Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon …~ilana
NEW ESSAY IS “Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask?” It is a feature on The Unz Review and on LewRockwell.com, as well as on Substack, where you can join me for conversation.
Excerpt:
In examining the causal factors in the criminal psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel, I have questioned “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation,” namely the convention, accepted among solidarity commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, that there is a strict divide between Judaism and Zionism.
Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as a faith largely beyond reproach—humanistic, universal, and peaceful; Zionism as its opposite. In this asserted split, it is assumed that Judaism is naturally antagonistic to Zionism and always arrayed against Israel.
The zealotry with which our camp, in solidarity with the Palestinians, adheres to the Judaism-Zionism divide can’t but catch one’s attention. It is as though mouthing these platitudes was The Charm, a protective amulet of sorts.
Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I noted that the idée fixe of “The Chosen People” goes a long way to account for the unwarranted sense of supremacy that animates Jewish Israelis. A biblical aspect of Judaism such as “Chosenness” appears to have encouraged, animated and privileged a factional preference among Jews, to the near exclusion of universal fellow-feeling.
Biblically based Chosenness and the corresponding supremacy certainly help explain the indelible reservoir of evil, a bottomless pit of it, expressed and acted out by the Jewish Israeli commonwealth’s most faithful representatives: The People’s army, the IDF, or the Israel Defense Forces.
There is no grimness in the IDF’s approach to the “mission” of mass murder. Undaunted, they go about their “business” with barbaric gaiety. (Remember, I watch the Hebrew-language tv channels. No filters there.) This Israeli “citizen army” is on its second genocide, uninterrupted.
From Gaza, to the West Bank, to Southern Lebanon; from sun-up to sun-down—Israel continues its genocidal deformation of the Levant’s landscape and its people. Now, generations of Lebanese agrarians—food producers, their well-appointed residences, built to blend into, not lord over, the undulating hills—the very means of production: wiped out. Ancient religious heritage sites, Muslim and Christian, gone (although it should be noted that the magnificently spirited Shia community is the prime target of the Terrorist State and its American enabler). Over a million people displaced. Upwards of 4100 murdered. Israel is not on a killing spree; it’s in a comfortable groove, a second-nature killing groove. Jewish Israel is flying close to the sun, and nobody dares to swat it down.
In marked contrast, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levi and the inimitable Norman Finkelstein were quick to implicate “Chosenness” in the psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel. In August of 2024, in conversation with Current Affairs’ editor Nathan J. Robinson, Levi, a veteran dissident journalist, had been commenting about the unexamined lives Israelis lead. Although he has since vacillated; in his better days, alluded to here, Levy had also remarked in anguish that Jewish-Israel shapes its genocidal media, not vice versa. In other words, genocide is market-driven. The general average of Jewish Israelis throughout the country knows and likes what’s going on.
Lone Israeli voices like Levi and Amira Haas, another Haaretz pro-Palestine columnist, would be first to tell you that, in Israel, “they represent absolutely nobody,” confirmed Norman Finkelstein, also to Current Affairs’ editor on June 6, 2026.
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: ….
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”:
The South is being ethnically cleansed of the brave resisting population, predominantly Shia. And the media stands by. By now you will easily believe it, but there is but one foreign correspondent documenting genocide in Southern Lebanon.
More than 56,264 hectares of agricultural land have already been affected across approximately 285 towns in the south, Bekaa and Baalbek-Hermel regions, representing nearly 22.5% of Lebanon’s total agricultural areas … According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), during the November 2025 to the March 2026 period, around 874,000 people in Lebanon – or 17% of the analysed population – were already facing “Crisis” or “Emergency” levels of acute food insecurity. The report now estimates that 1.24 million people are expected to face acute food insecurity between April and August this year.
Lebanon is now classified under IPC Phase 3, or “Crisis” – meaning many families can no longer consistently afford basic food and are being forced to skip meals, cut portions or take on debt.
… For decades, Lebanon focused more on banking, trade and tourism than building domestic food production. But the country still relies heavily on the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon for local food production, including wheat, potatoes, leafy vegetables, olives and fruits. The Bekaa Valley alone supports around 42% of Lebanon’s agricultural production.
…with 95% of [banana growth] affected, citrus orchards at 97%, olive groves at 91%, in addition to major damages to fruit trees, protected agriculture and smallholder farming systems.
The livestock and fisheries sectors have also suffered major losses. The ministry estimates that around 1.8 million cows, goats, sheep, poultry and other animals have died, alongside the destruction of 29,121 beehives and losses exceeding 2,030 tons of fish production.
