Eric Cheyfitz

Eric Cheyfitz is a professor at Cornell University and author ofThe Colonial Construction of Indian Country: Native American Literatures & Federal Indian Law.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

“Muslims across Palestine marked yet another Eid amid Israeli strikes, raids, and other violence. Those in Gaza were once again blocked from making the Hajj pilgrimage.

Over the last week alone, Israel killed more than two dozen Palestinians in Gaza, including several children. One strike severed a baby’s leg and reportedly killed his mother. At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the military to take control of 70% of Gaza – yet another clear example of how the supposed ‘ceasefire’was in name only” (Zeteo)

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

Trump loves to dictate and call it negotiate. But Iran does not take dictation. So Trump‘s pronouncements are simply that: Trump‘s pronouncements. Trump, narcissist that he is, believes what he says constitutes reality. But of course, anyone who thinks they can control reality by what they say is ultimately the victim of reality. Negotiations can only succeed when both sides are grounded in reality. In this case,the Iranians seem to be standing on that ground whereas Trump is treading water in the world of wishful thinking.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

Killing for the hell of it: “Why on Earth would these callous corporatists [Trump and Musk] criminally destroy an Agency [USAID] with an average budget of $23 billion a year (about 10 days of the Trump-bloated Pentagon war budget) to save the lives of millions of babies, children, women, and men? Especially when much of this spending goes right back to U.S. contractors who ship the food, medicines, drinking water, wheelchairs, medical devices, and other materials to poverty-stricken nations” (Ralph Nader in CounterPunch).

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

“On May 15, Palestinians around the world mark 78 years since the start of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes that paved the way for the establishment of the State of Israel and the ongoing colonial settlement project across Palestine. 
But the Nakba is not a historical event. It is, as Palestinian legal scholar and Al-Shabaka analyst Rabea Eghbariah has argued, an ongoing structure—one defined by displacement as its foundational violence, fragmentation as its organizing logic, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination as its purpose. Indeed, what began in 1948 has never ended but only evolved: from mass expulsion to military occupation, siege to genocide, and creeping annexation to the deliberate erasure of Palestinian life across Palestine and the diaspora. 
This year's commemoration arrives at a devastating and clarifying moment. As Israel advances its so-called ‘day after’framework under the cover of a ceasefire, expands the Yellow Line to control nearly 60% of Gaza, and positions the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza as a technocratic manager of reconstruction rather than a pathway to sovereignty, the Nakba's structure is more visible than ever. The international system has not stopped it; rather, in many cases, it has enabled it.”Al-Shabaka

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

“…the US policy process has become irrational. The Iran war was decided by a small circle of presidential loyalists at Mar-a-Lago, with no formal interagency process and a National Security Council that had been hollowed out across the preceding year. Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, resigned on 17 March with a public letter describing “an echo chamber” used to deceive the president. The war was the output of a decision-making system in which the deliberative apparatus had been turned off.
This was neither a war of necessity, nor a war of choice. It was a war of whim. The underlying premise was hegemony. The United States was attempting to preserve a global dominance that it no longer possesses, and Israel was trying to establish a regional dominance that it will never have.” Jeffrey Sachs’s and Sybil Fares

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

When Trump calls Cuba, a failed state he is projecting . Under devastating sanctions Cuba has the same infant mortality rate the same longevity rate and the same literacy rate as the United States. In addition Cuba has free medical care free college education and heavily subsidised daycare. It also has approximately twice as many doctors per thousand people as the https://t.co/00AqPdhsIA these respects, the US should be emulating Cuba not trying to destroy it.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy
bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.
President DONALD J. TRUMP

The irony of Donald Trump calling the Iranians “crazy bastards“ is profound.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

It would make sense if TV culture warrior Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in deep over his head with Iran, had fired three senior Army generals last week in a desperate attempt to deflect blame and turn around his disastrous war. But the real reason Hegseth is purging the ranks is much simpler: he appears to hate women and Black people and hopes to reshape the military in the image of the fascist, white supremacist Trump administration. Quoted from Zeteo

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s [Armegadon]post[of Easter Sunday], by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.”

Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.” (an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson‘s blog)

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

250 years and we still haven’t gotten it right.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

Trump is like a two year-old with a bazooka. He doesn’t give speeches he just rants for attention: mommy mommy look at me. This all would be funny and then boring except this child has weapons. and he has no aim.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

I wrote The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States during the end of the Obama and the beginning  of the first Trump administration. The center of that book is Melville’s novel The Confidence Man (a prefiguring of Trump) and the last chapter “Thinking from a Different Place What Is A Just Society? A Brief Manifesto,” which looks to Indigenous theory and praxis for a foundation of social and economic justice. The Democrats can take their fair share of the responsibility for where we are now, without that foundation, in both foreign and domestic policy: their unequivocal support for Israel and It’s war crimes, their support for the bloated defense budget, their subversion of democracy (socialist democracy) around the world, and at home their failure to support Medicare for all , universal child care, which New Mexico just passed, and subsidized college (these just for starters). On these fronts, I have not heard them change direction. What does “affordability” mean then? In The Disinformation Age, I quote the French economist Thomas Piketty who told us clearly that vast discrepancies in wealth and democracy are incompatible, which is where the US has been for a long time. I also quote from Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), which argues convincingly that these vast discrepancies are the ground of the Constitution (see Federalist 10, in which Madison states bluntly that the “first object of government” is to protect these discrepancies). No wonder we are where we are. Here is the question: what does it say about the US that it has elected, twice, a pathological narcissist, who controls the largest arsenal of lethal weapons in the history of the world? We need to confront our history, our real history, and change its trajectory.

I write this my first day of Passover . Peace.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

https://t.co/gFDzzEke5T

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

While Marco Rubio rails against the religious fanaticism of the Iranian regime, Pete Hegseth practices religious fanaticism as Secretary of Defense: “Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,’ saying: ‘We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ’” (quoted in theHeather Cox Richardson blog). Everything Trump and friends say about their enemies is pure projection.

[Eric Cheyfitz @echeyfitz]

The Decline of the US Empire: “Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, ‘shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.’ Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggeststhat various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: ‘What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.’… Countries that came to rely on American security guarantees—guarantees that expanded as the U.S. consolidated its singular-superpower status in the West in the aftermath of the Suez crisis—are reckoning with new realities. ‘This war is a violation of international law—there is little doubt about that,’ German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to German diplomats last week. ‘It is also a politically fatal error.’ Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign minister of Singapore, described the geopolitical shift underway, in a recent interview: ‘The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor,’ he said. ‘But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.’”Ishan Tharoor in The New Yorker