Greg Palast

I have followed Greg Palast's writing for years. How he discovers some of his info I don't know and he won't say. He can be rather infuriating. Not AT him, but at what he writes about. In the back of my mind is a little voice saying, "He's right! Dammit!" And another voice says, "It can't be that bad." But it often is.

I used to think the “Horseshoe Theory” was horsesh*t. The ”horseshoe” theorem is that, like the two far ends of a horseshoe, extremists of the political Right and Left will meet and echo each other.

My talk at a building with Jesus Christ on the wall showed me that, to my chagrin,  the “horseshoe” is alive and well.  

Some Sundays back, I was asked to speak to a church discussion group about my investigations of vote suppression. The room was packed with white hairs, old hippie types (like me) who, you could imagine, always tell their friends about the mud at Woodstock even though they probably weren’t there.

Anyway, one of the wizened women strummed a Joan Baez-y song about kindness and freedom and worked in lyrics about the ICE killings in Minneapolis. It was all very kumbaya.

Then I gave a little talk about the new Jim Crow tactics used to deny voting rights to Black citizens.  

But the parishioners had more important things on their mind. One gray-hair said, “I have a bone to pick with you.” I invited her to pick.

Her complaint was that I had, on some radio appearance, made mention of the 30,000 protesters gunned down in January in Iran.  

This bone-picker demanded that I accept the Iranian government’s figure of “only 3,000” killed.

I didn’t want to nit-pick a bone picker, but the figure of 30,304 dead was based on actual Iranian hospital records.  

Rather, what got to me was her use of the word, “only.”

“ONLY 3,000??” Wow. Here was a group in a building meant to honor the Prince of Peace and they were brushing off 3,000 dead — just after bemoaning the death of two protesters in Minneapolis. 

So, I asked why they were not disturbed by the deaths of thousands of unarmed protesters, whether 30,000 or 3,000.

The congregation’s convener responded, “Those demonstrations were instigated by Mossad!”

As if that made it OK to gun down unarmed protesters. It is ill-making when I hear self-described “Christian Progressives” echo language from Trump’s sticky lips…that protesters are “terrorists.”

That statement about Mossad was offensive on several levels. It’s certainly a slur against Muslims — that Muslims protested against the mullahs, put their lives on the line, only because they were duped by Israelis.

I asked him why, when we have a case of Muslims gunning down other Muslims, Christians make it the fault of the Jews.  

He replied, “Not Jews. Zionists.”

Oh, OK then. It is now perfectly fine, according to this gentleman of the cloth, to shoot unarmed Iranians as long as you can find a Jew (or “Zionist”) lurking nearby. It sounds a little too close to the Proud Boys chant, “Jews will not replace us!”

The Horseshoe was alive and well. These Christians’ comments would have fit very well on The Tucker Carlson Show.  

This little story has nothing to do with Netanyahu or Trump or their crazed bombing spree in Iran.  

This has everything to do with who WE are.  

The philosopher Elvis Costello once asked, “What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?”  

Oh, dear Lord, Kumbaya.

Greg Palast