I get a lot of junk email, much of it — hell, MOST of it — political in nature, and I’m sure you do too, if we are both living in the same century. Today, one piece of it was from the National Campaign For Justice, warning of the permanent connection of the USA military, widely regarded as the only army in WW2 that didn’t rape (as a matter of policy, at least), with the Israelis under the recently-ended regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, who, IMHO, have committed a massive, modern genocide against the Palestinians. It remains to be seen whether a government now led by Isaac Herzog, himself a notorious conservative, and do any better… at any rate, if you’re interested (and you should be, particularly if you have served in any branch of the military or know someone who has), you can read the full pitch for signatures on a petition and donations to the Campaign here.
Since these letters are all the same, they don’t count for much in the minds of the MAGA-idiots-who-pretend- to-be-politicians-instead-of-Fascists unless you PERSONALIZE THEM in some way, and that usually means writing a little something, perhaps at the beginning or the end of the form letter, to express your opinions. Politicians don’t count emails any more, they just look at how much memory they occupy, and base their policy decisions on that.
Now, it just so happens that I have a dog in this here fight, and I spent about an hour writing the following prequel to the three MAGA stooges who represent me — Ashley Moody, Greg Steube, and the infamous bat-baby Rick Scott, none of them worth a bucket of warm spit, as Teddy Roosevelt said of the vice-presidency. So here it is below, spontaneous and unchanged from what they are now reading. Let me know what you think!
TO ASHLEY MOODY, RICK SCOTT AND GREG STEUBE:
A relevant personal message: My father was a New York Jew who used his degree from MIT, and his experiences running vital radar units in Great Britain and on Iwo Jima, together with his brilliant mind, to design the radars for the Missile Master system, the first radar-guided anti-aircraft missile battery, installed at Ft. Monmouth New Jersey, near where we lived in Red Bank, in the early 1950’s. There is absolutely no question of his loyalty and service to the USA. Also, as an anti-racist, he was at least 10 years ahead of his times.
And do you know what? I never once heard him say ANYTHING about the state of Israel, and my older sister and my younger brother agree! He was a patriotic, secular Jew who acknowledged his Jewish heritage with pride, but thought the Old Testament was a book of mostly superstitions, and had no use in his work or life for the New Testament. He was pretty much agnostic.
Now, to me: The slaughter of 1200 innocent, unarmed Israeli civilians is so horrible, repulsive and evil a deed that I could vomit. And some justice is warranted… but what warrants the killing of +70,000 innocent, unarmed Palestinians, mostly women and children? Revenge? The desire to claim their territory? Remaking Gaza into a beach resort? Justice is not served, folks, and the violence that Israel has used against the Palestinian people, denied their own state since 1948, with mostly American-supplied weapons, can never, ever be condoned by any civilized human with a shred of conscience. Even the math doesn’t work out: 70,000 dead Palestinians divided by 1,200 dead Israelis is a kill ratio of 58.3 to 1, and the decimal 3 repeats endlessly. Don’t both the Pentateuch and the Old Testament say something like (as a female Rabbi once revealed to me), “ONLY an eye for an eye, and ONLY a tooth for a tooth”?
Lady and gentlemen, genocide is a pardoxical social disease that is contagious. We thought we’d stamped it out at the end of WW2, but it has reared its horrifying head yet again, this time in the form of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
And you want to link our military, now totally independent, with this kind of madness? Mass murder? At what point do we sink to the level of a Third World nation?
Thank you for your attention to these matters. We now return you to our regular form letter.
Copyright 2026 Malcolm J. Brenner. All rights reserved.
