The RPI Challenge

Aside from Israel, the United States is the nation most responsible for the pain and suffering people in Gaza are experiencing due to Israel’s devastating military action of the last two months. This is because the US is now and long has been the number one provider of weapons to Israel, as well as the source of much intelligence employed to direct the use of those weapons. The Israel government bears responsibility for its ongoing devastating attack on Gaza. But, the destruction, with truth...

Palestinians have become sand in the eyes of the Mideast. How did this happen? From where did they come? Nowhere, according to the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. She insisted Palestinians did not exist and were merely human flotsam and jetsam. That was pretty rich coming from Golda Mabovich, born to a Jewish family in Kiev, Russia. So where did the Palestinians come from who are now under terrifying siege by Israeli forces in and around Gaza, with 15,000 killed so far by Israeli...

I was watching the 2002 war movie We Were Soldiers a couple of nights ago. I’ve seen it before but it’s such a great movie that I periodically re-watch it. It stars Mel Gibson, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Sam Elliott, Keri Russell, and others. The movie is based on a true story. It dramatizes the Battle of la Drang in Vietnam, which was the first major battle between US military forces and North Vietnamese forces. The battle took place in November 1965, two years after President...

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”  -- Hosea 8:7 The debacle of the nearly 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan continues in Joe Biden’s America today. This disaster began when President George W. Bush -- stung deeply by the intelligence that he failed to heed, thus enabling the attacks of 9/11 to take place unimpeded -- convinced the American people and Congress and most of our allies that the bad guys who ran Afghanistan in the early part of this...

A number of serious commentators – one being U.S. Professor Victor Hanson – are warning: “Brace yourself for what’s coming in 2024”. Hansen sees bad omens darkening the future. Is he exaggerating? Perhaps not. One cannot but notice how bad tempered Americans and Europeans generally have become. Calm, reasoned discussion of issues is gone; Yelling, emotivism and ‘othering’ is commonplace; something bad is coming. A gut feeling, Tucker Carlson says. “There are “angry people who...

To a nation of snowflakes, Christmas has become yet another trigger word. Indeed, the season for giving has turned into the season for getting…and for getting offended. Over the years, Christmas casualties in the campaign to create one large national safe space have ranged from the beloved animated classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (denounced for promoting bullying and homophobia) to the Oscar-winning tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (accused of being a date...

In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations. The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy's defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel. Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form...

Over the weekend Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained to the American people what’s really wrong with US foreign policy. Some might find his conclusions surprising. The US standing in the world is damaged not because we spent 20 years fighting an Afghan government that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. The problem has nothing to do with neocon lies about Iraq’s WMDs that led untold civilian deaths in another failed “democratization” mission. It’s not because over the past nearly...

The right to privacy -- to be left alone, to engage in personal behavior and communications immune from government regulation or surveillance, to be yourself -- is a fundamental human right that we all exercise every day. It is also a constitutional right since it is expressly protected by the Fourth Amendment and has been expressly recognized and upheld by state and federal courts consistently for the past 60 years. The Fourth Amendment requirement of a search warrant prior to surveillance is...

Last Thursday afternoon, news would spread throughout Ireland of a horrific knife attack on three young schoolchildren and their teacher outside a Gaelscoil (Irish-language school) in Dublin city centre. At the time of writing, the youngest of the victims, a five year old girl, remains gravely ill in hospital. With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year...

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later as Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the Red Army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an abrupt end. The world had descended into a “77-Years War”. It had incepted with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its...

Some libertarians dismiss concerns over social media companies’ suppression of news and opinions that contradict select agendas by pointing out that these platforms are private companies, not part of the government. There are two problems with this argument. First, there is nothing unlibertarian about criticizing private businesses or using peaceful and voluntary means, such as boycotts, to persuade businesses to change their practices. The second and most significant reason the “they are...

Update: A video transcript of Yasmin Porat’s testimony translated by David Sheen for Electronic Intifada follows this article. In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7.  “This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry...