Donald Trump

22 photos from, and my report about the 43rd “First Wednesday” monthly global vigils for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, which took place across the US and worldwide on and around Wednesday August 5, 2026. In the accompanying text, I summarize the history of the vigils, and discuss the significance of Guantánamo beyond its shamefully enduring manifestation as the last bastion of the Bush administration’s hideous “war on terror” — as a barbaric affirmation of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 regime of torture prisons for Palestinians, and as the inspiration for the sickening mass abduction and imprisonment of immigrants under Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, in which versions of Guantánamo have proliferated across the US mainland, and which I describe as “a national scandal on an almost unimaginable scale.”

My response to today’s claim, trumpeted by Donald Trump, that the Board of Peace — the body set up under his administration last October to implement a ceasefire and supervise the future of Gaza — has “reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all the other armed groups in Gaza.” Typically for Trump, this was a simplistic reading of an agreement made by Hamas to hand over its weapons to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), the Palestinian committee that was supposed to take over the day-to-day running of Gaza, but whose entry has been prevented by Israel, but only if Israel honors its unfulfilled commitments under last October’s ceasefire deal — to bring to an end its military activities, to stop seizing ever more land in Gaza, and to ensure adequate deliveries of humanitarian aid. As Netanyahu sought to dismiss the deal, a US official working with the Board of Peace publicly rebuked him for his intervention, and for failing to fulfil its obligations under the existing deal, but it remains to be seen if the US will do anything meaningful to restrain Israel if they fail to cooperate. Of course, all of this is dispiriting. It fails to recognize Israel as the aggressor, and it fails to recognize that Israel’s entire occupation is illegal, and, although there are some within the Board of Peace who are seeking to secure a viable future for the Palestinians, it must never be forgotten that, at its upper levels, the Board of Peace contains investors and real estate developers including Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who, in January, unveiled a plan for a techno-futuristic “New Gaza”, in which, as I explain, “the Palestinians themselves would, presumably, occupy nothing but the lowliest positions, servicing new super-rich colonizers on their own land, from which they would still be dispossessed — not through sickening religiously-inspired slaughter drawn from the Iron Age, but through the demeaning marginalization of service personnel in 21st century capitalism.” As I conclude, “For now, the Board of Peace’s route to the future is less horrific than Israel’s, but neither route offers what the Palestinians need and deserve and are entitled to, which is autonomy on their own land, and permanent peace from the genocidal monsters living next door to them.”

My review of the last week’s events relating to the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked war on Iran, beginning with the ceasefire talks in Pakistan between the US and Iran, which were derailed by the US’s undeserved arrogance, and in which questions were raised about whether or not Benjamin Netanyahu played a disruptive role from afar. I also examine the confusing response of Donald Trump who, in between lauding himself as Jesus and launching bitter attacks on the Pope, decided that blocking the already blocked Strait of Hormuz, which wasn’t blocked before the war began, was a good idea. This, however, can only add to the growing global energy crisis that it’s already too late to avert, but that will only get worse until the US and Israel are somehow persuaded to back down. I also look at the forthcoming negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in Washington, D.C., which look doomed to fail, because Israel, fresh from its sickening day of massacres in Lebanon last week, is apparently insistent on carving up the whole of southern Lebanon into a deserted buffer zone and an active military zone lasting for an unspecified amount of time, while leaving the Lebanese government with an unfulfillable requirement to disarm and dismantle Hezbollah in the north, or face further military action. As always, the most disturbing aspect of this entire chaotic situation is Israel’s obsession with endless, murderous aggression, which must be curbed if the entire region is to have any opportunity for any kind of peace.

My reflections on the last five days of horrors, from Donald Trump’s expletive-filled post threatening Iran on Easter Sunday to his even more disturbing post on April 7 when he threatened Iran with nuclear annihilation, stating, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”, and the widespread revulsion that greeted both posts, to the ceasefire deal agreed that evening, brokered with Pakistan, establishing a two-week period for negotiations aimed at ensuring a lasting peace. Israel, excluded from the negotiations, immediately launched attacks on Lebanon of unprecedented savagery, even though ending its hostilities in Lebanon was included in the ceasefire deal, either in an effort to sabotage the deal or to indulge in a last burst of sickening genocidal fury before complying. My feeling, as I describe it, is that, “Whatever comes next, it seems pretty clear that Iran has won, and that both Trump and Netanyahu have suffered spectacularly resounding defeats”, from which neither may recover. I can only hope that this will happen. As I explain, although it “wouldn’t fundamentally change the juggernauts of horror in either country, it might be enough of a break to pull us back from what, otherwise, looks like nothing less than an ever-growing and all-compassing darkness of bottomless depravity.”

