Opinion

Dr. Bob Fitrakis and Dan-o Dougan converse with local musician Ed Forman and play songs from his new album with 400 Pirates -- and a few live songs he strums in the studio.

Fridays 11pm - WGRN 91.9FM 
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The paradoxical phrase, 'running away forward' is one of the most apt descriptions that illustrates the state of Israeli affairs now. 

 It seems that everything that Israel has done in the past year or so is a mere attempt to deny, distract from or escape imminent future scenarios - all of which are bleak. 

 Indeed, the last year has repeatedly proven that Israel's military supremacy is no longer able to win wars or decide political outcomes. 

 Moreover, the genocide in Gaza and the rapid theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank have exposed, like never before, the ugly face of Zionist settler-colonialism. Only those who are wholly indoctrinated or are paying no attention still argue that Israel stands for any kind of moral ideals or is a "light unto the nations". 

If you want to play the game of politics, here’s step one: Reduce everything to a linear political viewpoint: “right” or “left.” No matter how deep and large and complex that viewpoint is, politicize it, turn it into something that’s either right or wrong. It’s all about winning or losing.

Did Harris lean too far left? Oh gosh. Neither Liz Cheney nor Taylor Swift could save her.

I’m still immersed in my own recovery process – recovery from the election, of course. And yes, I’m feeling pain because “my side” lost, but my emotions are complicated by the fact that I didn’t really have a side in the election. It wasn’t simply that I was frustrated with the campaigns and claims of both major parties (the only ones that mattered, right?). I’ve apparently reached a point in my life where the entire political game feels problematic; it minimizes our world in a way I can no longer tolerate.

A Franklin County map from 1892 of “ancient earthworks,” or Native American burial mounds and other structures, may show that Shrum Mound on the near West Side does have a sibling mound nearby, after all.

The map, uncovered by fringe historian and author Fritz Zimmeran, is pictured above with an arrow pointing to two mounds. One of those dots is believed to be Shrum Mound (pictured on right), which is on present-day McKinley Avenue. It is one of region’s last remaining conical Native American burial mounds. The Ohio History Connection believes it was constructed by the Adena people 2,000 years ago and possibly homage to a distant mountain.

No doubt, map making from the late 1800s was an imperfect task. Nevertheless, the map suggests there are two Adena burial mounds off McKinley Avenue, as amateur historians have speculated for decades. They have dubbed the second mound “Quarry Mound” (pictured on left) and Shrum Mound stands stoically in a small public park on the banks of the quarry roughly three hundred feet away.

If you stop and think about it, we’ve come up with a lot of doozies in our history. Like the genocide of 20 million Native Americans. Or the enslavement of 12 million kidnapped Africans. Or us invading Vietnam and killing 4 million Asian people for no reason at all. We are not a good people. We have a non-stop cavalcade, a sordid laundry list of evil deeds that led us directly to last week, to the point where we the people, by popular vote, elected a 34-time convicted felon, a fascist, and a civilly-charged and convicted sexual abuser to be our 47th president of the United States. And we did so after he clearly and quite honestly warned us that he was going to do a mass round-up and deportation of nearly 15 million people. And that he would consider executing people he referred to as “the enemy within” (i.e. his political opponents and those who were disloyal to him).

The paradoxical phrase “running away forward” is one of the most apt descriptions that illustrates the state of affairs in Israel right now. It seems that everything that the Zionist state has done in the past year or so is a mere attempt to deny, distract from or escape imminent future scenarios, all of which are bleak. Indeed, the past year has proven repeatedly that Israel’s military supremacy is no longer able to win wars or decide political outcomes.

Moreover, the genocide in Gaza and the rapid theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank have exposed, like never before, the ugly face of Zionist settler-colonialism. Only those who are wholly indoctrinated or are paying no attention still argue that Israel stands for any kind of moral ideals or is a “light unto the nations”.