Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis, part twenty

Let me make some important distinctions and qualifications at the beginning of this commentary.

First, although entirely unconstitutional, unprovoked, and undertaken solely at the behest of the murderously genocidal and barbaric Zionist State of Israel, the American military bombing of three of Iran’s leading nuclear facilities was successful in obliterating those facilities, something that, despite Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s absurd contentions to the contrary, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, admitted himself:

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted in an interview on state TV that the U.S.'s strikes caused serious damage to Tehran's nuclear facilities, despite Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's insistence that there was minimal impact.

Araghchi said in the interview that "the level of damage is high, and it’s serious damage," according to the Associated Press.

Post-strike assessments have shown that Iran’s nuclear sites suffered damage in both U.S. and Israeli attacks. All three countries — Iran, Israel and the U.S. — have reached similar conclusions about the extent of the damage, despite what a leaked intel report indicated.

The only leader who seemingly does not agree with the assessments is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said that "the Americans failed to achieve anything significant in their attack on nuclear facilities," according to reports.

Khamenei appears to be more focused on projecting strength than reflecting reality. He described Iran’s attack on Al-Udeid, the American airbase in Qatar, as a "heavy slap to the U.S.’s face." While President Donald Trump dismissed it as a "very weak response" and thanked Iran for giving the U.S. "early notice."

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said in a statement on Tuesday that the agency had "seen extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities."

In addition to discussing the damage done to Iran's nuclear sites, Araghchi also addressed the possibility of resuming talks with the U.S. He said that the American strikes "made it more complicated and more difficult" for Iran to come to the table, but did not rule out the possibility that negotiations could resume.

Nuclear talks with the U.S. might not be entirely off the table for Iran after last week’s strikes—even if Tehran is not interested in reentering negotiations right away.

Trump on Wednesday expressed optimism in the U.S.’s ability to resume nuclear talks with Iran.

"We’re going to talk to them next week, with Iran. We may sign an agreement, I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean, they had a war. They fought. Now they're going back to their world. I don't care if I have an agreement or not. The only thing we would be asking for is what we're asking for before about, we want no nuclear [program]. But we destroyed the nuclear," Trump said.

Despite Trump’s statement, there is still no clear indication that the countries have plans to meet in the near future. (Iran FM admits 'serious damage' to nuclear sites despite Ayatollah's denial. An alternative view of how much damage was done by the American bombing can be found at Disgraced Pentagon Still Insists That Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were ‘Destroyed’.)

Second, it is one thing to criticize the American decision to undertake the June 22, 2025, bombing of the Iranian nuclear facilities and quite another to recognize the bravery and skill of the pilots who flew undetected for over thirty-six hours before dropping their planes’ payloads on their intended targets. This was certainly an extraordinary feat on the natural level of planning, logistics, and execution. Recognizing this does not in any way mitigate the immorality of the mission but only to note that those assigned with undertaking it carried it out as ordered. These men should never have been put in harm’s way to do the bidding of Zionist State of Israel by attacking a country that was not directly threatening the national security of the United States of America.

Third, then again, of course, the pilots who dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, wrote about the difficulties they encountered in carrying out their orders. Those difficulties, though, can never justify the immoral mission that they were ordered to undertake and execute in the bombing of civilian population centers.

Fourth, despite the public claims made by the administration of President Donald John Trump and Vice President James David Vance, testimony given behind closed doors by administration officials to members of the Armed Services Committee of the United States revealed that “bunker busting” bombs were not used in the June 22, 2025, attack on the Isfahan nuclear site Iran, but that they were used in the bombings of the Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites:

The US military did not use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s largest nuclear sites last weekend because the site is so deep that the bombs likely would not have been effective, the US’ top general told senators during a briefing on Thursday.

The comment by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, which was described by three people who heard his remarks and a fourth who was briefed on them, is the first known explanation given for why the US military did not use the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb against the Isfahan site in central Iran. US officials believe Isfahan’s underground structures house nearly 60% of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, which Iran would need in order to ever produce a nuclear weapon.

US B2 bombers dropped over a dozen bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites. But Isfahan was only struck by Tomahawk missiles launched from a US submarine.

The classified briefing to lawmakers was conducted by Caine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. A spokesperson for Caine declined to comment, noting that he cannot comment on the chairman’s classified briefing to Congress.

During the briefing, Ratcliffe told lawmakers that the US intelligence community assesses that the majority of Iran’s enriched nuclear material is buried at Isfahan and Fordow, according to a US official.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told CNN on Thursday night after receiving the briefing that some of Iran’s capabilities “are so far underground that we can never reach them. So they have the ability to move a lot of what has been saved into areas where there’s no American bombing capacity that can reach it.”

The Trump officials who briefed lawmakers this week sidestepped questions about the whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of already-enriched uranium. President Donald Trump again claimed Friday that nothing was moved from the three Iranian sites before the US military operation.

But Republican lawmakers emerged from the classified briefings on Thursday acknowledging that the US military strikes may not have eliminated all of Iran’s nuclear materials. But they argued that doing so was not part of the military’s mission.

“There is enriched uranium in the facilities that moves around, but that was not the intent or the mission,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas told CNN. “My understanding is most of it’s still there. So we need a full accounting. That’s why Iran has to come to the table directly with us, so the (International Atomic Energy Agency) can account for every ounce of enriched uranium that’s there. I don’t think it’s going out of the country, I think it’s at the facilities.”

“The purpose of the mission was to eliminate certain particular aspects of their nuclear program. Those were eliminated. To get rid of the nuclear material was not part of the mission,” GOP Rep. Greg Murphy told CNN.

“Here’s where we’re at: the program was obliterated at those three sites. But they still have ambitions,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “I don’t know where the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium exists. But it wasn’t part of the targets there.”

“(The sites) were obliterated. Nobody can use them anytime soon,” Graham also said.

Weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Jeffrey Lewis told CNN that commercial satellite images show that Iran has accessed the tunnels at Isfahan.

“There were a moderate number of vehicles present at Isfahan on June 26 and at least one of the tunnel entrances was cleared of obstructions by mid-morning June 27,” Lewis said. “If Iran’s stockpile of (highly enriched uranium) was still in the tunnel when Iran sealed the entrances, it may be elsewhere now.”

Additional satellite imagery captured on June 27 by Planet Labs show the entrance to the tunnels were open at the time, according to Lewis.

The preliminary DIA assessment noted that the nuclear sites’ above ground structures were moderately to severely damaged, CNN has reported. That damage could make it a lot harder for Iran to access any enriched uranium that does remain underground, sources said, something that Graham alluded to on Thursday.

