Featured post

NEW (5/4): Sodom & Gomorrah Media Vs. God: How The Almighty Would NOT Approach The Modern Serial-Killer State

America, GAZA, Individual Rights, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Natural Law, Religion

NEW COLUMN AND VIDEO: “Sodom & Gomorrah Media Vs. God: How The Almighty Would NOT Approach The Modern Serial-Killer State.” Now on The Unz Review and Lewrockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market.

Excerpt:

THE BIBLE has great significance to religiously-minded conservative Americans.

Ben Shapiro, a stupid and sickening influencer, once referred to the Hebrew Bible as the Torah. It’s Tanach, dummy.

The Tanach has three sections: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim, for a total of about 37 books.

To me, the Hebrew Tanach is a great literary work. I know it in the Hebrew, through secular study as a school girl. It’s a literary accomplishment that sports a lot of shit-hot writing.

A story worth considering is Sodom and Gomorrah, and, in particular, how The Almighty approached Sodom and Gomorrah, the Sin City of antiquity.

The all-knowing Almighty possessed full-knowledge of the evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah’s utter debauchery and murderous decadence.

In front of Him, The Almighty had the totality of the crimes. The cumulative evidence was spread before him.

What did He do?

Did He dispatch a group of wise men to further “investigate” the Sodom and Gomorrah Sin City, a place where crime was law?

Did He solicit the perspective and opinion of the City’s top criminals about their crimes?

No. He had in evidence His infinite knowledge, much like an AI archive.

In other words, did the Almighty do what the complicit, narrative-shaping, collaborator, Western corporate media do, at this stage of Israel’s crime spree?

Of course not.

Take UK’s Channel 4 collaborators, and all western media, for that matter.

“Oh, Almighty Israel, give us your side of The Story,” these media persist in pleading with the Serial-Killer State.

“Give us your take on your latest mass butchery, thievery, looting, and raping. We’re listening, Oh Almighty Israel.”

What is wrong with the Sodom and Gomorrah media!

Even “Democracy Now!”, decent dissident journalists, even they insult reality, this way. Still! They reported, on April the 23rd, that Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil “was killed by an Israeli strike.”

WTF. And what dross!

Like hundreds of Gaza’s journalists before her, Amal Khalil was first targeted by the serial-killer thugs. Next, she was threatened by the serial-killers, who warned her that her head would be separated from her body, if she didn’t quit reporting on their crimes.

Finally, Ms. Khalil was martyred in a triple-tap hit:

Double-tap or triple tap attacks are all terms from the genocidal entity’s lexicon of crime and cowardice:

First, they hit the target, almost always civilian, a journalist in this instance. They follow up with a strike on survivors and rescuers. For good measure, they repeat the “feat.”

The biblical Sodom and Gomorrah was a city whose crimes, the least of which were carnal, did not come close to those of the modern Serial-Killer State.

By bringing up the Sin City of antiquity analogy, you have not heard me advocate that The Almighty’s solution to Sodom and Gomorrah be applied to the modern-day Serial-Killer State.

What you hear me point out, rather, are three things: ….

...THE RESTWATCH AND READ NEW COLUMN, “Sodom & Gomorrah Media Vs. God: How The Almighty Would NOT Approach The Modern Serial-Killer State,” are now on The Unz Review and Lewrockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market.

May 5, 2026: UpScrolled is way worthier than the cesspool of censorship created by house-trained billionaire Israelite Elon Musk, or the overlord of Facefuck (who once banned my high-brow site’s hyperlinks for close on a decade).

Small, but meaningful, UpScrolledis a welcoming environment—no shadow-banning, no throttling, no cutting back on the few Followers pro-#Resistance intellectuals and activists manage to muster on X.

And, no hashtags that go nowhere but are funneled into the equivalent of a digital leper colony.

For older folks like me, who do not like using their mobile phones for anything more than personal contacts—you can use UpScrolled on your desktop with the aid of an Android emulator.

Join good people and me:

@ILANA_MERCER @PulaRJS @bisan__bisan, @guychristensen_ Reason2Resist with Dimitri Lascaris

From X:

The US merely ‘boards’ them. This is how consent is manufactured in real time”:

https://x.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/2048733536954593418

The perpetrators-did this many thousand times over:

https://x.com/Abu_Salah9/status/2048931324652646426

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UPDATED (4/24): Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet

America, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Paleolibertarianism, Palestinians, Private Property, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

NEW ESSAY IS “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet.” Read it now on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com.

It is now available on IlanaMercer.comhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

Excerpt:

We have a “good negotiating team, the best,” blathered Trump, with respect to the individuals he dispatched to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, April 10, to dictate the terms of surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Team Trump was led by Israel firsters and Israeli assets like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoaff (sic), and Vice President JD Vance, whose eyeliner only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he embodies and represents.

I’ll make this very simple. Against the Islamic Republic, victim of the US-Israel’s untrammeled criminality, the president’s men have committed the most egregious crime, the crime of aggression, categorized as such in international customary law—and in all systems of law, codified and uncodified.

By violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory—by strafing Iranian cities, targeting life-sustaining infrastructure and industries; hospitals, healers and first responders.; historic sites and schools; wantonly murdering thousands of Iranian people, assassinating esteemed political and scientific leaders—Trump has demonstrated that he has assimilated Israel’s military doctrines. The president of the United States of America has Israelized the US Military and is ‘going Amalek’ on the Jewish State’s designated enemies.

The “accumulated evil,” another legal term invoked in international customary law with respect to the “supreme crimeof unprovoked aggression—this rot is evident in all Trump’s dealings and deeds. It is etched on his decaying Dorian Gray like countenance and is manifest in what is disgorged from the American president’s mouth.

By extension, it was quite clear what tone Trump’s team of choice would set for any and all “negotiation” proceedings with Iran.

Once the talks in Islamabad predictably collapsed, it transpired that Vance had likely been holding all information in reserve for Bibi Netanyahu’s edifications and approval.

Confirmed Netanyahu: “I spoke yesterday with Vice President J.D. Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

One wonders why Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, would sit down at the negotiating table with this coterie. After all, “in a phone call with his German counterpart, … Araghchi had proclaimed that Iran entered the failed April 10/12 talks in Islamabad with full distrust because of the US repeated breaches and betrayals of diplomacy.”

Foreign Minister Araghchi is certainly a class act. Team Trump/Netanyahu are class enemies. To wit, during the farcical negotiations, the US sneakily attempted to breach the Strait of Hurmuz, over which Iran has natural, riparian property rights. Simultaneously, the Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen, a mediocre neoconservative, calling for the assassination of the Iranian negotiators if they refuse to submit.

