Saturday, April 4, 2026

"We may speak thousands of languages, but we all call this planet home. No matter where we come from, protecting our Earth is a shared responsibility. We need more ambitious #ClimateAction — for our planet and the generations to come."

United Nations

We may speak thousands of languages, but we all call this planet home. No matter where we come from, protecting our Earth is a shared responsibility. We need more ambitious #ClimateAction — for our planet and the generations to come. — via @UNDP

https://x.com/UN/status/2040399735526195506

UN Development- Working to end poverty, inequality & climate change & advance the #GlobalGoals.

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO see art or read good articles or quotes IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

Over 100 US legal experts condemn strikes on Iran as possible ‘war crimes’ : United States-based scholars sign open letter raising concerns about conduct, rhetoric during US-Israeli war on Iran.

[The war, which is costing U.S. taxpayers between $1-2 billion each day, is imposing significant harm to civilians in the region, has resulted in the loss of hundreds of civilian lives across the Middle East, and is causing serious environmental and economic harms. https://www.justsecurity.org/135423/professors-letter-international-law-iran-war/ ]

A picture released by the Iranian government's foreign media department shows graves being prepared for victims, mostly children, of a United States attack on a girls' primary school in Minab, Iran [Iranian Foreign Media Department via AP]

By Al Jazeera Staff

More than 100 United States-based international law experts have signed an open letter condemning US and Israeli military strikes on Iran as a violation of the United Nations Charter and potentially amounting to “war crimes”.

The letter, published on Thursday, also said the conduct of US forces and statements by senior US officials “raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law”.

The scholars warned that the US-Israeli campaign, which began on February 28, was launched without UN Security Council authorisation and without credible evidence of an imminent Iranian threat.

“Force against another state is only permitted in self-defense against an actual or imminent armed attack or where authorized by the UN Security Council. The Security Council did not authorize the attack. Iran did not attack Israel or the United States,” the letter said.

The experts’ concerns fall into four areas: the legality of the decision to go to war; the conduct of hostilities; threatening rhetoric from senior officials; and what they describe as the dismantling of civilian protection structures inside the US government under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “gloves off” approach to warfare.

The scholars highlighted a strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the war that killed at least 175 people, most of them children, as well as attacks on hospitals, water plants and energy infrastructure.

“We are seriously concerned about strikes that have hit schools, health facilities, and homes,” the letter said.

Alarming disrespect’ for international law

The letter also condemned public statements by senior US officials, including President Donald Trump.

In particular, it noted a mid-March comment from Trump where he said the US may conduct strikes on Iran “just for fun”. It also cited comments from Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth from early March in which he said the US does not fight with “stupid rules ⁠of engagement”.

“Public statements by senior officials indicate an alarming disrespect for the rules of international humanitarian law accepted by states, and which protect both civilians and members of the armed forces,” the letter said.

It also added that the war is costing US taxpayers up to $2bn a day.... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/over-100-us-legal-experts-condemn-strikes-on-iran-as-possible-war-crimes

Death, displacement and military duties: children plunged into crisis by Middle East war. The US-Israeli war will have a lifelong impact on millions of children across the Middle East

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/children-us-israel-iran-war-middle-east

Displaced children arrange a bouquet of flowers outside their tent in a carpark in Beirut’s waterfront area. Photograph: Ibrahim Amro/AFP/Getty Images

Unicef’s representative to Lebanon, Marcoluigi Corsi, warned last month that displacement would have lasting effects on the children. “This relentless cycle of bombardment and displacement is severely compounding their psychological scars, embedding deep-seated fear and threatening profound, long-term emotional harm,” said Corsi.

Ahmed said he has already seen some of these effects in his own children. When Israeli jets break the sound barrier or bomb Beirut, his son starts to run, trying to hide from a bomb he thinks will land on him.