“These strikes did a lot of damage to those three facilities,” Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat, told CNN on Thursday night. “But Iran still has the know-how to put back together a nuclear program. And if they still have that enriched material, and if they still have centrifuges, and if they still have the capability to very quickly move those centrifuges into what we call a cascade, we have not set back that program by years. We have set it back by months.”

Caine and Hegseth on Thursday said the military operation against Fordow went exactly as planned but did not mention the impacts to Isfahan and Natanz. (US did not use bunker-buster bombs on one of Iran’s nuclear site, top general tells lawmakers)

Fifth, more to the point, of course, is the fact that there is never any justification for preemptive military action. As horrible and as bloodthirsty as is the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its leaders, despite all their verbal bellicosity against the United States of America, posed no imminent or even legitimate threat to this country’s national security.

Sixth, the mission ordered by President Donald John Trump was undertaken solely to accomplish the geopolitical and military goals of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in what has been an absolute slavish adherence to whatever the Zionists have demanded of American presidents dating back to the days of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, something that former United States Representative John J. Duncan, Jr. (R-Tennessee) noted as follows:

For the U.S. to take military action against Iran, it is almost like the University of Tennessee football team taking on a little boys team from the Pee Wee league.

Iran’s total military budget was only a little over two percent of the U.S. military budget, and that was before Israel started dropping bombs there and killing Iran’s top eight Generals and its nine leading nuclear scientists.

Iran had made no credible military threat against the U.S. and was not even capable of attacking us in any significant way if they had.

We should not have allowed Netanyahu to lead us into another unnecessary war in the Middle East as he did in Iraq. The world renowned foreign policy expert, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, called Netanyahu the “main cheerleader” for the Iraq War and described him as “one of the most violent and dangerous people in the world.”

Even before we jumped in, Israel was already winning its war and had achieved total air superiority by wiping out Iran’s air defense capabilities.

Thankfully, our pilots and crew members were in no danger and were simply following orders, but they were dropping bombs that were not needed and should not have been dropped in the first place.

Netanyahu had been crying wolf for 30 years falsely claiming over and over that Iran was just weeks or months away from developing a nuclear bomb. This claim had been debunked by several different intelligence officials over the years, including by Tulsi Gabbard as recently as March 25.

Israel has refused to join the International Atomic Energy Agency like all other countries with nuclear power except North Korea. It also has refused to disclose the number of nuclear warheads it has, but most estimates are 300 or more. This gives Israel overwhelming nuclear superiority in the Middle East.

The only reason it needs to have the U.S. in this war is for public relations purposes. Almost every nation except the U.S.has harshly condemned Israel for its extreme and excessive cruelty in killing and starving so many thousands of women and children in Gaza.

Sen. Charles Schumer said in a Senate speech on March 14, 2024 that Netanyahu had become “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows”, and he added “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”

Israel’s unnecessary war in Iran might possibly have been the last straw, the final step in making it a worldwide pariah for sure if the U.S. had not joined the war.

Unfortunately, almost every President since World War Two, with the exception of Eisenhower, has seemed to want to be seen as a new Winston Churchill. They and their closest advisors seem to get excited and feel very powerful and important if they can go to dramatic late night meetings in a White House war room and put this Country into another war.

The head of the U.S. Military Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, nicknamed “The Gorilla” and described as “Israel’s favorite General”, and Gen. Dan ‘Razin’ Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been pushing for U.S. involvement. Also egging the war effort on have been the Senate’s two leading “bomb everybody” hawks, Sen. Lindsay Graham and Sen. Tom Cotton.

This war has already cost our taxpayers many billions in all the weapons and equipment we have sent to Israel in addition to the planes, bombs, missiles, warships, troops and equipment we have moved into the region. Earlier we spent about two billion and lost two jets in bombing Yemen at Israel’s request.

President Trump was elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq and because he said he wanted to put America First. The war in Iran is not our war. It is putting Israel First.

In his Inaugural Address. President Trump said: “We will measure our success not only by little battles we win, but also by the wars that end, and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, THE WARS WE NEVER GET INTO.” (my emphasis) Where is that man today?

In his speech in Riyadh, he said the marvels of the Middle East were “not created by the so-called ‘nation builders’, neocons, or liberal non-profits….”. He said “the so-called nation builders wrecked far more than they ever built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” Where is this man now?

By intervening in this latest war, we are bowing to the wishes of the neocons who have already cost this Nation the lives of thousands of young Americans and trillions of dollars.

Even if this intervention against a very weak Iran ends quickly, it still sets a very bad precedent and sends us down the wrong path to follow for a Nation whose rank and file want peace, not unnecessary war. And the neocons said the Iraq War would be a “cakewalk.”

I wish President Trump would be more like President Eisenhower. In 1956, Eisenhower not only resisted tremendous pressure from Israel to join it in a war against Egypt, he did it on national television one week before the presidential election.

Mitchell Bard wrote in The Times of Israel in 2014: “Eisenhower went on television to criticize Israel’s failure to withdraw from Egypt and warned he would impose sanctions if it failed to comply. Eisenhower was prepared to cut off all economic aid, to lift the tax-exempt status of the United Jewish Appeal, and to apply sanctions on Israel.”

Trump said on Feb. 13 that he wanted to cut the military budget in half. Now, he is pushing his” Big Beautiful Bill” which would increase defense spending by $150 billion to over one trillion a year.

In Evan Thomas’s book on Eisenhower’s foreign policy, “Ike’s Bluff”, it says: “When Defense Secretary Neil McElroy warned him that further cuts would harm national security, Eisenhower acerbically replied, ‘If you go to any military installation in the world where the American flag is flying and tell the commander that Ike says he will give him an extra star for his shoulder if he cuts his budget, there’ll be such a rush to cut his budget you’ll have to get out of the way.”

Eisenhower also told his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew Goodpaster “God help the Nation when it has a President who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do.” (Netanyahu Leads U.S. Into Another Unnecessary War.)

Seventh, the power of the Zionist State of Israel and its lobbying arm in the United States of America, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, over the government of the United States of America is vast, and it has divided Donald John Trump’s so-called “Make America Great Again movement:

The MAGA movement is reeling, with the primary point of contention being Israel. “America First,” which Trump used before the less scintillating “Make America Great Again,” is not compatible with unswerving support for another nation. The Christian Zionists and the millions who were thrilled by Trump’s oft cited disdain for the “forever wars” aren’t compatible, either. There is a huge difference between the Mark Levins and Ben Shapiros and the Candace Owens’s and the Tucker Carlsons. An America First foreign policy was a nonnegotiable issue with most MAGA supporters. If Trump puts Americans in harm’s way over Israel’s squabbles, then he is no different that Bush, Clinton, Obama, or Biden. Probably 100 million Americans are fed up with the two party duopoly, and want something that represents their interests. Going to war with Iran obviously doesn’t fall into that category.