Today marks 900 days since Israel began its genocide in the Gaza Strip, a sustained assault of such naked and self-glorifying depravity, shamefully supported by most of the west, that it has left billions of us struggling to cope with what the very notion of our humanity means. It also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, one of over 270 Palestinian journalists murdered by Israel. To mark these grim anniversaries, I cycle though Israel’s atrocities, almost unbroken for two years, with the exception of a six-week ceasefire in January and February last year, noting how every red line regarding appropriate conduct in war has been eviscerated, and how Israel’s crimes are so numerous that it’s hard to even remember them all. I also update the story of Gaza since a supposedly permanent ceasefire was declared on October 10 last year. This brought to an end Israel’s relentless carpet-bombing, but in every other respect the genocide has continued, albeit more slowly. Crucially, humanitarian aid — and especially medical supplies — are still severely restricted, and Israel has retained complete control of 60% of the Gaza Strip, hemming the surviving Palestinian population into the remaining 40%, where they largely live in subsistence-level squalor. Crucially, I note how the template of Gaza’s extermination — the relentless killing of civilians and the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure — has now expanded to Iran, since the US-Israeli “war” began three weeks ago, while Israel also seeks to replicate the Gaza model in Lebanon, and has also stepped up its violence in the West Bank. Where we go from here is still unknown. While Israel has very clearly descended into a psychotic mania that seeks the death of their “enemies” at every moment, I suggest that Trump’s supreme folly was allowing himself to be talked into joining Netanyahu in his deranged 40-year dream of destroying Iran, and wonder if there can be an “off-ramp” before he is held responsible for what, through the massive disruption to oil and gas supplies, is looking like a looming global economic crisis on an unprecedented scale.

As the illegal US-Israeli “war” on Iran continues, with, last night, horrific attacks on Tehran’s oil refineries that enveloped the city in a toxic, apocalyptic black fossil fuel cloud, I examine what has led to this point: the grotesque convergence of the two most malignant ideologies in the world today — Zionism, under the malignant leadership of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Christian Zionism, its absurd but deadly offshoot in the US, whose adherents believe that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and the wider Levant region is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In prayer meetings in the White House, Christian Zionists lay hands on Trump and worship him as though he is Christ reborn, but while the godless Trump gave the go-ahead for the US to join Israel in its deadly crusade, he is growing noticeably more incoherent, and it is Pete Hegseth, the woefully unqualified Secretary of Defense (rebranded as the Secretary of War), who has become the more prominent face of the “war”, embracing Christian Zionism, and delivering grotesquely vile and violent speeches at press conferences, enthusing about the genocidal slaughter of the entire Iranian people. Can anyone rein in these dark forces before they collapse the global economy, through the massive disruption to the production of, and distribution of the fossil fuels on which the entire edifice of global civilization depends, or are we witnessing an unprecedented manifestation of extreme evil, which, between Trump, the Zionists and the Christian Zionists, now exists solely to rain down apocalyptic genocidal extermination not only on Iran and the rest of the Middle East, but on the whole world?

My analysis of how the US and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked “war” on Iran demonstrates extraordinary hubris on the part of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — the Ancient Greek concept of fatal overreach through excessive pride and arrogance. For Netanyahu, this is the fulfilment of a dream he has cherished for 40 years, into which he has, one way or another, dragged Donald Trump, who has, increasingly, during his deranged second term, become deluded by his own self-importance. So blinded are both men by their own blinkered obsessions that they failed to take into account Iran’s size, its population, and its long and proud history, or how its first actions — assassinating Ayatollah Khameini and his family, as well as other senior officials — would make him a martyr and increase national solidarity, rather than encouraging regime change. So blinded are they by their hubris that they also failed to recognize that, since their 12-day war on Iran last June, the Iranians have been preparing for renewed attacks, stockpiling weapons and identifying targets in Israel and on US bases throughout the Middle East at least as assiduously as their enemies. They also failed to realize that their “war” would have unintended consequences — leading insurers to stop insuring vessels carrying essential oil and gas supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, and also leading countries in the Gulf to suspend production for safety reasons, causing an economic crisis that will bring misery to much of the world unless they can be prevailed upon to withdraw. Will they recognize their dangerous hubristic folly, or are they determined to do nothing but destroy, no matter the cost, even if it leads to their own destruction?

