As a child of two Holocaust survivors and a product of Jewish day schools and Zionist summer camps, I was brought up to love Israel unconditionally.

My great-grandmother moved to Palestine from Poland in the 1930s because she recognized the dangerous drumbeat of the approaching Third Reich. Most of her children chose not to follow her. They and their children paid a heavy price. My mother, for example, went through five concentration camps and two death marches. Her 4-year-old sister was pulled out of her arms by SS soldiers. My Israeli relatives emerged from the war unscathed.

I understand the trauma that birthed the state of Israel and the need for its existence. I understand how the villainous acts of Oct. 7 triggered memories of the Holocaust and calls for revenge.

But when this war is over, the problem that started it will still remain. In fact, it will be worse. So many innocent Palestinians are being slaughtered. So many survivors of this humanitarian crisis will inevitably have hate in their heart. I agree with journalist Carolina Landsmann, who wrote an op-ed titled, “If Israel must be more brutal than Hamas to win the war, it’s not worth it.”

Terrorists gain their power by provoking overreaction. Iran and Hamas want Israel to attack Gaza with unrestrained ferocity, writes NYT columnist Ezra Klein in his op-ed “Israel is giving Hamas what it wants.” They knew this would be the best way to convert the international sympathy Israel earned on Oct. 7 into outrage, explains Klein.

And indeed, that has happened. Klein warns that Israel should learn from, rather than repeat, the mistakes made by the U.S. in its response to 9/11 — mistakes for which we are still paying the costs.

Perhaps the worst fallout from the Hamas attacks is that it has killed empathy and the hope for peace. “I truly believed that the other side were not terrorists. That they wanted to live in peace like me. Now we can’t trust anyone,” an Israeli survivor of the terrorist attacks said when asked in a New York Times interview about how trauma has affected her views.

An Israeli military analyst, a former high school classmate, posts on Facebook: “Pray for peace, but only if it follows victory.” Other former classmates share the quote attributed to Golda Meir: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

I disagree. There will be no victory without peace. Israel will not be forgiven for killing their children en masse. Gazan children who are 15 years old have already gone through three wars. Watch “Born in Gaza” on Netflix, a documentary that follows 10 children and captures their daily life following the 2014 Israeli military offensive that devastated the Gaza Strip. Their trauma and poverty is excruciating. How many of these children are now Hamas fighters or sympathizers?

It is verboten, however, to say something like this in many circles; it is seen as justifying the actions of the terrorists. Any presentation of context is deemed scandalous, writes Klein, and is seen as diluting the “purity of condemnation.” So many Jews say nothing.

We fear talking about the deplorable conditions of Gaza’s open air prison, the land seizures, the home demolitions, the deprivation of food and water, and the scores of other sources of suffering that are a product of the Israeli occupation. We cannot decry this war and thousands of innocents who have already been killed or maimed, who are dying in hospitals with no power or slowly under the rubble.

Because if you risk speaking out, you are called an antisemite and a self-hating Jew. You risk losing family, friends, jobs, career opportunities, funding support and more. Everything is a binary. You’re either with us or against us. We are in a competition for grief, it seems, and have been pitted against each other.

But if we don’t talk about how Hamas is built on Palestinian despair, Klein writes, and if you “create a new wave, a new generation of fathers who lost their sons, and brothers who lost their sisters, and people now dedicated to revenge, have you actually made Israel safer, or have you made Hamas or something like it stronger?”

How can you keep the Gaza Strip in a permanent humanitarian crisis, asks Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, and not think there will be a price to pay? But we must ask this question — not to justify what Hamas did — but to understand how to stop this unending cycle of revenge.

Something has to change or nothing ever will. Things cannot go back to the way they were before Oct. 7. The unrelenting punishment of civilians must end. Trauma only begets more trauma. Peace, not vengeance, must be the primary goal. Anything less is destined to fail.

Sarena Neyman is a fundraising/marketing and grant writer.

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Film success is based upon how much a movie brings in at theaters, and highly grossing films usually mean a sequel in the future.

But the 2023 film about Mattel’s “Barbie” surprised everyone by grossing $1.44 billion at the box office.

And fans are disappointed to learn that a sequel is not going to happen.

Actress and producer Margot Robbie, who brought the doll to life alongside Ryan Gosling’s “Ken,” informed news outlets this weekend that the film was never intended to become a trilogy.