There really hasn’t been much criticism of Israel from anyone in Washington, D.C. since November 22, 1963. An otherwise nondescript Republican, Rep. Paul Findley, had the audacity to buck AIPAC, and it ended his political career. He wrote the best seller, They Dare to Speak Out, but it changed nothing. Very few have dared to speak out against our “greatest ally.” Another Republican, Pete McCloskey, talked about how the ADL uses bullying tactics, and declared, “There is a strong Jewish lobby....I do not understand why the Jewish community should resent it being labeled as such.” McCloskey’s political career, too, was ended by these kinds of comments. James Trafficant was one of the last great Democrats in Congress. His criticism of Israel, and courageous defense of embattled Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk, resulted in him being expelled from Congress, and sentenced to seven years in prison.

As I wrote about in an earlier Substack, Rep. Thomas Massie gave a remarkable interview last year to Tucker Carlson, in which he spoke of AIPAC having a “babysitter” for every politician, and how he threw them out of his office. Shortly thereafter, his healthy wife suddenly died, after a vacation with their grandkids. I still haven’t read anything on what the cause was. She wasn’t vaccinated, so it wasn’t a case of “doctors baffled.” Maybe all these things are coincidences, and opposing Israel has no impact on one’s life or political career. We’ll see how many members in Congress join Marjorie Taylor Greene and Massie in opposing any U.S. involvement in the mess between Israel and Iran. Massie has introduced a bill about this, demanding that Congress hold a debate, and vote on any declaration of war, which is their role under the Constitution. But Congress hasn’t declared war since WWII. Needless to say, we have been at war somewhere almost continuously since then.

Iran has never done anything to us, other than the hostage situation just before the 1980 election, which ended with a real “October Surprise.” Perhaps Iran had had enough of our meddling in their affairs. After all, the CIA overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. It’s a “democracy” thing, you wouldn’t understand. The Shah was an American puppet. Remember that whole “consent of the governed” thing that we fought a revolution about. Now, Abraham Lincoln crushed that notion forever, but it’s still a timeless and profound concept. In more recent years, the U.S. backed Iraq, led by CIA asset to become foreign hobgoblin Saddam Hussein, during their war with Iran, poison gas and all. One of the few things Trumpenstein did the first time around was assassinate Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, supposedly the most dangerous “terrorist” in the world at the time, although no American had heard of him before.

Now, we backed Iraq because Israel wanted us to. Trump assassinated Soleimani because Israel ordered him to, just like he bombed Syria twice at their behest. Barack Obama murdered an entire wedding party in Yemen, certainly an impeachable offense if ever there was one, but it is unknown if Israel personally requested it. The Gulf War, our senseless years in Afghanistan- all of it was because it was in Israel’s interest, not ours. What has Afghanistan, let alone Yemen, ever done to us? Donald Trump pulling out and holding a chair for Bibi Netanyahu was about as symbolic a gesture as could be imagined. Maybe Bibi asked him to. You don’t turn down Bibi. And you don’t make fun of a less than masculine nickname like that. Bibi apparently wants to kill the latest Ayatollah. That’s how out of step I am; I didn’t know there were multiple Ayatollahs. Trump allegedly stopped Bibi from doing that. I’m not sure that’s believable. (Trump, Israel, and the Death of MAGA. Also see Candace Owens Torches Trump: ‘I Feel Embarrassed That I Told People to Go Vote For Him’.)

As we know, of course, every secular political movement, based as each has been, is now, and will forever be, on false principles of Pelagianism and naturalism, is bound to founder over the time. No country can be truly great in the eyes of the true God of Divine Revelation, the Most Holy Trinity, unless its people are converted to the Catholic Faith and thus has leaders that seek to pursue the common temporal good in light of man’s Last End, the possession of the glory of the Beatific Vision of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost for all eternity in Heaven. No country that has committed atrocities endless atrocities of its own (see, for example, US Soldiers Raped, Pillaged, and Plundered, American Atrocity: Remembering the Shenandoah Burning, Balangiga Massacre, 1901) that one secular author summarized as follows five days ago now:

When a just war of defense turns into a war of revenge, it ceases to be a just war and becomes an unjust war of aggression. That explains why Robert E. Lee—who followed the conventions of civilized warfare agreed upon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—saw his role as defense of the South, and not as aggression against the North. In 1863, he said:

It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.

In “The War Against the South and Its Consequences” Murray Rothbard points out that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, by contrast with Lee, abandoned all such conventions and launched a total war against civilians. Rothbard explains:

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism).

Veale attributes the blame for Sherman’s war strategy, particularly the attacks on civilians, to Lincoln:

Sherman only executed the most dramatic and devastating example of the strategy which was laid down by President Lincoln himself and followed faithfully by General Ulysses S. Grant as commander-in-chief of the Northern armies.

It was the deliberate policy of the Union army to view Southern civilians as no different from combatants. As reported in “War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies” published in 1880–1901, Sherman stated, “We will remove and destroy every obstacle—if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.” Sherman’s apologists do not deny his total war tactics; on the contrary, they argue that these tactics were justified for various reasons including the claim that his war crimes were necessary in order to win the war.

In his book War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, Walter Brian Cisco examines the evidence in the Official Records concerning the Union war strategy. Cisco recounts civilian homes in Athens, Alabama being invaded, looted, and burned to “retaliate” against Confederates who were attacking Federal troops, and to discourage the civilian population from supporting the “rebels.” Federal troops also broke into businesses and looted the premises. Significantly, none of these actions were condemned by Union officers—they were seen as just punishment against the South. Cisco gives many examples of this:

“Everything of value was carried out of dry goods stores, jewelry stores and drug stores,” remembered Indiana sergeant George H. Puntenney. “The sacking of Athens has often been condemned,” he concluded, but “was about what those Athenian rebels deserved.”

In another example, Major James Austin Connolly said,

We’ll burn every house, barn, church, and everything else we come to; we’ll leave their families houseless and without food; their towns will all be destroyed, and nothing but the most complete desolation will be found in our track.

In Tennessee, Sherman destroyed an entire town, Randolph, to retaliate against an attack by Confederate guerillas on a steamboat docked in the town. Sherman wrote, “Immediately I sent a regiment up with orders to destroy the place. The regiment has returned and Randolph is gone.” His approach to Atlanta was the same, as he declared, “Let us destroy Atlanta and make it a desolation. One thing is certain, whether we get inside Atlanta or not, it will be a used up community by the time we are done with it.” Cisco recounts that, “As many as five thousand rounds of shot and shell fell on Atlanta that one day… It went on day and night for another three weeks.” It was obvious that civilian casualties would be a direct result of this shelling, and such casualties were not merely “collateral damage.” Deliberately destroying civilian homes to avenge Confederate attacks was not unusual. Major General Hunter, when he heard that Confederates had attacked one of his supply trains in the Shenandoah Valley, “was furious, ordering the torching of houses in the neighborhood where his loss had occurred.”

