The 1st “NO KINGS” day was on the Porcine Emperor’s 79th Birthday, when five million of us marched for Democracy; than, 7 million more a few months later; now, no bullies nor bullets will stop us.

Steve Villano

Mar 28, 2026

(The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no allegiance to the US Constitution, no respect for democracy, no heart, no conscience & no soul. But he has spawned the largest pro-democracy, pro-America demonstrations in the nation’s 250 year history.)

For Donald Trump’s 77^th birthday, almost 3 years ago—before he stole billions of our tax dollars for himself, his family and friends, the grotesque grifter was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling—or selling— Nuclear secrets.

His actions are similar to the 70+ year old case that resulted in execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act, and allegedly passing national security secrets to the Russians. It’s so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are intertwined, yet again, this time, without the repulsive Roy Cohn as the intermediary. Trump has transformed into his own stinking stain, exceeding the extraordinary evil of Roy Cohn.

A few years back, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”

Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory. He’s already be behind bars if a Florida-based judge, jonesing for a future Judicial appointment, hadn’t improperly dismissed the airtight Espionage case against him.

As we’ve witnessed everyday in Trump’s incessant Smash, Destroy, Grab & Grift 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to snort up every dollar and put everything in the U.S. up for sale—or put his own name on it—the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–has become increasingly plausible, thanks to documents accidently leaked this week to Congress by the Department of Justice, led by another Trump-kept Florida judicial officer, Pam Bondi.

This adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror and massive error, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information—even while he is President.

Like Trump’s friend, mentor, role-model and lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents.

After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My devotion to the law, and faith in the US Justice system has been completely undermined over the past several years, but especially because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius, or as his best-friend Jeffrey Epstein, for abusing young girls. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say.

And, since the geopolitical grifter Trump has not been treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic. It’s so on brand that Trump and his team of hatemongers —like Stephen Miller, Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth—have doubled-down on the phrase “Cultural Marxists,” a slur popularized by Adolf Hitler to demonize progressive Jews.

After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain. “Angels” is being produced again at a local theatre in my neighborhood later this Spring.

Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney and the attorney for major organized crime families in New York to whom he introduced Trump, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.

ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.

ROY: But am I dead?

ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.

(Pause)

ETHEL:

I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.

I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”

Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will as Cohn did, die in his own shit, babbling baby-talk about ballrooms and ballpoint pens and stripped of everything he ever knew?

The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached (and working on a three-peat) twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, carelessness and flagrant disregard for any and all laws—domestic or international—have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe.

Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, or the highest bidder? Is he capable of forgiving the Qataris of funding the single biggest act of violence and terror vs. the U.S.—committed 25 years ago this September 11— and accept gilded planes, gifts and billions of dollars in bribes from them and the Saudis?

Would Trump sell pardons to the highest bidders or the facilitators of such bribes, as he did with Michael Flynn, and then reward them with taxpayer-funded payouts for being prosecuted for crimes to which his handmaids pleaded guilty? Would Trump white wash the most heinous sex crimes committed against children in U.S. history, in which he participated, according to testimony given to the FBI? Would the porcine Pedofile protector profer a pardon for the female Sex Trafficker, Ghislaine Maxwell, who facilitated and participated in those crimes in exchange for her silence about his involvement?

Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, truthless, soul-less half-century headlong flight from accountability of any kind for every crime he ever committed, and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed:

“Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”

Since Donald Trump started his Second Reich in 2025, all the wrong people are dying.

Steve Villano

Mar 22, 2026

(From Iran’s Anadolu Agency, pictures of some of the schoolchildren killed by U.S. bombs in Iran on the first day of the War.)

All the wrong people are dying;

If there’s a God, she’s not even trying

To even the score,

And maybe, just maybe a bit more.

Bob Mueller died this week,

And, before Rigor Mortis arrived,

Trump vomited through his teeth,

That he was glad our hero died.

Are you there God?

That’s your target.

Not Mueller, nor Jesse Jackson,

Nor Virginia Roberts Giuffre,

Nor 168 children in a classroom in Iran.

God, how could you let this happen?

All the wrong people are dying.

But, still breathing and lying,

Are Hegseth, Miller, Trump & Vance,

And anyone who’ll drop their pants

For a few million bucks or strokes or bribes,

Or anything that cleanses the human tribe.