In July, director Greta Gerwig told the New York Times she did not plan to make a sequel.

“At this moment, it’s all I’ve got. I feel like that at the end of every movie, like I’ll never have another idea and everything I’ve ever wanted to do, I did,” she told The Times.

“Barbie” beat “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and became 2023’s biggest movie.

According to Business Insider, “Barbie” is also Warner Brothers’ most successful film released domestically and worldwide.

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Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Mark R. Warner of Virginia and Vice Chair Marco Rubio of Florida are leading a group of colleagues in a call for action to secure American supply chain and reduce reliance on the PRC.

The People’s Republic of China continues to dominate the critical mineral supply chain, and Warner and Rubio hope to reduce U.S. reliance on the PRC for minerals that are inputs for critical technologies, including through increased government support to U.S. private sector companies investing and operating in critical mineral projects.

Last month, they hosted government officials and domestic industry leaders for a roundtable discussion on access to critical minerals.

In a letter to the Biden administration, the senators highlighted the exploding demand of critical minerals and their growing importance to U.S. national security, while pointing out the U.S. is falling behind its adversaries in efforts to secure the global critical mineral supply chain.

“Demand for critical minerals is growing exponentially, yet the U.S. substantially lags behind its adversaries in securing critical mineral supply chains. In fact, in many cases China controls nearly 100 percent of the end-to-end supply chain, and is actively seeking to maintain and increase its control of these resources around the globe.”

The senators outline key areas where improvement is needed to expand domestic capabilities, and request that the administration take a series of steps to ensure U.S. support to domestic industry, to strengthen internal coordination across government agencies, and to formulate a strategy for U.S. collaboration with our allies, to combat China’s growing dominance in this space.

“Focusing the efforts of the U.S. government, in coordination with our allies, upon standing up processing, refining, and metallurgical capacity must be a priority if we are going to succeed in reducing our reliance on China for critical minerals.”

Warner and Rubio were joined by U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Chris Coons of Delaware, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

In a separate letter to Reta Jo Lewis, Chair of Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM), Warner and Rubio advocated for the prioritization of EXIM’s projects to secure critical mineral supply chains both domestically and in allied and partner nations, in order to reduce dependence on China.

“Given the national security and economic implications of critical mineral supply chains, U.S. government agencies and institutions – including EXIM – must better align efforts to support the establishment of supply chains that serve our interests and are independent of the influence and control of the PRC.”

In order to ensure that appropriate steps to prioritize critical mineral projects are being taken, the senators requested EXIM seek approval from their board of directors to invest in relevant projects, develop a strategy to coordinate with the private sector engaged in this space, and notify Congress of any additional resources or fixes needed to better support critical mineral projects.

“The stakes of our economic struggle with the PRC demands that we reduce our dependence on them in critical technology sectors and for critical goods, especially those with defense and energy applications.”

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The Alleviating Spaceport Traffic by Rewarding Operators (ASTRO) Act would award funding to spaceports with proven track records of launches, protecting and promoting America’s strategic, military and commercial interests in space exploration while supporting local economies surrounding spaceports.

The legislation would also support spaceports across the United States and unleash investment in space and addressing the concern of spaceport bottleneck.

U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner of Virginia and Dan Sullivan of Arkansas introduced the legislation before Thanksgiving.

“Space is an incredibly critical frontier for the next generation of America’s strategic needs and economic growth,” Warner said. “The ASTRO Act would solve a pressing need by allowing successful spaceports to rapidly scale their operations, unleashing the potential for more frequent launches and paving the way for breakthroughs across the cosmos.”

America faces a severe and worsening “spaceport bottleneck” as the need for space launch facilities vastly outstrips supply, creating very high demand on a small number of facilities. The ASTRO Act would get non-federal spaceports the resources they need to build transit infrastructure and quickly increase launch capacity and cadence. Under the ASTRO Act, spaceports would receive $250,000 for each licensed launch and $100,000 for each permitted launch up to $2.5 million annually, promoting investment in spaceports that already have a record of successful launches.

“America’s spaceports are facing increasing demand for launch services,” Sullivan said.  “As one of four sites in the United States with a demonstrated ability to vertically launch objects into orbit, the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island plays a key role in providing American access to space, and also providing much-needed missiles to our allies, like Israel. The ASTRO Act is a critical step towards strengthening our space launch capabilities and will allow for needed infrastructure developments that will help bolster our national security, and propel our nation’s space ambitions for generations to come.”

