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ESSAY (June 9): Update II (6/25): Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism

America, Conservatism, Ethics, Foreign Policy, History, Individual Rights, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, Logic, Middle East, Morality, Natural Law, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Sex, The State, The West, War

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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

LATEST ESSAY is “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism.” You an read it on LewRockwell.com, The Unz Review, The New American and Power & Market at Mises.org.

Now on IlanaMercer.com:
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/06/defending-gaza-part-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism/

Excerpt:

… the Electronic Intifada’s director, Ali Abunimah, gets to the quick of the human experience, and I paraphrase:

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.)

Still on the topic of the Kelly conservatives who missionize for mass-murder: I have to wonder who’s truly ugly deep down, Megyn?

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.

Similarly, before it discovered that the “Goyim” were repulsed—the “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.

Such patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are associated with psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” How cruel. The revelation comes via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.

National-Interest Pragmatism

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. …

… THE REST OF PART I of “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism” is now on LewRockwell.com, The Unz Review and The New American and Power & Market at Mises.org.

Now on IlanaMercer.com:
https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/06/defending-gaza-part-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism/

* https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/06/ilana-mercer/defending-gaza-part-i-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism/
* https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/defending-gaza-part-i-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism/
* https://www.unz.com/imercer/defending-gaza-part-i-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism/
* https://mises.org/power-market/defending-gaza-part-i-natural-law-principles-vs-national-interest-statism

UPDATE I (6/10): The Beauty of Gazans:

“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

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 10, 2024

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

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 10, 2024

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.

UPDATED (1/12): NEW ESSAY: Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Christian Right, Conservatism, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Hebrew Testament, History, Ilana Mercer, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, War

6 Replies

The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism ~ilana

NEW: “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In” was a feature on The New American, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity (January 6), and The Mises Institute, Power & Market (January 8).

I am honored that the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams at the helm—from the get-go doing the work of the Lord—has featured the essay, “Jewish Supremacism, Like American Exceptionalism, Breeds Barbarism.”

First, I ask you to consider: Are First Principles opinion? Are the rules of logic opinion? Is the Sixth Commandment opinion? Is it optional? Is Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory opinion? Of course not. Immutable natural law is truth, not opinion.

The truths tackled

*The “Hamas Made Me Mass Murder ‘Argument'”.
*The fact of “Murder And Ethnic Cleansing having been Mainstreamed, in Israel.
*The media tool that is “Fox News, providing War Porn Militarytainment to Americans and Israelis.
*And some tools that front Fox, who promote “The Antisemitism Libel (Set Theory is in there. Oh, yeah; my mind takes me to math, sometimes).
*The ILLOGIC Of The Justification is dismantled.
*All this against the backdrop of an account of the “Israel In Which I Grew Up.”
It’s Gone.

The piece, “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban Not The Israel I Grew Up In,” passed muster with my book editor’s gimlet eye. Robert James Stove, PhD, has written most kindly:

Wow. I think that this article might be your best literary production yet.
It taught me so much about Israel’s early decades which I didn’t know otherwise.
If you’d written nothing else in your life, you would still deserve salutes for this cri de coeur alone.

This wide-ranging essay, an intellectual and spiritual purge of sorts, spans, by necessity, past and present, the personal and the political, the philosophical and the factual.

As remarked,

One of the advantages of age … is historic perspective, harking back to the past. There is value in looking back, even if it is only to lament what is no longer. Doesn’t the Left preach the merits of processing grief?

And while this column generally avoids excess use of the singular, 1st person pronoun; there comes a time when the personal cannot be avoided in galvanizing on behalf of the victims in Gaza. VDARE’s Peter Brimelow, ever-so kindly and under personal duress, had written the Foreword to Broadsides: One’s Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture (2002), my first book. This most observant of men observed the following:

Somewhat to my surprise, it is actually quite rare for this most emotionally intense of columnists to draw on … personal experiences. What seems to motivate Ilana, ultimately, is ideas

As painfully revealing as writing “Today’s Jewish Taliban is not the Israel I grew up in” was, it nevertheless accomplishes what it sought to achieve: To near-hermetically refute, I hope, almost every possible “argument” in support of Israel’s orgiastic murder spree in Gaza.

I aimed to seal the case against the prosecutors and defenders of a war, “70 percent of whose casualties are women and children.” Nobody can say, after reading this, that the war even remotely qualifies as a just war. Gazans are owed reparations for the irreparable.

Even explained is the difference between murder and “righteous killing,” with allusion to The Sixth Commandment’s “Thou shall not murder”. In Hebrew and in English.

There is nothing righteous about Israel’s murder spree in Gaza.

Conservatism Inc has currently banished such thinking, just as first-principles criticism of Genghis Bush was silenced during the United States’ war on Iraqis—only way worse: There is a monk-like devotion to Israel Über Alles among America’s Israel First media, left and right. Personally, I know very few fellow Jews—Stanton Peele, Esq., PhD, longtime colleague, is one—who are in agreement with “Today’s Jewish Taliban is not the Israel I grew up in“.

