In a rare, candid conversation, Abby Martin interviews a former Israeli Army combat soldier who served as an occupier in Palestine’s Hebron City. Eran Efrati spent years as a sergeant and combat soldier in the Israeli military, but has since become an outspoken critic of the occupation of Palestine and Israeli apartheid.
Efrati gives explosive testimony on the reality of his service and explains how war crimes are institutionalized, as well as how systematic the oppression against Palestinians really is in a war of conquest that will no-doubt be accelerated under the Trump Administration.
‘The Trump Prophecy’ Is a Horrifying Window Onto Evangelicalism
A new movie makes a retired firefighter out to be a prophet. In reality, he’s a radical conspiracy theorist who thinks Democrats control the weather.
Even more disturbingly, earlier in this same interview Taylor describes how God has been speaking to him through racehorses, reading the euthanization of a racehorse named after Barack Obama as a sign that Democrats are about to start being executed.
“This has nothing to do with Roe vs Wade right now,” says Taylor of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “This has everything to do with military tribunals, them being charged with treason, and going to prison for the rest of their life and some being executed.” He continues:
The racehorse named Barack Obama was euthanized. That is probably the biggest prophetic sign that you could have of God saying this man is going to go down. Period. That’s the bottom line. You can get mad at me all you want to, but God’s the messenger here, he is the one sending the message. People don’t think that this stuff is real or it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.
This is real. Justice is not coming, it’s here, period, and it is taking place on the earth. This whole thing with Kavanaugh is about trying to stop the military tribunals … This is all about rounding these people up, charging them with treason, and they know that, basically, their head is going to be in a noose, literally.
Taylor’s beliefs are extreme even for Christian fundamentalists. But by co-producing a motion picture about his life, Liberty University—one of the largest, most organized institutions of American evangelicalism—has effectively endorsed Taylor’s status as a prophet.
That The Trump Prophecy aims to establish the legitimacy of a “prophet” whose latest “prophecy” predicts the state-sanctioned murdering of Trump’s political enemies is a fact that the film’s most prominent reviewers haven’t even touched on. Harriet Sherwood, writing for The Guardian, ends her coverage of the film with a feel-good quote from producer Rick Eldridge, who says “every American who loves his country should appreciate the movie and be inspired by it.”
U.S. Army School of the Americas
aka Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
the School was assigned the specific Cold War goal of teaching “anti-communist” counterinsurgency training to military personnel of Latin American countries.[4] At the time and in those places, the label “communist” was, in the words of anthropologist Lesley Gill, “… an enormously elastic category that could accommodate almost any critic of the status quo.”[8]:10 During this period, Colombia supplied the largest number of students from any client country.[8]:17
.. On September 21, 1984, the school was expelled from Panama under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty. Prior to this expulsion, politicians and journalists in Panama had complained that civilian graduates from the school engaged in repressive and antidemocratic behavior.[13
.. Despite this required instruction, the School still utilized material from Spanish language training manuals that discussed methods of coercion against insurgents through execution and torture from 1982 until 1991.
.. As the Cold War drew to a close around 1990, United States foreign policy shifted focus from “anti-communism” to the War on Drugs, with narcoguerillas replacing “communists
.. This term was later replaced by “the more ominous sounding ‘terrorist‘
.. By 2000 the School of the Americas was under increasing criticism in the United States for training students who later participated in undemocratic governments and committed human rights abuses.
.. the institute was renamed to WHINSEC. U.S. Army Maj. Joseph Blair, a former director of instruction at the school, said in 2002 that “there are no substantive changes besides the name. […] They teach the identical courses that I taught and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”[1]
.. WHINSEC says that its curriculum includes human rights,[43] and that “no school should be held accountable for the actions of its graduates.”[43]
.. Since 1990, SOA Watch has sponsored an annual public demonstration of protest of SOA/WHINSEC at Ft. Benning. In 2005, the demonstration drew 19,000 people. The protests are timed to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador on November 1989 by graduates of the School of the Americas
.. six Jesuit priests