News bits: Dark free speech rising; God's home in the brain; A brain gone woke; Etc.

The Hill reports about evidence that DJT's violence-inciting rhetoric is poisoning congress:

Trump’s violent talk shows signs of taking over Congress

Trump-allied conservatives are using more pugnacious rhetoric than ever, and in some cases, such as an incident Tuesday featuring Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), are ready to make things physical, a trend that is setting off alarm bells on Capitol Hill.

Republican and Democratic senators say former President Trump’s bombastic threats and insults, which have proved to be a winning political formula for the GOP, are catching on more broadly in Congress.

Senators in both parties say they were shocked when Mullin, a first-term senator and Trump ally, challenged the president of the Teamsters to a fistfight in the middle of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing, forcing the 82-year-old chair, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to step in to keep blood from being spilled on his carpet.

Mullin told the Teamsters leader to “stand your butt up” and sprung out of his chair while taking off a wedding ring to prepare for melee.

The Oklahoma senator, a former mixed martial arts fighter, told CNN on Wednesday he had “full intentions” of pummeling the labor boss right there in the hearing room.

“First thing I thought of when I stood up I thought, ‘I’m going to break my hand on this guy’s face’ and will take my wedding ring off,” he said

That exemplifies how DJT’s hate speech is getting some radical right Republicans to act, imagine what might happen if DJT asked for people to make a citizen’s arrest of judges and prosecutors in his court cases. 

People like Elon Musk defend this kind of violence-inducing speech as merely free speech. DJT’s inciting rhetoric is mostly legal free speech, but all of it is dark free speech. All or nearly all American pro-tyranny elites (i) ignore or deny the existence of dark free speech, (ii) deny it causes harm to society, democracy or the rule of law, and/or (iii) cynically claim it is honest speech speaking truth to evil socialist liars and deep state pedophiles.

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A 2012 article commented about God in the brains 

"We have found a neuropsychological basis for spirituality, but it's not isolated to one specific area of the brain," said Brick Johnstone, professor of health psychology in the School of Health Professions. "Spirituality is a much more dynamic concept that uses many parts of the brain. Certain parts of the brain play more predominant roles, but they all work together to facilitate individuals' spiritual experiences."

A 2019 paper commented:

We conducted a systematic literature review of research on the neurobiological correlates of R/S, which resulted in 25 reports studying primarily R/S with electroencephalography, structural neuroimaging (MRI), and functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET). These studies investigated a wide range of religions (e.g., Christianity, Buddhism, Islam) and R/S states and behaviors (e.g., resting state, prayer, judgments) and employed a wide range of methodologies, some of which (e.g., no control group, varying measures of religiosity, small sample sizes) raise concerns about the validity of the results. .... The findings implicate several brain regions potentially associated with R/S development and behavior, including the medial frontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, precuneus, posterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, and caudate.

A 2022 paper commented:

Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. .... In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105), we applied lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.

These findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity map to a common brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray, a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning, pain modulation, and altruistic behavior.  

Spirituality, or more precisely spiritual acceptance, has been defined as “a stable shift in worldview towards belief in forces that cannot be rationally comprehended or objectively proven.”  

Patients with brain disorders can provide unique insight into the neural substrate of spirituality and religiosity that can complement data from functional neuroimaging. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy can present with hyper-religious symptoms, which has been linked to hippocampal as opposed to amygdala pathology. .... Such patients can allow for causal inferences between neuroanatomy and spiritual or religious behaviors, but multiple different brain regions have been implicated.

PAG = periaqueductal gray

Well, that's clear as mud. It's good to get that straightened out.  

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The Daily Beast reported: Joe Manchin Says Trump ‘Will Destroy’ U.S. Democracy if He Wins in 2024. Another mind has gone woke. And there was much rejoicing -- yaaay. 

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Another tyranny warning from a NYT opinion by Jamelle Bouie:

But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his allies and enablers, it is also important not to lose sight of the fact that anti-democratic attitudes run deep within the Republican Party. In particular, there appears to be a view among many Republicans that the only vote worth respecting is a vote for the party and its interests. A vote against them is a vote that doesn’t count.