…According to the ministry’s Rapid Needs Assessment, 23,611 farmers have already registered damages. In southern Lebanon, 77.9% of farmers have been displaced, while only 22.1% remain in their towns.
…’Production across the entire zone, from livestock to beekeeping, has come to a halt in the zone south of the Litani, even north of it,’ he says. ‘Farmers cannot reach their lands due to the constant threat.”
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 crime” of 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 sneakilyattempted 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. …
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. …
The Anglo-Israeli-American genocide in Palestine is a moral matter, not to be subsumed within the confines of foreign policy, but transcending it. ~ilana
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.”
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.” …
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.
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.”
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
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.” …
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:
“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.”
‘… 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
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.
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.
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.
“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
“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
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.
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
“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
If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West ~ilana
Israel has been trampling underfoot everything decent and good.
Genocide is back. This time with President Trump in fawning agreement, playing procurer and pimp for the Israeli State, and subjecting ingrate Bibi Netanyahu to no more than a curt jerk of the leash. Just the same, during a press conference with the US president, on April 7, the Israeli prime minister’s face grew as dark as a thundercloud on mention of possible diplomacy with Iran.
Under such favorable circumstances, Israelis are louder and prouder about killing and destroying with monomaniacal diligence. Indifferently, and for the first time, Israel openly admitted to targeting journalist Hussam Shabat for “elimination,” in December of 2024, and executing the him on March 24. The sadistic serial killer stalked its prey, then pounced.
“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. … For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.
I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”
By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to tell the truth, and now, at last, I have found rest—something I have not known for the past 18 months. I did this because I believe in the Palestinian cause, in our right to this land. The greatest honor of my life was to die defending it and serving its people.
I ask you now: Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.
For the last time,
Hussam Shabat, from northern Gaza.”
Trampling underfoot everything decent and good: Fatma Hassona was to be the subject of an upcoming documentary, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Israel could not allow that. So, Air Force Genocide bombed the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, also murdering nine members of her family.
After a brief, relative lull, eighteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel has resumed its slaughter of civilians at an average rate of 103 souls a day, with 223 individuals dealt life-altering injuries, also daily. Since March 18, reports Ha’aretz, Israel has killed 1,652 people and wounded 4,391 in strikes on Gaza. (Ha’aretz “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.) The number murdered now exceeds 2,000.
With 62,000 Palestinians missing, over 52,000 confirmed dead; and indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, by the Lancet’s account—the fake, fossilized media should be obligated to report the official number of Palestinians dead by Israel as well over 100,000. That too is a vast undercount.
The mind is crowded. Palestinians murdered melt into a montage of faces. Yet remember we must men like Rifaat Radwan. Radwan was among fifteen medical and humanitarian workers who were summarily executed pointblank, on March 23, by the Israeli regime in Gaza.
The underworld that is the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)—the world criminals and lawbreakers inhabit—is premised upon lies. By now you know The Liar’s lines, as he drops American “earthquake bombs” on kids at community kitchens:
“Hamas. Terrorism. If Palestinians die; they needed killing.”
But Satan’s non sequiturs can’t conceal the truth—or silence the deeply felt devotionals of the righteous. As the SS IDF stood above him, riddling his colleagues and himself with thousands of bullets, Radwan, Palestinian Red Crescent Society medic, did not beg the agents of his demise. Instead, he recorded their crime for posterity while righteously reciting his last prayers. These are achingly beautiful:
“Oh Lord, accept us. Oh Lord, accept me as a martyr. Mother, forgive me. This is the path I chose … that I help people. … .” Until he expired.
Late last year, when teenager Shaban al-Dalou smoldered alive, the presstitutes did what they always do: Fudge the English language in the service of Israel. …
…
… Back to the malodorous cauldron of death and decadence that is the Israel Defense Forces. (Or perhaps the Israel Defense Feces?)
A new load of grief came, in March, to residents of the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, in the northern occupied West Bank. Slatternly IDF soldiers have a familiar signature. They leave behind human waste in the homes they wreck:
“Feces, urine and used condoms—these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in these Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault [in March],” reports the Electronic Intifada.
That the IDF has such a documented “tradition” of defecating and urinating in the West Bank and Gazan homes they occupy and vandalize is backed by other reports, not least that of Philip Weiss’ Mondoweiss article, “S-it Israeli soldiers did in Gaza.” A 2014 account in the Guardian seconds the same: “Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left feces and venomous graffiti.” As has the august author of Drinking the Sea At Gaza, Amira Hass of Ha’aretz, documented the defiling ways of the Israel Defense Feces.