So, help me understand: I ask readers to please explain to me and to my readers why have Israel’s supporters not denounced the manifestly diabolical deeds being committed in Gaza?

Leave your comment here, so others may understand to what you attribute this deformity. Anon is fine. Email me personally, if you simply cannot share your insights publicly. I want to hear and understand.

The New American: “Memory & Indictment: Today’s Jewish Taliban.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/memory-indictment-todays-jewish-taliban-not-the-israel-i-grew-up-in/

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity: “Jewish Supremacism, Like American Exceptionalism, Breeds Barbarism.”

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/jewish-supremacism-like-american-exceptionalism-breeds-barbarism/

The Mises Institute, Power & Market, January 8

https://mises.org/power-market/israels-hamas-made-me-do-it-claim-doesnt-excuse-tel-avivs-barbarism

Agree with @IlanaMercer or not, she is a very fine writer and she gives all she has in this cri de couer. Very much worth the read. https://t.co/aE9N6NTYCm

— Tom Piatak (@PiatakTom) January 6, 2024

This is mostly a very strong, humane and principled piece of writing from @IlanaMercer https://t.co/ZaSGDdXxqV

— Arthur Bloom (@j_arthur_bloom) January 6, 2024

UPDATED (11/14): NEW COLUMN: Bibi Obliterates Memory Of Oct. 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza

Argument, Conservatism, Crime, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Morality, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Terrorism, War

2 Replies

Murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’; murder of innocents is still murder ~ilana

The razing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which civilians are dying: This is murder with malice aforethought, a concept that includes ‘deaths resulting from actions that display a depraved indifference to life! ~ilana

UPDATED (11/9): STOP. WAKE THE FUCK UP. SAVE YOUR SOULS. The razing of Gaza and the ongoing murder and displacement of thousands of innocent civilians by the Israel Defense Forces, with US imprimatur—these are war crimes, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, sheer evil.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/11/bibi-obliterates-memory-october-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-gaza/

NEW COLUMN IS “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of Oct. 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza.” So far, three exceedingly courageous publications have published it: my home at The New American.

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/november/03/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

And, The Mises Institute (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague.”)

https://mises.org/power-market/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-himself-dock-hague

Note that this is a column penned by a systematic rightist, hence , I offer facts about Palestinian voting patterns and agency. I do this in order to dispel the Disneyfied foreign-policy narrative of the West, and in order to make this clear:

Whatever we think of people, as a group; ethical human-beings can never-ever endorse their wholesale murder. I think these facts strengthen the rightist antiwar message, as they are made from a place of reality, not hippie naiveté.

I thank my editors at TNA for standing by The Truth.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity has always stood for the Truth.

That Truth is now visible from space.

I thank my podcast partner, David Vance, for sharing a moral commitment, and, well, having the proverbial male bits so few men have.

I am still hopeful there will be others.

Alas, little has changed since Iraq. This response to the razing of Gaza has elements of an Iraq redux, where you tell the unvarnished truth, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2004/11/liberation-has-a-body-count/, become persona non grata forever; and 15 years hence, you get to watch fools slowly feel their way to the truth as you and your ideological ilk had articulated, at the time it mattered, and against your own professional interests, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/05/iraq-liars-and-deniers-we-knew-then-what-we-know-now/ in dozens of essays, starting on September 19, 2002: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq .

Many are the good people who learn to trust you; the rest remain as dumb as fuck.

Excerpt from “BIBI OBLITERATES MEMORY OF OCT. 7 MARTYRS; CREATES NEW MARTYRS IN GAZA“:
https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/november/03/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

It’s simple: If you know in advance that your actions will cause the death of thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy.

The razing of Gaza and the ongoing murder of thousands of civilians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with western imprimatur, is a war crime. Strafing civilian populations and pulverizing entire neighborhoods to ostensibly “soften” the few embedded targets within—this violates natural law, international law, and Just War Theory.

It was true when Genghis Bush dropped daisy cutters and cluster bombs on Iraqi civilians, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of them; it was true when allied forces firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, and it was true when Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians.

Not that it helped his victims, but Truman icily expressed some “regret” for “the [beastly] necessity of wiping out whole populations”: “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare,” he told an ardent supporter, “but I can’t bring myself to believe that because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.”

We know ineluctably that Gaza is “a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare.” The sympathies expressed by Gazans toward their neighbors, victims of the October 7 slaughter, were meager and grudging, coerced by media, for the most. …

…. These uncomfortable facts notwithstanding, murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without the State; by the designated “good guys” or the “bad guys”; murder of innocents is still murder. …

…THE REST: “BIBI OBLITERATES MEMORY OF OCT. 7 MARTYRS; CREATES NEW MARTYRS IN GAZA” :
https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/november/03/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

* Gaza, Before and After, Screen Pic Courtesy Al Jazeera