This is not a new phenomenon. We saw a version of it on at least two occasions in 2018. In Florida, a nearly two-thirds majority of voters backed a state constitutional amendment to effectively end felon disenfranchisement. The voters of Florida were as clear as voters could possibly be: If you’ve served your time, you deserve your ballot.

Rather than heed the voice of the people, Florida Republicans immediately set out to render it moot. They passed, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed, a bill that more or less nullified the amendment by imposing an almost impossible set of requirements for former felons to meet. Specifically, eligible voters had to pay any outstanding fees or fines that were on the books before their rights could be restored. Except there was no central record of those fees or fines, and the state did not have to tell former felons what they owed, if anything. You could try to vote, but you risked arrest, conviction and even jail time.

It almost goes without saying that we should include the former president’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as another example of the willingness of the Republican Party to reject any electoral outcome that doesn’t fall in its favor.

I’ve already written about the attempt among Wisconsin Republicans to nullify the results of a heated race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. Voters overwhelmingly backed the more liberal candidate for the seat, Janet Protasiewicz, giving the court the votes needed to overturn the gerrymander that keeps Wisconsin Republicans in power in the Legislature even after they lose the majority of votes statewide.

In response, Wisconsin Republicans floated an effort to impeach the new justice on a trumped-up charge of bias. The party eventually backed down in the face of national outrage — and the danger that any attempt to remove Protasiewicz might backfire electorally in the future — but the party’s reflexive move to attempt to cancel the will of the electorate says everything you need to know about the relationship of the Wisconsin Republican Party to democracy.

Ohio Republicans seem to share the same attitude toward voters who choose not to back Republican priorities.  

It failed. And last week, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to write reproductive rights into their State Constitution, repudiating their gerrymandered, anti-choice Legislature. Or so they thought.

Not one full day after the vote, four Republican state representatives announced that they intended to do everything in their power to nullify the amendment and give lawmakers total discretion to ban abortion as they see fit. “This initiative failed to mention a single, specific law,” their statement reads. “We will do everything in our power to prevent our laws from being removed upon perception of intent. We were elected to protect the most vulnerable in our state, and we will continue that work.”

Notice the language: “our power” and “our laws.” There is no awareness here that the people of Ohio are sovereign and that their vote to amend the State Constitution holds greater authority than the judgment of a small group of legislators.  

To many Republicans, unfortunately, persuasion is anathema. There is no use making an argument since you might lose. Instead, the game is to create a system in which, heads or tails, [Republicans] always win.

That’s why Republican legislatures across the country have embraced partisan gerrymanders so powerful that they undermine the claim to democratic government in the states in question.

Republican elites know that for the most part they cannot persuade and win policy arguments on the merits. That is why they have no choice but to resort to ferocious, often threatening dark free speech. Their rhetoric and propaganda Leviathan deceives, lies, slanders, crackpots, misdirects, and foments as much irrational, unwarranted reason-destroying emotion as possible, e.g., fear, hate, anger, intolerance, bigotry, racism and distrust of democracy and pro-democratic institutions, political opposition, inconvenient facts, true truths and actual history.

News bits: Rut roh for poor Rudi; DJT-related legal sleaze; Russian brutality

Poor Rudi, the Tutti Frutti. The former federal prosecutor, Mayor of NYC and all around idiot dictator supporter just can't seem to git 'er done. His fumbling and bumbling just doesn't produce the results he and DJT want, i.e., kleptocratic dictatorship. The New Republic reports:

Uh-Oh: Giuliani’s “Biden Sources” Charged With Being Putin Agents

The Ukrainian officials Rudy Giuliani used to investigate Joe Biden were just charged with treason

Ukraine’s Security Service notified Rudy Giuliani’s top Ukrainian allies on Monday that they are suspects of treason, citing evidence that the officials participated in activities aiding Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A Ukrainian member of parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk are suspected of joining an organization founded by chief members of Russia’s Military Intelligence while Giuliani worked to dig up dirt on President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in 2019, according to a statement.

We can rest assured that (AARR) America's authoritarian radical right will either deny this as fake news or more likely just ignore it to minimize the embarrassment. It certainly won't tarnish Rudy's image with the AARR as a valiant patriot fighting for God Almighty against the evil socialist pedophile deep state hoards, and evil Joe and evil Hunter and the evil missing laptop. Just about everything anywhere near DJT is just plain sewage.