Was it, then, prudent for Iran’s finest to grace with their presence such proven bad-faith actors? More important still, why trust Israel’s proxies—the detritus of humanity, human waste by any other name—with your life, Mr. Araghchi? Had not Mr. Araghchi’s predecessor, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi and his wife, been murdered in “a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home”? Indeed. So, too, is the supreme leader’s successor, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, said to be languishing after wounds inflicted on him by this merged criminal cabal.

Just how duplicitous and vicious a people are we and our Israeli overlords?

A man is only as good as his word. Knowing that America’s word is shit, the Pakistan Air Force is purported to have “deployed an aerial shield” to escort the Iranian delegation, led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” safely into Pakistani airspace. On departure, their Pakistani hosts scrambled “advanced fighter jets” to protect the Iranians (to whom they had given a rock-star welcome).

True, one negotiates with foes, not with friends. Known, too, is the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Iranians and their leaders. Hours before his murder by Murder Inc., the equally impressive late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated that, as long as 90 million Iranians are without bomb-sheltering bunkers, so too will he, their spiritual leader, remain above ground, outside the shelter. He did. He died.

Iranians and their leaders seem to have so much more love and loyalty in them than their oppressors. But this does not mean you sacrifice your finest to Israel’s American idolaters. Trump and team are capable of surprising calculated, calibrated evil. Jared Kushner, in particular.

Behind Kushner’s sylphlike appearance is a boa constrictor anticipating its next meal. …

… Parenthetically, I’ll say that I’m sick of Gaza being reduced to no more than an ‘open-air concentration camp.’ Legally, this is true. But Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower. To compare Gaza of yore to the Gaza dreamt up in the Kushner consortium’s Master Slave Plan for the Strip is like comparing a centuries-old church with the heavily adorned Trump White House and White House ballroom. …

…READ THE REST. “Team Netanyahu/Trump Sinks Iran Talks; Kushner Beefs Up Rap-Sheet” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com. 

And on IlanaMercer.comhttps://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/04/team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/

UPDATE (4/23):  Genius Resistance Rap (via Dimitri Lascaris’ Reason2Resist).

 AI LEGO Strait Outta Iran

https://x.com/drew_ponder/status/2045183966848934021

UPDATE 4/24:  
Did I call it or not? Resistance Rap by young Iranian geniuses.

Lego Melania Trump: “I was Never on #Epstein’s Island. Full White House Speech.”

IRAN IS THE ‘IT’ COUNTRY. TOTALLY.
@AntiwarNews @dimitrilascaris #Lego #Iran @ExplosiveMediaa

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Trump Goes Amalek on Iran: Israelization of The US Military; Gazafication of Iran & Lebanon

America, Ancient History, Argument, Bush, Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Law, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, War

NEW ESSAY IS “Trump Goes Amalek on Iran: Israelization of The US Military; Gazafication of Iran & Lebanon.” It can currently be read on The Unz Review, home to dissidents from day one, and on LewRockwell.com, antiwar, anti-state, pro-market.

In it you’ll encounter Oafs Wittkoaff and Kushner, sons Odai and Qusai, Big Daddy Beelzebub and his favorite, serial-killer state, even an ugly war-gaming American makes an appearance. Never forget though that in reality, the Axis of Resistance is battling The Axis of Epstein for us all.

To Israel’s unbridled barbarism, America has responded by joining in. Trump has naturalized the idea of conquest, ethnic cleansing; genocide and mass murder. ~ilana

The Axis of Epstein wants to destroy the Axis of Resistance. ~ilana 

Excerpts:

Decent, moral people will root for Iran to hold the line against a Satanic confederacy, Israel in the lead, seeking the fragmentation and Gazafication of Iran and Lebanon.

To that end, President Donald Trump had convened “hucksters and shysters” to head his diplomatic corps to the Middle East and beyond, Iran included. In the commission of the greatest Sins known to Man, the “populist” president had recruited billionaires to his White House, who also happen to be Israel-first fixers and assets. Like their boss, both Trump’s point “men” are regarded as “Israeli assets,” as “one Gulf diplomat with knowledge of the talks” told The Guardian, on March 17.

This, the president, to whom Bibi Netanyahu’s word is law, did with a purpose, the outcome of which is in evidence:

The final and full Israelization of the American military, and the attempted Gazafication of Iran and Lebanon. The “Gaza doctrine applied to a new front,” concludes Jonathan Whittall, a humanitarian and fellow South African. “And the American state is in compliance, providing firepower and striving to finally and fully Israelize the American military.”

The crime of aggression is “the supreme international crime” in international customary law. Why so? Because “it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The aggression is not only “a crime against the state that is attacked,” but it is “a crime against individuals who are killed or harmed as a result of war.”

Think “accumulated evil” when you look at Trump, a “second-rate gangster who strove to be Bibi Netanyahu” and has finally and fully arrived.

Without half trying, Trump has made us all confederates in Israel’s crimes. The Israel-US criminal regimes are in contravention of the laws of war, and the Charter of the United Nations—Articles Two and 51, in particular—by which “armed force” shall not be deployed against “the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State.”

For reasons obvious, the twinned Trump-Netanyahu regimes are also an affront to God’s law, the Ten Commandments—according to which you must not covet or murder—and the natural justice, subsumed within which is the libertarian law. The latter pivots on the universal injunction against unprovoked aggression, not on the “national interest fiat standard.” 

Most of all, this obtains “regardless of a declaration of war”! In other words, the murderous parliamentary procedures and protocols of Israel or the US do not usurp eternal codes of morality and ethics. Codified or uncodified, all laws that govern the comity between the community of nations and uphold individual rights have been trashed by the US-Israel coalition of evil.

By rights, Iran then is not only expected to defend its people—but to defend them against any “State [that] allows its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State [USA] for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State [Iran].” By the letter of the law, Iran is fighting fair when it targets the Persian Gulf states, from which attacks on the Iranian people are staged.

These eternal universal laws have been sundered by two rogue, nuclear powers, whose nuclear proliferation is undeclared and unsupervised. Obscenely, the US and Israel have justified their attack on a third state [Iran] that has no nukes and has not initiated war in centuries, by invoking nuclear control and non-proliferation, comments Craig Mokhiber.

This is enough to make one gag.

