Description: A European man’s arm holds up a sword, implicitly likening the Axis to the Crusaders, and behind it are three Baltic flags and two other European ones: the flag of Lithuania, the flag of Latvia, the flag of the Third Reich, a flag of Finland, and the flag of Estonia. In the background is an unarmed Bolshevik skeleton (equating Bolshevism with death) looking at the sword with concern, almost trembling before it.

Prior to the recent trips to DPRK and [the Socialist Republic of] Vietnam, Putin conducted a two-day visit in [the People’s Republic of] China in late May. In addition to meeting with [President] Xí Jìnpíng, Putin also met with students at the Harbin Institute of Technology, known for its defense research and its work with the People’s Liberation Army.

Unlike [the People’s Republic of] China, the DPRK and [the Socialist Republic of] Vietnam, Russia is not a [people’s republic], and therefore, it does not have a centrally planned economy spearheaded by a pro-working class political party. Russia has been a capitalist country since the counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union in 1991.

U.S. foreign policy since 1992 has explicitly planned U.S. economic and military hegemony in all world regions, which meant planning to weaken and divide Russia so that it could never compete as a rival capitalist power. This included expanding the U.S.-commanded NATO up to the Russian border, conflicts with Russian allies in West Asia and the overthrow of a government in Ukraine in 2014 that was friendly to Moscow.

Putin’s recent trip shows that Russian diplomacy is successfully countering U.S. [neo]imperialism’s aggressive policies.

Providence, one of Oregon’s largest corporations, owns one-quarter of Oregon’s health care market. The yearly income of Providence CEOs has risen to $10 million. The nurses are being offered a 7% raise the first year and only 3% in subsequent years, less than the annual rate of inflation.

On June 1, Oregon became the second state, after California, to establish mandatory nurse staffing ratios. The law establishes minimum staffing ratios to ensure quality patient care and to prevent nurse burnout, but the law is insufficient, as it gives the hospital corporations some flexibility. The ONA is insisting on maximum nurse-patient ratios. The union wants the contract to go beyond the minimum allowed by law, ensuring safer staffing ratios at Providence whereby nurses can provide care for patients with a wide range of needs.

Exactly one year ago, 1,800 Providence nurses and staff at three other Oregon locations carried out a week-long strike, demanding better health care coverage, paid time off, higher wages and improved staffing levels. An ONA speaker at last year’s strike rally called for fewer millionaires and more nurses. Since COVID-19 began, she said, “CEOs’ pay is up and staffing pay is down.” (workers.org/2023/06/71964/)

Last year, those striking nurses won wage increases between 17% and 26%, additional paid time off and a promise to add nurses in order to comply with Oregon’s staffing law.

After the current strike ended, because of a five-day contract Providence made with replacement (scab) nurses, the hospital locked out several striking nurses until June 23.

Nicole Hudson, an emergency room charge nurse at the Willamette Falls Medical Center, told this reporter that by not letting all the nurses back to work at the same time, “Providence is violating their contract, trying to separate us and cause discord between nurses.” She said the situation inside the hospital is dangerous now. There are reports from the inside that replacement workers don’t have the right experience for the job.

Hudson stressed: “We are united, demanding that we return to work as a unit to deliver the quality care we are trained for, that feels gratifying.”

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine appreciates the announcement by the Republic of Cuba to join the lawsuit filed by South Africa against the “israeli” occupation in the International Court of Justice.

They describe it as an important and courageous step that reaffirms Cuba’s historic, steadfast and supportive stance on the rights of the Palestinian people.

Cuba’s joining of this lawsuit represents a qualitative addition to the efforts seeking to prosecute the Zionist entity for the genocidal crimes it continues to commit in the Gaza Strip and to continue the pressure to stop this destructive war waged with U.S. and Western partnership.

The Front calls on all countries supporting the rights of the Palestinian people to emulate Cuba’s step and join international efforts aimed at condemning the occupation for committing genocide and prosecuting its leaders and all those involved with them from Western leaders in the International Criminal Court as a step towards delegitimizing this rogue Zionist entity.