Ahmed himself is exhausted. He had to leave his wife and 17-year-old daughter in the hospital in Tyre after they were injured in the bombing of their house. He shows a picture of his comatose wife in a hospital bed, counting her ailments: Skull fractured in 33 places, internal bleeding, spinal injuries.

“They say she won’t make it,” Ahmed said, looking at his children. “The children are kept busy now, they’re playing. But when they come home and don’t find their mother there, it will be a disaster.”

Deaths, injuries and mourning in Palestine

Despite a ceasefire which is now more than five months old, health officials in Gaza say at least 50 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the Iran conflict began more than a month ago. The number of child fatalities is unclear but on 29 March Israeli airstrikes on checkpoints killed at least six Palestinians, including a girl, according to local rescue services.

The Gaza Strip has not recovered from 23 months of Israeli bombardment, which killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed hospitals and schools in what a UN investigation found to be a genocide. Up until October last year, an average of at least one Palestinian child was being killed every hour. The number of children killed by Israeli forces in its war on Gaza surpassed 20,000 late last year, according to Save the Children.

While the Iran war did not open a new front in Gaza, it has deepened insecurity and resulted in an intensification of ongoing Israeli military operations... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/04/children-us-israel-iran-war-middle-east

What Would Jesus Say to a Zionist Christian? ... (umkahlil wrote this in 2009, and it is just as applicable today.)

umkahlil

Thursday, September 10, 2009

What Would Jesus Say (to a Zio-Christian)?

Holy Family Catholic Church in Ramallah

Time to re-visit, as administrators like to say, the Christian Zionists. This is a response to the usual blather from one of the the Armageddon is nigh types:

You ask rhetorically, Who Are the Palestinians? just before you admonish them to take up residence in one of the twenty-two Arab countries so that European and American Jews may live in Palestine without Arabs.

What you don't seem to get, full of the usual canards that you are is that Palestinians are a diverse people, just like any people. We certainly are not all alike. I am a Christian Palestinian; twenty percent of the Palestinians are Christian. We are the original stones; that is, the original Christians descended from the apostles. My father was born in Ramallah, which before 1948, was a totally Christian village. I can asssure you that none of my relatives nor I wish to see Jews obliterated.

Most Palestinians would just like to return to their towns and villages from which they were expelled to make way for European and American Jews. I think that it is very sad that our grandmothers and grandfathers may not return to their villages to be buried, yet any Jew, from anywhere in the world may immigrate to Israel and become an instant citizen. I wonder how Christ would view this injustice.

Would Christ be happy that Zionist Jews shoot children in the head and the heart? Johnny Thalijieh was an altar boy at a Greek Orthodox Church; he was shot by an Israeli soldier while he was standing in front of his uncle's store. Do you know that the Christian villagers of Bir'im watched as the Israelis bombed their village in the 1950's? Even though the villagers wanted to live peacefully among the Israelis and didn't even want the part of the land back that European Jews had stolen from them, the Israelis wanted to assure that they would not return so they bombed their beloved village.

Would Christ condone land theft and house demolitions? Would Christ condone a Zionist Jewish settler in Hebron who screams "whore" at her Palestinian neighbor and directs her children to throw rocks at her in hopes that she'll leave her home?

I find it very arrogant to expect my relatives and countrymen to leave their homes and take up residence in any Arab country so that European and American Jews may continue to devastate and wreck havoc in what once was a Holy and peaceful land. We do not come from Syria; we do not come from Saudi Arabia; we do not come from Qatar or Dubai or Kuwait; our home is Palestine. This is a story that I wrote about Christian Zionists:

An Apology From a US Christian to Palestinians

This is my apology for Christians in the US to Muslims, the Arab World, and particularly Palestinians. Too many of my co-religionists have made a travesty of the Golden Rule which unequivocally compels us, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

For example Ed McAteer, founder of the Moral Majority, and a Christian Zionist who doesn't believe Israel should relinquish any of the illegally occupied territories, was asked by Bob Simon of CBS News: "What about the three million Palestinians who live on the West Bank and Gaza?"Simon said that McAteer suggested that " . . . the bulk of them could be cleansed . . . and moved to some Arab country."