Trump’s team of choice gave tone to all negotiation proceedings. The Three Amigos—Trump and his Israel-first fixers—have recruited America into their unbridled barbarism. In progress is a system of plunder developed by this coterie. Don’t, however, let the sweep of destruction they leave in their wake fool you. Trump and his loyalists are amassing fortunes. So too are sons Odai and Qusai making money hand over fist.

The one oaf sent abroad to “represent,” Steve Witkoff, is an old pal of the president. A real estate developer and investor, the man knows less than nothing about most things, the world of stocks and bonds excepted.

As we know, Trump is economical with the truth. Like him, Witkoaff has told lies right and left. About the long-suffering, patient, genial Iranian negotiators—a class act if ever there was one—he piled up a heap of lies to a receptive media: …

…  Predictions, classifications, derivations, etiologies: Man has always performed these mental operations. However, the war gaming going on under the guise of military scholarship is both repulsive and dangerous, given the “place of massive impunity” that has been carved out for Netanyahu and his complicit countrymen. As I see it, the gaiety someone like Robert Pape affects, while huffily flogging his war-on-Iran predictions, comes under the “Ugly American” category. …

The use of tactical nuclear weapons must be decried with the lash of logic, not logistics, and in clear moral language. Protest, rather than prattle to show how much you know or how predictive your war gaming is. …

Protest and pray. In Iran, the Axis of Epstein, whose combined age is 327 years, is trying to destroy a civilization 6000 to 8000 years old. Pray they fail. …

… READ THE REST. NEW ESSAY IS “Trump Goes Amalek on Iran: Israelization of The US Military; Gazafication of Iran & Lebanon.” Read it now on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com.

UPDATED (3/28): PROGRESSIVE METAL VERSION of the great “BOOM BOOM TEL AVIV” anthem. Really well done. Bravo NadaNita.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVW8sHMDEU&t=5s 

UPDATE: 4/2/026: A note I wrote on #LinkedIn, whose algorithms are deceptive:

Since the #Genocide in #Gaza commenced; the only “connections” offered up to me have been pro-Israel. Today’s offering among many other such “candidates”: director of a Zionist outfit, and someone at the Israel-adoring Blaze.

This is what LinkedIn’s AI Idiocracy comes up with, given this work?

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/gaza/

LinkedIn might be construed to be preventing persons inclined to my views from being employed by myself. Not enabling, but preventing.

Quiz: What are the terms used in law and economics for organizations that misrepresent their mission statement? LinkedIn’s is: “… create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. … by building a platform that helps professionals build skills, connect, and discover opportunities…”

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/gaza/

UPDATE (4/11/026):

The great patriot Scott Ritter made mention recently of the indelible, undisturbed ignorance that grips the American mind. In this tradition is the ahistoric libel about #Iran and #terrorism. So here, READ, ‘educate yourself,’ as Candace Owens likes to say:

IRAN: ‘Everything You Need To Know But Were Too Afraid Of The Israel Lobby To Ask,’ by ilana mercer, 7/1/025:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/07/iran-everything-you-need-to-know-but-were-too-afraid-of-the-israel-lobby-to-ask/

Israel torched a 1600 year old Byzantine-era Church of Saint George in Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

https://x.com/susanabulhawa/status/2042413468670644448

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ESSAY & VIDEO: Introducing Mossad Farsi, The Motto And The Methods (Comment HERE!)

Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Morality, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

NEW ESSAY is “Introducing Mossad Farsi, The [Hebrew] Motto And The Methods.” It is currently featured on The Unz Review, home to dissidents from day one. Now on IlanaMercer.com

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/01/introducing-mossad-farsi-the-hebrew-motto-and-the-methods-video/

Those involved in these foreign-policy drives honestly believe that to be American or Israeli is the existential Gold Standard. Lowly humanity is a pilgrim en route to the Promised Land, whether they know it or not —sometimes by hook or crook. Ultimately, the lives of all the Others being roused to revolt are just not worth much until they “arrive.” ~ilana

(It’s useful to have someone who has a facility with higher Hebrew, especially when the Hebrew motto is hidden or embedded in graphics.)

Excerpt:

“… According to the twinned belief-systems of Jewish supremacy and American exceptionalism; all ‘good,’ ‘happy’ human beings are either those who are like Americans or like Israelis, or en route to becoming clones of the one or the other.

Those involved in these foreign-policy drives honestly believe that to be American or Israeli is the existential Gold Standard. Lowly humanity is a pilgrim en route to the Promised Land, whether they know it or not —sometimes by hook or crook. Ultimately, the lives of all the Others being roused to revolt are just not worth much until they “arrive.”

As to their deep involvement in inciting regime-change riots in Iran: News tidbits to that effect have come to us directly via the Israelis themselves.

By now you know that Israel is “amoral,” it acts outside the laws of both man and God. By now you know that bursts of pride accompany Israeli barbarity. As is often the case, Israelis and their media openly report their crimes. And they are especially proud to be inciting regime-change in Iran. On the ground.

Take the X account titled “Mossad Farsi.” So nauseatingly audacious in content is it, that I doubted its authenticity.

In sickeningly sugared tweets, “Official Mossad in Farsi” and its bots (the programmed, online Artificial Intelligence responders or Israel’s paid lickspittles) profess the love Israelis have for the largely pro-Palestinian Iranians.

These are the same Israelis, still mid-murder in Gaza and the West bank, who were posting and celebrating imagery of murdered Palestinians with the flesh hanging on their bones in ribbons. That amoral Israel is now “loving on” the Iranians, a people who have generally resisted for Palestine.

Filled with love, “Mossad Farsi” has been loud and proud about its role in attempting to break the Islamic Republic. Here is the Mossad Farsi tweet that got world attention. Dated December 29,  it reads as follows: “Let’s come out to the streets together. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from afar and verbally, we are with you in the field as well.” …

Speaking in unison, Israeli media—Channel 14,  i24, Israel Hayom, and others, no doubt—confirmed the authenticity and impetus of this account. In identically scripted messages, all outlets announced that a “Mossad X account in Farsi urges Iranians to protest as unrest sweeps the country.”

