christendom, the pope served as the conscience of Christian kings and queens, correcting them when they persecuted their own people or oppressed the church (as the French king was doing from the perspective of the papacy). Or especially when two Christian kings were in conflict and needed mediation. The pope's historical role as arbiter between temporal rulers is one reason the pope is still seen today as a bridgebuilder or peacemaker (it's not the only reason, obviously). No one yet has any idea what agenda this pope will pursue, but one might predict that one role he sees himself playing is as the conscience of rulers and the arbiter between nations in conflict (i.e. think of Ukraine here, or events in the Middle East, or the tensions in East Asia, etc.).

Father John O' Malley, the late great historian of the Jesuits and a Jesuit himself, once remarked to a seminar I was in that he didn't think an American pope would ever be elected in our lifetime. The youngest of the students in the seminar were probably in their late 20's (graduate school age.) The reasons he gave were identical to the explanation below. Does it mean that the multipolar moment has arrived? If an American pope does not mean that, at least it means that the rest of the world probably sees it that way.

One cannot help but be struck by the flagrant hypocrisy of Rubio on the free speech issue in this interview. Rubio spends time at the beginning recalling how conservative Americans were deplatformed by the tech industry at the will of shady Biden State Department-funded organizations. He goes on to defend especially the free speech rights of Americans living abroad (by abroad, he seems to mean Europe), who he warns might be arrested and deported for their speech. Despite everything that has occurred, Rubio still seems to perceive free speech as a fundamental and universal right (he even makes a pretty good defense of why it's so important!). But nowhere is there any corresponding consideration here of what has been done to Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, or any of the other legal green-card or student-visa holders recently apprehended by ICE for their involvement in the pro-Palestinian protests. Now having read what these students have said in interviews and in opinion pieces, one is actually struck by how moderate their views are--how cautious they were. These students seemed to go to great lengths to warn their peers against antisemitism, emphasize harmonious co-existence and their support for the two-state solution. No-where can I find them talking about even mildly incendiary topics like "Palestinian rights" or "rights under international law" or "genocide." There's not even a hint of supporting Hamas, or even of the international right to resist occupation in a theoretical sense. In short, their views adhere to the widely-accepted bromides of the Bush-Obama administrations, and I agree with Aaron Mate, who recently called them "models of civility." This brings up the question of why they were targeted so aggressively. My own view is that the State Department wants to extinguish the pro-Palestinian perspective from the public sphere. In other words, to return back to the 1990's when only Edward Said and a few other obscure academics were talking about Palestine. And my main point here is that I don't think such flagrant acts of censorship will work in this social-media environment. It's the images of carnage that have done most of the work, not the voices. So in the end, all people will remember about Rubio's "defense-of-free-speech" will be the sheer hypocrisy.

Russia has civilizational goals, which are clear and understood by everyone: for Russian civilization to thrive and for Eastern Christendom to be restored. China has similarly understood civilizational goals. For at least a century, the US had civilizational goals involving widely accepted ideologies of human progress-- sometimes understood as technological progress and at other times as social progress. Across a wide range of demographics and economic classes, progress was always at the center of US aspirations. For reasons that are too complicated to explore here, the goal of human progress has largely been replaced, among a powerful array of American elites from both parties, with a very different eschatology. Below Lee Fang interviews Republican congress members, but you would find just as many senior members of the Democratic party who hold parallel beliefs. This is why I believe John Mearsheimer's thesis about the Lobby only partially explains US support for Israel. As odd as it may seem, it's as much a theological question as it is a question of donors. These people are certain in their belief that the US is part of a cosmic eschatological mission.