Jim Kavanagh of The Polemicist discusses “Trump’s Exemplary Gaza Plan,” as well as ongoing geopolitical upheavals, led by the Trump-instigated US break with Europe and Ukraine.

Excerpt:

Kevin Barrett: So, hey, I want to run an idea by you here, Jim. I just came up with this. So what if every Ramadan, starting with this Ramadan, all of us Muslims decided, instead of looking to our local national authorities to decide when to start the month of Ramadan—which day is the day you start fasting? This is something we do every year. And then sometimes there's controversy. In the United States, different groups of Muslims follow different authorities and they don't always agree which day Ramadan starts and ends.

So how are we going to solve this problem? (How do we get the whole Muslim world to agree, or better yet, to start fasting on the same day?) It's been suggested do whatever the Saudis do. But those of us who aren't very impressed by the Saudis don't like that idea. Another approach is just follow tradition, which is, of course, you go with your local emir or political leader.

But…how could we unite the Muslim world? Here's how you do it. I say we all go by the Palestine moon sighting. In other words,you always go by whoever has the authority in Islam: whenever they say that somebody has sighted the moon in your jurisdiction, that's when you start fasting. Well, let's go by the Palestinians! And specifically, let's have somebody at the Al-Aqsa Mosque look for the moon. And the whole Muslim world will fast the day that they see the moon.

And if we do that, Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular becomes the de facto capital of the Islamic Ummah. And suddenly a lot of things would change. So that's my idea. I'm throwing it out here. And if it happens, you can say you were there when it started.

Jim Kavanagh: OK, I'll give you credit for it. I'll write you down as the source of that idea. It's a good idea. It's a... kind of metonymy for the idea that if the Arab and the Muslim world would unite around Palestine, the Palestine issue could be solved with justice.

It’s a way to get some grassroots pressure in that direction. I hope the King of Morocco doesn't get mad at me for saying this, because he's the one who decides when Ramadan starts here, or his people do. But anyway, moving on from there…not that far, though, over to Gaza. You wrote a piece on Trump's exemplary Gaza plan, and it's kind of…painful. Everybody, including me, is saying, this is ridiculous. I mean, this plan is not only evil beyond belief, but it's also unrealistic beyond belief. What is this guy smoking? Is he on a bad PCP trip? But you pointed out that all the other possibilities are highly unlikely, too. So...that's kind of a frightening conundrum, isn't it?

It’s the plan. It is the plan from the beginning. It's Netanyahu's plan. It is happening. “We're going to kill or expel, exterminate or expel most of the Palestinians, if not all of them, just like we did in 1948. We did it before. The world accepted it. We're going to do it again and the world will accept it and the world is accepting it.”

So they're going to do it over a year or over six months or over 20 or 48 years, or 70 years. But that's what they want to do.

Trump’s plan is a kind of gross, grotesque, blatant version of the plan that's actually in motion. And who has the alternative?

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