On day three of Donald Trump’s cataclysmically stupid decision to indulge Benjamin Netanyahu in his malignant 40-year dream of destroying Iran, I explain how, in some key respects, it’s starting to look as though it will backfire on him spectacularly. Firstly, Pentagon officials have stated that “Iran was not planning to strike US forces or bases in the Middle East unless Israel attacked Iran first”, undermining Trump’s claim that the joint US-Israeli attacks were aimed at “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, leaving him particularly vulnerable because he neither sought nor received approval for his unprovoked attacks from either Congress or the UN Security Council. Secondly, US allies throughout the Gulf have, as I describe it, “discovered that their long-standing alliances with the US, in which they were offered protection in exchange for allowing the US to establish military bases on their soil, have turned out, when tested, to be nothing but a mirage.” And, thirdly, Trump’s indifference to US casualties, which he announced when the military operation began, and reiterated last night in a video message in which he breezily dismissed further US military deaths as “that’s just the way it is”, will not reassure the majority of US voters who are opposed to the attacks that Trump has any fundamental interest whatsoever in the lives of US military personnel. As the fallout from the US’s selfishness continues to test the strength of long-held alliances in the Gulf, perhaps the most burning question concerns the reasons for Trump’s support of Netanyahu’s long-cherished dream. Can it really be that this is the US’s first pedophile blackmail war, undertaken because Israel has evidence of Trump’s sexual crimes that were deliberately hidden in the recent release of millions of pages from the Epstein Files?

My analysis of the shameful launch, this morning, of unprovoked military action against Iran, undertaken in joint attacks by the US and Israel, which were defended by Donald Trump, in a pre-recorded video message on social media, as “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime”, even though no “imminent threats” exist, and this is blatantly a “war” of choice. Amongst the most sickening aspects of this unprovoked war are Trump’s complete sidelining of Congress, even though no war can legally be launched without Congressional approval, his disturbing suggestions that US military personnel might be killed, and fundamental questions about why he is so willing to support attacks that are a long-cherished dream of Benjamin Netanyahu, but that have no evident upside for the US. Is it because he has been bought? Is it because of blackmail, based on the Israelis’ possession of incriminating evidence from the Epstein Files? Or is is, as I suggest, because, like Netanyahu, Trump is a vile old man, nearing the end of his wretched existence, who clings to life solely to deliver as much death and misery as he can to as many people as possible?

My report about the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace” in Washington, D.C. last week, the day after Ramadan began, when the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip sought to bring their devastated homeland back to joyful life with lanterns, lights and celebrations. The meeting of Trump’s would-be alternative to the UN — whose newly-recruited members include autocrats, those seeking to curry favor with Trump, and the Gulf and Muslim countries determined to maintain influence over the “peace process” — was notable for its expansion of the vile, heartless and profit-obsessed techno-futuristic plans for a “New Gaza” that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, unveiled at Davos last month, dressed up as opportunities for peace and stability. Of particular concern was the revelation that the entire plan had originated in the earliest days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza by Yakir Gabay, an Israeli-Cypriot real estate billionaire, who, with the help of his good friend Kushner, had then sought out similarly-minded opportunists to make his grotesque plan a reality. Also deeply troubling was a presentation by the former Israeli intelligence official Liran Tancman, for the development, in Gaza, of a “cashless society” of total digital control, from which, of course, as I describe it, “anyone regarded as unwanted, for whatever reason, could be completely cut off from all economic activity — a scenario of ‘blackmail and pacification’, as described by the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada”, and one that numerous governments worldwide will be keeping a close eye on, as they seek to replicate it on their own populations. While Israel’s voracious hunger to resume its genocide is still largely being kept at bay, it continues to push against the rosy visions of the billionaire developers, but all their hopes require the disarmament of Hamas and the other Palestinian factions, which Israel has failed to achieve, and which Hamas itself has wisely refused to contemplate, offering only to hand over political control — and its weapons — to a Palestinian body empowered to establish autonomy; in other words, the Palestinian technocratic committee that is part of the peace process, but which everyone involved wants to keep sidelined. As I explain, however, “No other solution can bring the peace that all parties claim to want, and any alternative course of action will only expose the truth behind their masks: on the one hand, on Israel’s part, the most grotesque enthusiasm for genocide that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, and, on the other, the repulsive greed of the western investors who only ever see the world through the prism of dollar signs.”