Spaceports across the nation would be eligible for funding, including the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, and the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

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On November 17, 2017, two U.S. Park Police officers shot and killed 25-year-old Bijan Ghaisar.

Ghaisar, who was unarmed, was involved in a car accident with another motorist, who called 9-1-1. U.S. Park Police officers Alejandro Amaya and Lucas Vinyard pursued Ghaisar’s vehicle and fired 10 shots at him in Fairfax County. Video of the shooting was available because of dashboard footage from the Fairfax County Police Department.

Ghaisar later died in the hospital of the wounds he sustained in the shooting.

On the sixth anniversary of Ghaisar’s death, U.S. Reps. Don Beyer and Jennifer Wexton of Virginia and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington D.C. wrote to Secretary Deb Haaland urging implementation of reform at the Department of the Interior (DOI) to improve transparency in law enforcement agencies. They also requested a wholistic internal review of the Ghaisar case by the Department of the Interior (DOI).

“We are writing to ask that you revisit a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Park Police and FBI for officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths. The process that followed the 2017 shooting death by Park Police of Bijan Ghaisar revealed a failure by the two departments to demonstrate a level of transparency and management of the incident that reinforced public trust. The Park Police’s response to the case was the antithesis of a commitment to transparency and clarity. Revisiting how communications and incidents are shared and handled between these two agencies is imperative.”

The Department of Justice’s review of Ghaisar’s death and the civil case related to the shooting have concluded, and the lawmakers request a follow up to Beyer’s request agreed to by then-Park Police Chief MacLean on February 26, 2018, for an internal, wholistic review of the case by DOI.

Related stories:

Judge dismisses case against Park Police officers in Bijan Ghaisar shooting – Augusta Free Press

DOJ not reopening investigation into Bijan Ghaisar shooting – Augusta Free Press

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Gas prices in Virginia are basically holding steady, as the rest of the country catches up to where we’ve been for a while, heading in the direction of $3 a gallon.

The average across Virginia on Monday is $3.11 a gallon, down a penny from last week. The average across the 50 states is down 5.8 cents, to $3.21 a gallon.

The national average price of diesel has fallen 5.2 cents in the last week and stands at $4.23 per gallon.

The data comes from GasBuddy.

“With the national average price of gasoline declining for the 10th straight week, motorists are enjoying the longest downward trend at the pump since the summer of 2022. The timing couldn’t be better as Americans head into the holidays, leaving them with more in their wallets at a time of year many start to spend on gifts for loved ones,” said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.

There is a seasonal aspect to the decline – basic supply and demand.

“Gasoline demand continues to be dragged lower as Americans stay inside more often, helping to put continued downward pressure on gasoline prices,” De Haan said. “However, we’re carefully monitoring OPEC’s delayed meeting, set to occur this week, for potential surprises that could eventually mean an end to lower gas prices should they make any surprise oil production cuts.”

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Due to climate change, vampire bats may soon come to the United States – and carry rabies with them.

A study published in the Ecography journal predicts that vampire bats – currently found in Mexico and Central and South America – are on the move.

Vampire bats, research shows, have expanded their locations in search of more stable, temperate climates.

“What we found was that the distribution of vampire bats has moved northward across time due to past climate change, which has corresponded with an increase in rabies cases in many Latin American countries,” said Paige Van de Vuurst, a Ph.D. student in Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program.

The research team, which included both undergraduate and graduate students, also found this expanded reach could be linked to a spillover of rabies. Latin America is currently feeling the bite of the rabies spread through the loss of livestock, which has generated fear as the bats’ migration patterns expand.

The Virginia Tech team aims to vigorously identify and track the bats by traveling to Colombia to help contain the spread to other countries, including the United States and its vital cattle industry.

“Colombia is a mega-diverse country, making it a perfect natural laboratory,” said Luis Escobar, assistant professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources and Environment.

The country boasts having the highest number of hummingbirds and bats, attributed to its tropic climate and proximity to the equator.