The criminal Svengali Bibi tips the nose toward Iran (allegedly), in a December 29 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump runs. “Fetch,” says Netanyahu to a pack of dreadful American curs, and they fetch. …

… READ THE COMPLETE ESSAY. “Introducing Mossad Farsi, The Motto And The Methods.” It is features on The Unz Review. And now on IlanaMercer.com

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2026/01/introducing-mossad-farsi-the-hebrew-motto-and-the-methods-video/

UPDATED (January 24, 2026): “Introducing Mossad Farsi, The [Hebrew] Motto And The Methods”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASIYTLBZodk 

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ESSAY: Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Is ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian

Argument, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Palestinians, Political Philosophy, Reason, The West, War

NEW ESSAY IS “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian.” It appeared on The Unz Review, where it was one of two featured articles to lead the page, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

Excerpt: 

Stateside, people speak of genocide as though it were an item of foreign-policy, albeit—small mercies—an unwelcome foreign policy event.

Absurd, of course!

Whether such crass utilitarians like it or not, the Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it.

“Genocide for Israel” is Trump’s de facto Middle East foreign policy. Enmeshed, the American and Israeli cabal, two self-appointed world powers, are presently and shamelessly still engaged in genocide. Israel acts to “disappear” the Palestinians as individuals, as a people and as a polity. Trump, who respects Israel’s wishes to the letter, appoints people who do the same. He pursues and imposes policies that dovetail with what Israel demands.

Israeli-American devilry has entailed the decimation of Palestinian habitat, the salting of their earth for decades to come; the despoiling and theft of their rightfully owned resources, the elimination of their historical artifacts and records; of thousands of their bloodlines. Gone are Gaza’s institutions of law, of learning of healing; their churches, their mosques, their leadership.

All ongoing. We are 790 days into Israel’s relentless bloodletting.

Trump, corporate media and the political ring leaders sashaying up and down both aisles may call the “new” dispensation under which Palestinians live a “ceasefire.” In point of fact, the so-called ceasefire is just Trump’s “engineered new normal: a slow-paced genocide.” For Israel.

The future of Gaza, Trump has made clear, would “be pretty much up to Israel.” When Israel declared its intention to take over Gaza, Donlad Trump had shrugged and egged them on. “Ramp it up,” he whooped. Having long since slipped between the sheets with soulmate Bibi Netanyahu, Trump gave the Israeli prime minister the go-ahead to “fight and finish the job.”

Under Gaza’s weeping winter skies, massacres continue. Drones, killer quadcopters and other Israeli shelling implements come scudding at Gaza from the north all the time. The “destruction of remaining homes, property and land, and the prevention of the entry of food, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure materials” had never ceased, only let-up slightly. Genocide hums along now at the rate of more than eight human beings murdered a day, and at more than 20 injured, also each day, attest the Euro-Med’s human-rights monitors, on the ground.

By no unfortunate coincidence, Trump had normalized this mindset during his first administration. I was hardly being a crusty cynic when, in a January 3, 2018 column, “How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” I foresaw the vanquishing of Venezuela:

Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump’s foreign policy.

A couple of months back, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake let it be known that he was in neoconservative nirvana: ‘… for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. ‘The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,’ Trump said. ‘We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.’

‘For a moment,” swooned Lake, ‘I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting.’ (“How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism,” Ilana Mercer, January 3, 2018)

“Onward to Venezuela!” I wearily wrote. It was not a mysterious sense of foreboding. I was just following facts.

Then, I watched the lies with fascination. Now, I know all the tricks. Of course I did not vote for the man in 2024. And, of course Trump was bound to normalize genocide for Israel, albeit at a slower pace. 

Another of Trump’s hombres is Florida Representative Randy Fine. No sooner did the “Hebrew Hammer,” as he fondly calls himself, advise the Palestinian collective to “starve away”—than Trump rushed to pose by Fine’s side. The pair of them, two mountains of flesh as soft as sin, giving themselves over with passionate intensity to criminal complicity. That was in July of 2025. Come October of 2025, Trump endorsed Fine’s  candidacy.

Having gotten their hostages back, the inviolable Israelis, for their part, have settled into a different rhythm of genocide. The only thing that has come to an end in Israel are mass hostage protests. Since the Israeli-dictated “ceasefire” took effect on 10 October, upwards of 352 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel and over  900 injured. “Gaza is a living necropolis,” reports the Glia organization, also on the ground in Gaza.

Having kept up its standards, the majority of the casualties inflicted by the “most moral army in the world” are women, children and the elderly. You might look at these two diminutive brothers, small for their ages (for obvious reasons), and think kids. IDF terrorists, with far greater acuity than you, were able to discern “two suspects who crossed the yellow line,” and were conducting “suspicious activities on the ground.” …

… The REST. “Why The ‘National-Interest’ Standard Feels ‘Fake & Gay’ & Solidarity With Palestine Is Libertarian” is on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com

Now on ILANAMERCER.COM.

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HASBARA UPDATES (11/26): ON TOM WOODS TV: GAZA IN RETROSPECT: BLOCK V. MERCER

Argument, Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, War

ILANA MERCER: Israel, state and civil society, is a degenerate, genocidal entity engaged in an extermination campaign against Palestinian Resistance. Solidarity with this resistance-based society is the ONLY libertarian position.

I was hoping to refute many more Hasbara points. But Walter’s format of presenting a long lecture packed with many Hasbara points did not allow me to puncture his disquisition with counterpoints, so as to address each of his points.

Please post your comments to these two spaces:

  1. The Comments section of this Tom Woods TV debate:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g2XEGSyDk
  2.  The Unz Review, without which there is no truly diverse, dissident writing, left and right. The comments space to post your thoughts is “On Tom Woods TV: Gaza in Retrospect, Block V. Mercer.”    https://www.unz.com/imercer/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/
  3. The blog Comment space is open to you, too.
    https://barelyablog.com/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/#comments

Many thanks,

ilana

UPDATES (11/21) from X:

https://x.com/UncleFlapjacks/status/1991917293572612546

https://x.com/DerekWheeler42/status/1991917079306322137

UPDATE (11/22): Thanks, Pilot Dave on LinkedIn, for taking the time to support.

UPDATES (11/26):   One of the fallacies I was hoping to get to dispute during the Tom Woods TV debate was this myth-history:

“…the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel.” (Ha’aretz, Nov. 26)

The Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)has submitted the resolution for a “U.S. Bill [that] Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations.”

“If approved, Nov. 30 would commemorate the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel. The holiday was first adopted by Israel in 2014.” (“U.S. Bill Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations“)

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UPDATED (11/23): Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity

Crime, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Logic, Palestinians, Reason, Science, Sex, The Therapuetic State

About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say that, like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for their hostages; there are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity. Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. ~ilana

NEW ESSAY IS “Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity.” It is currently on The Unz Review, where it led the page as one of two feature essays. And on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. 