Are you there, God?

They’re your target.

Not the Reiners,

Nor Catherine O’Hara,

Nor half the population of Gaza,

But men in suits, or wearing jackboots,

All the wrong people are dying.

Venality still high-flying

In the form of vampires

Like RFK and Kushner Jr.,

Witkoff, Dumbkopf and Lutnick’s liver;

Bibi, Marco & the terrorist, Ben-Gvir,

Surely you can make them slither,

And pay for the pain they’ve all delivered.

Are you there, God?

They’re your target.

Not Jane Goodall or Country Joe,

Willie Colon or the Dead’s Bob Weir,

Nor anybody Trans or Queer,

Beaten to a pulp by Trolls

Utterly deformed by fear.

When needed most, God, why aren’t you near?

All the wrong people are dying.

If there’s a God, she must be hiding—

Averting her eyes & ears to wailing and crying.

Taking Risa, and Rocco, Pretti & Good,

And Caroline Kennedy’s daughter.

Withholding food, medicine & water,

From babies within our own borders,

And Lebanese children, tagged for slaughter.

Are you there, God?

Those innocents are NOT your target;

Unless you are gathering the best around you,

Creating Hell’s Tenth Circle of evil here, on earth,

Governed by ghouls, pedophiles and thieves,

Teaching the rest of us who want to believe,

That justice only comes to those of us who grieve

The good already gone from us.

The news about Cesar Chavez & Dolores Huerta took my breath away.

Steve Villano

Mar 18, 2026

(The Napa County, CA., Sculpture of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, by Napa sculptor Mario Chiodo. Photo by the Napa Valley Register)

I woke up the morning I learned the news and couldn’t catch my breath.

No, it wasn’t because of my age; it wasn’t because almost daily now, I hear of another old friend or former colleague getting a debilitating disease or disability, or dying.

It wasn’t because another school full of young, innocent Muslim girls was obliterated, or a high-rise residential apartment tower in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon, blown to bits by Israeli terrorists—masquerading as a government—with each floor pancaking upon the one below it, crushing into dust any humans still inside.

It wasn’t because something bad had happened, God forbid, to one of my granddaughters or my son or my partner of 54-years. Those are a steady drumbeat of worries, which always come in bunches, and not as single spies. That is the background music to my life; a constant hum.

And, no, it wasn’t because of another all-too real series of night terrors of mine, where I raced against time to prevent a bomb from going off, or spent the darkness loudly cursing out Trump or Bondi or Bibi or Hegseth or a long litany of monsters, until my shouts awakened others to how conscious my unconscious had become.

What made me gasp for air this time, was a headline in the on-line New York Times confirming disturbing rumors we heard about Cesar Chavez, the day before, but tried to dismiss because there no credible sources for those rumors, and we know how anything can be made up by anyone, anywhere at anytime and become what passes for fact, instantly.

Only this morning, the source could not be more credible: it was Dolores Huerta, Chavez’ co-leader of the United Farm Workers union, and, at 96, the living heart and soul of the movement for social & economic justice for more than 65 years.

There was the New York Times headline: “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.” And there were the sources: Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas—two women raped by Chavez when they were young girls in the 1970’s; and Dolores Huerta, Chavez’ most prominent female ally in the Farm Workers Movement, and a labor-movement icon in her own right.

Dolores Huerta, 96 years old, who suffocated a secret for 60 years, of having been raped by Cesar Chavez, on more than one occasion, resulting in two pregnancies—which she hid—and the birth of two daughters, whom she gave away to be raised in more stable family settings. This was Cesar Chavez. This was Dolores Huerta. Two pillars of my life from my early years of college; two symbols of the urgency of struggle to bring about sweeping social change; two working-class heroes.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Melinda Henneberger was eloquent in her excruciatingly painful description of the torment which Huerta had hidden for six decades, in her Substack column entitled Kansas City Stack, headlined: “Why did Dolores Huerta wait 60 years to accuse César Chávez of rape? I hope I know the answer:

‘Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing’

From the Times story:

“Ms. Huerta said he abused her not only physically but emotionally. Union records document an argument at La Paz between the two of them over missing financial receipts during a board meeting in 1979. Ms. Huerta demanded respect and pushed back against his suggestions that she had stolen money. Mr. Chávez responded by shouting at her with curses and insults, repeatedly calling her a stupid bitch, according to the audio recordings of board meetings The Times listened to.

