Tag Archives: Netanyahu

The American Pastors Supporting Genocide

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Last week over a 1000 American pastors, mostly white, mostly men, and mostly evangelical, flew to Israel for a summit. It wasn’t to address the suffering of Palestinian children or to assist Palestinian families. It wasn’t to demand an end to the genocide. It wasn’t even to pray for a just peace for all peoples. It was a training program for Israeli propaganda.

Mike Huckabee, the Trump regime’s ambassador to the genocidal state and rabid Christian Zionist, joined the group. He said: “It’s an extraordinary time for pastors to go to their pulpits and push back on the bigotry being pushed toward Israel.”

Notice that Huckabee didn’t say bigotry against Jews. He said bigotry against Israel. Against a state. A state which is actively committing genocide with the full support of the United States.

This is significant because Christian Zionists are notoriously antisemitic. They do not support Israel because they love Jews, whom they believe are destined for hell if they continue to refuse their evangelical message of salvation. They do it because it fits neatly into their narrow, misinformed and heavily biased interpretation of the ramblings of a man who lived in a cave on a Greek island years after Christ walked the earth.

American evangelicals see Jews as essential only insofar as their role in the fulfillment of an eschatological opera. But they don’t see Palestinian Christians at all. They are rendered invisible because to acknowledge them would mean admitting the deep racism at the heart of their theology.

Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with an arrest warrant on him for war crimes, also addressed the crowd saying: “I’m counting on you. I know you’ll do what has to be done.” He also told them he wanted them to recruit 10,000 more pastors.

There is something deeply perverse about a group of Christian men being flown into a nation which is committing the very worst crime against humanity, only to “learn” from the very criminals perpetrating it. And doing this all while ignoring the mass suffering occurring just a few kilometres away. Not one of those pastors visited a Palestinian church or even mentioned Israel’s bombing of churches in Gaza.

That this happened during Advent is also staggering. This is a time when Christians around the world meditate on the story of a refugee child hunted by a vicious genocidal king. But instead of attending to the suffering of children being slaughtered by a contemporary genocidal government, they basked in its comfort and vowed to defend it.

To be sure, this is the heart of American Christianity. And it is a cold, deadened one. A theology of death. A gospel of calculated cruelty. And nothing will awaken these dead bones from the white washed sepulchers they have chosen to repose in.

*photo is from the “summit.”

Kenn Orfanos, December 2025

The Charade of Death

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This is the man given dozens of standing ovations in the US Congress. The man welcomed in the White House with open arms. And not just by Trump. Biden was enraptured by that bromance too. This isn’t because this man controls the American Empire. It is because Israel is the empire’s last true colony. It is its last major investment.

Beheading children with airstrikes. Starving infants and sniping toddlers. Raping doctors to death and shooting nurses. Burning journalists alive and burying medics in their ambulances. Leveling everything in sight, from shelters to bakeries to universities to water treatment facilities. All of this is simply the business of American Empire. It is the collateral damage that allows the dollars to keep flowing upward.

Now, as the annihilation of an entire people has entered its final chapter, it has become impossible to deny what the United States is: a sham. The myth of its fabled democracy hobbled along with empty promises and hollow platitudes as crutches for a long time. Even as its institutions became sepulchers that housed barely conscious old, rich, white men. Fortresses that protected their capital investments. But the shroud that covered their moldering corpses has been ripped off for all to see. The myth of American democracy has finally died in the streets of Gaza.

We need to look at it. We need to see it for what it is. Otherwise, we will continue to delude ourselves that there is something worth saving. When the reality is that everything must be rebuilt from the ground up for us to be worthy of saving. Everything. Because to save any of what is left is to ensure that there will just be more of the people-killing, planet-killing, soul-killing same. And I, for one, want no part in that charade of death. 

Kenn Orphan, April 2025

Because it is the Human Thing to Do

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gaza boy 1Since Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, a captive population in what is the world’s biggest open air prison, there have been scores of heartbreaking stories that have emerged from the Strip.  For the medical staff at Al-Shifa hospital there is barely a lull between patients flooding their corridors, bloody, screaming and near death.  But through it all these devoted staff members, many of them volunteers, have remained to help the wounded and comfort the bereaved.  They do this at great risk to their personal safety.  They do it because it is the human thing to do.