READ IT NOW on IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

There’s a reason I purposefully avoided mention of the fracas in Israel over the leaked Sde Teiman video, in the companion column to this one: “Rape of Palestinian Men By IDF & Israeli Security Forces: Habitual.”

You see, the Hasbara herd seems to have one gift, in Israel and stateside. They live in a self-reverential and self-referential world: They talk from under wet cement about … themselves. And, they are training you to do the same: talk about them.

As hard as it is for this lot to compute; the genocide, however, is about their victims, Israel’s victims, the Palestinians.

About the Sde Teima leaked rape tape, suffice it to say the following: Like the Hostage Square demonstrators in Tel Aviv, whose concern was exclusively for only their hostages; the same Israeli society is not unhappy about crimes against Palestinians; but that one such crime had been made public to the detriment of their criminally complicit countrymen.

More so than mere publicity—after all, Israel is conducting genocide to a packed house, the world—Israel’s military advocate general worries that the leaked Sde Teiman footage will undermine Israel’s international legal impunity.

The case of the rectal-rape-with-objects of a Palestinian hostage, one among thousands held in the legal limbo of detention-without-trial, was leaked by the Military Advocate General’s office (MAG), whose apparatchiks had heretofore never expressed—nor acted to convey—regret, remorse, contrition, or penitence over the genocide ongoing. (So you know, Israel has merely shifted to “genocide lite” and to the “ghettoization” of the Strip.)

There are no nettles of conscience in the genocidal society. The on-camera rape has just become a PR (public relations) problem. Unless the world’s yelling can be quelled, Israel’s legal representatives fear for the country’s legal impunity, which is meant to last in perpetuity.

Like all shouting scraps in Israel, this one is entirely without an ethical or moral dimension. The leak of the filmed rape is but a procedural, administrative annoyance, the “Minister of Defense and many others in the political sphere and public discourse,” even claiming that any criminal proceedings constitute a “blood libel.

At about this time, Israeli think-tank residents are fretting. As the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) put it (in all sincerity), it is imperative to preserve “Israel’s legal and diplomatic ‘resilience’ internationally, and thus … our ability to protect IDF (Israel Defense Forces) service members from legal risks around the world.” …

… READ THE REST. “Israelis NOT Sweating Sde Teiman Rape! Prosecutor’s ONLY Concern: Leaked Rape Tape Undermines Israel’s International Legal Impunity” is currently on The Unz Review. And on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. 

READ IT NOW on IlanaMercer.com.

UPDATE 11/23:  As I told you, grumbling across the world, move the Serial Killer State to make token arrests. There will be no serious prosecutions of the hundreds of settler culprits:

“Israeli Teenage Settler Charged With Terrorism-related Offenses Against West Bank Palestinians”:

“According to the charges, the teenager arrived as part of a group of rioters at a logistics center near the Palestinian village of Beit Lid, where they smashed windows and set fire to buildings, trucks, and vehicles belonging to Palestinian workers.”

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NEW ESSAY (NEWS 10/6): Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Constitution, Donald Trump, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Government, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Natural Law, Palestinians, Racism, The State

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

New essay is “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu.” It is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

You can now read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

Excerpt:

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

Ours should be The Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking (which I articulated in August 2022). What is The Skokie Standard of free speech? In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took a stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived. The Skokie Standard of free speech is one that champions unpopular expression, and vigorously defends all marginalized speakers and thinkers, rather than purveying and protecting state and corporate ideology du jour.

…    Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech…

…  Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

THE REST:  “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu” is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com

Read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

NEWS UPDATE (10/6):  Jeremy Scahill
“Hamas’s Strategic Gamble” by the dedicated and able Jeremy Scahill: “While President Trump enthusiastically welcomed Hamas’s response to his Gaza plan, the White House and Israel deal in deception.” (Drop Site News)

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WATCH & READ (UPDATED 7/23): ‘The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History’

Argument, Crime, Democracy, Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, History, Individual Rights, Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Justice, Media, Middle East, Military, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, The State, The West

‘… Hasbara and Israeli official myth-history aside, because of Gaza you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel. Reality is truth. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. Because of Gazans, the living and the martyred, the truth about Israel is now ahistoric’ ~ilana

The reaction to “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History,” an address I delivered at the Revisionist History of War Conference, in Auburn, Alabama, for the Mises Institute, was humbling and overwhelming: cheers, tears and responsorial calls, like in a Church.

https://rumble.com/v6toq73-the-real-israel-vs.-hasbara-history.html

Full textThe Real Israel Vs Hasbara History: WATCH, READ

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/05/real-israel-vs-hasbara-history-watch-read/

UPDATE (5/27/2025): The written address is up in full on IlanaMercer.com. When excerpting, remember to cite the source, myself, and link back to The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History: WATCH, READ” by ©2025 By ilana mercer, May 16, 2025.

I shared this deeply moving experience with my beloved girlfriend—a soulmate. And a Muslim.  “In Islam we call what you did a summons to The Truth; an invitation to walk in truth,” she explained.

My invitation was graciously accepted.

Other than one individual—a medic, a healer, if you can believe it—who rushed me screaming “terrorist”; the lecture given at the invitation of our beloved Lew Rockwell and my longtime good friend Dr. Tom DiLorenzo, president of the Mises Institute, was met with solidarity.

Excerpt from “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History” WATCH, READ:

Read the full lecture, “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History,” on IlanaMercer.com, where you can watch the video, too. 

You can watch “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History” by following anyone of these hyperlinks:

1.The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History” on my own Rumble video channel. Please Subscribe, Follow, Share and Comment.

2. “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History” on the Mises Institute’s Rumble Channel.

3. The Real Israel vs. Hasbara History on the Mises Institute’s website.

The main thing is to please share the lecture, “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History,” widely.

Plainly put: Our Deep Tech overlords, YouTube in this case, prohibit high-minded, first-principles based, precisely worded, anti-genocide Truths, unless finessed.

Citations are to be credited to the author/orator by name and via hyperlink on the cited words. https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/05/real-israel-vs-hasbara-history-watch-read/

Excerpt:

When America’s regime historians reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they always praise Pax Americana. That is the idea that American hegemony brought peace to the world.

Conveniently, they leave out the horrors of it.

Naturally, regime historians, the ones we are here (at the Mises Institute’s Revisionist History of War Conference, in Auburn, Alabama) to counter, speak a lot about Hitler, but hardly ever mention Hiroshima.

Likewise has Israel shaped its past, mixing some history with myth, to render a myth-history.  The propaganda sustaining Israel’s counterfeit history is called Hasbara, explanation in Hebrew.

