PARIS – The UN’s Under-Secretary-General just warned that 14,000 Palestinians children risk starving to death in the coming hours due to the total Israeli blockade of food, medicines and water. Thousands of other adults will also die due to famine or Israeli bombing in coming days.

No amount of running old documentaries on Auschwitz or threatening pro-Palestinian protestors will cover up what the UN calls a `war crime.’ Nor will threatening financial hardship on those who protest Israel’s savage repression of Gaza.

So far, Israel’s extreme right-wing government led by Benyamin Netanyahu has rejected all calls to aid the 2.2 million starving or injured Palestinians in the hellhole of Gaza. His government will eventually bend a little in the face of outrage from France, Canada, the UK, Australia and other western powers.

Meanwhile, Israel has run amok, becoming what Jewish author Arthur Koestler called ‘a nasty little Sparta.’ The slaughter in Gaza would not be happening without the prior connivance of the Biden administration, which fell under the control of the rabid pro-Israel neocons in Washington, and now Israel’s cheerleader, Donald Trump.

But Palestinians will continue to starve or die from US-supplied bombs dropped on refugee camps because Washington keeps blocking real action to halt the mass killing. Jewish hostages in Gaza have been forgotten.

Interestingly – or shockingly – the rest of the Arab League has only issued little peeps of criticism over the slaughter in Gaza, with the exception of remote, impoverished Yemen, which was heavily bombed by the US and Israel. President Trump’s visit this week to the obedient Gulf states showed once again how the west has re-colonialized most of the Arab world and brought it to heel.

Meanwhile, Israel and the US keep talking about ‘transfer’ of 2.2 million Palestinians from Gaza to someplace else. For a while in the 1930’s Ethiopia and Kenya featured as key deportation centers for Germany’s Jews. When National Socialists (aka Nazis, a British propaganda creation) spoke of moving Germany’s Jews to other remote countries, they were scourged as horrid racists by the Brits and Americans. But today the US and UK are doing something similar with their efforts to expel third worlders and Latinos or move them to Albania, Zimbabwe or Libya.

Israel’s far rightists – ‘Jewish Nazis’ in the words of the late, great Israeli columnist Uri Avnery – aim to kill as many Palestinians as possible to limit their future reproduction. They are determined to thwart creation of a long-overdue Palestinian state, and seized lands occupied by West Bank Palestinians. These could include much of Lebanon and Syria, and possibly Iraq’s oil producing regions, and even some of Saudi Arabia’s northern territories.

Many of the one million former Soviet citizens who moved to Israel thanks to US financial help will recall Stalin’s infamous saying, ‘no man, no problem.’ But following in the footsteps of Heinrich Himmler and the Stalinist mass murderers in Ukraine, is ‘worse than a crime’, to paraphrase Talleyrand, a ‘mistake.’

Many Israelis want to be rid of the Netanyahu government and end the mass killing of Palestinians. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert speaks for them. The western powers should ensure he returns to office

‘White farmers are being brutally killed in South Africa’ warned President Donald this week amid all the uproar and craziness over tariffs, world trade and kickoff of a campaign to force Big Pharma to lower its prices to consumers.

Why would Trump target South Africa? First, because South Africa dared accuse Israel’s far right government of genocide and war crimes in its savage repression of Gaza’s Palestinians. An estimated 55,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, have been killed by Israel in Gaza. Another estimated 2,500 Palestinians are believed to have died in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and some 2,000 or more dead remain under the ruins of destroyed apartment buildings in Gaza.

The Trump Administration is very close to Israel’s hard right-wing government. So far, Trump has followed and defended Israel’s repression and slaughter in Gaza. It’s often hard to tell if the American dog is wagging the Israeli tail or vice versa.

Trump’s government has repeatedly lashed out at South Africa for accusing Israel of genocide and war crimes. Trump and his MAGA backers are well known for their negative feelings about blacks in general and have made efforts to eradicate often deep black influence in US society. Bringing in whites from South Africa is a novel way of lessening America’s infatuation with all things black under the Biden administration.

As a native New Yorker, I well recall the attempts by past Democratic governments to flood the city with immigrants who would inevitably vote Democratic. The Biden administration tried the same strategy to secure black votes for the Democrats. Vast welfare schemes were set up to cater to black and colored voters. Many of these schemes are now being dismantled by the Trump hit squad. Meanwhile, the Trump White House is busy trying to import more Hindu Indians to replace Muslims who are increasingly unwelcome these days in Maga USA.

In fact, I sympathize with the plight of white South African farmers. I spent much time while in South Africa with white farmers, known as Boers. They were very much like the Homesteaders of the American West: tough, rough and ready, God-fearing and straight shooters.