Ms. Huerta struggles to reconcile the César Chávez she knew, who inspired so many and achieved so much, and the man who assaulted her and publicly humiliated her. She said she was unaware of any sexual abuse of teenage girls. Moments after some of that abuse was described to her, Ms. Huerta broke down, sobbing and wailing.”

Hennenberger: “That made me want to wail, too. According to the story, both times Chávez abused Huerta resulted in a pregnancy she said she concealed “by wearing baggy clothes and ponchos.” She gave birth both times, too, to baby girls, “and then arranged for them to be raised by others.” In her statement today, she said that even though she’s been able to stay close to those children, who know her other children, “no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.” That’s so enormous, for everyone involved, that there’s no way to overstate it.”

If that’s what happened, every single piece of this — being raped by your boss and work partner, whose brother later became your life partner — and then having to hide two children you could not raise or tell how they came to be — is so painful that if only those who’d walked that mile could judge, no one would.”

I re-read the New York Times investigative report on Cesar Chavez several times in disbelief. How could all of us not know that Cesar Chavez was Jeffrey Epstein before there was a Jeffrey Epstein? How could this God-like man rape little girls? Exactly because he wasn’t a God.

Henneberger and I did the same thing: ran to an authority we both knew on the Farm Workers Union and Cesar Chavez, the journalist/historian Miriam Pawel, who wrote two books on the union and Chavez. Melinda seized upon a telling paragraph written by Pawel:

“As Miriam Pawel relates in her authoritative biography—the second of two books she has written about the UFW’s rise and fall—Chavez’s personal obsessions, combined with his sudden fame and power, and some of the more malign elements of America’s culture in the 1970s, gradually caused him to turn narcissistic and to encourage a cult built around him.”

Perhaps because of my professional background as a labor organizer for national teachers unions—which I was practicing at the very same time that Chavez and Dolores Huerta were organizing Farm Workers—I was drawn to another powerful passage written by Pawel in : “The Union of their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement,” Bloomsbury Press, NY., NY, 2009:

“Those who once dedicated their lives to Cesar Chavez’s crusades now wince when they drive past farmworkers, hunched over rows of vegetables or trimming grapevines in the bitter cold. Once so certain they could change that world, the UFW alumni rue their failure. They applaud each other’s individual accomplishments, but lament the lost opportunity to collectively achieve even more. The memories still cause pain.”

Now, the pain is multiplied, and much, much more profound than the failure of a union or an organization or a government or a leader to live up to its, or his or her, promise, and our hopes. Those of us who have worked for unions, or non-profit organizations, or socially conscious corporations or good-government Administrations have all known that deep level of disappointment and disillusionment when things do not turn out the way we wanted.

But, the rape of young children, and of co-workers, and the decades long destruction and those lives, is something far more devastating, and damaging, than mere disappointment and disillusionment.

It’s enough to make all of us “break down, sob and wail,” and gasp for air.

Illegal, immoral, lawless “preventive” bombing attacks on Irans & Lebanon’s civilian populations by Israel and the United States, have violated all laws, ethics, and any semblance of humanity.

Steve Villano

Mar 11, 2026

( Israeli Ultra-Nationalists and warmongers National Security Minister Ben-Gvir (l.), Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and Finance Minister Smotrech, far right.)

(US officials Trump & Hegseth (not pictured) are conducting an illegal war with Israel against Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank.)

At long last, after decades of blocking any peace agreement between the Unite States and Iran, pleading for US support for “decapitating” (assassinating) Iranian leaders; undermining all efforts for a two-state solution with Palestinians; and succeeding in securing an endless stream of American armaments to annihilate 20,000 innocent Palestinian children and turn Gaza into a mass graveyard, Israel, under the totalitarian leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, has unveiled it’s secret weapon against the Muslim world: the United States military, led by a Christian Nationalist extremist who hates Muslims as much as the Netanyahu gang does, and green-lighted by an American Golem of a President who would do anything to escape jail, and the Epstein files.