Hasbara constructs serve to coat Israel’s real crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose. Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus, artificial constructs to rape reality.

Undeniably, American foreign policy has a certain narrative talent. The injustices of imperial power, notwithstanding, people are persuaded by the strut of it. Less obvious is the appeal of Israeli Hasbara and the Jewish supremacy that goes with it—and has seduced many Christians into ignoring Christ’s core teachings.

Christ commands care, not for the oppressor and the predator, but for the poor and the oppressed.

Hasbara and official myth-history aside, because of Gaza you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel. Reality is truth. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. Because of Gazans, the living and the martyred, the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

Shortly after October 7, with the commencement, in Gaza, of Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron,” certain self-evident truths became crystal clear.

By late October, Israel’s actions within and without Gaza had shown the world the absolute depravity of Israel, state and civil society. One such emerged reality is that, Palestinians, not Israeli Jews, as Hasbara teaches, are the most imperiled people in the world; Israelis the most perilous.

Another is that Israel, with overwhelming support from the Jewish-Israeli public, has gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate, industrial-scale murder and ethnic cleansing ongoing.

The Israel Defense Forces, IDF, were allowed to obliterate all the fundamentals of physical, national and economic life in Gaza, turning it into an uninhabitable “post-apocalyptic wasteland.” The Strip has been reduced to its sub-soil particulate elements, only badly soiled.

Gaza is now a mass grave along a small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, where living ghosts wander.

Gaza’s soil is soaked through with a mix of millions of tons of building debris, the decaying bodies of tens-of-thousands of human beings, their pets, livestock; fauna, flora all gone—an inferno of garbage, open sewage, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance.

Said a scholar of the architecture of Occupation: Israel has “stolen” from Gaza’s Palestinians “the very ability to produce food.” Or, receive it. Or use means of exchange to get it. Banking was dismantled.

Believe it or not, but under years of a medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people.

Indeed, Israel has systemized the mass murder and displacement of innocent Palestinian civilians, targeting them and their habitat for Total Warfare.

Since war against civilians is a war on civilization; Israel, by extension, is an enemy of civilization.

Our ally Israel is a country in which genocide, snuff films, extra-judicial assassinations, rape, robbery, torture and starvation of Palestinians are de facto legal. Israel is thus a criminal entity, and a threat to the comity of nations.

The indictment against Israel ought to be hermetically sealed. Israel’s ethnocide and domicide in Gaza is in violation of most systems of ethics known to man over intellectual history—it is in violation of God’s law, the Ten Commandments. These command not to covet, steal or murder. It is in violation of libertarian law (the axiom of non-aggression). It is in violation of natural justice, the laws of war (although genocide is not war), as well as humanitarian law.

And it is in violation of the systems of law within which the above is subsumed: The natural law and the positive law. …©2025 By ilana mercer

THE REST.

Thank you,
In solidarity,
ilana

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/gaza/

UPDATE (5/24/2025):

https://x.com/jeremyrhammond/status/1926094827516547420

What a decent man-–a  scientist and reporter, is Jeremy Hammond:

https://x.com/jeremyrhammond/status/1926094827516547420

“Israel has played its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house to the world. Israeli Jews don’t lack for facts, but most appear without the analytical and ethical faculties to examine their actions. They lead the unexamined lives of self-anointed, superior beings. … “The US regime has been a worshipful partner in Israel’s vice.” “The evidence is conclusive. IDF shoot, loot, and bomb for fun. No doubt, the Israeli state is genocidal. But by the numbers and by their statements, Israeli society is as sociopathic.” “While American foreign policy is a museum of horrors, Gaza is now the main exhibit.” This is an absolutely essential talk by @IlanaMercer at the @mises Institute #MisesInstitute. I cannot recommend it highly enough. TRUTH, WISDOM, and COURAGE!

“Ilana Mercer gave this incredible talk speaking the plain truth about the sheer perversity of Israel’s genocidal society”~ JEREMY R. HAMMOND

https://x.com/jeremyrhammond/status/1926981512773112039

And, Stephen Carson:

https://x.com/RadicalLib/status/1925927063812227455

“Sects of Christianity can no longer distinguish Satan from God… They favor AIPAC’s edicts over the commandment of the Prince of Peace.” –@IlanaMercer

I highly recommend this speech she just gave  @mises, which was kicked off YouTube.

And Do Not Analyze: “The biggest news story at Mises was ilana mercer’s speech.”

https://x.com/Trillion0x/status/1930827313182118154

“Damn! I just watched the entire thing. I haven’t seen such a thorough dismantlement of Israeli society as this is. Every word was perfection. And it is refreshingly free of the baggage terms of colonial & white supremacy that just make people dismiss the arguments.” Mystical Owl

“Ilana Mercer’s lecture at the Mises Institute is required viewing for anyone who does not understand that the entire Israeli project is a criminal one, and everyone an accessory to the crime. … Very proud of the Mises Institute for remaining steadfast. Watch the full speech, “The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History,” here.” ~ DR. MICHAEL RECTENWALD, X (https://x.com/RecTheRegime/status/1930334185245552676)

https://x.com/MaryamEbadi12/status/1925305467640688831

https://x.com/Trillion0x/status/1930827313182118154

Watch how cowards melt on Facebook, Comments. Watch how it’s done. Take the time:

Are you not yet ashamed to parade as a man who promotes genocide—an onslaught by cowards?? To be the worst of men, without the proverbial male bits?! Castrati! To be have the mentation of a filthy organism squirming in a petri dish? Stay away from this space, human effluent.

(With apologies to petri-dish organisms.)

UPDATE 5/25:  Israelis, speaking in near unanimity, murdered Gaza. The initial cheers of the world have subsided and grown softer. A disgustingly immoral West has come up sharp against the consequences of its crimes ongoing. Western commentators, politicians, public figures—now that Israel’s mission has been completed—wish to salvage their standing in the world. “I was wrong,” say crooked opportunists like Piers Morgan and other genocidal British public figures, including politicians such as Tory MP Mark Pritchard, and Piers Morgan, who, on May 21, 2025, long after Gaza’s destruction, decided to divest from genocide. Ditto echo the editorials in leading newspapers. Worldwide, the boos increase daily. Genocidal criminals—vicariously involved or on active duty—want to salvage their reputations. Don’t let them.

Here they are in action:

“As Gaza Deaths Mount and Soldiers Burn Out, an Israeli Anti-war Movement Is a Matter of Time.”