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The legal sleaze coming from DJT's court cases is breathtaking, terrifying and outrageous. The Hill reports about who leaked videos of co-defendants doing plea deals in the Georgia criminal state RICO prosecution:

Leaked videos. An apparent confession, later represented as a “typo.” Demands for a protective order.

Media reports detailing confidential interviews with four defendants who were divulging their knowledge to state prosecutors in the Georgia racketeering case involving former President Trump set off a bizarre “whodunnit”-style hearing in state court Wednesday afternoon.

It culminated with a confession by one defendant’s lawyer and a Georgia judge weighing whether to issue a protective order placing restrictions on how defendants can disseminate materials they receive in discovery.

“In being transparent with the court and to make sure that nobody else gets blamed for what happened — and so that I can go to sleep well tonight — Judge, I did release those videos to one outlet,” said Jonathan Miller, an attorney for defendant Misty Hampton. “And in all candor, I need the court to know that.”

Miller’s admission capped a whirlwind series of developments that began Monday, when footage surfaced of proffer sessions the four defendants who pleaded guilty — ex-Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, plus former Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall — participated in as part of their deals with state prosecutors. 

Their confessions, published first by ABC News and the Washington Post, bolster the narrative laid out in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s 98-page indictment that Trump led the charge on efforts to subvert Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results in his favor.

Like I said, just about everything anywhere near DJT just turns into sewage, most of which never generates any serious repercussion for the sleazy scumbags involved.

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Ethnic cleansing:  Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

Putin publicly says he wants to obliterate the Ukrainian language and culture. He is dead serious about it. Ukrainian children are being taken into Russia and undergoing “re-education” to speak Russian and hate their Ukrainian heritage. China is currently doing the same kind of brutal ethnic cleansing or “re-education” to the Uighurs in China. The NYT reports about Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territory fleeing to avoid being brutalized and re-educated:

The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message.

“They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine.

She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine.

In the Russian-governed lands, she said, it has become so tense that “you are afraid to look out your own window.”

The military deadlock that has settled in across southeastern Ukraine poses a looming security threat to the rest of the country, and menaces Europe with a long period of instability. But for the estimated 4 million to 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-held areas, as Evelina was, the stalemate means something more dispiriting: an occupation with no end in sight.

Emptied of about half of its population and under the thumb of a harsh military rule, the swath of Russian-occupied territory, an area the size of the Netherlands, is stuck in a distressing state of limbo: run by Russia but recognized by most of the rest of the world as Ukrainian.

Demographics in these regions are changing as working-age people flee, leaving an older and poorer population.

Russian soldiers quarter in abandoned houses and crime has risen. Russian businessmen are strong-arming local business owners into selling stores and farms, and Central Asian migrants have shown up to trade in markets and work as laborers.  

Repression, including torture in makeshift detention sites in basements, targets those who reveal pro-Ukrainian views, altering the political makeup of the area in Russia’s favor but also shifting the cultural landscape away from Ukrainian language and identity.

Russia now controls about 17 percent of Ukrainian land, a half-moon-shaped expanse of farmland, villages and cities in the southeast. The region is off-limits to rights groups and most independent reporters, but accounts by people who have left the occupied areas offer a window into this portion of Ukraine.  

Evelina took an unusual but increasingly popular route back into Ukrainian-controlled territory: traveling into Russia and heading north and west, then back into Ukraine through an unofficial border crossing near the northern city of Sumy.

That path is taken by about 100 Ukrainians daily. They hire drivers or take public transportation in Russia to get to the border. From there, they stagger into Ukraine, a thin stream of exhausted families walking two miles on a rutted rural road between the two armies, an unlikely corridor of peace between two nations fighting a violent war.

Russia is just like China. The dictators brutalize innocent people, torture or murder the recalcitrants and keep the press and NGOs the hell away. What the world and local populations get to hear are propaganda fake stories about happy re-educated people who now see the errors of their obliterated past. 

To sharpen and localize the criticism, the Russian and Chinese dictators are the people that DJT and radical right elites admire and publicly praise. Knowingly or not, admitting it or not, that is what most of the American authoritarian radical right supports. What they support is disgusting and evil, not merely debatable and maybe immoral.