Somebody should rub IDF noses in their own mess to teach them a lesson, once and for all. Nobody has.
Yes, Israel makes atrocities past and present look like sandbox play. Still, …
May 9, 025: Where are the animal activists for these innocents; these devoted, long-suffering companions being butchered alongside “their” humans. This is censored on many social media sites. Not even Palestinian animals are considered deserving of mention.
“… Teratogenic damage. Developmental failure. Genetic disfigurement, not by chance, but by war. Bombs struck not only buildings, but chromosomes. The weapons, steel, shiny, American, fell not just to destroy the present, but to corrupt the womb. To poison the idea of tomorrow….”
MAY 8, 025: When on January 15, 2025 Trump instructed a ceasefire; I wrote then that “Trump ordering a ceasefire into being within days indicates that, at any point, Team Genocide, Biden and Blinken, could have done the same: stopped genocide at its inception. Team Genocide took a decision not to stop genocide.” And Trump, Team Genocide II, could do the same, if he were not, well, I don’t think this odious ignoramus deserves the effort of my sobriquets.
MAY 7, 025: The headlines generated by the actions of the State of Satan. You know their contents. You’ve seen the images of four-month-year old starving babies, extremities, digits like those of a dainty hatchling.
Now, some of the same loathsome characters are posturing as lifelong supporters of a peace process, who had no part in a diaspora that did energetic Hasbara for Israel.
BEWARE. There will be many such cobra-heads galvanizing the Iraq Defense: Nobody Knew. Or, it was Netanyahu, nobody else. Israel was mislead by Netanyahu. When in fact, Netanyahu had simply fulfilled the average Israeli voter’s wish list: They want their hostages back, but not Gaza.
The Board of Deputies is vehemently against one Kneecap, who must be a stellar fellow, or a good outfit, for raising their ire.
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). ~ilana
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.
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. …
“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:
"Haunting is the lonely figure of the sainted Dr. #HussamAbuSafiya 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… pic.twitter.com/H2wz6iIMCy
The IDF’s ‘Aktion’ in northern Gaza resembles nothing short of the ‘liquidation’ of the ghettos of East Europe ~ilana
1/5/025: Speech restrictions stateside in the form of the Antisemitism Awareness Act mirror the worst of British and western Europe’s anti-speech tribunals. Tabled by a Republican and a Democrat and passed by the Upper Chamber, S. 4127 would embed Israeli agitprop throughout American education. For posterity.
Aside being in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the Antisemitism Awareness Act would utterly enervate discourse in our country, and would actually criminalize tracts like my last:
12/29/024: Emanations from the collective that is the Israeli mind continue to be as septic as an open sewer. The Church of Satan, IDF, sets up a spa-like facility on the northern coast of Gaza, stolen land. Breakfast, BBQ, mani-pedi and massages are on offer to the killing squads in the killing fields of Gaza.
There’s a lounge for treats, Belgian waffles and pretzels, there are also popcorn and cotton candy machines, as well as a barber and a pedicurist for the fighters.
Surrounded by synthetic grass, and the putrefying bodies of murdered Palestinians.
12/17/024: Yet even the solidarity camp has to keep intoning that Jews oppose the vampiric Zionists. Not quite.
A genocide is taking place in Gaza in the name of Zionism, the state of Israel and in the name of Jewish people. According to Jeremy Leibler, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, a recent survey conducted by Monash University reveals that “the overwhelming majority…
According to a 2024 Pew Research survey, which misleadingly labels the genocide in Gaza a “military operation,” “Opinion about Israel’s current military operation against Hamas,” reveal that, “Jewish Americans… are quite divided on this question:
28% say Israel’s military operation is going too far.
24% say it has not gone far enough.
32% say it is taking the right approach.
13% are unsure.
“Across all of American Jewry, support for Israel is strong, consistent, and bipartisan (83% of Democratic Jews, 86% of Independents, and 94% of Republicans)”
Kamala Harris had never repudiated Genocide-Joe’s genocide, and had promised to continue doing what was in Israel’s interests. It is fair to deduce then, that genocide was not an overriding issue for Democrat-supporting Jews.
12/11/024: Israelis and their lickspittles pitch a fit when the language of the Nazi Holocaust is applied to the genocide Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians.