At the eleventh hour, Germany, Israel’s second largest supplier of baby-busting munitions, is worried about optics. And, it’s safe to protest. The genocide has been accomplished. So, 19 months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, here’s a whimper from the Teutons:

“Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merzagain criticized Israel’s policy in Gaza, saying that Israel’s operations “no longer appears to me as strictly necessary for defending Israel’s right to exist and for combating Hamas terrorism.”

UPDATE JUNE 6:  

“One of the best articulated speeches I have heard about the state of Israel & their subversive impact on world media, politics, war & society. Hats off to @IlanaMercer
& @mises for this brilliant gem” ~ jeannita, X

https://x.com/jeannita/status/1931096336088068110

“Most articulate and most eloquent. Unwaveringly ethical thank you @IlanaMercer.” ~ debatinglama, X

https://x.com/debatinglama/status/1930848575119839405

“Ilana Mercer’s lecture at the Mises Institute @mises is required viewing for anyone who does not understand that the entire Israeli project is a criminal one, and everyone an accessory to the crime. … Very proud of the Mises Institute for remaining steadfast. Watch the full speech here” ~ Dr. Michael Rectenwald https://x.com/RecTheRegime/status/1930336341423993305

~ NINA on X https://x.com/NinaHoubigant/status/1931037820308856894

WATCH & READ (UPDATED 7/23): IMAGES

Mises Institute, May 2025, with Lew Rockwell, rekindling a deep bond

Mises Institute, May 2025, with best friend

Mises Institute, 2025, With Karen Kwaitkowski

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ESSAY & UPDATES (2/13/025) On BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

America, Argument, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, GAZA, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East

NEW ESSAY is “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily.” It is currently featured on The Unz Review, home to dissidents, where it was a main feature, and on LewRockwell.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com

Excerpt:

I grew up decades back in the Middle East, when the American Empire was still nascent. Backed by the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the Arab World was a formidable force. It was neither managed nor handled by the Soviet Union, but, rather, a partner with the USSR in an uneasy balancing act: maintaining the global balance of power.

In those days, it was not unusual for BBC World Service, radio then, to respectfully and professionally lead with news about this or the other Arab-bloc maneuver, in the service of pan-Arabic interests. These news Ledes were announcements—not imperial pronouncements, as they are today—about the Arab World as a global, oil-producing wielder of soft power.

OPEC Before AIPAC

Like Empire, the grubby influencers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were still on the ascendancy; AIPAC mattered far less than OPEC.    In fact, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, largely Arab, routinely and energetically acted to disabuse the Anglo-American Oligopoly of its dominance, in the interest of the oil-producing countries. Scholarly foreign-service Arabists—the likes of ambassador Chas J. Freeman—exerted influence in American and British statecraft.

Naturally, no free-market libertarian would ever argue, as a matter of economic theory, for a cartelized commodity market. This OPEC certainly was. Every half-decent libertarian would, however, champion Arab national sovereignty in the control of Arab resources, over American ownership of these means of production, invariably achieved through the unceasing carnage of regime-change political subterfuge and economic sanctions.

Another vestige of a proud Pan-Arabist impetus was the Arab League. All but neutered nowadays, the Arab League was founded in 1945, by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan (now Jordan), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, acting in unity of purpose to  “strengthen and coordinate the political, cultural, economic, and social programs of its members and to mediate disputes among them or between them and third parties.”

Other members are Libya (1953); Sudan (1956); Tunisia and Morocco (1958); Kuwait (1961); Algeria (1962); Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (1971); Mauritania (1973); Somalia (1974);… Djibouti (1977); and Comoros (1993).

Count among them the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; 1976), too. Different times, indeed.

In addition to economic cooperation among signatory states, a little-known fact is that the Arab League was bound by a NATO-like commitment, signed on April 13, 1950, to mount a joint coordinated military defense in the case of an attack on a member.

Structures and alliances that were once de rigueur in the Arab world now lie in ruins, nixed or neutered by Israel and America. The Israel-America menage (well, it’s as though Americans and Israelis share a household) is joined by that pathetic poodle, Perfidious Albion—reliving an imperial moment in the sun. In-tow are the genocidal German State, which has reverted to historic character, and other western European vassal countries.

Co-opted as well has been the organization for Arab Cooperation. Founded later, in 1989, it no longer rates a mention. By 1989, it is fair to say, Pan-Arabism had been subordinated to Tel Aviv and Washington, the latter acting chiefly to make the Middle East safe for Israel. Persian Gulf countries, especially, had become puppet states, in thrall to the Anglo-American-Israel axis.

The maelstrom of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the country’s vertiginous expansion across the Levant, and the generous forbearance the Global North continues to lavish on it, funding, exculpating, and encouraging Israel to expand its evil endeavor—this must lead to an inescapable conclusion:

The Western Woke State has entered a new phase: Humanity now faces an out, loud-and-proud Genocidal State, and the supra-state structures, financial and military, that underwrite it. It is not hyperbolic to argue that humanity, whatever race, age and ethnic origin, is existentially imperiled by the openly Genocidal Western State.

By the same token, the narrative talent of American foreign policy is such that people are persuaded by the strut of it. Exceptionalism asserted rather than enacted rubs off. Curiously—and considering the centrality of good-vs.-evil, of a values-based pretense in U.S. foreign policy—if ever a clear, moral case for American military intervention presented itself; it is on the side of the civilians of Gaza as against the Israelis, who are armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Yet Israeli mass murder has been fenced off from any outside intervention by no other than the United States of America, that global force for “good.” With American backing, Israel, you can say, has outwitted the world. Israelis continue to murder Arabs and destroy their lands and leaders as the fancy takes them.

Abandoned by Russia, parts of it purloined by the US and Türkiye, Syria has been practically annexed by Israel. ISIS-in-Syria, an internationalist group that has rebranded itself as Hay?at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the Israeli-Jewish Jihadis, had made common cause in Syria. While they are not exact avatars of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—the motley crew of militants based in Syria is informed by similar, illiberal habits of mind. The IDF and HTS are, moreover, also underwritten by the same regime-changing foreign interests. Washington and its Wahhabis, if you will.

With an assist from Türkiye and the US, Isra-ISIS has, for now, collapsed the genocide-fighting Axis of Resistance, the supply routes for which ran from Iran, through Syria, to Hizballah in southern Lebanon, and the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Fifteen bloody months into a broadcasted genocide, in a markedly late, December 5, 2024 “landmark report”, Amnesty International has issued a ruling: It’s “genocide.”