Q: Is that over the top or reasonable criticism of the Putin, Chinese dictators and American dictator-lovers?

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The WaPo reports (not paywalled off) about Israel's ongoing attack on a Gaza hospital: 

Israeli troops scour Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for evidence of Hamas presence

The presence of Israeli forces inside Gaza’s largest hospital stretched into its second day Thursday, amid the wait for more concrete evidence of extensive Hamas infrastructure at the facility that precipitated the raid.

Israel also said no further evidence of Hamas activities in the hospital was scheduled to be made public for now, following the release Wednesday of photographs and video showing small caches of rifles and laptops that the Israel Defense Forces identified as Hamas material. The military did not show evidence of tunnels or a command center it has said exists under the hospital.  

Israel described the incursion as a “precise and targeted” mission to push Hamas from one of its main command centers. The operation was in compliance with international law, Israel said, because the military gave the staff days of warning to evacuate patients and Hamas activities there had stripped the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions.

But humanitarian groups condemned the incursion and said Israel’s actions highlighted the need for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, calls for which Israel and the United States have rejected.  

“There has been a breakdown of the most basic respect for humane values, the killing of so many civilians cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. The only winner of such a war is likely to be extremism and further extremism,” [Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights] said. .... The absence of electricity and fuel for generators has led to a breakdown in the enclave’s sewage systems and hospitals so that “massive outbreaks of infectious disease, and hunger, seem inevitable,” he said. 

Commentators in Israel said the military would need to show more evidence to support assertions that Shifa has been a Hamas stronghold for more than a decade, something doctors working there have denied.  

Anger at Netanyahu has been high as even some of his supporters blamed him for both the failure to prevent the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. and his long-standing policy of bolstering Hamas in the first place, a strategic attempt to sow division between Palestinian factions.

Polls taken in the weeks after the attack showed two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu replaced.

Other sources are reporting that Israel is having a hard time finding evidence of a major Hamas operation, but is still looking. Does it make sense that a major underground Hamas military facility under a building is hard to find and report evidence of? Maybe Israel’s intelligence was wrong and there was no major Hamas presence there. Maybe we will know in the next few days. Maybe we will never know. What if there was a small Hamas presence, does that make any difference?

Did Israel really allow innocents to safely flee? Maybe. Maybe not.

Have one or more Israeli governments supported Hamas? Very likely yes.

So many questions, too much uncertainty, and too much propaganda.

The Doctors are… IN?

Barring the Australian Outback or savage natives on some remote South Seas jungle island, I’d venture to say that there is virtually no adult on the planet who hasn’t heard of and probably witnessed many of the “activities” of one Donald J. Trump.

But, forget about the jungle and the Outback. Let’s stick closer to (blog) home here.  

We are all civilized people. We pay attention to what’s going on in the bigger world out there.  We have seen Trump in action.  So...

Question: Knowing what you know about him, is Donald Trump more (i) crazy (as in a Hitleresque madman with delusions of grandeur), or more (ii) crazy like a fox (as in appearing foolish or strange but actually very clever). In other words, how much of what he does is nefariously “calculated?”

Which way does his (un)balance(ed) scales tip?

Any additional thoughts?  

As one of our resident armchair psychologists, what is your psychological diagnosis of Donald Trump?

A couple of thoughts about atheism and pragmatic rationalism

NYT opinion columnist Ross Douthat opines (full opinion not paywalled off):

Where Does Religion Come From?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim critic of Islamic fundamentalism and longtime champion of Enlightenment liberalism, has announced that she now calls herself a Christian — a conversion that she attributes to a twofold realization.

First, that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism in a world where it’s increasingly beset, and the biblical tradition from which the liberal West emerged offers a surer foundation for her values. Second, that despite the sense of liberation from punitive religion that atheism once offered her, in the longer run she found “life without any spiritual solace unendurable.”

Her essay, not surprisingly, attracted a lot of criticism. Some of it came from Christians disappointed in the ideological and instrumental way that Hirsi Ali framed her conversion, the absence of a clear statement that Christian claims are not merely useful or necessary but true. The rest came from atheists baffled that Hirsi Ali had failed to internalize all the supposedly brilliant atheistic rebuttals to her stated reasons for belief.

