They prob­a­bly don’t know it and wouldn’t acknowl­edge it any­way,  but Ali Khamenei, Binyamin Netanyahu and Don­ald Trump owe the com­mon god they claim as an exclu­sive ally the same thing: a lit­tle time off.

At the moment, the unholy trio are the bad jokes that prove the truth of the late come­di­an George Carlin’s assess­ment: “The God excuse, the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument.”
For starters, if you adhere to any of the three great monothe­is­tic reli­gions, you have to admit that your deity (he/she/it/or what­ev­er) must have already done more than enough work just cre­at­ing the cos­mos. includ­ing Earth and all its glory.
Then there are all those prayers to be answered, sports stars to help win games and races, fools  to save from them­selves and athe­ists who changed their minds in uncount­ed fox­holes in the idi­ot­ic wars we insist on.
And all those pale to mere details in the face of polit­i­cal lead­ers who insist they have exclu­sive call on divine inter­ven­tion and back­ing on a mas­sive scale.
As Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei abus­es the moral pedestal of an Islam­ic theoc­ra­cy to con­trol a cor­rupt, repres­sive police state and threat­ens to man­u­fac­ture nuclear weapons to defend it. Con­sid­er­ing that “Death to Israel” and “Death to Amer­i­ca” have been the mantra of the Iran­ian regime since 1979, how­ev­er, the “defence” argu­ment is rather disingenuous.
If the mor­tal impre­ca­tions were to meet with divine favour, the Aya­tol­lah and his ilk and acolytes would shout “Allah hu Akbar” (God is Great) loud enough to shake the heav­ens, and expect  a resound­ing pos­i­tive response.

                         BIBLICAL DEFENCE

Lest any­one miss the point whose side the Israelis think the one deity is real­ly on, since its birth near­ly 75 years ago the Israeli mil­i­tary has anoint­ed near­ly half of all its oper­a­tions with names that have Bib­li­cal roots, accord­ing to Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, a researcher at Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty in Israel.
Exam­ples include: Peace for Galilee (1982 inva­sion of Lebanon), Gideon’s Char­i­ots (Gaza), and Arrow of Bashan  (Syr­ia). Bib­li­cal­ly-inspired weapon­ry names embrace: The Gospel (AI sys­tem used in Gaza),  Jeri­cho (bal­lis­tic mis­sile) and weapons sys­tems denot­ed Sam­son and David’s Sling.
Netanyahu and his allies quite right­ly rail against Iran as a “state spon­sor of ter­ror­ism” with prox­ies doing its dirty work.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that the same terms can be applied to the Israeli mil­i­tary stand­ing by while mobs of armed Jew­ish set­tlers in the West Bank have car­ried out more than 1800 attacks on Pales­tini­ans since Octo­ber 7, 2023. Homes, vehi­cles and olive groves have been smashed and torched and Pales­tini­ans assault­ed and shot.
The set­tlers pro­fess what they call “Judea and Samaria” was giv­en to them by divine right mil­len­nia ago, so Pales­tini­ans have no right to be there.
In non-reli­gious terms, the rough­ly 250 Israeli set­tle­ments in the ter­ri­to­ry are in vio­la­tion of the Fourth Gene­va Con­ven­tion, and hence ille­gal under inter­na­tion­al law.

                  THE CHRISTIAN VERSION

Announc­ing the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facil­i­ties, Pres­i­dent Trump called it  “the likes of which the world has not seen in many, many decades.”
The pres­i­dent, who self-describes as a “non-denom­i­na­tion­al Chris­t­ian” and whose knowl­edge of the Bible seems to begin and end with sign­ing copies and then sell­ing them, thanked the U.S. mil­i­tary “…and  in par­tic­u­lar, God. I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great mil­i­tary. Pro­tect them. God bless the Mid­dle East. God bless Israel and God bless Amer­i­ca. Thank you very much. Thank you.”
One won­ders what what­ev­er form of the deity to which he’d like us to think he feels behold­en would make of spend­ing an esti­mat­ed $196-mil­lion to drop bombs, after approv­ing mas­sive cuts to for­eign aid in the name of cost-cut­ting, which Oxfam Amer­i­ca warns “… could cause 23 mil­lion chil­dren to lose access to edu­ca­tion… up to 95 mil­lion peo­ple could lose access to basic health­care, poten­tial­ly lead­ing to over 3 mil­lion pre­ventable deaths per year.”
My bet is that alone pre­cludes any divine inter­ven­tion to help along the Trumpian fan­ta­sy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
At about the same time satel­lite imagery of the dam­age alleged­ly done by the 14 “bunker buster” bombs  in Iran, the Rubin Obser­va­to­ry in Chile, the largest dig­i­tal cam­era ever built, with rough­ly the same num­ber of pix­els as 260 mod­ern cell phone sen­sors, was cap­tur­ing images that ‘.. will pro­duce the most detailed time-lapse view of the cos­mos that has ever existed.”
It seems to me polit­i­cal lead­ers would do well to reflect on the idea that the deity they invoke for wars might con­sid­er that – and human­i­tar­i­an aid — a bet­ter use of inge­nu­ity, intel­li­gence and mon­ey than weapon­ry, both “con­ven­tion­al” and nuclear, to wreck our minute place in the cos­mos they alleged­ly believe their cho­sen ver­sion of god created

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