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“Brutally savage” Russian airstrike kills more than 20 in Ukraine · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's Tuesday, September the 9th, 2025.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the daily article podcast from Denison Forum.
• 0:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chris Elkins, new reading today's daily article, written by Cultural Theologian Dr. Jim Denison.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than 20 people were killed in a Russian attack on a village in Eastern Ukraine this morning.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky posted on ex a brutally savage Russian air strike with an aerial bomb on the rural settlement of Yarova in the Denetsk region.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Directly on people, ordinary citizens, at the very moment when tensions were being dispersed.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, his post showed horrific footage of body strewn across the ground.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I saw the news, I admit that it felt like more of the same.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This terrible war has been going on now for three years.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have never been to Ukraine and don't know that I know anyone directly affected by this tragic news.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, far more people died in this morning's air strike and were killed in an attack on a
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: A tragedy that I use to lead the daily article and have continued to grieve.
• 1:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: My response comes from the fact that I have many friends in Israel, having let dozens of study tours there, and love the land and its people dearly.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's my guess, many in our culture likely view the latter as I viewed the former, seeing another attack on Jews in Israel as irrelevant to their lives.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: or even worse, they saw the victims of the Palestinian takers as the villains and the attackers as the victims.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once I did media narratives against the Jewish state have been regularly debunked, but they persist, drowning out reporting that disagrees.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a result, 60% of young adults told a recent survey that they favor Hamas.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: which has been designated a terrorist organization by at least 8 nations and the European Union over Israel.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In addition, recent moves by various governments to recognize a Palestinian state have strengthened Hamas whose leaders are calling them one of the fruits of the October 7th attack.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rise of anti-Semitism is tragically on display in America as well.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: According to the American Jewish Committee, a tax on Jews in our country, quote, have reached shocking levels affecting American Jewish behavior and sense of security, like we haven't witnessed before, in quote, as just one example, a man speaking Hebrew was assaulted recently at the Santa Monica Pier, part of what officials are calling a deplorable escalation of anti-Semitism across Southern California.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: What explains this escalation?
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Paul Miller is professor of the practice of International Affairs at Georgetown University, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He served as a member of the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and Barack Obama in a recent article for the dispatch he explains.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The problem with framing the Israel Hamas conflict as one between the powerful and the powerless.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Miller perceptively describes the process through which the left came to view Israel as a powerful overlord with the Palestinians as the heroic resistance, a settler colonial state, with the Palestinians as indigenous rebels, and white, with the Palestinians as their non-white victims.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: As he shows, all three claims are spurious.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Israel has become powerful by defending
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This does not make it an overlord or evil by definition.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a settler colonial state.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It began resettling the land under the Ottoman and British empires and did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the era population of the historic Palestine grew from 1.4 million in 1948 to 7.4 million today.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Israel isn't quite or European, and equal number of Israeli citizens are descendants of immigrants from Asia and Africa as from Europe.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: 20% of the population is Arab.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: However, as Dr. Miller explains, none of this matters to Israel's critics.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In what he calls the Marvelization of Reality, whereby we expect reality to conform to the story arcs of fiction,
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the protagonist, the Palestinians, the goal, statehood and liberation, and the villain Israel.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a complex world, we crave simplicity and white hats for the good guys and black hats for the bad guys.
• 4:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to much of America these days, Israel wears the black hat.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The marvelization of reality is relevant beyond Israel in ways that speak to our national future.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: As author and educator, Neil Postman warned in amusing ourselves to death, public discourse in the age of show business, the television age turned us from active participants in society into passive consumers of entertaining soundbites.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Digital technology exacerbates this trajectory since we can now watch whatever we want for
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since there is far too much content available for us to consume, we filter it by preconceived biases, and since we don't produce the content we consume, we are at the mercy of those who do.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is massively significant for our post-Christian society, which has no objective filter by which do discern truth from falsehood and, in fact, rejects the existence of objective truth itself.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it is just as significant for Christians in such a society.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can be as secular as our secular friends, according to research by George Barnum, about half of those who attend evangelical churches, say there is no absolute moral truth, and belief people can earn salvation through good works.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Only four in ten believe humans are born into sin and need salvation in Christ.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can be swayed by entertainment that normalizes extra marital and same-sex sexual relations.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can evaluate political news through our partisan biases.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can measure success by cultural popularity rather than biblical obedience.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can claim that the answer is to view secular culture through the prism of the Bible, but skeptics will assert that this is just as biased as viewing the Bible through the prism of secular culture.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: After all, the Bible is a book like any other book, subjectively written by flawed people using words that must be subjectively interpreted by flawed people, or so they'll say.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the difference.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Spirit who inspired these words can give us the discernment we need to understand and obey them.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jesus promised that in ways no secular person can understand, the Holy Spirit will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you from John 14 verse 26.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Accordingly, from 1 John 2 verse 27, his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and is no lie.
• 7:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because he literally lives in you, according to 1 Corinthians 3, verse 16, the Spirit can speak to your mind and influence your Spirit in ways no one else can.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you keep in step with the Spirit taught in Galatians 5, verse 25, he will guide you into all truth, affirmed in John 16, verse 13.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the book of Acts and a plethora of spiritual awakenings across history show, he can empower and direct God's people to impact their broken culture in transformative ways.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he can guide only those who will follow.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Would the spirit say you are in-step with him right now?
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: If not, why not?