I have no criticisms to offer myself. Some sort of religious attitude is essentially demanded, in my view, by what we know about the universe and the human place within it, but every sincere searcher is likely to follow their own idiosyncratic path.

A lack of a spiritual component to both atheism and pragmatic rationalism struck me as a serious problem starting about 15 years ago. My study of human cognitive biology and social behavior led me to believe we are hard-wired for spirituality. Spirituality apparently has a powerful attraction for humans and formal, organized religion. As best I can tell, that still seems to be a reasonable belief today.  

So when Douthat opines that in view of human knowledge and behavior, some sort of religious attitude is demanded, that seems to be basically right. The human brain-mind really does demand some sort of religion or source of spiritual gratification. 

For the life of me, I cannot figure out a way to integrate spirituality into either atheism or pragmatic rationalism. That probably permanently relegates those mental frameworks to permanent small minority, low influence status. I can see serious pro-civilization and pro-sustainability value in both, but they are fatally flawed by evolution. I’ve hit a brick wall and can’t see a way past it. Bummer. 

Q: Is that true, false or mixed true & false?

News bits: The cost of global warming; Status of global warming abatements; TDS update

The WaPo reported:

The National Climate Assessment, compiled by numerous federal agencies and published every few years at the direction of Congress, paints a picture of a nation whose economy, environment and public health face deepening threats as the world grows hotter. These days, weather-driven disasters happen far more frequently and cost the country about $150 billion each year, on average, according to the report.

But as the dangers become ever more evident, so does proof that many governments and communities are responding, the report says, even as the United States and other developed nations remain woefully far from hitting their long-term climate goals.

Risks from climate change, the report says, are becoming only more visible, whether it’s rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the Southeast, drought in the Midwest, ferocious fires and diminishing water supplies in the West or torrential rainstorms in the Northeast.

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The WaPo reports about how we’re doing in dealing with global warming:

Among the many dramatic ways society must transform to limit the worst effects of climate change, the world is only moving fast enough on one of them — the uptake of electric vehicles, according to a new report from seven climate organizations looking at 42 indicators of climate progress.

On the other 41 points of transformation, change is either too slow, too hard to measure, or going in the wrong direction. For example, the global rate of deforestation ticked up last year. The carbon intensity of steel production is increasing when it needs to be falling. Government financing for fossil fuels has risen for the first time since 2018.

While the takeaway is familiar — that the world is well shy of its stated goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the State of Climate Action report provides a detailed diagnosis of the factors leading the planet astray. Those factors touch on almost every aspect of life, from how power is generated, how people commute, how food is produced, how buildings function and how readily finance flows to developing countries.

“We are woefully off track,” said Kelly Levin, the chief of science, data and systems change at the Bezos Earth Fund, one of the groups involved in the research. (The fund was created by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.)

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Trump's TDS is getting far out of hand. I take his latest blast as evidence that (i) his mental status has appreciably degraded in the last month or so, and (ii) his New York civil fraud case is starting to look extremely deadly to his financial situation. We can only hope. Salon writes:

“This is an actual incitement”: 

Legal experts alarmed after Trump pushes “citizen’s arrest”

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday reposted a Truth Social post calling for a “citizen’s arrest” of New York Attorney General Letitia James and Judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing his fraud trial. Trump shared a post by a user describing his “fantasy”: “I WOULD LIKE TO SEE LITITIA JAMES AND JUDGE ENGORON PLACED UNDER CITIZENS ARREST FOR BLATANT ELECTION INTERFERENCE AND HARASSMENT.”

It would be great is someone would put DJT under citizen’s arrest for treason, a coup attempt, massive election fraud, inciting violence and corruption. Fat chance of that happy day ever coming. It still seems unlikely that he will ever spend a day in jail. More likely, he gets re-elected and pardons himself and the big cadre of traitors and grifters he pulled into his morally rotted personal orbit. Then people like us get whacked good and hard for being worse than subhuman vermin. 

An opinion, history and commentary about the Israel-Hamas war

The NYT published an interesting opinion by Palestinian journalist Dalia Hatuqa: 

This War Did Not Start a Month Ago

For Palestinians, this type of systematic violence is nothing new.