Newest round-ups for death marches toward the south, the Sinai desert:
Footage documents the abduction of dozens of innocent civilians by Israeli occupation forces around the Awni Harthani School in northern Gaza this morning. pic.twitter.com/MKYTf0GSyO
Israelis and their lickspittles pitch a fit when the language of the Nazi Holocaust is applied to the genocide Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians. So here goes:
The northern part of the Gaza Ghetto is being “liquidated” (as remarked on October 31). Israel’s methodology there is that of the Nazi death squads, who were said to have “liquidated” the ghettos of Eastern Europe before transporting their involuntarily confined Jewish occupants to the extermination camps, in cattle cars.
Going up against ghettoized civilians were the soldiers of the Nazi Party, the SS, the toughest in the Wehrmacht. Like the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the SS presided over a Kafkaesque apparatus of propaganda, intelligence, police and military bureaucracies.
Plainly put, the purpose of liquidation was deportation to the death camps for extermination. Israel, of course, has further streamlined and industrialized mass eviction and murder by collapsing liquidation and extermination into one. Duly, the IDF is currently attempting to shoo about 400,000 broken and starving human beings in the Strip’s northern most section toward a “safe zone,” the narrow midsection that is the Netzarim Corridor.
The IDF’s “safe zones” bafflegab is reminiscent of the upbeat postcards which deported Jews were urged to mail to their associates: From these condemned Jews, the Nazis, clever and coldhearted, had coerced messages of good cheer: reassuring postcards to folks back home from those who were never coming home. Don’t worry. We’re safe. We’re being ‘resettled’ in a wonderful place. (“Dear wife, I am healthy and I work as a tailor…”)
Since the Palestinians know all too well what is meant by “safe zones”; they are mostly standing their ground. Consequently, the SS IDF is slowly exterminating the residents of northern Gaza in-situ.
As the field monitors of Euro-Med Monitor reported, in the waning days of October, 2024, “Israel is systematically and extensively working to drive out the Palestinian population and forcibly displace them from their residential areas in the northern Gaza Strip.” To that end, they are “using massacres, mass killings, bombings of hospitals and shelters, and the destruction of [the little that remains of the] basic necessities of life.” ……
… Grossaktion Gaza is how the Nazis would have dubbed the SS IDF’s actions.
Aktion or Grossaktion is the term the Nazis used for their assorted ghetto-liquidation operations. Grossaktion Warsaw was the Nazi code name for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto—again, deportation for the purpose of extermination.
The IDF’s GrossaktionGaza resembles nothing short of the “liquidation” of the ghettos, as detailed by the National WWII Museum (carpeting your victims with bombs is Israel’s contribution to the annals of genocide):
“The liquidation of ghettos involved rounding up all Jewish inhabitants, shooting any resisters, deporting Jews to killing centers, and the physical destruction of the ghetto. Blanka Rothschild describes her memory of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto: ‘[When] came our time, we had to be taken out. The entire population of our [building] was walked to the place where the cattle cars were, and we were loaded. It was a horrible thing because people had to stand. There was no place to sit or squat. If somebody was sick or even dying, he died on his feet standing up. It was just unbearable.’ While some were able to escape or were transferred to forced labor camps, the vast majority of Jews who lived in ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe perished either from horrid conditions or mass deportations to extermination centers.”
…These days, Gaza looks worse than the Polish Kutno Ghetto of yesteryear, for example, depicted in Hugo Jaeger’s photography, curated by Time & Life. On the one hand are the heartbreaking images of the Polish shantytown, its many makeshift shelters, and its hopeless inmates amid the collapsing ruins. On the other are the nylon tents that have come to typify Gaza, set against a Hiroshima-like hellscape, from which all signs of collective Palestinian life have been erased. The similarities are too conspicuous to ignore. …
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.
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 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.
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.” …
UPDATED (10/10): Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip are documented through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year-long genocide.
Named and shamed. All the International Criminal Court need do is start criminal proceedings.
The Nazis hid their systematic crimes; Israelis–a majority–celebrate them, even use their depraved exploits on dating apps. Israeli society has a sadistic pornographic edge to it.
One Year of Genocide. Courtesy of BBOBBY, Lowkey and DoubleDownNews. Take it from one who has a facility with words: this is powerful, brilliantly done. Not a word is misplaced. Not a rhythm in this calculated genocide is uncalculated.
UPDATE 10/1: The Arab world mourns the death of Hassan Nasrallah, a man Norman Finkelstein called, in conversation with Glenn Greenwald a week prior to Nasrallah’s murder, “The frankest most impressive leader on the world stage.” (“Gaza is Gone.”)