Many people suppose that the burning of the South may have been some sort of accident. They presume that a fire somehow started, the winds picked up, and the rest is history. The truth is that Sherman considered burning civilian property to be a justified form of retaliation against Confederate soldiers. He said “everything is right which prevents anything. If bridges are burned [by the Confederate armies], I have a right to burn all houses near it.” Explosive charges were buried throughout Atlanta before the fires were lit. Sherman wrote, “commence the destruction [of Atlanta] at once, but don’t use fire until the last moment.” Ohio captain George W. Pepper commented, as the city lay in smoking ruins, “This is the penalty of rebellion.” There is plenty of evidence that the fires were deliberately lit. For example,

The Medical College was spared when Dr. Peter D’Alvigny confronted soldiers igniting straw and broken furniture they had piled in the entrance hall. The doctor shouted that sick and wounded soldiers were still inside, throwing open the door to prove it.

Nor was there any attempt to ensure that only property belonging to slave owners was burned which, although also illegal, may have been regarded by some people as morally justified. However, the burning was indiscriminate. No attempt was made to ascertain who owned the burned homes, nor to ensure that slaves would not also be punished along with slave owners. Cisco recounts many examples of plantation homes that were deliberately burned by Union troops:

Troops fired the gin house, granary, and a large quantity of cloth. “The Negroes went out and begged for the cloth,” wrote Mrs Canning, “saying that it was to make their winter clothes. The cruel destroyers refused to let the Negroes have a single piece.” “Well, madam,” sneered one of the soldiers, “how do you like the looks of our little fire. We have seen a great many such, within the last few weeks.”

Rage and fury in the heat of battle, undisciplined soldiers behaving badly, and the urge to retaliate for losses, are often shrugged off as understandable human reactions in the chaos of wartime. However, Robert E. Lee insisted that his army should not fight for vengeance, following a well-established convention that armies should not retaliate against soldiers by attacking civilians or burning their property. Throughout the first and second world wars—when the allies were accused of indiscriminately bombing German towns, killing civilians, and destroying their property—their response was to (emphatically, albeit dishonestly) deny it. The point here is not to endorse dishonesty in brazenly denying war crimes—the point is that, by bothering to deny war crimes, the combatants at least exhibit awareness that war crimes are abhorrent and nothing of which to be proud. Unlike Sherman’s apologists, they did not attempt to argue that bombing civilians is justified, nor are there annual celebrations of the bombing of Dresden the way some American academics annually celebrate the burning of Georgia and South Carolina.

The convention in Europe, as noted by Veale, was that “hostilities between civilized peoples must be limited to the armed forces actually engaged.” As Veale notes, any European state that broke this convention did not attempt to claim that there are circumstances where breaking the convention is justified: “for two hundred years it was acknowledged by all the European States. In the main it was complied with and, when infringed, was paid the tribute of indignant denials.” As David Gordon observes in “The Historical Origins of Modern American War Crimes,” the conventions described by Veale have now wrongly been abandoned, in favor of the horrendous view that “shock and awe” attacks on civilians are acceptable in the name of bringing a “quick end” to the war:

In the American context, a great deal of horrendous conduct stems from the Civil War, and one thing Moyn brings out is the role of the “Lieber code”, a guide to conduct for the American armed forces written by the German immigrant Francis Lieber, in this matter. Moyn says, “Lieber refused to pity victims of war. Lieber’s code went in a different direction, legalizing shock and awe, with humanity a fringe benefit rather than a true goal…. Erected as one of its founding fathers later, Lieber was not really part of the tradition of making war humane. He condoned horrendous acts such as punishing civilians and denying quarter—which meant that, when enemies surrendered in hopes of avoiding death, you could kill them anyway.” (pp. 19–20)

As Samuel Moyn points out, “For Lieber, anything necessary in war, more or less, ought to be legal; if there was such a thing as excess violence and suffering, it was because it was necessary to achieve victory, which hastened peace.” Those who rightly desire peace have wrongly adopted Lieber’s opinion that the end justifies the means, and that to hasten a peaceful future any and all war crimes are justified. After the war is won, the atrocities are memory holed. As Veale puts it, “As the war had been won, it did not seem to matter very much how it had been won.” Thus, further steps are taken in the “advance to barbarism.” (Total War Against Civilians Is Never Justified.)

What the author of the piece quoted just above does not realize is that the European conventions about limiting wars to the battlefield were the result of an attempt by the formerly Catholic nations of that continent to adhere to the principles of the Just War Theory, which required them to seek to indemnify and hold harmless civilians as far as was possible. War may bring with it unintended consequences as civilians get caught up in hostilities, but civilians can never be deliberately targeted in any warfare, something that this country has long ignored even though its leaders have always claimed to be so morally righteous. Amorality is from the devil and leads those who practice it to hell if they do not repent before they die as members of the Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation and without which there can no true social order within nations nor a just peace among them.

Eighth, the Israeli preemptive strike upon Iran on Friday, June 13, 2025, came at quite a cost to the Israelis and the infrastructure of several of its cities, including Tel Aviv itself:

Despite the arduous efforts of Israeli censors to hide the devastation Iran inflicted on Israel with its barrage of ballistic missiles during the 12-Day War, information is emerging that destroys the myth that Israel had an impregnable air defense. The map at the head of this article reveals the sites targeted by Iran. Based on the videos of strikes in Haifa and Tel Aviv, I think this map accurately portrays the massive scale of the Iranian attack. For the first time in its history, Israel took a major beating.

According to various Israeli media reports, damage spanned residential buildings, scientific infrastructure (e.g., labs at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot), the Israeli Defense Ministry complex, and commercial hubs like the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Iran also struck a military target near the Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva. The medical center was hit by the blast wave, which caused extensive structural damage, a chemical leak, and dozens of injuries. The Israeli press claimed this was a direct strike on Soroka, but the fact that no one was killed undermines that claim.

Iran also struck the following residential areas, reportedly targeting Israeli military and intelligence officials:

Bat Yam: 9 killed, ~200 wounded; high-rise apartments destroyed.
Ramat Gan: Nine buildings destroyed, hundreds displaced.
Haifa and Tel Aviv: Strikes near military HQs (“Kirya”) and civilian neighborhoods.