Netanyahu and his extremist Ultra Nationalist government—driven by convicted terrorist Meir Kahane’s disciples Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli’s National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister— chose to respond to the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas of more than 1200 innocent Israeli citizens and the forced kidnapping of hundreds of hostages, by grinding Gaza into the dust, and killing more than 75,000 Palestinian non-combatants. Such a genocidal counter-attack also blew up the most fundamental Jewish ethical standard of “proportionality of response,” which guided the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) since it’s inception.

Critics of the Netanyahu’s genocidal and disproportionate response to Hamas’ horrible murders and torture of innocent Israelis were instantly assailed as Anti-Semites—including Jews in Israel and abroad , if we questioned not only the Israeli government’s utter annihilation of Gaza, but Netanyahu’s sinister track record of previously providing funding to Hamas for the terrorist organization to torpedo any Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution—an outcome which Netanyahu and his extreme right wing supporters violently oppose.

Overnight, any semblance of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF), Code of Ethics for the IDF was obliterated by the Netanyahu government. Before BiBi bastardized the highly regarded Israeli Military and transformed it into his own ICE-like hit squad, the Code of Ethics for the IDF—based upon fundamental humanitarian principles of Judaism— commanded the IDF to adhere to specific rules of combat.

That Code of Ethics, required as part of basic training for IDF soldiers for decades, consisted of four essential principles:

· NECESSITY: “to apply force only for the sake of the mission;”

· DISTINCTION: “aim your fire at those who pose a threat, NOT at combatants indiscriminately;

· RESPONSIBILITY: “since you know there will be collateral harm of civilians, you have to do whatever you can to MINIMIZE the expected collateral harm.”

· PROPORTIONALITY: “Is the expected collateral harm proportionate to the military achievement?”

Netanyahu and his megalomaniacal, anti-Judaic cabinet— hell-bent on driving Palestinians and Muslims from all parts of Israel and from surrounding lands in the Middle East— negated all of that moral and ethical guidance for Israel’s soldiers, which had gained the IDF world-wide respect for decades. Unarmed Palestinian women and children—either in Gaza or the West Bank—were considered sub-human by the Ultra Nationalists controlling the Israeli government and its’ armed forces. Fanatical, law-breaking Israeli settlers were permitted to randomly kill Palestinians and to destroy life-sustaining olive-tree orchards of Palestinian families living in the West Bank for decades, while the IDF stood by silently and did not act to protect human life.

Instead of abiding by the IDF’s historic ethical code, Bibi and his band of extremists justified dropping 2,000 pound bunker-buster bombs—provided by the United States—on civilian populations by claiming, suspiciously, that Hamas or Hezbollah combatants had hidden themselves underneath non-combatant populations and structures, like hospitals, schools, day-care centers, or apartment buildings.

Just this week in Iran, the exact same bogus argument was used when US Tomahawk missiles, obliterated an all-girls school where some 150 young Iranian girls were massacred.

By its’ own actions, the Netanyahu government has not only trashed the humanitarian underpinnings of Judaism—an ethical, spiritual and religious standard that existed thousands of year before Israel did—but has single-handedly undermined the credibility of any statements or videos coming from the IDF or the nation of Israel, much as the Trump Administration and the US Defense Department under former Fox-News commentator Pete Hegseth has done. Facts and any concern for humanity have been suffocated completely in the fog and fury of of an undeclared, illegal war with extraordinarily high personal and political stakes for both Netanyahu and Trump.

Under the spurious “self-defense” definition defiled by Israel—and used as a fake shield to justify military attacks upon others— any civilian population in any country in which anti-Israel terrorists may be hiding is fair game for any indiscriminate—and non-proportional— IDF attack. National borders, international law, or individual state sovereignty do not matter under this new formulation of “self-defense” by the Netanyahu government, and echoed by the most anti-democratic, fascist government in United States history. To phrase it differently, “we have seen the enemy, and it is everybody else, but us.”

Netanyahu and the Ultra Nationalists ruling Israel, have effectively used the “self-defense” trap to ensnare the US and other allies in its illegal military actions, expanding it’s unending crusade for revenge for the murders of October 7, 2023, well-beyond retribution against Hamas, or the boundaries of Gaza and the West Bank.