Politicians and military generals love to cite tactical statistics and spin their most heinous attacks into word games.  “Surgical precision” and “targeted killing” are some of the terms used this time in Gaza.  Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Gaza’s dead are “telegenic” meaning they have an “appearance or manner that is appealing on television.”  It is difficult to plum the depths of utter depravity in such a comment, but it is a defining characteristic  of the kind of person who can justify bombing hospitals, cafes and boys playing football on the beach.

The wordsmiths of organized murder will never understand the courage it takes to remain in a home, or a school, or a hospital even as the bombs are reigning down around them.  They will never know how a child’s hand feels as the life drains out of them on a cold, steel stretcher in a crowded corridor.  They will never know the crushing sorrow of having to tell a grandmother that her entire family has been killed in one indiscriminate attack.  They sit comfortably in leather chairs within the guarded, air conditioned catacombs they call “war rooms.”  They are shielded from such visceral experiences by the rhetoric they have carefully constructed to defend their patently indefensible actions.

But in the end their folly will be relegated to the dusty confines of a barely read book, while the warm touch of compassion generously given by a nurse, or doctor, or medic, will be remembered in the most sacred of places; the human heart.

Kenn Orphan  2014

Photo: Wounded Palestinian boy clutches medic, Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza (Photograph: Ezz al-Zanoun/APA images)

No Excuse

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Palestinian boys watch a scene simulating clashes between Palestinian stone-throwers and Israeli soldiers in Gaza CitThere is grief in Israel today.  Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, 16, had gone missing in mid June, and their bodies were found yesterday in a shallow grave in the occupied West Bank.   The grief in Israel echoes the grief of Palestinians whose children have been targeted far more often and almost always with impunity by settlers and by the Israel Defense Forces.  In March of this year 15 year old Youssef Shawamra was shot to death by IDF troops  as he picked wild thistles to be used for a meal.  In May Israeli forces killed Nadim Nuwara, 17, and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, 16, in an unprovoked attack caught on CCTV.  And just this month Mohammed Dudin, 15, was shot to death by Israeli soldiers in the infamous “Operation Brother’s Keeper”.  And these are only a few cases.

The killing of any child is abhorrent, but looking at American media coverage, or lack thereof,  regarding such tragedies reveals an insidious bias and an endemic racism.  In the last decade thousands of Palestinian children have been killed or maimed by Israeli occupation forces and settlers, and many more have been snatched from their homes in the middle of the night and spirited away to military detention centers.  According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and the UN there is ample evidence of torture and inhumane treatment at these facilities.  But this reality is obscured by the mainstream media.  It is as if they do not exist at all.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu begins his rampage of collective punishment in the West Bank and Gaza this lack of fair and unbiased journalism only pours fuel on the fire of animus and indiscriminate violence and fosters the myth that the conflict is equal.  Israel has a military, has occupied Palestinian territories for decades, colonized its lands and kept its population in a constant state of terror and oppression through home demolitions, destruction of fields and orchards and carving up properties with the wall of separation.  Israel controls the sea and air space and routinely fires on farmers tending their fields or fishermen attempting to bring in their catch.  When militants respond with rockets, Israel responds with collective punishment through bombings that level entire apartment blocks or critical infrastructure or the use of white phosphorus that blinds and burns children.

Of course the abduction and murder of these three Israeli teens is deplorable and the criminals should be found and punished.  But it should be noted that these boys were the children of illegal settlers in a region where settlers routinely harass and persecute the indigenous population, and vandalize property and destroy wells and farm land with impunity.  To ignore the conditions out of which this tragedy was born is nothing less than irresponsible, and as long as it persists the result will continue to be the same.

There is no excuse for the crime of harming or murdering children.  And as we mourn Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel whose lives were mercilessly cut short, we should take care to remember and mourn for Youssef Shawamra, Nadim Nuwara,  Muhammad Abu al-Thahirand and Mohammed Dudin, whose lives were also robbed of them by meaningless violence, and whose worth as human beings was not one bit less.

Kenn Orphan  2014

(Photo: Reuters)