Iran also caused extensive damage to the Port of Haifa and the Port of Ashdod (Note, I had no information on the latter when I posted yesterday.), as well as the refineries at Haifa and Ashdod. Israel has maintained a complete blackout on the damage to its military and intelligence facilities, but the sites identified on the map above indicate that Iran likely enjoyed similar success as that observed in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

The following brief video shows Tel Aviv — before and after. Israel got a taste of what it has done to the Palestinians in Gaza; it was a painful morsel. (Israel Suffered Extensive Damage)

The report above is not entirely accurate as there has been reporting in Israel itself about the damage imposed by the Iranians in their effort to thwart the Israeli attack:

Israeli soldiers search through the rubble of residential buildings destroyed by an Iranian missile strike in Bat Yam, central Israel, June 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

With a shaky ceasefire between Israel and Iran taking effect on Tuesday morning, the full scope of the 12 days of fighting, which started with a surprise Israeli operation against Tehran’s nuclear program, began to emerge.

Two hours into the ceasefire declared by US President Donald Trump, Iran launched two more ballistic missiles at Israel, setting off sirens in northern Israel. Both projectiles were intercepted, and the Israel Defense Forces in response struck an Iranian radar north of Tehran, seemingly ending the conflict.

The civilian toll

Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel during the 12 days of war claimed the lives of 28 people — all but one of them civilians — and wounded over 3,000 people.

Israeli soldiers search through the rubble of residential buildings destroyed by an Iranian missile strike in Bat Yam, central Israel, June 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Baz Ratner)

The civilian toll

Iran’s ballistic missile attacks on Israel during the 12 days of war claimed the

Israel’s Health Ministry said a total of 3,238 people were hospitalized, including 23 who were seriously injured, 111 moderately, 2,933 lightly, 138 who suffered from acute anxiety, and another 30 whose conditions have not been determined.

The vast majority of the casualties were civilians, with the IDF reporting just seven soldiers hurt in one missile impact in central Israel and an off-duty soldier killed in Beersheba.

Israeli authorities have said more than 9,000 people have been displaced from their homes, dozens of which were damaged or destroyed by the Iranian attacks.

Missiles and drones

Iran launched between some 550 ballistic missiles and around 1,000 drones at Israel during the war, according to the IDF.

Most of the missiles were intercepted by Israeli and American air defenses at an interception rate of around 90 percent, similar to the rate in Iran’s April and October 2024 attacks on Israel.

At least 31 ballistic missile impacts were reported in populated areas or critical infrastructure sites, including a power station in southern Israel, an oil refinery in Haifa, and a university in central Israel. Dozens of other missiles struck open areas, without causing significant damage.

The vast majority of the 1,000 drones, which are slower-moving but harder to track, failed to even make it to Israel’s borders.

Nearly 99% of the drones that had posed a threat to Israel — around 500 — were intercepted by the Israeli Air Force with fighter jets, helicopters, and ground-based air defense systems; the Israeli Navy with missile boats; and the 5114th Spectrum Battalion with electronic warfare means, according to the military. (The Israel-Iran war by the numbers, after 12 days of fighting.)

Eighth, while recognizing the death and displacement of innocent civilians is always tragic no matter where it occurs, including within the borders of Israel, and that the targeting of civilian population centers can never be justified morally, the leaders of Zionist State of Israel, though, have never had any compunction about targeting innocent civilians as they consider all non-Jews to be potential sources of terrorism whose liquidation is, to them, both militarily necessary and morally mandatory. Ah, but it is also important to note what I did in October of 2023. namely. that No One Has Killed More Israelis Than the Israelis Themselves.

Consider how the Israelis are continuing to kill of the civilian population of Gaza as the world’s attention has been focused on the war it started with Iran on Friday, June 13, 2025:

We cannot be asking civilians to go into a combat zone so that then they can be killed with the justification that they are in a combat zone.” It defies belief that the Unicef spokesperson, James Elder, should have needed to spell that out this week. And yet each day Palestinians continue to be killed while attempting to collect aid for their families from food hubs in Gaza, forced to make a lethal choice between risking being shot and letting their families slowly starve. More than 500 have died around the centres since the system was introduced – yet, with attention fixed on Israel’s attacks on Iran, there has been little to spare for recent deaths.

The Israeli military has given shifting accounts of events. But soldiers told the newspaper Haaretz that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds that posed no threat. The Israeli prime minister and defence minister attacked the allegations as “blood libels”. Médecins Sans Frontières has accurately described the system as “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid”. Meanwhile, Israel has closed crossings into the north.

Overall, Gaza’s health ministry says that 56,331 people have died in Israeli attacks since war began. Researchers who assess war casualties suggested this week that, far from being exaggerated, this undercounts the toll. They estimated that violent deaths had reached 75,000 by this January, with another 8,500 excess deaths due to the war. The toll of hunger has yet to be reckoned.

The ceasefire with Iran has prompted talk that Benjamin Netanyahu may be contemplating an early election, hoping to ride to victory on the glory. That would be tough without the release of hostages and at least the impression of an end to the war in Gaza. Yet it remains unclear whether there is actual movement towards a deal with Hamas. Donald Trump’s hazy vision of a grand deal for the Middle East is built upon a fantasy of Arab state acquiescence without any concrete offer for Palestinians.

Without a proper agreement, the threat of strikes resuming would loom large, there would be no promise that proper aid would follow, and recovery would be impossible. The far-right coalition partners upon whom Mr. Netanyahu depends want the “day after” to bring not a resurgence of life but the disappearance of Palestinians from Gaza – and beyond. The surging violence and mass displacements in the occupied West Bank, which have seen 943 Palestinians killed by settlers or security forces since 7 October 2023, have been described as “Gazafication”. Meanwhile, Israel entrenches its control politically.

As Israel’s allies stand by – or, like Mr Trump, spur on horrors such as the food scheme – the necessary destination of a two-state solution is becoming a mirage. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has suggested openly that the US no longer sees an independent Palestinian state as a goal. European nations, including the UK, which had edged towards recognising one, have backed off since Israel attacked Iran.

A review by the diplomatic service of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – found that the country was probably breaching human rights duties under their trade deal, yet the bloc has not acted accordingly. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, rightly urged the EU to suspend the accord. While the arms and trade still flow, Israel’s allies are complicit in the destruction of lives in Gaza. They must instead make themselves central to building a future for Palestinians in a state of their own. (The Guardian view on annihilation in Gaza: the deaths mount, but the pressure has ebbed.)

At least 26 people, including more aid seekers, have been killed in the latest Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The attacks come as desperate Palestinians under Israeli blockade continue to wait at food distribution points amid an ongoing hunger crisis.