A new poll conducted by Zionist media finds that, among settlers who previously lived in northern occupied Palestine, 28% of those surveyed said that they would never return, 46% said they would only return if there was a “clear solution.”

Nearly all of them stated that “the state has abandoned them.” Some settlers have taken it upon themselves to attempt to secede from the Zionist entity, while others formed a refugee camp.

Over 230,000 settlers have been displaced from the northern settlements for the last nine months as a result of the strikes of the resistance.

The affiliation agreement gives the ALU the exclusive right to organize other New York City area Amazon facilities into the Teamsters union, which has pledged an initial $8 million toward that effort.

The ALU’s rôle in Amazon organizing drives outside of Metro New York is defined in the agreement, with a minimum of three members involved in planning and strategy sessions. This essentially affirms the contributions of President Chris Smalls and other ALU leaders in the first unionization victory at an Amazon warehouse, the JFK8 facility in Staten Island, New York.

Workers attempting to organize Amazon’s largest airplane hub, KCVG in Kentucky, have also affiliated with the Teamsters. The union created an Amazon division in 2021.

The near-unanimous vote by Staten Island Amazon workers to affiliate with the Teamsters means from now on organizing drives will have the backing of one of the biggest U.S. unions, with 1.3 million members.

As anti-imperialist Bronxites, we reject the bourgeois co-optation of queer revolt, the Zionist attempt to pinkwash the genocide in Gaza and the consistent pushing out of Bronxites by capitalist real estate developers.

While many of our trans siblings are unable to afford the health care necessary for gender reaffirming care, those in the Zionist entity are allotted free health care with our tax dollars.

Politicians use pinkwashing to gain our votes and then use their power to bankroll Israeli occupation while failing to protect trans rights.

Over 500 anti-queer and anti-trans laws have been proposed or passed in over 40 states. Pride parades are marching with the same Zionist-aligned politicians, connected to weapons manufacturers, banks and [neo]imperialist NGOs that contribute to the strangling of queer life abroad. This is why we say “No to pinkwashing!”

LGBTQ+ rights will NOT be used as a cover for genocide in Palestine or [neo]imperialist aggression against nations like Haiti, Cuba and beyond. Queer and trans people will not be used to beat the drums of war and genocide anywhere on the globe.

The struggle never began with representation and assimilation into the colonial/capitalist system. Our struggle is for the liberation of all peoples from the grasp of the U.S. Empire.

In Gaza, [neocolonialism] has failed to achieve any of its publicized goals, despite almost nine months of continuing genocidal attacks. Netanyahu’s war cabinet has crumbled in resignations. Escalating internal dissention and demonstrations of tens of thousands of people [under Zionism] are demanding negotiations. Finding housing, schools, jobs and subsidies for over 100,000 angry settlers driven out of stolen lands is creating a crisis in Zionist ideology and in the economy.

The head of the […] Occupation Forces Herzi Halevi said [that] the army is facing troop shortages amid rising casualties in the war against Hamas in Gaza. Enlisting more troops is difficult due to rising public opposition to the war.

???

There is open conflict between Netanyahu, his defense minister and conflicting infighting among his gaggle of small reactionary political parties.

The U.S. military machine has overwhelming deadly capacity. Imperialist strategists flaunt their power in obscene ways. Military contractors sell their weapons in ways that increase their profits and ensnare countries in debt traps.

[Zionism’s neocolony], as a primary ally in U.S. regional domination of West Asia, has access and use of an endless supply, paid for by workers in the U.S. from the U.S. treasury.

Impoverished and developing countries, determined to assert their sovereignty and escape a colonial death grip, are using science and applying their limited locally available resources to engineer weapons and strategies of self-defense that can prevent the destructive U.S. mega-weapons from determining the outcome.