Via SEYMOUR HERSH
The munitions dropped on a city block in the south of Beirut, by the mad dog medinah, to murder Hassan Nasrallah, are described thus by the New York Times, otherwise known as Israel’s stenographer:
A video published by the Israeli military showed that planes it said were used in the attack that killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Friday night carried 2,000-pound bombs, according to munitions experts and a New York Times analysis.
The video showed eight planes fitted with at least 15 2,000-pound bombs, including the American-manufactured BLU-109 with a JDAM kit, a precision guidance system that attaches to bombs, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician. These bombs, a type of munition known as bunker busters, can penetrate underground before detonating.
UPDATE 9/30: Luckily I have Hebrew. Two versions do America’s overlords who are in Israel transmit to the world. The Hebrew Maariv lede reads, “The Americans got the message: ground invasion of Lebanon is not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.'”
UPDATE 9/28: As Mouin Rabbani reasons, the late Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizballah, did the principled thing: He stood foursquare with the Palestinians of Gaza against the mass murderers of Israel. The world stood by during the Jewish Holocaust, even though by 1942, the Final Solution was quite well-known among Allied powers.
Mad dog Medinah (=country in Hebrew) Israel dropped 85 tons of explosives on southern Beirut’s civilians to murder a major Arab political leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah? holds a majority seats in Lebanon’s Parliament. By the way, where do u think the Kirya, Israel’s major military compound, is located? In the heart of Tel Aviv
2:32 PM · Sep 28, 2024
Confirmed by Hizballah on Saturday, Nasrallah’s killing comes after a series of tactical successes in the early stages of Israel’s unfolding full-scale attack on Lebanon, an open-ended assault that may well equal in barbarity Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. These are terrible and difficult thoughts to absorb after almost a year of genocide. …
Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.
The euphoria in Israel, Washington and some Arab capitals, will be exceeded only by the grief of Nasrallah’s supporters, who are far more numerous.
And there is no doubt that the loss is real and great from the perspective of a resistance that faces not only Israel’s formidable arsenal, but all the resources of the United States and the collective West.
Israel’s ability to carry out this series of attacks in quick succession will shake the confidence of many in Hizballah’s legendary prowess and operational security.
The attacks will go some way to restoring the prestige Tel Aviv has lost among its Western and Arab backers after a year of military failure in Gaza, and its failure to prevent the Hamas military offensive that wiped out the Gaza division of Israel’s army on 7 October 2023.
And although Hizballah has been hammering Israeli military assets and settlements in the north of historic Palestine with rockets, many in the region are asking why the resistance group’s response to Israel’s escalating aggression has not been harder and harsher – even as Israel intensifies its bombardment of civilians across Lebanon and within its capital.
Like others before him, Nasrallah gave his life on the road to liberate Palestine, and that struggle did not end today.
UPDATE 9/19: The long arc of the Israeli terroristic enterprise has expanded into Beirut, Lebanon, in the form of a staggered operation against civilians, which saw the yellow-bellied Mossad operatives (allegedly) booby trap thousands of pagers and other devices deployed by Hezbollah non-combatants in civilian life (Hezbollah is an elected Lebanese political party). The Israelis killed dozens and caused gruesome injuries to thousands, all to the whooping and cawing of their flaccid girly fanboys and groupies stateside. Need I say that all this is prohibited by the laws of armed conflict? (George Galloway’s “The Biggest Act of Mass terrorism” renders the best analysis of the biggest act of mass terrorism .)
A particularly disgusting aspect is the weaponization by Israel of electronic commodities. Let us hope that this malevolent tampering spurs local Lebanese industries. It will certainly lend the competition an edge.
Two things to bear in mind: First, Israeli mama’s boys opt for digital warfare because they lack the courage to fight combatants openly and up close like men would. Second, Israel is the proud promulgator of the “doctrine of inflicting massive harm to civilians.” Israel, the neighborhood bully, proudly named its killer creed “after an area of Beirut, Dahiya.” (MEI) All this occurred practically in the presence of US special envoy Amos Hochstein, which shows how Israel spits on its biggest benefactor, the US.
UPDATE 9/11: Murdering Animals and Owners, as in “mowing the lawn”; it’s all in a day’s work for Israel’s finest. I give you The Chosen People’s Settlers. What a mindset it takes to slaughter a helpless creature:
UPDATE (9/5/2024):‘Mowing the Lawn.’ The Devil and its handlers, IDF under Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, said on Wednesday that the military has been “mowing the lawn” during an ongoing major operation” in the West Bank, which will require the need to “pull out the roots.”