Equally slow to gather seemingly hard-to-find “findings”; Human Rights Watch has also said “genocide,” and documented methods deliberate and systematic to dehydrate Gazans to death, namely to deprive them even further of potable water.

Human rights reports do not militate against murder ongoing. Day after day, the word from Gaza is the same. ….

 …. Unless stopped, Israel will continue to open up new fronts of evil. Emanations from the collective Israeli mind  flow as freely as an open sewer and are as septic. They’ll seep and spread everywhere. …

READ THE REST OF MY January, 2025 ESSAY: “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

* Israel’s uglies via Zeteo

Now on IlanaMercer.com

UPDATE (2/13/025): Another excerpt from https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/01/brics-pan-arabism-revived-tackle-israel-militarily/:

“Haunting is the lonely figure of the sainted Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya making his way through the ruins toward his Israeli tormentors. The bulk of an approaching tank is ahead.

The lecherous, licentiousness Israelis, ‘brothers in the breed of Cain,’ had tortured to death a colleague, renowned surgeon Dr. Adnan al Bursh, at Sde Teiman, Israel’s rectal-rape center.

Already a fabled figure, Dr. Abu Safiya had refused to abandon his patients at Kamal Adwan, North Gaza’s last, listing hospital.

His belief undiminished, at one stage in this man’s heroic resistance; Dr. Abu Safiya had performed the rites of burial over his young son, murdered by the IDF, before returning to his patients.

Now the director of Kamal Adwan has vanished into the maw of Israeli torture centers, from which proud #Palestinian men emerge small, bent, traumatized, deformed, disabled or dead. …

Enough….”

If King Abdullah had the backbone, this is what he and the Arab Leaders would do. READ THE REST:

BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

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ESSAY, Update (11/6): Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not

Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Morality, War

11/6/024: Humbled. Brilliant and brilliantly ethical Norman Finkelstein (@normfinkelstein), lodestar for me and millions more regarding Palestine and Gaza, explained to India Global Left, a podcast (@Indiagloballeft), https://x.com/ejmalrai/status/1854027558238441749, why the language of war does not apply to genocide, something approaching my own deduction in “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War,” September 20, 2024.

“…Genocide is neither war nor war crime

Humbled to have approached the light in such dark days. To do my part.

9/23/024: Video of mangled Palestinian baby flesh and bone embedded in my latest essay, “Genocide’s A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War,” was removed by X. (The Platform formerly known as Twatter.)

You don’t have to go looking before clones of it, courtesy of the Vampire State, are shared on X:
https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578

https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578

https://x.com/MuhammadSmiry/status/1837455703104987502

NEW ESSAY (September 20, 2024) is “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War.” It was a main feature on The Unz Review, and, titled “Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War,” was featured on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War” can now be read at IlanaMercer.com.

Excerpt:

IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Jewish State’s crimes.

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.

This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.

But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Jewish State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.

Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.

Israel, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”

In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza. Currently, it is by a preponderance of 71 percent that Israelis support a war on Lebanon.

In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.

The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.

Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara. …

In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.

The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attacks. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these, list the names of children 18 years and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)

This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.

Hasbara to what end? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing exclusively with Israel and demonizing Arabs. (+972 Magazine.)

Hasbara to dress up tiny dismembered babies, courtesy of Israel’s American baby-busting bombs, as something other than a little torso, and a miniature groin, from which a floret of baby flesh protrudes, where once a chubby little leg kicked. Watch! (https://x.com/DaniMayakovski/status/1833695316165398763. ) I am told by an expert code writer that the embed code generation for these tweets of mangled baby flesh has been disabled. Censorship down to the code in the service of Hasbara. (https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578).

Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes. …

…    Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.

“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)

Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.

As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:

“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.” …

… The complete column, “Genocide’s A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War,” can be read at the Unz Review, and on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market, where the essay is titled, “Israel’s Waging Genocide, Not War.

And now at IlanaMercer.com.

Remembering Qasem Soleimani, Revolutionary Guards General Whose 2020 Murder Joe Kent Praises

America, Argument, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Logic, Middle East, Military, Morality

LATEST ESSAY is “Remembering Qasem Soleimani, Revolutionary Guards General Whose 2020 Murder Joe Kent Praises.” Read it at The Unz Review, home to radical dissidents from day one, and LewRockwell.com

Now on IlanaMercer.com.

‘In your first administration, you understood better than any modern President how to decisively apply military power without getting us drawn into never-ending wars. You demonstrated this by killing Qasam Solamani and by defeating ISIS. ~National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent (2026)

If we accept U.S. state aggression based on erroneous prior-restraint reasoning—then aggress we can ad absurdum. ~ilana (2020)

EXCERPT:

… The debate is only ever over whether the U.S. government should or shouldn’t act on its divine rights as transnational judge, jury and executioner, never over what’s right and what’s wrong.

Stateside, the only inquiry permissible is a cost-benefit calculus. Will the assassination of Soleimani, a military official of a sovereign state, and an avid and effective slayer of Islamic State terrorists—pay strategic dividends for America in the long run?

This is crass pragmatism bereft of principle. It’s on display everywhere, surfacing on BBC News, where a female analyst, an American, was deploying the childish “bad man” meme to outline America’s Disneyfied foreign policy.

This angels-and-demons production always starts with the prototypical evil dictator who was alleged to be messing with his noble people, until the avenging, angelic empire sent a drone to the rescue.

Again, even Tucker, whose antiwar credentials in recent years have been impeccable, had conceded that this Soleimani guy probably needed killing, which is the same thing Iraqis old enough to remember America’s destruction of Iraq, circa 2003, would say about President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice.

So, who’s right? Or, is blind patriotism predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world?

“Soleimani deserved to die,” an atavistic bit of jingoism made by Republicans and Democrats alike on Fox News and on CNN—it holds true only if you believe that the U.S. government is the keeper of the flame of an immutably just, universal code of law, which it is deputized to uphold, wherever it takes-up residence.

Such a chauvinistic impulse is true only if you believe that the U.S. government’s might gives it the right to be universal judge, jury and executioner, deciding who may live and who must die the world over. ….”

…THE REST: Remembering Qasem Soleimani, Revolutionary Guards General Whose 2020 Murder Joe Kent Praises” is at The Unz Review and LewRockwell.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com.

* Image screen pic credit: www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/youth-members-of-the-scouting-movement-walk-with-a-large-news-photo/1892454629?adppopup=true