I’m here today to highlight some recent non-tariff atrocities. Although they might’ve slipped under the radar, some recent funding cut targets rise to the level of organized violence against civilians. And since the White House had company in from out of town his week, I remembered my manners and brought enough disgust to share. Let’s get to it.
Cutting off health research and support for people doing some of the hardest work around — like firefighters and coal miners – is violence.
Creating widespread, unnecessary hunger for senior and vulnerable civilians is violence.
Creating a dangerous no-heat or no-cooling environment for senior and vulnerable citizens in their own homes is violence.
Add it up, and you get a core Trump principle: casual cruelty toward the vulnerable. That behavior is right in line with hiring a puppy-killer to oversee a sloppily run international prison scheme.
It’s also right in line with swerving a public conversation with the Israeli prime minister into a rhetorical ditch to note the “love” that Nazi guards showed to Holocaust prisoners. Because sure, perhaps the whole operation was based on genocide, but it was the little things that showed how much they really cared.
CORRUPTION, CAHOOTS, AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
For years, I didn’t invest too much in Middle East politics. Frankly, it seemed like an intractable, ongoing tragedy where no political leader(s) had the will to make the big move(s) necessary to break the cycle.
Like a lot of Americans, my level of awareness and education ticked upward after the Hamas terrorist attack of 2023 and the Israeli government’s subsequent open-ended razing of Gaza.
Before 2023, I had expected more from an Israeli government than from Hamas, since Hamas is a governing organization on one side and a terrorist arm on the other. Eventually, though, I would learn that Netanyahu had loathed the idea of a two-state solution (or more specifically, the idea of a Palestinian state) so much that he had approved of sending cash to Hamas itself.
As the Hamas attack revealed, keeping Gaza hemmed in and obstructing a two-state solution as a two-pronged long-term strategy was an historically bad attempt at realpolitik.
But immediately after Hamas’ attack, one particular headline conveyed retribution so swift and so obviously disproportionate that it was impossible to deny that Trump has an Israeli brother in casual cruelty.
In particular, cutting off the water supply to a large civilian population is violence. And a war crime.
In case it needs to be said, being the victim of a war crime is not a free pass to commit a different war crime. It’s just two war crimes.
Netanyahu’s choices after the Hamas attack squandered goodwill with a speed I never thought I would see again after George Bush extinguished a flicker of international post-9/11 sympathy by invading the wrong country and whatnot.
But that’s the kind of chaos and bad policy you get when you have a prime minister who has already been indicted on multiple separate charges, is trying to survive a different trial and yet a still different national security scandal right now, and will use any available lever to preserve the protection afforded him by his office.
Would you buy a “support the enemy to perpetuate conflict and we’ll figure the rest out later” strategy from this man?
Americans can’t relate to the close-proximity history of conflict that the Middle East has known, but Trump obviously relates to a man who will respond to his own policy failure by doubling down and tapping into his cruel streak. The rest of us, meanwhile, can empathize with an Israeli population that deserves much better.