LAITH MAROUF—Thousands of years of cultural exchange and intermarriage exists between East African peoples, and Arabic peoples and their ancestors. For one, there is not one Somali family that is not intermarried to a Yemeni family; thousands of years of sailing back and forth between what is now Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Yemen and Hijaz. The cultural exchange, trade and intermarriage along the Nile basin from Egypt to Ethiopia was as significant as the movement across the Red Sea. Finally, we can not forget the failed invasion of Mecca by the King of Abyssinia on the day of the birth of Prophet Mohammad, and the complete opposite 40 years later, the granting of asylum by the Christian King of Abyssinia to the first Muslims who were escaping assassins.
WAR
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The response to millions of people expressing outrage over genocide was treated as a public relations stunt, which is what SOTU and the U.S. presidency have become.
If nothing else SOTU laid bare the utter fraudulence of the Biden presidency. It is harder to make the case of lesser evilism or holding one’s nose to vote when the betrayals are so blatant. Claims of moving Biden to the left or holding feet to the fire were always made by the cynical to the naive. Both the con artists and their targets have a lot of explaining to do when Biden used the SOTU speech to appeal directly to the Trump voters we are otherwise told to view as deplorable.
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Losing an election costs Democratic party leaders nothing; all the career politicians and political operatives at the top keep their careers either way. From their point of view this is just a cushy job with sweet benefits, and they keep those win or lose. And obviously Biden himself doesn’t care; he’ll have a comfortable retirement regardless of the outcome in November, and on some level he’s surely aware that it’s nuts for a dementia patient to be in the White House anyway.
If the Democrats cared about getting your vote they’d be trying hard to earn it. They’re not trying because they don’t care.
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EDITOR—A high point of the episode is a discussion about climate change. Chris Black is extremely pessimistic, believing that the assertion that climate change is a hoax needs to be reexamined carefully. The idea this is a hoax has become popular, of all places, notes Black, among the world’s left, and progressive statesmen, which may be a huge miscalculation. Leaders around the world keep talking about this issue but do little, with Russia and China doing the most, but still not enough, and the West doing the least, or next to nothing. We are at a point where a few more degrees may spell the death of all life on this planet due to the collapse of agriculture and plant life in general, says Black.
Ben Toth replies that a Russian scientist recently advised Putin that humanity had a “Window” of about 10,000 years to solve this problem. This may be wildly optimistic. In Siberia the problem may be extreme, as permafrost (thought to be “eternal”) is now melting away at ever faster rates, in the process releasing methane.
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RON UNZ—I think that the Israeli leaders have become so arrogant, so insular, and so confident in their complete political control over the enormous power of the U.S. and its media that they don’t have the slightest concern over what the people of the world think. This explains their very public massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians by bombs, bullets, and starvation.
After all, the Israelis and their Zionist predecessors have been freely committing the worst sort of crimes and atrocities for generations, without ever incurring any penalty. Instead, nearly all of those dark deeds were either successfully concealed by their media allies or have been almost entirely forgotten.