EDITORS—The first episode of Praying for Armageddon goes inside the evangelical Christian movement to explore its influence on US democracy and foreign policy. Preparing for the “end times”, a grassroots pastor gathers an army of veterans in the heartland of the United States, and megachurch ministers provide spiritual advice to politicians in the nation’s capital. They call for the “final battle” which they believe will trigger the second coming of Christ. Central to their apocalyptic prophecy is Israel. It is with their blessing that the Trump administration controversially recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moves the US embassy there in 2018. “It feels like everyone has a say about the destiny and the future of Jerusalem except for the Palestinians living in it,” says Palestinian activist Fayrouz Sharqawi.
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DON HANK—Thanks to the unconditional support of America’s millions of fundamentalists, the US government can provide military aid to the Israelis and can ignore all of Israel’s human rights abuses, now more and more openly discussed by groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and under investigation by the ICC . Indeed, based on the above-described religious reasoning, since 1948, the US has vetoed all UN resolutions condemning Israel’s crimes, as documented here and here.
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Two leading critics of global imperialism, Profs. Michael Hudson and Richard D. Wolff, analyse the present political/economic situation shaping events across the world, and the behaviour of the US empire in this historical phase characterised by the decay of US hegemony, and the rise of powerful independent powers determined to build a new order grounded in sovereignty, peace, international solidarity, and multipolarism. The guests focus on the Kursk invasion supported by NATO, which is being presented in diametrically opposite ways by the mass media. Those in the West are advancing a complete lie, suggesting that the invasion is a huge victory for Ukraine that could end up destroying Russia’s armies and the much hated “Putin regime”. The reality media used by the West’s opponents describes a Ukrainian incursion that can easily become Kiev’s last “Hail Mary”, their desperate “Last Hurrah!”. Dr Wolff concludes that we may be witnessing (from Ukraine to the Middle East) a lot of theatrics. Dr Hudson speaks about the creation of a Nazi Ukraine, via the Anglo-American persistent exploitation of regional hatreds and prejudices, especially in Western Ukraine (Galizia, etc.), all of which has created a monster in Eastern Europe, just as the West has created a similar monster in Israel (occupied Palestine). The experts are in agreement that the likelihood of the Ukraine war ending through negotiations is next to nil, as Putin has frequently suggested, since there’s no Kiev government capable of such an agreement, and the West, especially the US, is not agreement capable.
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EDITORS—We have a potential military clash in the Middle East, as Iran makes good on its promise to respond to Israel’s outrageous provocations, including the sordid assassination of Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh, such acts backed up, as usual by the depraved US Hegemon. Under such circumstances, the clash between the collective West and the Russo-Iranian alliance could ignite a major world war, but Russia is fortunate to have an extremely sophisticated weapons system, and a huge industrial and scientific capacity to match, all inherited from the Soviet Union. Garland believes that Russia has a huge stake in supporting Iran, not to mention its own strategic assets in the Middle East, and may have been providing Tehran with advanced weapons systems, including powerful AD and rocket/missile systems capable of deterring and defeating a Zio/American assault.
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CBS—Ultra-right-wing Israeli nationalists stormed two military facilities late Monday, protesting the detention and questioning of nine Israel Defense Forces reservists suspected of raping and abusing a Palestinian prisoner whose injuries were so bad he had to be hospitalized. Social media videos show guards at the Sde Teiman military base and prison, near Beersheba in southern Israel, shouting at and pushing military police who’d arrived to question the reservists, seemingly in defense of the suspects.