The West Bank has now been invaded by IDF. The orgiastic destruction of built and natural habitat has begun there in earnest. Ethnic cleansing has commenced there too. Since October 7, one child has been killed in the West Bank every 2nd day
The “operation” dubbed “Summer Camps” now openly uses terms Israel had once denied were in use.
Suffer the children.
UPDATE (9/2/024): Genocidal impetus is underway in the West Bank courtesy of Satan’s forces on earth. Via Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur to the occupied territories, comes the news that the IDF is in the midst of a full military assault, destroying hospitals, roads, infrastructure already damaged in prior raids, replete with telling the Palestinians to evacuate en mass. (Drop Site)
Via Bashir Matahen, the director of Public Relations and Media at the Jenin Municipality: “The occupying (Israeli) forces have demolished more than 70% of the city’s streets completely (…) to a depth of approximately one to one-and-half meters, which has led to the destruction of water and sewage networks, as well as communication and electricity cables, in the areas that were demolished, initially estimated to cover 20 kilometers.” (Middle East Monitor)
UPDATE (8/29/024): Israel: What Moral Rot Looks Like: As Israel’s IDF death squads, Einsatzgruppen, murder, maim, starve and destroy all human life in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank—where land and pitiful possessions are being stolen daily with impunity by armed settlers—the IDF’s auxiliaries, says Mouin Rabbani—Israelis party on. The picture of moral decadence:
According to UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), on average, “one Palestinian child [has been] killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, every two days since October 2023.”
Since the Demon State began its genocide in Gaza, young Bisan, a heroic reporter, chronicler of life under Genocide, has prefaced each of her many transmissions from Gaza like this: “This is Bisan in Gaza, and I am still alive.” In what universe is a young woman forced into such a reality for close on a year? Now Bisan’s skin is ulcerating. Due to the absence of sanitation infrastructure (bombed) and products (aid delivery halted by the Satan State) in Gaza; a human being’s largest organ and barrier to pestilence—the skin—is losing its capacity to protect internal organs. This is very dangerous, since all roads lead, via Israel, to sepsis and organ damage, even death.
Oren Ziv from +972, August 19, 2024, reports on the latest Settler Pogroms. IDF soldiers watch on as settlers rampage through West Bank villages, burning, looting and, yes, murdering. Arrests? Nah. For what? Nothing to see. Move on. Jewish supremacy; Jews über alles. “If you try to defend yourself, you’re dead’”.
Watch this Twitter video, via the Human Rights organization, B’Tselem. “Rape in the name of God,” threatens a Settler named Shem Tov Luski . And Christians defend these people and alienate me. I’ve added “Christian Ethics” to my skill set on LinkedIn.
In the latest essay, I had also mused about the Israeli sexual prurience:
“When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read Ali Abunimah’s ‘Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film‘), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the Israel defense Forces (IDF), and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.”
As do I mention the temperamental difference between the peoples, Israeli and Palestinian. You can see it in the video. The Palestinian man is embarrassed at the sexual brazenness. Not the Settler.
Essay was cancelled here, author dismissed, for adhering to Christian, not AIPAC, ethics. We know what Jesus would have done. Actually, as one Christian told me, Christ did inveigh exactly against what he termed “The Synagogue of Satan.”
The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.
As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages.
The crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over—these Israel has already de facto legalized in what passes for law in that thugocracy.
By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”
Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by. ……
A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a new report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.”
In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise. …
Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges (Alan Dershowitz in the lead) to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.
Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions. ~ilana
Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.
Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.
The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE … of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.
Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW—how Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.
On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that, “A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.
Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.
The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.
Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world. Excerpt from the coda:
…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?
Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.
The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.
The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.
UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.”
UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress.Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.
… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.
UPDATEV (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:
“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”
(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.
UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.
UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”
UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’
UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet, has awoken to its obligation to Truth:
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.
ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:
No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”
? Bram Settenbrino shared these videos of himself indiscriminately shooting a gun and blowing up a mosque
Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality—the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes ~ilana
If you did nothing and said nothing during the genocide of the Gazans, we know exactly what you would have done during the genocide of the Jews.
Nothing. …
Historically, Mr. Abunimah’s aphorism tracks with the manner in which most of conservatism’s celebrity pundits had comported themselves during the ramp-up to the war on Iraq, for that war’s duration, and with how most have been conducting themselves in the course of Israel’s unimpeded genocide against Gazans (the Ghazzawi?).
