Glorifying Violence and playing God

JVL Introduction

The USA claims to separate religion and State and yet now, under Trump, we see Christian prayers in the White House, Christian prayers in the Pentagon.  We have leading decision makers claiming Trump was sent by God.  They do not pray to a God of peace, where all peoples are the children of God but they pray for the success of the violence unleashed by Trump – and Natanyahu. These are prayers in support of the dehumanising and killing of “others”, most especially Iranian, Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Meanwhile Netanyahu trumpets the ancient story of Jewish liberation from the Pharoahs and cites Israel’s modern day actions against Gaza, Lebanon and Iran as examples of modern day plagues that are commemorated at Passover each year. These plagues are problematic in themselves and certainly a form of (now illegal) collective punishment as explored here in a recent JVL post.

But, argues Sachs in this article “…it gets even worse. Both Trump and Netanyahu are would-be messiahs. They are self-proclaimed agents of God. For them, stopping the war on Iran would mean God was wrong. And the self-proclaimed messiah cannot be wrong, either, because the messiah and God have become, in the grandiose psyche, effectively the same.”

Western criticism of the religious Muslim fundamentalism of Iran, Hamas and others is certainly hypocritical but it is also highly dangerous. Who will call this out and combat it?  Who will disobey the illegal orders?

LL

This article was originally published by Savage Minds (Substack) on Tue 7 Apr 2026. Read the original here.