Prior to this week’s unprovoked attack upon Iran by Israel and the United States, and Israel’s massive bombing campaign in Lebanon which has, so far, driven 700,000 Lebanese citizens from their homes, Bibi launched a Regional “Ring of Fire” War against the terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Anyone Netanyahu perceived to be a threat to Israel was fair game for a “disproportionate”attack, without any reason required, except those manufactured by BiBi. The Trump Administration has adopted the same nationalistic, militaristic approach to all other countries it deems a threat in the Western Hemisphere, includingVenezuela, Cuba, and at times, Mexico.

Before using the United States military as a shiny, new blunt instrument of terror against Iran over the past few weeks, Israel had already dangerously expanded it’s “Ring of Fire,” across the national borders of Lebanon, Yemen & Syria.

The first Israeli/American missile strikes against Iran’s alleged nuclear capabilities in June, 2025—which failed to take them out, despite Trump’s claim they were “obliterated”— was, the Israeli’s said, to retaliate for Iranian missiles being launched into Israel. In truth, Iran’s missile attack was done in response to Israel’s attack on Hezbollah strong holds in Southern Lebanon, the assassination of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders, and the maiming of thousands of Hezbollah operatives and Lebanese citizens with exploding personal communications devices—an illegal act on Israel’s part, considered by some, to constitute terrorism against the nation of Lebanon and its people. This week, Israel stepped up its acts of terror against the non-combatants of Lebanon by carpet-bombing Beirut.

Two years ago, in a remarkably prophetic piece, the Jewish publication The Forward outlined several military options Israel might take against Iran, which would shatter any hopes for a ceasefire, any chance of peace in the MidEast, and destabilize democratic nations and economies around the world, which is precisely what is happening right now during this current assault on Iran and Lebanon:

· “A tactical strike on Iran: A more substantial response could involve direct military action against Iranian assets, such as oil facilities or military installations. This would aim to inflict real damage on Iran’s infrastructure, forcing it to reconsider further provocations.

An attack on an oil installation, for instance, could disrupt Iran’s economic lifelines and send the clear message that Israel will not tolerate continued missile strikes. The goal here would be to create enough pain for Iran to deter future actions, without pushing the region into a full-scale war.”

· “A strategic overhaul of the region’s balance of power: This option is far more ambitious, and fraught with risk, but could reshape the Middle East. It would involve Israel somehow pushing the West to lay down the law with Iran, demanding not just an end to its missile strikes, but a full dismantling of its nuclear program and an end to its sponsorship of proxy forces across the region”.

The Forward goes on to point out that the most extreme option poses a serious, not hypothetical, risk of starting World War III:

“If Iran responds forcefully, the U.S. would almost certainly be drawn into the conflict to protect Israel. This could trigger a chain reaction, with Russia and China, both of whom have strategic relationships with Iran, seeing an opportunity to exploit the chaos. China could use the distraction to finally make a long-threatened move on Taiwan, while Russian President Vladimir Putin might take the opportunity to expand his war in Ukraine, or press into neighboring countries.

The global balance of power would be thrown into disarray, with potentially catastrophic consequences.”

The stakes here, at this very instant in human history, are extraordinary, and not just for the future existence of Israel, nor the existence of Iran, nor the entire Middle East, but for all of us.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, in his final speech delivered at a Peace Rally where he was assassinated by an Ultra Nationalist Jewish extremist on November 4, 1995, stated clearly one of the fundamental principles upon which the State of Israel was built:

“The path of peace is preferable to the path of war. I say this as a military man…and see the pain of the families of the IDF soldiers. For them, for our children, in my case for our grandchildren, I want this Government to exhaust every opening, every possibility to promote and achieve a comprehensive peace.”

Netanyahu and the terrorist clones of Kahane now surrounding him, campaigned against every peace initiative put forth by Rabin going back 30 years–especially regarding a Two-State solution as outlined in the original UN Charter which created Israel. Cowardly US members of Congress—who received an extraordinary amount of money from the American/Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)— enabled Bibi to directly undermine US National Security interests and Barack Obama’s Nuclear Peace Treaty with Iran in 2014, and again in 2024, when they facilitated BiBi’s bullying and bloviating before Congress to scuttle American cease-fire efforts in Gaza, tied to the freeing of the remaining hostages.