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“These machines will eventually need to have the power to take lethal action on their own, while remaining under human oversight in how they are deployed. Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing — and you’re not going to lose. I don’t think people we would be up against would do that, and it would give them a huge advantage if we put that limitation on ourselves.” —Frank Kendall, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force

This fascinating quotation about the military potential of A.I. is deeply revealing of how an obsolete way of thinking works. The Secretary of the Air Force is not an evil person, only someone trapped inside his limited perspective. There are too many like him in Russia, in China—and in Israel and Gaza.

This statement allows a direct stare into the heart of evil, not the evil of malign intent, but of the blind futility of violence accelerated by technological “progress.” It foretells a perverse refusal of possibilities other than dehumanizing our adversaries so completely that we are willing to kill them with machines that are already frighteningly lethal even without the capacity to make their own decisions.

“I don’t think people we would be up against would do that.” Of course the Secretary means that our adversaries would be unable to refuse any possible military advantage available through A.I. Isn’t this projecting our own proven capacity for depravity (think Vietnam, Iraq etc.) onto our adversaries? And isn’t it also an admission that we have no other option but to continue the we-build-they build cycle, already nuclear, on the A.I. level, a path that leads at best to some variation of war as depicted in the Terminator films?

Also implicit in the Secretary’s old thinking is that sacred cow of establishment thinking, deterrence. As long as we have more of the latest, fastest, most intelligent and most destructive weapons, we will not need to use them, because that will be sufficient to make our enemy think twice before taking us on. But contemporary asymmetric warfare (think 9-1l-2001, 10-7-2023), let alone the likelihood of either human or A.I. error,  effectively undermines deterrence theory.

The truth of the obsolescence of war has been demonstrated for all to see by the events unfolding from the October 7 pogrom. Hamas, seeking to slow or stop any larger peace process, has only ensured that a further cycle of violence will eat its own young along with those of Israel.

Conventional war doesn’t resolve the underlying conflict that initiated it. Nuclear war even less so (think nuclear winter). Variations on nuclear or chemical or biological war with the added dimension of A.I. will become doubly, triply world-destructive—in other words, obsolete.

Because everyone’s security and survival is a shared problem, the need is to re-humanize our adversaries—to perceive the me-semblance of the “other” even if they seem hateful to us and toward us. We need our military people on all sides to gather and peer together down the time-stream at a future which holds only two possibilities: either adversaries spend infinite treasure and resources to arrive at stalemate on a new, even more hair-trigger level—or we destroy ourselves. When we agree that these will be the outcomes unless we change, we can work together to apply A.I to common challenges, including the prevention of wars no one can win.

Because there is no doubt Artificial Intelligence can do remarkable things for us. It could point the way toward pragmatic climate solutions where everyone wins. It is already revolutionizing medical diagnoses and treatments. But ordinary unenhanced intelligence provides an indispensable perspective still in short supply, such as that articulated by almost every astronaut who has had the privilege of seeing the Earth from space—Russell “Rusty” Schweikart for example:

“And you look down there, and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again. And you don’t even see them.   . . . there you are—hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. And you wish you could take one in each hand and say, ‘Look!’ You know? One from each side. ‘Look at it from this perspective! Look at that! What’s important?’”

Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide” and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative.

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The holiday shopping season is here, and while there are good deals to be found, criminals are also looking to take advantage of your urge to get discounted prices.

Each year, these scams seems to be more sophisticated and harder to spot.

Virginia Tech cybercrime expert Katalin Parti shares these tips to help you avoid falling victim.

Tips to avoid holiday shopping scams

• Avoid clicking unsolicited pop-ups, links or attachments.
• Don’t contact the telephone number received via pop-up, text or email.
• Never download software upon the request of an unknown individual who contacts you.
• Never allow unknown individuals to control your computer (or other devices) remotely or physically.
• Remember that the U.S. government will never request money via wire transfer to foreign accounts, gift/prepaid cards or crypto.
• If you receive an email asking you to update your payment method or requesting other personal information, contact the company’s help desk directly to make sure the email is legit before you do anything else.
• Report suspicious activities to local FBI offices and provide as much detail as possible to help counteract these sophisticated threats.

Parti says it’s important to closely review any emails being sent to you.

“Pay attention to the sender’s email address, subject line and body of the email. Misspellings, bad grammar, requests to share personal details and low-quality logos are all red flags of email phishing.”

Unfortunately, Parti says there isn’t an obvious way for the average person to be able to identify if or when a website has been compromised.

