The world of overbearing tyrants

The title of my column echoes the sermon of the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost). The Holy Father did not mention any name but it is who the cap fits should wear it. Immediately President Donald Trump jumped into a fight with the pope saying the pope was talking about him despite the fact that as a pastor of God, he was preaching what our Lord Jesus had commissioned him to preach to the whole world. Trump could not be consoled threatening to fight the man of God to surrender. He even said the pope’s brother in Chicago was an ardent supporter of his “Make America Great Again – MAGA. He even bragged that if he had not been president, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost would not have been elected pope. This is of course an unverifiable claim. The poor cleric of God was saying the obvious in a world in which President Vladimir Putin of Russia was ordering the murder of thousands of Ukrainian women, children and the elderly against the international war protocols. The prime minister of Israel was committing genocide in Gaza killing hundreds of thousands of the same category of humanity that Putin was killing in Ukraine. If the truth must be said Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel has committed not only genocide in Gaza, he is doing the same in Lebanon as he had done in Syria and is now joining Donald Trump in doing  it in Iran.

Netanyahu has become so power drunk that he is saying Israel has joined the ranks of the super powers. Nobody seems to be able to call him to order for fear of being labelled as committing the crime of antisemitism. The case of Israel is just too sad to be forgiven as just a crime dictated by the exigencies of war. Israel has wasted the goodwill earned by the suffering of the Jews in the course of their history during  which they were victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms, Nazi “final solution” during which time Jews were industrially murdered not only by Germans  but aided by  the French, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and other Europeans. Because of this terrible sin committed against the Jews, the rest of the world has had to tolerate unnecessary violence by the Israelis against other people especially the Arabs and now the Persians (Iranians).

The world needs to wake up in case the tide of history may turn against the Jews who have to permanently cohabitate with the Arabs and others in the Middle East. Friends of Israel must advise the government of Israel to be careful of its treatment of Israeli Christians and Arabs who are being prevented from accessing their holy places of worship as was done to Christians who wanted to worship in Bethlehem during Easter. Recently, Christian statutes in churches in Southern Lebanon were defaced by irreverent Israeli troops and Christian pilgrims are sometimes taunted by Israeli security who call them pagans! The whole world or at least substantial portions of it are beginning to wonder what has befallen their adored Israeli state with their skills in science, medicine and agriculture and knowledge of turning the desert to fertile land.

My prayer is that the old Israel will come back and be the Israel that my Bible enjoins us Christians to pray for because I personally cannot pray for the present murderous Netanyahu state. As we say when things are bad that “God has departed from Israel”, my hope this may not be a permanent sobriquet for the state of Israel.

If lovers of Israel are not happy with the current violent tendencies of the current state of Israel, what do we say about the United States of America, otherwise known as “God’s own country”, the country of the brave and the free? This was the origin of modern democracy as imperfect as it might have been in 1776. When the 13 colonies of America broke away from the British Empire, they issued a classic document of freedom or death and that all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, even if the drafters of this document were slave owners, they at least had a vision which they aimed to attain. It took America a long period from 1776 to 1965 Civil Rights legislation for outsiders to see that the United States was the land of freedom. But the country that produced extraordinary leaders like Fredrick Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,   Lyndon Baines Johnson,   Donald Reagan, George Walker Bush, James Carter, and Barrack Hussein Obama to mention a few in recent times.

There was a time in human history when America was the beacon of freedom and hope to the world. I grew up in the era of JF Kennedy when all young people wanted to be American, if not   American, to at least visit or talk, speak, dress and even walk tall like an American. America conquered the world with soft power of culture and later the computer and internet. To us in the South of the world, America for centuries has always been looked up to as a country of political liberalism and economic prosperity. The United States has generously donated food to the hungry and medicine to the sick as well as scholarships to brilliant young people of our countries. The USAID and American information services and its libraries and radio have provided needed media for the youth of the developing world. Of course there have been instances of withdrawal from the world reflecting internal political differences and divisions between the two rival political parties in the USA - the Republican and the Democratic parties, we have however never seen a time like the current time when a whole continent is branded a “shithole continent” and where its citizens are deemed as undesirable and unwelcome and people previously holding genuine valid visas are told to stay in their own countries.

The agencies targeting developing countries’ problems such as USAID have been closed down and technical aid directed at taking care of people suffering from such diseases as AIDS have been cancelled by President Donald Trump’s administration. It seems that Black Americans are simply excluded from the present administration despite the fact that a larger percentage of the Black electorate voted for the current Republican administration than before. I suppose Trump can say he threw some missiles into Nigeria to warn the country that he will not allow Muslim terrorists to kill their Christian compatriots.  Does he expect us to celebrate this as our own share of Trump’s victory?

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The Trump administration has armed Israel to the teeth to kill Palestinians in Gaza and to join him in killing Iranians and celebrating it to the world. We now witness a situation of kidnapping president of Venezuela and his wife from their bedroom and hauling them before a trial judge in New York. Government officials, scientists and military officers of countries he differs from are now murdered in daylight without consequences. These illegal things which constitute international crimes are what the Pontiff has been decrying and President Trump is beefing about. Do leaders of the world religions keep quiet in the face of wickedness, murder and genocide?  I suppose, like Adolf Hitler, Trump can ask how many army divisions does the pope have.

The blockading of ports of countries with differences of opinion from American president may lead to confrontation with other world powers like China and the Russian federation which may want to continue trading with those Trump wants to exclude from international trade. The global hegemony that Trump’s America appears determined to believe in may lead to clash and global conflagration. There world may at the end be grateful to the pope and men of God who call for restraint on what appears  to be untrammelled power by global tyrants .