To many inside and outside this war, the brutality of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks was unthinkable, as has been the scale and ferocity of Israel’s reprisal. But Palestinians have been subject to a steady stream of unfathomable violence — as well as the creeping annexation of their land by Israel and Israeli settlers — for generations.

If people are going to understand this latest conflict and see a path forward for everyone, we need to be more honest, nuanced and comprehensive about the recent decades of history in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, particularly the impact of occupation and violence on the Palestinians. This story is measured in decades, not weeks; it is not one war, but a continuum of destruction, revenge and trauma.

Since the 1948 Nakba — in which entire Palestinian villages were wiped off the map and the modern state of Israel was established — Palestinians have endured a subjugation that has defined their daily lives. For decades, we have been reeling from Israel’s military occupation, as well as a succession of deadly invasions and wars. The wars of 1967 and 1973 helped shape the modern geography and geopolitics of the area, with millions of largely stateless Palestinians split between Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, often referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, Palestinians are prohibited from entering or leaving, except in incredibly rare circumstances.  

This history has been absent from much of the discourse surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, as though the attacks of Oct. 7 were completely arbitrary. The truth is, even in times of relative peace, Palestinians are second-class citizens in Israel — if they are deemed citizens at all. According to Israeli law, Palestinians do not have the right to national self-determination, which is reserved for Jewish citizens of the state. A variety of laws restrict Palestinians’ right to movement, governing everything from where they can live to what personal identifications they can hold to whether or not they can visit family members elsewhere.

What resonates with me is the assertion that history and nuance is often absent from people’s thinking. The attacks of Oct. 7 were not completely arbitrary, IMHO. Israel knowingly and intentionally supported the creation and maintenance of Hamas in its cynical, successful effort to prevent the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state. 

Hamas is blowback?

As far as I can tell, Israel’s role in creating and supporting Hamas is historical fact, not my opinion. But that version of history is contested by many Israelis. The Intercept writes:

BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM 

HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT

But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

This short Israeli video casts the role of Israel as more a matter of mistakes and judgment errors in the creation and rise of Hamas, than a purely cynical attempt to keep the Palestinian people divided. The speaker here points to the analogy of the US inadvertently creating the Taliban. The final lesson drawn here is that you cannot control radicals because they will eventually make you pay.

One other source, Analyst News, makes these comments:

What you might not know is that this same group was actually created in part by Israel itself. While it may sound like a conspiracy theory, it’s actually a well-documented, open secret that Israel has helped finance and prop up Hamas for years.

“We need to tell the truth,” Israeli major general Gershon Hacohen, an associate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a 2019 TV interview. “Netanyahu’s strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.”

Understanding Israel’s strategy in doing so can help us read through the lines of the Israeli government’s rhetoric on Hamas’s barbarism. It also helps illuminate Netanyahu’s vision for the region — and his ultimate endgame.  

In a 2019 Likud party meeting, Netanyahu gloated to his compatriots: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

And an Israeli Ministry of Intelligence document published by +972 magazine on Oct. 30, 2023 makes it even more explicit. In it, officials refer to the option of the Palestinian Authority taking control of Gaza as the worst possible outcome — because it would remove “one of the central obstacles preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

Indeed, Netanyahu has been intent on keeping the Palestinians divided under two ruling groups: the diplomatically successful Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the militant Hamas in Gaza. (The Palestinian Authority, led by the vestiges of the PLO, was created as an interim self-governing body meant to pave the way for an independent Palestinian state, but that has not happened.)

So long as these two groups are divided, Israel has cover to avoid negotiating with the Palestinian Authority on the grounds that the group doesn’t represent all Palestinians.  

In a 2015 interview, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained that Hamas’s militancy, and therefore its illegitimacy on the world stage, was a boon for his government’s political strategy.

“The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset,” Smotrich said. “It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.”

It seems that no matter how one spins it, history indicates that at best, Israeli governments miscalculated and made major judgement errors about Hamas. At worst, it is mostly responsible for the cynical, intentional creation and existence of Hamas as a means to prevent the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state. 

Q: Is Hamas mostly a creature of (i) Israeli government bad judgment errors, (ii) cynical Israeli divide and conquer politics, or (iii) something else, e.g., completely independent of Israeli government involvement?