“The only potential tell-tale sign might be that the website itself doesn’t quite look ‘right.’”

To help monitor your accounts, Parti recommends enabling purchase alerts on credit cards and disabling international purchases, unless you’re going overseas. She also suggests only making purchases on your home or cellular network, never on public wi-fi.

“Don’t save your credit card information on retail sites,” said Parti. “If possible, use a third-party payment method like Apple Pay, Google Wallet or PayPal.”

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I am a Jew.

My father and all of my grandparents emigrated from the pale of settlement in eastern Europe, as did my wife’s Jewish father. It was difficult to know where they lived exactly and for how long; Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, Hungary, Belarus… the borders kept changing, the pogroms kept threatening. Jews were people with fundamental insecurity of place, of home and homeland. They were often on the move, from one site of subsistence and abuse to another.

When my wife and I traveled around Ireland, we knew it was possible to find relatives of her Irish Catholic mother whose grandparents had come to the USA. When traveling to the places our vast extended Jewish family members had lived who did not emigrate with our fathers and grandparents, there would be no one there to find as nearly everyone was annihilated in the Holocaust.

A few years ago we spent a week at Auschwitz/Birkenau in contemplation of horrors truly beyond imagination that we felt compelled to imagine nonetheless. We sat in meditation alongside the gas chambers and crematoria, in the grove where the children clung to their mothers awaiting their turn to die, letting the blood in the earth open and break our hearts.

I have been to Yad Vashem, the holocaust remembrance center in Israel, and there, too, absorbed as well as I could the fullness of the monstrous acts of which human beings are only too capable when certain conditions come together to stimulate our worst suppressed impulses and urge forth our worst potential, impulses and urges we all carry buried within us. Yes, everyone.

So, I do not need to be reminded of Jewish suffering and after centuries of persecution the soul deep yearning for sanctuary. I assure you, I have not forgotten it. And, at the same time, I know that I do not really know what it must be like to live in Israel at this particular time. I can’t imagine.

I have also been in refugee camps in the Palestinian West Bank and gazed into the living light within the innocent undefended eyes of Palestinian children who have lived and most likely will live their whole lives in virtual captivity. I have known Palestinian mothers to embrace these children with the same unbounded love with which Jewish mothers embrace their children. Some Jewish friends and even members of my own family have denied my experience (never having shared it) and devolved into the belief that Palestinian mothers do not love their children or else, they say, they would not use them as “human shields.” I find this notion to be obscene, the wretched propaganda of an oppressor absorbed by those who will not look at “the other” long and deeply enough to really see them as fellow beings.

I ask you. If a suspected potential enemy combatant may be hiding in an apartment building is it legitimate “self-defense” to bomb that building into rubble, crushing and mutilating everyone there? Do you think that mothers and fathers who did not heed the command to abandon their home and commence walking through a hellscape into the desert without food or water with no promise nor likelihood of ever returning to their now demolished city don’t love their children and are deliberately using them as “human shields” when the building comes down upon them? Do you?

And wouldn’t the suspected enemy who was the supposed target be the first to squirrel away into the warren of tunnels beneath the streets leaving only the families in the building when it is reduced to rocks and dust?

Since the barbaric Hamas massacres of October 7 began the current eruption of this ghastly war I have been talking with a dear Israeli friend, a rabbi with whom I travelled around Israel years ago, prompting me to write what you now read. The entire 70-member extended family of a Palestinian friend of his in Gaza has been wiped out in the bombing by the IDF of which he was once a member. His beautiful heart and mind are empathetic to the suffering of all and he is devastated, as am I, at what is being done, and in our name.

We have been told since Israel’s founding that worldwide Jewry is safer if there is a strong Jewish state. I believe, for this to be so, that state must be righteous among the nations. If not, our collective peril increases, as it now has.

A famous rabbi, Yekusiel Yehudah Haberstam, an Auschwitz survivor who died in 1994, asked his students if they could imagine anything worse than the Holocaust. They could not.

He then offered his own answer, saying, even worse is to be the murderers. Of such elevated sentiment, human beings are also capable.

As the poet W. H. Auden counselled at the outbreak of World War II, “We must love one another, or die.” Such love is required of us. Are we equal to it? This is the question I ponder and to which I have no answer.

Jonathan Klate writes regularly about spirituality, political ideology, and the relationship between these two.

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