Netanyahu and his nationalist war-mongers never entertained any exit plan from Gaza nor the West Bank that involved Palestinian self-determination, or contradicts the fever dreams of the Ultra Nationalist coalition keeping Netanyahu in power, and out of prison.

The same nihilistic “no-exit” strategy applies to the brutal and illegal war being waged right now against Iran and Lebanon. But now Bibi has all-to-willing accomplices in the President of the United States—as eager to stay out of jail for crimes he has committed as Netanyahu is— and a messianic Christian US Secretary of Defense out to rid the world of, ironically, non-Christian infidels, who simply clutter the path to Armaggedon, the return of Christ to the Holy Land, and the forced conversion of all Jews to Christianity.

Ironically, Pope Leo, the Christian leader who heads the single largest Christian group in the world—1.39 billion baptized Catholics—has a far different take on the destruction of Gaza, the violence in the West Bank, the incessant bombing of Iran and Lebanon, and the Nationalist fiction that nations—like Israel and the United States—had the right to launch “preventive wars:”

“Let us raise our humble prayer to the Lord that the roar of bombs may cease, that weapons may fall silent, and that space may be opened for dialogue in which the voices of peoples can be heard.”

Two of Pope Leo’s most prominent representatives in the United States, Cardinal Blase Cupich, from Pope Leo’s hometown of Chicago, and Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, have strongly denounced the latest War in Iran, with Cupich calling it:

“A real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game—it’s sickening.”

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, told the Associated Press just this week that the U.S. and Israel had failed to meet the minimum criteria for the war to be considered morally just:

“Lebanon may fall into civil war. The world’s oil supply is under great strain. The potential disintegration of Iran could well produce new and dangerous realities. And the possibility of immense casualties on all sides is immense. For all of these reasons, Catholic teaching leads to the conclusion that our entry into this war was not morally legitimate.”

Jewish organizations in the US and worldwide, like the American Council for Judiasm, and the Jewish Voice for Peace have offered an alternative voice for Jews, offering “Judaism beyond Zionism,” which, according to a March 2026 article in The Nation by Joseph Dana (“The Long Shadow of the ‘Jewish Question’”) points to a growing collection of:

“Synagogues, study groups, and ritual communities whose identity does not depend on an attachment to any state…These groups argue that thriving diaspora life is not a deficiency awaiting a territorial cure, but a legitimate form of Jewish existence that predates and will outlast the current crisis—and is, in fact, necessary to resolving it…these movements share a refusal to let the Israeli state define what Jewish identity means.”

Dana goes on to point out that, “In 2024, the Jewish Council of Australia was formed to explicitly challenge the claim that established Zionist organizations spoke for all Jews. When the council called for sanctions on Israel and an end to military ties, it framed its position as emerging from rather than contradicting its members’s Jewishness.”

Perhaps the merging of Israeli and US nationalist, militaristic and totalitarian ambitions will finally force American Jews to face the future of our continued connection to Israel, to mainstream Jewish organization, to AIPAC, and to public officials who pretend to be acting in our best interests, when, in fact, they are acting against the fundamental humanitarian teachings of our Judaism.

Writing about many of us Jews, worldwide, seeking a different, more just and humane definition of Judaism, Dana concludes in his article in The Nation:

“They are proposing an identity that doesn’t need to be defended through domination. The answer to what it means to be Jewish need not come at Palestian (nor Muslim—my edit) expense.”

The wisdom of Rabbi Hillel, the Elder, has never been more necessary for American Jews, and Jews worldwide to heed:

“If not us, who? If not now, when?”

##

Trump & Bibi wave missiles and bombs around the world like like they’re comparing erections. The prescient folk-singer Phil Ochs warned us about this kind of rape & pillage of nations 60 years ago.

Steve Villano

Mar 06, 2026

(Photo by S. Villano)

(60 years ago the War in Vietnam was raging. US troop levels had just leaped from 16,000 in 1963 to 180,000 in 1965—a ten-fold increase in less than two years. Americans and other citizens of the world were paying the price with our lives for over a decade of arrogant American destabilization of nations around the world, brought about by the American Colonialist foreign policies of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen, who headed the CIA.