The Zionist movement and its U.S. [neo]imperialist backers face a strategic dilemma — in order to avoid a very destructive wider war, for which they are not prepared and cannot win, they need to end the current genocidal war on Gaza. Ending the war without defeating the resistance would be a huge setback for the Zionist movement and an even larger humiliation for its protector and co-conspirator — U.S. [neo]imperialism. It will be a huge advance on a world scale.

Regarding Netanyahu’s mention in his interview about disarming the resistance and imposing civil administration on the Gaza Strip, these are mere delusions. Netanyahu is deeply mired in the Gaza quagmire and has achieved none of his aggressive goals except for murder and destruction.

His statements are intended for local consumption to try to prolong the war, which contradicts the position of the exhausted army, unable to continue this war or fight on multiple fronts due to the heavy losses it suffers in Gaza and the war of attrition from multiple fronts, especially the Lebanese front.

The Palestinian people and their courageous resistance will alone decide the future of the Gaza Strip, thwarting any attempt to impose civil administration or bring in foreign or Arab forces.

These statements in the interview indicate that Netanyahu is merely a psychologically ill and vile person acting as a sadistic criminal leading the dirtiest colonial entity in history with the most despicable, brutal and terrorist army.

Like other Zionist and U.S. war criminals, war criminal Netanyahu will not escape punishment. The day will come when they will all pay the price for every crime they committed against our people and other nations.

Quoting Detlev Vagts’s Carl Schmitt’s Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives:

A little more than a year into his rule as [Fascist] Chancellor, Hitler felt threatened from two directions. On the one hand there was restiveness among members of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the brown‐shirted street fighters who had done so much to bring him to power. Some of them took seriously the idea that there was meaning to the words “socialist” and “workers” in the title of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. They felt that their contributions had not been recognized or rewarded.

Their head, Ernst Röhm, was a formidable fighter and potential troublemaker. He was intent upon gaining primacy in military matters vis‐à‐vis the army. On the other side, there was unease among the conservatives who had opened the way for Hitler’s appointment. Several of them were planning to meet with President Hindenburg to urge him to curb what they regarded as excesses in Hitler’s policies. Most disturbingly of all, the army leadership was considering forceful means to end the attempt by the SA to gain control over military matters[.]

It seems likely that subjectively Hitler took these threats seriously, though no evidence of any plot to seize power was ever presented. Witnesses describe him as highly excited to the point of foaming at the mouth. He flew to Munich and there confronted leaders of the SA in a resort hotel and had them imprisoned. One of Röhm’s chief deputies was caught in bed with another man, a matter that Hitler stressed in moralistic terms. Röhm was seized and given a chance to commit suicide; when he declined he was shot to death by SS (Schutzstaffel) officers.

Elsewhere in [the Third Reich] murder squads went into action. They killed General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s immediate predecessor as Chancellor, together with his wife and an aide, General Bredow. Also on the list were Edgar Jung, secretary to Chancellor von Papen, who had drafted a critical article about Hitler’s excesses, and Erich Klausener, head of the Catholic Action movement. Schmitt had interacted with von Schleicher in various ways.⁵

Hitler also settled scores with men who had incurred his displeasure along the way: Gregor Strasser, formerly an important Nazi organizer, and Gustav von Kahr, a figure in Bavarian politics in the 1920s. Hitler’s enemies on the left were spared as they were already stowed away in concentration camps.

Some were killed by mistake, confused with a target having a similar name. No list of the assassinated was ever made public and the relevant files were destroyed. Hitler told the Reichstag that the number was 77; subsequent research indicates that the real number was twice or even three times as great.⁶

On July 13 Hitler spoke in the Reichstag to the German people, justifying his actions, and a statute was passed ratifying them. By and large the popular reaction in [the Third Reich] seems to have been favorable. Many regarded the SA as uncouth rowdies that constituted a menace to the public peace and the killings of the rightists were largely ignored, even by their comrades in the army. Only one officer dared to attend von Schleicher’s funeral.

