The Importance of Time-Based Analysis: Getting Bethlehem Out of Christmas
Trump used the threat of all-out war against Venezuela to push Palestine out of the headlines, opening the way to escalate anti-Muslim pretexts for Empire with a Christmas Day bombing of Nigeria.
I quote from posts on X below. It’s my New Year’s resolution to spend far less time on X and more time writing these pieces. If anything, I’ve viewed my posts on X as drafts or footnotes to more polished articles like this. All best to my readers for the New Year.
Trump’s hyper-Christmas optics and ridiculous claim to have brought “for the first time in 3,000 years peace to the Middle East” atop his Dec. 17 address were part of a wider strategy that fit in with bombing Nigeria on Christmas Day. This was the latest chapter of orchestrated machinations to manipulate the public mind.
Trump’s crass propaganda was rebutted by patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem: "We pay heed to the Prophet Jeremiah’s warning against those saying, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Jerusalem’s Latin Patriarch, archbishop Pizzaballa, who might have been pope, led Christmas mass at Gaza’s only Catholic church just before Christmas.
And Trump’s Nigeria spouting which offered: “May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists…” was obviously out to frame Nigeria in anti-Muslim religious terms and was also debunked. Ironically, a mosque was bombed the day before. This is part of a pro-Israel strategy.
An obvious point was the symbolism of bombing on Christmas with the pretext of defending Christians as families gathered around the US.
Christmas was celebrated in Bethlehem this year for the first time since 2022. This was a challenge to the Empire’s propaganda system since the majority of their population purports to be Christians. So Bethlehem must be kept out of the headlines. Empire must find maneuvers to squash the call of someone like Rev. Munther Isaac that the Christian world must “turn its gaze to Bethlehem — not the imagined one, but the real one, a town whose people today still cry out for justice, dignity and peace.”
You would think that many notables from the US building an audience from their rhetorical criticism of Israel would go to Bethlehem around Christmas. (Among them, the much celebrated and attacked Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. But they were too busy going to Doha and to Erika Kirk. As it was, the most prominent Usonian in Bethlehem this year that I know of was the blood thirsty uberzionist Mike Huckabee.)
Here’s a performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in Bethlehem in 1994.
As it was, the celebrations and joys of Christmas by actual Palestinian Christians were kept largely out of the US establishment narrative.
A big part of that was defining deviancy downward, with Trump threatening war on Venezuela, and many of his alleged critics focusing on the rather dubious possibility of an Iraq-like invasion as a litmus test of his conduct — the result was that many seemed grateful with the current criminal state short of such an invasion.
I posted the following on the afternoon of Dec. 17, several hours before Trump’s “Christmas message” that day:
The Importance of Time Based Analysis
I've suspected that part of targeting Venezuela now was a distraction from Gaza, and the escalating attacks by Israel against Bethlehem — esp around Christmas — and the rest of the West Bank. It felt similar to Trump doing his "Fire and Fury" think re Korea, which was on Aug 8, 2017 So I went back to see what I was tweeting about just then. Turns out it was the date of news conf re Syria. …
So it looks like Trump used rhetoric on Korea to distract people from getting out of Syria and is now doing the same re Venezuela. Obviously people are getting killed and it's criminal, but we should see its utility to the system.
I suspect there is a very sophisticated apparatus that continuously distracts the public. And that's why Trump is so useful to the establishment. And the US gov kept doing "ceasefires" around Thanksgiving.
They have to manipulate the public mind.
The system **seems** to contradict itself, but that's not the point. Like when Trump went back and forth on the China tariffs, I think that was all distractions.
Somewhat similarly, Trump ranting about "Hannibal Lecter" was correlated to reports about the Hannibal Directive coming out.
Some sophisticated entity or set of entities is using Trump's "randomness".
Meanwhile, this was the reality:
Israel can’t make its own case, so its apparatchiks are focusing on demonizing Islam. Ryan Grim recently reported in “LEAKED: Israel Is Considered a ‘Genocidal, Apartheid Country’ Abroad, According to Israel’s Own Research” that “Mark Penn’s Stagwell was commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to chart a path out of global isolation…Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds.”
Also see:
Early on in my career as a journalist reporting on U.S.-Middle East foreign policy and nonviolent activism in support of Palestinian equal rights and human rights, I corresponded with Pete McCloskey, a former member of Congress from California. In one letter, McCloskey wrote that it was impossible to overstate the influence of the Israel lobby and its media operatives over U.S. policy in the region. At the time, I thought that was an exaggeration of the situation. I soon learned otherwise. McCloskey, a Korean War veteran who earned the Navy Cross for valor in combat, had got it right. Would that we had more members of his caliber in the Congress today unafraid to push back against the kind of influence you describe, Sam.
It's too much to ask, a forlorn hope, that those at "the tip of the spear" of the US military will just say, no, we have a higher duty, not to participate in war crimes, to follow illegal orders. Just because Trump says it it's true? Of course, the Mitch McConnell-engineered Supreme Court will claim that in finding these pilots guilty of insubordination. Another example of the perversity of our times.