Many Boer families had been in South Africa’s Natal Province and Orange Free State since the 1600’s, much longer than black Zulu or Xhosa tribes. They are the real South Africans. I called them and white Rhodesians ‘the lost white tribes of Africa.’ America would benefit from offering them new homes. But they deserve to keep their homes in South Africa and Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe).

I recall visiting isolated Boer farmers in the Transvaal, with the South African army mixed race units. We visited farmhouses that had held off attacks by African Congress guerillas. Some were burned and their white occupants murdered. Whites had begun to flee South Africa. So, Trump is right to offer them asylum. But what about Palestinians?

One of the world’s, oldest and most dangerous conflicts went critical this past week as nuclear armed India and Pakistan traded threats of war. The Kashmir conflict is the oldest one before the UN.

In my book `War at the Top of the World’ I warned that the confrontation over Kashmir, the beautiful mountain state claimed by both Islamabad and Delhi, could unleash a nuclear war that could kill millions and pollute the planet.

After three wars and many clashes, it seemed the two bad neighbors had allowed the Kashmir dispute to fade into the background as their relations slightly improved.

Then came the murder last week of 26 Indian tourists at Pahalgam, a Kashmir beauty spot, by Muslim insurgents. Kashmir was roughly divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. The larger part of Kashmir was annexed by Indian troops as the entire region was scourged by massacres and rapine.

As a result, India’s portion of Kashmir became the only Muslim majority state in India. Kashmiri Muslims have waged a bloody struggle since the 1980’s to leave India or join Pakistan. Today, 500,000 Indian troops and an equal number of paramilitary police garrison the restive province.

I’ve been under fire three times on the Line of Control that separates the two Kashmirs and at 15,000 feet altitude on the remote Siachen Glacier. I was with Pakistani President Musharraf after he tried to seize Kargil which lies above Kashmir.

The outside world cared little about the India-Pakistan conflict until both Delhi and Islamabad acquired nuclear weapons. Their ‘hatred of brothers’, as I called it, pits fanatical Hindus against equally ardent Muslims who share centuries of hatred and are being whipped up by politicians.

Right wing Hindu militants in Delhi demand reunification of pre-1947 ‘Mother India.’ Pakistan has about 251 million citizens; India has 1.4 billion and a much larger GDP. Pakistan would be unable to resist a full-bore attack by India’s huge armed forces. So, it relies on tactical nuclear weapons to compensate for the dangerous imbalance.

But both sides nuclear arsenals are on hair-trigger alert and pointed at the subcontinent’s major cities. A decade ago, the US think tank Rand Corp estimated an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange would kill three million immediately and injure 100 million. Such damage would pollute most of the region’s major riverine water sources all the way down to Southeast Asia.

Given the region’s poor communications and often obsolete technology, nuclear arsenals must be kept on high alert lest they be surprised and decapitated by a sudden missile attack from across the border. Accidents are frequent. Anyone who has traveled across India knows about this.

India’s right-wing politicians are loudly demanding revenge strikes against Pakistan as PM Modi stirs up anti-Muslim hatred in India – following the example set in America by his new ally, President Donald Trump. Pakistan is calling on its key ally, China, for support. India and China are at scimitars drawn over their poorly demarcated Himalayan border –another legacy of British imperialism.

India claims Pakistan’s intelligence service ISI was behind the Kashmir attacks. Pakistan denies Indian charges. I’m unsure. A decade ago, as a war correspondent, I joined Kashmiri mujahidin guerillas operating against Indian forces. At the time, Pakistan was quietly supporting the insurgents. I was extensively briefed on Kashmir by ISI officials.

Today, it’s uncertain if Pakistan is involved, as India claims. India, for its part, also supports rebel groups in Pakistani Baluchistan and around Karachi. India routinely commits atrocities against Muslim Kashmiri citizens. Muslim Kashmiris have attacked local Hindus and Sikhs.

India just threatened to shut off the rivers leading from Tibet that nurture Pakistan’s wheat farmers. Pakistan threatens to breach any Indian dams on the Indue River and its tributaries with nuclear weapons.

Everyone wants beautiful, green Kashmir.

The world mourns Pope Francis, a good, loving man who brought the Holy Mother Church back to the people and made his native Argentina proud.

Francis was a welcome change after the orthodoxy and rigidity of former Pope Benedict XVI who sent an icy chill through Catholicism. Francis did a lot to soften the image of Catholicism despite the many sexual and financial scandals that beset the church.

For me, a non-Catholic, the most important thing about the late pope, born Jose Bergoglio in Argentina, was his choice of papal name: Francisco in the Latin tongues.