Further reading: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pages 213–226

Night of the Long Knives: Forty‐Eight Hours that Changed the History of the World

The Night of the Long Knives: The History and Legacy of Adolf Hitler’s Notorious Purge of the SA

Night of the Long Knives: Hitler's Excision of Rohm's SA Brownshirts, 30 June – 2 July 1934

(Mirror.)

In another clip from the Bnei David Yeshiva published by Channel 13, Rabbi Giora Redler can be heard praising [the Third Reich’s] ideology during a lesson about the Holocaust.

“Let’s just start with whether Hitler was right or not,” he told students. “He was the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side.”

Redler goes on to say that pluralism is the “real” genocide being perpetrated against the Jewish people, not Nazi Germany’s Final Solution.

Related: Israeli “Hebrew Gaza” Panel Likes Hitler’s Plans:

“The real Holocaust was not when they murdered the Jews, that’s not it. All these excuses — that it was ideological or systematic — are nonsense,” he said. “Humanism, and the secular culture of ‘We believe in man,’ that’s the Holocaust.”

The comments drew wide condemnation from opposition lawmakers who called for pulling all state funding to the Eli-based academy over Kashtiel’s and Redler’s remarks.

It was only one century ago that many would have been shocked to hear the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’, as it simply wasn’t something that ordinary churches enjoyed teaching. While a few premodern Christians (including the infamous Protestant pioneer Martin Luther, who responded with a massive wall of text after Jews kept telling him ‘nah, I’m good’) were aware of this knowledge, evidently nobody was really in the habit of emphasizing it either — quite the opposite of the current situation, where the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’ has become a cliché.

Since many churches considered anti‐Judaism part of their job, it made sense that they would have wanted to keep quiet about J.C.’s Jewish background, as it would have inevitably raised all sorts of awkward questions, e.g. ‘If Jesus was Jewish, why don’t we all convert to Judaism?’ However, since some Christians feel guilty about nearly two millennia of violent Christian anti‐Judaism, including the Shoah, and many other Christians want to show their support for Zionism, the teaching that J.C. was Jewish has switched from being an arcane detail to basic knowledge.

Now, certainly not all who repeat this trivia are directing it to Jews. In fact, a decade ago I usually saw it directed at blatantly antisemitic Christians, though I doubt that it was always persuasive (as one ‘political pastor’ painfully learned in 1939). This counterargument is also a little irksome in its own way, as J.C.’s Jewish background should not be the only, or even the main, reason why somebody should respect contemporary Jewish people. The paradox of Jews inspiring two overwhelmingly gentile faiths does fascinate me, but Jewish people have worth aside from that.

In any case, if you have been lurking Jewish communities for a while then you have likely noticed that when Jews mention this phrase, they tend to mention it unhappily. It isn’t just that the phrase has become cliché and pedantic, but mainly because the intentions behind it are almost always misguided. At best, telling Jews that J.C. was Jewish is only a quite minor, woefully inadequate way of expressing solidarity. At worst, it is an evasive rhetorical trick, basically the Christian equivalent to saying ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend!’ or ‘I’m part Cherokee!’, hence why somebody deemed the phrase antisemitic. I find both of those authors harsh, personally, so this is my attempt at putting it more gently if anybody finds their tones too off‐putting.

While it delights me to see Christians who are sincerely interested in demonstrating solidarity with Jewish people, I suspect that all Jews would agree (for once) if I said that reminding others of J.C.’s Jewish background isn’t enough. Maybe better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough. How, then, should one go about it? Click here for my suggestions, zero of which involve supporting an antidemocratic régime! Evangelicals, take note! And if you want to discuss Christianity’s Jewish roots in a way that actually sounds sophisticated and interesting, Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts is arguably the way to get serious about understanding them. See? Christianity’s Jewish origins don’t have to sound like boring trivia!

If you tell a Jewish person that J.C. was a Jew, the politest response that you’ll get is simply ‘good for him’. Few people want to bluntly tell you ‘I don’t care’, let alone patiently and respectfully explain to a stranger why they find this knowledge irrelevant, so this my contribution for anybody who needed help. Hopefully I articulated this well!