Among those killed during Israeli attacks on the besieged enclave on Saturday, 11 were aid recipients at distribution centres run by the United States-and-Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which the United Nations has condemned for its “weaponisation” of aid.

Meanwhile, Wafa news agency reported that at least three people were killed and several others wounded by an Israeli drone strike that targeted displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.

The report said that the attack targeted a tent sheltering displaced members of the Shurrab family. The tent was located in an area the Israeli military had previously designated as a “safe zone”.

In the last 48 hours, at least 202 people have been killed, including four recovered bodies after Israeli attacks, and 1,037 wounded by Israeli attacks across Gaza, the Health Ministry reported.

Since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, at least 55,908 people have been killed, and 131,138 have been wounded in Israeli attacks.

Attacks on aid sites

In recent days, Israeli attacks on aid distribution sites in Gaza have ramped up as thousands of Palestinians gather daily in the hope of receiving food rations following a two-month Israeli blockade of aid deliveries.

On Saturday, three people were killed at a GHF site in Khan Younis after Israeli forces opened fire. Several people were also wounded and taken to medical facilities.

Omar al-Hobi, a displaced Palestinian in Khan Younis, told Al Jazeera from a hospital that walking to those sites means you “enter the point of death”.

“I call it the point of death. The tank is in front of us, the machinegun is in front of us, and the quadcopter is above us, and there are soldiers on the ground with snipers. Anyone who moves before the time is shot, and the moment the tank retreats, we start running,” al-Hobi said.

Israel claims its attacks at the aid sites have been to control crowds, but witnesses and humanitarian groups have said that many of the shootings took place unprovoked, resulting in hundreds of casualties.

The Red Cross said on Thursday, the “vast majority” of patients who arrived at its field hospital in the enclave since the GHF aid system began at the end of last month had reported that they were wounded while trying to access aid or around distribution points.

Meanwhile, Wafa, citing the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority in the Gaza Strip, reports that there has been a disruption in internet and landline services affecting the governorates of Gaza, which include Gaza City, and north Gaza.

There is currently an ongoing outage in the southern and central areas of the Gaza Strip that has lasted for more than three days. (Aid seekers in Gaza continue to be targeted as Israeli attacks kill 26 | Israel-Palestine conflict News.)

The Israeli military ordered Palestinians to evacuate areas in northern Gaza on Sunday before intensified fighting against Hamas, as US President Donald Trump called for an end to the war amid renewed efforts to broker a cease-fire.

“Make the deal in Gaza, get the hostages back,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform early on Sunday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to hold talks later in the day on the progress of Israel’s offensive.

A senior security official said the military will tell him the campaign is close to reaching its objectives, and warn that expanding fighting to new areas in Gaza may endanger the remaining Israeli hostages.

But in a statement posted on X and text messages sent to many residents, the military urged people in northern parts of the enclave to head south towards the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, which Israel designated as a humanitarian area.

Palestinian and UN officials say nowhere in Gaza is safe.

“The (Israeli) Defense Forces is operating with extreme force in these areas, and these military operations will escalate, intensify, and extend westward to the city center to destroy the capabilities of terrorist organizations,” the military said.

The evacuation order covered the Jabalia area and most Gaza City districts.

Medics and residents said the Israeli army’s bombardments escalated in the early hours in Jabalia, destroying several houses and killing at least six people.

In Khan Younis in the south, five people were killed in an airstrike on a tent encampment near Mawasi, medics said.

The escalation comes as Arab mediators, Egypt and Qatar, backed by the United States, begin a new cease-fire effort to halt the 20-month-old conflict and secure the release of Israeli and foreign hostages still being held by Hamas.

Interest in resolving the Gaza conflict has heightened in the wake of US and Israeli bombings of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A Hamas official told Reuters the group had informed the mediators it was ready to resume cease-fire talks, but reaffirmed the group’s outstanding demands that any deal must end the war and secure an Israeli withdrawal from the coastal territory.

Hamas has said it is willing to free remaining hostages in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to still be alive, only in a deal that will end the war.

Israel says it can only end it if Hamas is disarmed and dismantled. Hamas refuses to lay down its arms.

The latest bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered in October 2023 when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, Israeli tallies show.

Israel’s subsequent military assault has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry, displaced almost the entire 2.3 million population, plunged the enclave into a humanitarian crisis and left much of it in ruins. (Israel orders northern Gaza evacuations as Trump calls for Hamas war to end.)

One unreconstructed, self-described Protestant “dispensationalist” described the Western propensity to support Israelis actions no matter the suffering its military imposes upon innocent civilians follows:

Confounding the government of Israel with the people of Israel
Supporting regime change
Taking money from Americans to give foreign aid to the government of Israel
Giving weapons to the government of Israel
Agreeing with everything that the government of Israel does
Thinking that Netanyahu can do no wrong
Believing that the U.S. government should bomb Iran for Israel
Calling offensive military actions defensive
Believing everything that Netanyahu says
Denying that there is an Israel Lobby in the United States
Supporting U.S. military intervention in the Middle East
Backing everything that President Trump does
Appeasing the country of Israel
Supporting ethnic cleansing
Turning a blind eye to Israel’s annual gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
Supporting a reckless, belligerent, and meddling U.S. foreign policy
Dismissing the killing of women and children as collateral damage
Supporting collective punishment
Ignoring the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty by Israel
Denying that Israel owns most members of Congress
Calling opponents of Israel’s military actions anti-Semitic or pro-Palestinian
Supporting assassinations
Excusing the atrocities committed by IDF soldiers
Supporting indiscriminate bombing
Thinking that God needs the help of the United States to protect Israel
Supporting the razing of Gaza
Inviting Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress
Supporting the installation of U.S. puppets as leaders of countries in the Middle East
Making excuses for everything that Israel does (What Blessing Israel Doesn’t Mean. The author of this article does not understand that the descendants of Abraham referred to by Moses in the Book of Genesis are the members of the spiritual Israel, the Catholic Church, and not Abraham’s physical descendants after Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’s Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday.

Ninth, the Israeli penchant for attacking innocent civilians extends not only to Palestinian Arabs, most of whom today are Mohammedan after so many Christian Arabs have been displaced over the past seventy-seven years since the Zionists began to throw them out of their homes, seized their property, and placed many of them in “detention centers” (concentration camps) but to the Catholics living in West Bank communities, which are now being attacked by those “peace loving” Israeli “settlers” who are aping contemporaneously there the same kind of brutal force used in 1948 and thereafter as the European Zionist invaders against those living within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries:

In a disturbing and increasingly frequent pattern, the Palestinian town of Taybeh, located east of Ramallah and known as the last remaining town in the West Bank inhabited entirely by Christians, faces ongoing attacks by Israeli settlers targeting residents, their property, and farmlands.