Not to be outdone, Kay Arthur, of Precept Ministries, an organization that leads tours to Israel, told Simon that Yitzak Rabin's signing of the Oslo Accords was a mistake " . . . and I believe that God stopped it by the things that happened," a not so indirect reference to Rabin's death by assassination.

In March 2002, Ariel Sharon invaded the occupied territories again. George Bush unequivocally told him to get out. Jerry Falwell launched a campaign in which his minions, estimated at 20-26 million, phoned, e-mailed, and wrote letters to Bush and Congress. Bush didn't say another word as Sharon unleashed another vicious attack on the indigenous people of the occupied territories and Falwell boasted, "The Bible Belt is Israel's safety net in the US."

One incitement to hatred that I found particularly appalling from my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ is the following from the Fourth International Christian Congress on Biblical Zionism.

"We also urge the Church to recognize that local Christian Arabs have been living under unbearable circumstances due to abusive Islamic coercion and intimidation."

My father was a Palestinian Orthodox Christian. When he lay dying four years ago, the person who visited him most frequently, and who came a long way from Northern California to do so was the son of a prominent Jerusalem Muslim cleric. Indeed, my father and Sa'eb were friends for most of their adult lives. For US Christian Zionists to make a proclamation about supposed animosity between Muslim and Christian Palestinians is the height of audacity and ignorance.

Indeed, the fate of the Christian Palestinian is no different than that of the Muslim if these millions strong fanatical hatemongers hold sway. In fact, Palestinians are chastised for seeking solace in Christ for their suffering. To the Christian Zionists it is no more than "exploitation of His suffering and sacrifice for temporal and devious political purposes."

Christian Zionist websites still peddle misinformation that has been debunked not only by Palestinian historians, but also Israeli historians. "There simply is no distinct Palestinian entity," proclaims retired Brigadier General James Hutchens of the JerUSAlem Connection. Particularly galling is his pernicious use of the word "so-called" when putting "Palestinian" before people.

And then he proceeds to pontificate on what we are "in reality." People without a "distinct culture." People to whom he referred in "An Open Letter to President Bush," as "from God's viewpoint . . . the illegal occupants, not the Israelis."

Christian Zionist websites repeatedly bleat that Allah is not "our" God although as a Christian Palestinian I call upon God, "Ya Allah." As the daughter of a Christian Palestinian I am the descendent of the original stones, the first Christians, although the Christian Zionists consider my Palestinian brethren, both Muslim and Christian as "illegal" occupants of the land to which they're indigenous. It is particulary hateful for these Bible Belters to make the ignorant assumption that Palestinians lack a discernable "culture." Assuming that they did not have a distinct culture, does it give anyone a right to ethnically cleanse them? To the Christian Zionists, Palestinians are the children of a lesser God.

For their malice, for their perversion of Christianity, for their promulgation of lies regarding the Palestinian people and their history in Palestine, for their demonisation of the Palestinians, for their lack of regard for the dwindling numbers of their co-religionists in Palestine, for the lies that their leaders spew about God; i.e., "Those who promote a Palestinian state have placed themselves in alliance against God," for their incitement to hatred, for their advocating ethnic cleansing, for their role in promoting Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories, for those who believe as does Gary Bauer, co-founder of Stand For Israel, that it is an "obscenity" to give up land for peace, and for their complete and total abdication of the Golden Rule, I apologize to the Palestinians on behalf of US Christians.

For those US Christians among us who are appalled at what our co-religionists are doing in our name, and who still consider "the least of their brethren," please look to those Palestinian Christians such as Reverend Naim Ateek, the founder of liberation theology, and an advocate of "spirituality based on justice, peace, nonviolence, and love." That's what I thought Christianity was all about. Let us not allow it to be hijacked by the fanatics.

https://umkahlil.blogspot.com/search?q=Christian

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