Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens stand and watch the United States sliding into the abyss and wonder, what can the Americans be thinking there? Their institutions, packaged once as the envy of the world with a free society and values of compassion and tolerance … all blowing away in the winds of history, over the edge and gone. The true Semites, of the Middle East, and not of Europe, gape at this catastrophe of so-called “liberal” Western-style democracy, as it is casually sucked into the moral black hole of a tedious television entertainer, a Wrestlemania con-man, with his billionaire henchmen and techno- Utopianists, who now plunder the richest, most powerful nation in the world as its own elites sit back in comfort, waiting to carve up the spoils. It is like watching Leviathan washed up on the beach, being dismantled by efficient, busy sand crabs. As everyone knows, fish rots first from the head.

To watch an American president openly say, while dutifully standing in the White House before the flag of an Israeli occupier, “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States in the Gaza Strip, as if he were showing a triplex condo on Central Park to a lesser Saudi prince, strips away the last veil in this long, sordid dance, this burlesque of empire pretending to moral superiority, while waiting for the right moment to deploy the Art of the Deal. “The Riviera of the Middle East,” he robotically intones, ever the salesman, as a grinning, indicted and fugitive Prime Minister looks on, scarcely able to believe what he is hearing, “The U.S. will take over,” and “we’ll own it.” Of course, everyone from the Achaemenids to Rome to Napoleon has liked Arab beaches, but Palestinians stand with the people of Greenland when they say, “Our land is not for sale;” nor do we yield to conquest, it should be clear to everyone by now. Any U.S. position in Gaza would have........

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