Kelly Conservatives (Bonus Material & Background)
I am not here speaking of unserious conservatives, like podcaster Megyn Kelly, for example, who deserves mention if only because, dear reader, you deserve some levity and laughter occasionally.
If nothing else, it is amusing to hear the Kelly vanity production call out America’s campus kids, selfless souls protesting a holocaust, for being unattractive, ugly. To an empty vessel, there is nothing worse than forgetting your facial fillers and falsies.
Myself, I think that Mohammad Khatami, a software engineer arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York, is beatifically beautiful. Techie Ray Westrick, arrested in California, also in protest of Project Nimbus—some kind of killer-Cloud-AI collaboration with IsraHell—is supermodel lovely. (Roll the tape or scroll down this text to look.)
How about the pampered LA Zionist thugs who took metal rods to the sculls of peaceful encampment protesters? How about those doing their evil utmost to logistically hamper “humanitarian aid deliveries at scale” to Gaza? How about the sated Jewish settlers and their doughy offspring, fat families, instructing their larded young on how to help starve other human beings? How about the observant IDF soldier, tooting, during a telephone interview, his religious platoon’s acts of murder and torture in Gaza, all in fluid, contempt-dripping, American-accented English?
Bombastic without and barren within: The IDF collective might wear fatigues, but it does nothing to camouflage its libertine, licentious, sexually depraved, pornographic culture.
The culture comes from the top:
His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that “as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .” News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.
Back to the point: To the extent they oppose the genocide in Gaza; conservatives, some with enormous populist and political sway, have confined themselves to disinterested mumblings about the national interest: Gaza is of no national interest to the United States of America. Bye-bye. Off to distract the masses with prattle about the wokerati. …
“Where are you going, my dear,” a tiny, determined Ghazzawi child is asked. She is striding along purposefully, holding her dad’s hand. She is very busy. No time to dawdle: Stray cats are starving.
Despite relentless Israeli bombardment and the scarcity of food in the Strip due to Israel's inhumane blockade, Palestinians dedicate their time to feeding the starving stray cats in the devastated streets of Gaza. pic.twitter.com/mlZJxFYHfR
Juxtapose this precious child with this poisonous cabal: Settlers, in collaboration with IDF soldiers, reports ABC’s Matt Gutman, blocking with boulders the aid trucks from reaching Gaza’s starving.
An ABC journalist reports on Israeli settler mobs establishing checkpoints to hinder humanitarian aid trucks destined for starving Palestinians in Gaza. In some instances, these mobs have attacked trucks, assaulted drivers, and destroyed aid and medicine intended for Gaza's… pic.twitter.com/X3QnXLxo94
Update II (6/25): “Synagogue of Satan” did this: Starve the children: Middle East Eye, one of my favorite news sources, reports: “… caused by the ongoing Israeli siege blocking the delivery of basic life-saving food and medical items.”
Read: MEE, Electronic Intifada, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, Mondoweiss for real news.
Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. Although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not. ~ilana
Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. ~ilana
Contra classical natural law theory, my own religious order, Judaism in its popular rendering has always appeared to me quite sectarian. The faith to which I was born frequently seemed a we-only litany, more about Jews and for Jews than about the world, or for the good of the world.
For “a spectacular sense of otherness and unity” (Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, p. 262), only the Mormons, tethered to their territory of Utah, equal Jews, with whom Mormons also strongly identify.
Myself, I came alive ideologically when I reached the New World, in the mid-1990s. It was as though a new world of ideas heretofore unknown had unfurled to quench the soul and the intellect. Alas, it did not come from Judaism, to which I was born.
I discovered the very American libertarian non-aggression axiom, which flows, at least in my opinion, from Thomist Catholic philosophy, Just War theory, and the Stoic doctrine of natural law, whose first “interpreter and transmitter” was Cicero,[1] to be followed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Roman Church.
As plain as plain is the idea of charity. It’s a religion surety, I had surmised, that benevolence is meant to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts in the community. Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. As instructed in Leviticus 19:18, “You should love your neighbor as you do yourself.”
Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam, the Jewish obligation to repair the world. Perhaps willfully—and to comport with my natural-law bias—I had always interpreted Tikkun Olam as a sublimely modest Jewish obligation.
Developed by the scholars and sages of a dispersed people, Tikkun Olam, I had hoped, was intended as a humble thing—as the duty of the Jewish individual to help, bit-by-bit, to bring about a better world in unassuming, day-to-day righteous acts. In his community and beyond.