According to ACI MENA, CNA’s Arabic-language news partner, in recent weeks settlers have established a new outpost on the eastern edge of Taybeh atop the ruins of a farmhouse whose owners were displaced roughly a year ago.

The outpost was erected in a vital agricultural zone, spanning around 17,000 dunums (roughly 4,200 acres), which serves as a key economic lifeline for the town. The area hosts thousands of olive trees, poultry and sheep farms, and wide fields used for seasonal crops. It forms the bulk of Taybeh’s total land area of about 24,000 dunums (about 5,900 acres).

Attacks and infringements are not new. In 2019 and 2020, settlers set up similar illegal outposts around the town, often accompanied by arson attacks on crops, theft of equipment, and deliberately releasing cattle into the fields to destroy harvests.

During the latest olive harvest season, for the second year in a row, farmers were barred from accessing their land near the Rimmonim settlement — which was built on confiscated Taybeh land — resulting in either theft or complete spoilage of the olive crop. Approximately 20 families were physically assaulted while trying to reach their land.

Father Bashar Fawadleh, parish priest of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in Taybeh, told ACI MENA: “The town, which the Gospel of John (11:54) refers to as ‘Ephraim’ — the place Jesus withdrew to before his passion — is no longer safe for its people today… We do not live in peace but in daily fear and siege.”

He added: “Since last October, more than 10 families have left Taybeh due to fear from ongoing violence and harassment.”

Fawadleh also described further Israeli-imposed restrictions: “Alongside these attacks, Israeli authorities have installed iron gates at the town’s entrances, severely disrupting residents’ access to work and essential services. These limitations, combined with mounting agricultural restrictions, have worsened unemployment and deepened the economic crisis, leading many to consider emigration.”

He added: “Since last October, more than 10 families have left Taybeh due to fear from ongoing violence and harassment.”

Israeli settlers attacked homes and lit a fire at the eastern entrance of the Christian West Bank village of Taybeh on June 26, as they rampaged through the neighboring village of Kafr Malik.

The rampage resulted in the deaths of three people from Kafr Malik, the Palestinian health ministry said, and the burning of several homes and vehicles. No injuries were reported in Taybeh.

"These days, we are living under the fire, barbarism and brutality of the settlers ... and under the direct protection of the Israeli occupation army," Father Bashar Basiel, priest at Christ the Redeemer Parish, wrote in a post he sent out to journalists. "We will win with hope. We are Palestinian Christians. We resist with our faith."

On June 25, a Palestinian boy was shot dead by the Israeli army during a raid on Al-Yamun, a West Bank town west of Jenin, the Palestinian Red Crescent said, as reported by Reuters.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the deputy to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, posted on X: "The government of Israel, with its behavior and decisions, is pushing the region to explode."

"We call on the international community to intervene urgently to protect our Palestinian people," he said, Reuters reported.

In a statement, the Israeli Defense Forces said dozens of Israeli civilians set fire to property in Kafr Malik, and after a confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinian developed including "mutual rock-hurling," the IDF and Israeli police were dispatched to the scene.

The statement said several people whom the IDF termed "terrorists" from within the village fired toward the forces who returned fire, with fatalities reported. Five Israeli suspects were apprehended and transferred to the Israeli Police for further processing, IDF said.

Settler violence in the West Bank, including Taybeh, has grown in severity over the past year and five months since the war in Gaza has continued, said Taybeh resident Nadim Khoury, owner of the well-known Taybeh Brewery and Winery, with settlers encroaching on Taybeh agricultural land with their sheep and cows, preventing farmers from reaching their crops.

"Settlers have been coming to Taybeh property and grazing their sheep and cows on the wheat and barley crops the people of Taybeh have planted. No one is stopping them," he told OSV News.

"Last night they started fighting with the Arab Bedouin and then they made it to the entrance of Taybeh. We can't do anything. Everybody is afraid and panicked but don't know what to do. Taybeh depends on its agriculture and olive trees. People don't know what to do or who to complain to if the government is with them, what can we do?"

Palestinian shepherds and Israel activists maintain that soldiers and police who are deployed to such incidents rarely do anything to stop the settlers and in fact seem to be supporting them, noting that the situation has gotten worse since the war as attention is placed on Gaza.

In May the Israeli government, the most extreme right-wing government in its history, said it would establish 22 new settlements throughout the West Bank. Most of the settlers who clash with Palestinian shepherds and farmers are from small illegal sheep and goat homesteads who use their animals as a way to encroach on Palestinian land.

Khoury said earlier in June settlers entered land belonging to his cousin and let the sheep eat all the new crops he had planted and took his water tank so he would not be able to water any new crops he planted. (Trenton Monitor.)

President Donald John Trump has turned a blind eye to this Israeli genocide.

So has Vice President James David Vance.

So has United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

So has United States Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth.

So has the Director of the United States Central Intellgence Agency John Radcliffe.

So has United States Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff General Daniel Caine.

So have the talking heads who fashion themselves as outright Zionists and “Christian Zionists.”

So have every Republican member of the Congress of the United States of America with the exceptions of United States Representatives Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).

Ever the dealmaker, Presiden Trump even thinks that there should be the removal of Palestinians from Gaza, which would be governed, he imagines, by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates:

A report issued in the Israeli media claims that President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to bring the hostilities in Gaza to a rapid end and expand the Abraham accords.

Israel Hayom, a publication owned by the family of the late Zionist mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, reported on Thursday that in a phone call directly following the U.S. military bombing of Iran on Monday, the two leaders agreed the war in Gaza would conclude within two weeks.

According to the daily newspaper’s sources, the region will then be governed by the UAE and Egypt in place of Hamas, the leaders of which would be exiled. Additionally, Israeli hostages still being held by Palestinian militant groups would gain their freedom.

However, Arab allied nations have maintained that they will not participate in the rehabilitation of Gaza apart from the region being turned over for management to the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority as a preparation for a two-state solution demanded under international law, though Netanyahu flatly rejects considering this option.

Additionally, there is no indication from Hamas leaders that they would accept these apparent terms.

Also joining Trump and Netanyahu on this call, according to the report, were U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer.

Further terms discussed on the call include the potential transfer of Gaza survivors who wish to escape their current plight and emigrate to other unnamed countries, while the new government of Syria and Saudi Arabia would recognize Israel and establish diplomatic ties with the expectation that other Arab and Muslim countries will then do the same.

For its part, Israel would declare its willingness “for future Palestinian conflict resolution under the ‘two states’ concept, contingent upon the Palestinian Authority reforms.”