He modeled himself after Saint Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, one of the most important and majestic figures in Catholic history. St. Francis was among the first spiritual leaders to call for the protection of the environment and humane treatment of and respect for all animals. The Franciscan Order was created in tribute to his teachings. St. Francis’ famous prayer for peace:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

He was particularly caring about two of the world’s most persecuted groups, Palestinians and animals. In a meat-eating world, the pope had to be cautious about how he spoke of animals, but his concern over the routine abuse and cruelty they routinely suffered everywhere was plain, if sometimes too gently stated, particularly in meat-mad Argentina.

Pope Francis called a tiny Palestinian Christian enclave in Gaza almost every night to check on their well-being and to offer them a scrap of comfort. One wishes he had been more vocal in denouncing the massacres in Gaza. However powerful the pope, he had to be thoughtful of the political and financial storm that any criticism of the United States and Israel would produce.

‘How many divisions does the pope have?’ mocked Stalin when warned of the Vatican’s reactions to his persecution of Catholics, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples.

None to be sure, but the great Polish warrior Pope, John Paul II, did much to undermine the hateful Soviet Union and free Poland from its claws. The non-political Pope Francis did not move with such panache, but his influence was still important and worldwide.

Despite ululating about how wonderful and merciful we are, we still murder tens of millions of animals daily, often in the most brutal manner. Baby male chicks are dumped into industrial grinders. Their fault: not producing eggs. Little sheep have their throats cut in April supposedly to please a Muslim, Christian and Jewish god. Millions of cows are ground up into burgers to feed our carnivorous youth.

Some 206 million chickens are killed daily in North America and 4 million little pigs. Millions of ducks are killed for food, 1.7 million rabbits. At least 5 billion animals are killed every day for food in hideous death factories we call ‘meat packers.’ As has often been said, if they had glass walls we would stop eating live animals.

Midwestern Republicans laud the industrial meat business. They think murdering baby animals is somehow righteous and godly.
I’ve gone to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi to pay my respects and pray for the souls of all our murdered animals. I pray we may one day learn to treat our animal cousins with humanity and respect. A good way to start would be meat-free Mondays.

We hope the next pope will have the same humanity and love for all living creatures and our earth that good Pope Francis had.

President Donald Trump wants to be a modern ‘Stupor Mundi or wonder of the world. The last ‘stupor mundi’ was the celebrated German Holy Roman Emperor and crusader, Federick II, known as ‘Barbarossa.’

It appears that President Trump seems determined to become the most important and commented upon person on earth. So far, he has succeeded brilliantly. So far, that is. As of this writing, Trump’s tariff crusade has become a debacle, making him and the United States the objects of hatred and fury around the plant – except for farm regions in the US and among Israel’s supporters. Now even the farmers in the Dakotas are mad as hornets at the president from Queens, New York for wrecking the soya bean market with new tariffs.

To many professional money men, it appears that Trump’s Russian roulette with tariffs threatens to bring a serious recession or worse. One of America’s smartest, most successful money managers, Ray Dalio, just warned that Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff proclamations and other economic policies threaten an eventual global meltdown. Dalio is a noted financial pessimist, but we are unwise to ignore his jeremiads now that America is up to its ears in too much debt.

As a historian, my mind goes quickly back to another financial miracle-worker, the infamous Scot, John Philip Law. He was a gambler who somehow convinced the bankrupt French king Louis XIV to replace gold coins with new paper money. Law created a paper company, the Mississippi Company, that was supposed to mind vast caches of gold.

Law became the richest man in Europe.

In 1720, Law’s company collapsed when it was unable to pay out gold for paper money. He fled to Venice. French state finances have never been the same since. Two other major get rich fast financial scams followed: the South Sea Island fraud and the great Tulip disaster.

We may be seeing a modern version of the Great Mississippi financial fiasco as scoundrels get their hands on the levers of state finance. Trump’s goals in his tariff jihad may be legit – to make America very rich for a short while before the rest of the world gangs up on the unloved USA.

But Trump’s methodology has been calamitous. He and his minions have ignited a worldwide panic, damaged US allies, enraged much of the globe and caused massive damage to world finance and business. And for what? To make President Trump the Stupor Mundi of the moment. Ego on steroids.

What all this betokens is the opening salvo of a coming US-China war. The 17th and 18th century trade wars offer ample evidence of how trade rivalries lead to wars. We are doing it again. We are wildly unwise to revert to the mercantilism of past eras during the nuclear era.

Even at the very end of his life, King Louis XIV knew his warlike, mercantilist policies were wrong. He urged his successor, Louis XV, to eschew expensive wars and to study peace. Young Louis followed this excellent advice and devoted himself to conquests of the boudoir.