Democratically elected governments in places like Iran, Guatamala, & Cuba—to name just a few—were overthrown through covert operations of the CIA throughout the early and mid-1950’s. Vietnam, long a target of plunder for Western colonizers, soundly threw out French invaders at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, ending the First Indochina War, after up to one million people were killed during eight long years. That bloody battle led the French to withdraw its badly battered troops from Vietnam, and to a Geneva Peace Treaty that divided Vietnam into two countries—North and South—at the 17th parallel.

Despite the devastating defeat of the French by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam forces under Ho Chi Minh in the mid-1950’s the Dulles brothers and US corporate and military interests were obsessed with regime-change throughout Vietnam, pouring enormous amounts of money and military support into South Vietnam, setting the stage for the American War in Vietnam through 1975. Estimates of deaths in Vietnam from 1955-1975, including some 300,000 bombing deaths of Vietnamese and Cambodians, range from a low of 2.4 million to a high of over 3 million people. United States Military fatalities during the American War in Vietnam totaled 58,220 soldiers.

Against that backdrop, American folk singers like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs used their music and their voices as sharp instruments of protest against the War in Vietnam and against American military arrogance. Phil Ochs (1940-1976) wrote and performed some of the most biting songs against US Military intervention around the world. One of those songs, written in 1966, ten years before Ochs death, was entitled “Cops of the World.” The lessons of Ochs’ remarkable songwriting are once again timely and poignant, as the Trump Administration has picked up where the Dulles brothers left off, in their quest to dominate, bully and plunder the natural resources of the world.

Recognizing that, and in tribute to Och’s fearless intelligence and foresight, I have written a parody of “Cops of the World” for the our present time, and have renamed it, “We’re the Cocks of the World.”)

“WE’RE THE COCKS OF THE WORLD” (with acknowledgement and gratitude to Phil Ochs, writer and performer of “Cops of The World,” 1966; Appleseed Music Inc; Electra Records)

Bow, get out of our way, boys,

Scrape, get out of our way;

We’re hot and you are passe, boys,

We’re big and you’ll have to pay.

We’ve sunk all your boats and killed all at your ports;

Trigger fingers so itchy, and attention spans short;

So give us your oil and we’ll grab us a snort,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

We pick and choose as we please, boys—

Pick and choose as we please;

You’d best get down on your knees, boys,

Best get down on your knees!

We’re tattooed and liquored and hot to attack.

Venezuela or Cuba, Iran or Iraq,

Just take off your clothes and lay down on your back,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

Egos need Epstein massage, boys

Be sure to rub us with lube;

We’ll obliterate you with a barrage, boys

It makes for good vid on the Tube.

We’ve got to protect all our citizens fair

So we’ll send drones and missiles for everyone there,

And maybe we’ll leave when we strip your land bare—-

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, Boys;

We’re the Cocks of the World.

We’ll dump all your children in a pile, boys;

Dump your dead kids in a pile.

Targeting schools is our style, boys,

Hospitals, schools it’s our style.

We’ll piss on the streets of the cities we wreck,

And find you a leader that we will select;

Those treaties we signed were a pain in the neck,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys

We’re the Cocks of the World.

So, clean your johns with a rag, boys

Clean your johns with a rag.

If you like you can use your own flag, boys

If you like you can use your own flag.

We’ve got so much money but we want so much more,

We’ll pummel it from you, with your blood and gore

But we’ll stop the terror when you are our whore—

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys

We’re the Cocks of the World.

Please, throw up your hands, boys

Please, throw up your hands.

We’re raping your land, boys,

We’re raping your land.

We’ll smash down your doors, we don’t bother to knock;

We’ve done it before, so why all the shock?

We’re the biggest, and cruelest Mob on the block—

And we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World.

And when we butchered your girls, boys,

When we butchered your girls.

We gave them a taste of our world, boys,

Gave them a taste of our world.

We own half-the world, oh say can you see,

All Power and profits to Bibi and Me;

So like it or not, you’ll never be free,

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the world, boys

We’re the Cocks of the world.

We’ve been chosen by God, boys

We’ve been chosen by God.

Ours is bigger than yours, boys

Ours has more guns than yours.

HE blesses our skin, so white and so pliable,

Your birth, a mistake, for which you are liable,

No place for you in our hearts, or our Bible…

‘Cause we’re the Cocks of the World, boys,

We’re the Cocks of the World!