Strangely, following the expression of such support, the apparent deal includes a U.S. recognition of “limited Israeli sovereignty implementation in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank),” suggesting the negation of Palestinian sovereignty over its internationally recognized territory, a constituent aspect of statehood.

Bottom of Form

Consistent with the requirements of international law, Arab nations have long maintained their willingness to recognize Israel and guarantee its security with the ending of their illegal occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territory and the allowance of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state to emerge on these lands.

Such a solution is supported by the overwhelming number of national governments of the world and the Catholic Church as witnessed to by the unanimous and constant testimony of the bishops in the region and the Holy See over decades. (Israeli media report claims Netanyahu and Trump agreed to end Gaza hostilities.)

There was evidently no discussion between the American president and the Israeli Prime Minister about the starving Palestinians, including children, who are being shot by the members of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Although it should go without saying to those who have reading this series since its inception shortly after the Hamas attacks upon Israeli on October 7, 2023, that Benjamin Netanyahu may have known about in advance but did nothing to thwart, there can never be any true and lasting peace in the Middle East as the major combatants have souls that are enslaved to the devil by means of Original Sin as well as their own Actual Sins, which affect their souls even though they do not realize in the subjective order of things that they have committed them any more than a person suffering from some undiagnosed medical problem does not realize the effects that the condition is taking on their bodies. Original Sin enslaves souls to the devil and what are Mortal Sins in the objective order of things serves as a cancer upon souls that darkens their intellects and sustains their wills in the pursuit of policies in defiance of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law, thus undermining the whole of social order by using hatred and revenge as the means to accomplish a “peace” built upon the false foundations of their rejection of the Most Holy Trinity and the Incarnation of the Word Who became Flesh in His Most Blessed Mother’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb by the power of God the Holy Ghost at her Annunciation.

Our Lady told Jacinta and Francisco Marto and their cousin Lucia does Santos that there can no true peace in the world without devotion to her Most Holy Rosary and her Immaculate, the “two last remedies” that her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, was giving the world from continuing to be the victim of its own iniquities:

Father, the Most Holy Virgin did not tell me that we are in the last times of the world but she made me understand this for three reasons. The first reason is because she told me that the devil is in the mood for engaging in a decisive battle against the Virgin. And a decisive battle is the final battle where one side will be victorious and the other side will suffer defeat. Hence from now on we must choose sides. Either we are for God or we are for the devil. There is no other possibility.

The second reason is because she said to my cousins as well as to myself that God is giving two last remedies to the world. These are the Holy Rosary and Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. These are the last two remedies which signify that there will be no others.

The third reason is because in the plans of Divine Providence, God always before He is about to chastise the world, exhausts all other remedies. Now, when He sees that the world pays no attention whatsoever then, as we say in our imperfect manner of speaking, He offers us with a certain trepidation the last means of salvation, His Most Holy Mother. It is with a certain trepidation because if you despise and repulse this ultimate means we will not have any more forgiveness from Heaven because we will have committed a sin which the Gospel calls the sin against the Holy Spirit. This sin consists of openly rejecting with full knowledge and consent, the salvation which He offers. Let us remember that Jesus Christ is a very good Son and that He does not permit that we offend and despise His Most Holy Mother. We have recorded through many centuries of Church history the obvious testimony which demonstrates, by the terrible chastisements which have befallen those who have attacked the honor of His Most Holy Mother, how Our Lord Jesus Christ has always defended the honor of His Mother." -Sister Lucia dos Santos of Fatima's interview with Father Augustin Fuentes, December 26, 1957 (THE STORY OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA By Brother Ernest, C.S.C.)

Interestingly, this is the last interview given by the real Sister Lucia dos Santos, coming as it did just year before the death of Pope Pius XII, who had instituted the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on May 4, 1944, just nine days shy of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Our Lady's first apparition to Lucia and to her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal. (For more about the real Sister Lucia dos Santos, please see Sister Lucy Truth.)

It was during the apparition of Our Lady on July 13, 1917, that she explicitly stated her desire to establish devotion to her Immaculate Heart, of which the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son was formed, to save poor sinners from Hell, a vision of which she had just given to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and to their cousin, Lucia do Santos, whose work on earth was to spread devotion to the Immaculate Heart and the keeping of the Five First Saturdays.

Here is Lucia's description of what took place on July 13, 1917:

You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world." (Our Lady's Words at Fatima.)

No Israeli schemes backed by the military, political, and economic might of the United States of America can ever produce any kind of “peace” in the Middle East as the Prince of Peace Himself, Who continues to be rejected by the Talmudic successors of the Sanhedrin, said the following:

Wherefore you are witnesses against yourselves, that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets. 32 Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. 33 You serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell? 34 Therefore behold I send to you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from city to city: 35 That upon you may come all the just blood that hath been shed upon the earth, from the blood of Abel the just, even unto the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar.

At that time, Jesus said to the Scribes and Pharisees, Therefore, behold, I send you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute from town to town; that upon you may come all the just blood that has been shed on the earth, from the blood of Abel the just unto the blood of Zacharias the son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation. Jerusalem, Jerusalem! you who kill the prophets, and stone those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you would not! Behold, your house is left to you desolate. For I say to you, you shall not see Me henceforth until you shall say, Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord! (Matthew 23:34-39.)

Our Lord did indeed forgive His executioners, namely, us, on Good Friday, but those who persist in unbelief, neigh well make warfare upon Him by denying His Sacred Divinity and making warfare upon His Holy Church, stand condemned by His own very words.

May we be always ready welcome Our Lord, Who beckons us in Holy Communion to come to Him with souls made clean in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, and to love Him with enlarged hearts that are filled with gratitude for what His Most Sacred Heart suffered for love of His Heavenly Father and for us and devoted tenderly to the Immaculate of Mary that intercedes for us to recompense for our lukewarmness and to pray for our own daily conversion as well as all those, including Jews and Mohammedans of whatever variation, who are outside the Barque of Salvation that is the Catholic Church.

Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary is a weapon of defense against the ways of the world, flesh, and the devil, but it is the only true weapon that can help to produce true peace within the souls of men upon which depends order within nations and peace among them.

Will we make use of these two last remedies, the Holy Rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary?

The answer is up to you.

We have a Blessed Mother who loves us, without whose perfect fiat to the will of the Heavenly Father at the Annunciation we would not have been saved.

Isn't this a cause of offering great thanks to the Blessed Trinity and of obeying her Heavenly messages perfectly?

All to thee, Blessed Mother. All to thy Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we love you. Save souls!

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and the hour of our death. Amen.

Our Lady of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

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Benedictus Qui Venit in Nomine Domini, Hosanna in Excelsis, part twenty

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