In the best sense of that much-abused term “Orthodox” is a reader of ours, “a Torah observant Orthodox Jewish man,” and an attorney at law. JBS, Esq. speaks of Jewish “Chosenness” as follows:
As you are likely aware, Judaism is an ancient religion based upon God’s revelation of Himself to Hebrews at Mt. Sinai. Zionism is a recent [19th Century] political movement associated with Judaism but is not Judaism. Most Jewish people conflate and blur the distinction.The ‘Chosen People’ concept is misunderstood by most Jews. God ‘chose’ the Jewish people to receive, accept, keep and fulfill His Torah and teach it to the world, to be a ‘light unto the nations.’ That is all being ‘chosen’ ought to mean, not a Jewish ego trip.
As to Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel: fulfillment of their Godly duties is required. I think Zionists believe otherwise; that military capture is sufficient. God twice banished Hebrews from the land for their failures and sins. Many Orthodox Jews (myself included) believe that Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel will require the appearance of Mashiach, the Jewish messiah. I don’t know much about that. (May, 2026)
Although there is a certain degree of comic protest about my next question; I ask it not to be a Smart Alec:
Does what our laudable reader say mean that, come Mashiach, real or imagined, ultra-orthodox Jews could be given religious license to rob Palestinian homesteaders? That, you see, is unclear. With respect to the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jewry; although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not.
In particular, the question of situational ethics and ethical relativism.
Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. History, more significantly, is replete with people who followed a false messiah. There is even a concept for this eventuality in Hebrew lore (mashiach sheker).
These days, my own humble perspective on the daily practice of piety is a mirage in the desert.
Certainly, my modest, morally universal interpretation of Tikkun Olam is not the one adopted by Jews who are “chosen”; namely favored, esteemed and elevated by gentiles and by institutional Jewry.
Starting with the barefaced Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, …
Is Zionism not, to some extent, an excrescence of Judaism? Why the near-religious divide between Zionism and Judaism? And, am I permitted at all even to ask? ~ilana
Pro-Palestine commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, are religious about maintaining a bifurcation—a divide—between Judaism and Zionism. Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as humanistic, universal and pastoral, and Zionism as its opposite. In the commingled rumble of commentary over Zionism; Arab commentators have been conditioned, by necessity, to internalize the split and the exact fissure-lines, as though mouthing these were a protective amulet, a matter of survival; theirs, ours. It is, in a sense.
Why this near-religious bifurcation between Zionism and Judaism? Is Zionism, to some extent, not an excrescence of Judaism?
Biblical Chosenness is certainly a facet of Judaism. Does it relate not at all to the Jewish supremacy that animates Jewish-Israeli expression and express action? Are these not connected? If so, should the question posed, then, really be a Jewish-Israeli question? Or, perhaps a Judaism Question is more apropos?
And, am I permitted at all to even ask?
Composer of some of the best, most exquisite English prose, with insight to match, was novelist Anita Brookner. Through her Jewish protagonist in the novel Making Things Better (2002, p 22), Ms. Brookner writes that the gentleman’s Jewish “ancestral religion,” which he did not practice, “seemed to him an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness for which he could see no justification.”
Miss Brookner, a rare gem and a genius, was a secular, unaffiliated Jew like myself. “Although resolutely secular in outlook,” Ms. Brookner also conveyed what I have long-since felt. It is that “the mystery of the Holy Spirit,” expressed in good will, gratitude and graciousness, seems absent from the encounters we Jewish outsiders, lonely people, have had within our “ancestral religion.” (Loneliness is the theme that threads Brookner’s novels.)
Like Brookner, I do not speak ex cathedra of the vexation that is Jewishness. It is indubitably a delicate matter. And, although knowledgeable, I am not an “expert.” However, to deny that eddying around the Jewish child is a sense of, or talk of, Jewish specialness—this would be dishonest. Whether you choose to imbibe “Chosenness” or not—I chose not to—as a Jew, you are likely to have been raised hearing about “Chosenness.”
The supremacy fallacy, it would thus seem, issues surely not strictly from “Zionism,” but from “Chosenness.”
The Chosen-People belief is as old as the Hebrew Bible itself. It is thus in the “Chosen People’s” philosophical marrow. For what—pray tell?—are foundational, early teachings like Deuteronomy 14:2, if not a declaration of Jewish superiority for posterity?
For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.
Alongside all the commentators and broadcasters who insist on upholding the division between Judaism and Zionism; I, too, very much hope that Zionism is not an instantiation or an extension, on some elemental level, of Judaism. I really do.
There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to …
