….Once-upon a time, I’d have said, more serenely, that when an American politician preaches about “the values that make our country great,” to quote Mrs. Clinton, and about “our ally Israel sharing these values,” to be spread far and wide, chances are they mean not ordered liberty, but a libertine order, where the Bill of Rights is subordinate to the Security-cum-Surveillance State apparatus, and any common-law traditions remaining are treated as living, breathing, mutating philosophical malignancies that must be made to second and reinforce the murderous apparatus just mentioned.
Without qualm, I’ll now venture that the contemporary version of civilization known as “western” has been repudiated to a great degree by the Axis of Genocide. “You can’t pull too many bricks out of that wall before it caves in,” to borrow from Louis Auchincloss (one of the great writers America once boasted).
The Axis of Genocide’s modus vivendi is instantiated across the West in every single institution of state and civil society. The “perpetrator block” encompasses nearly all western governments and the most powerful economic actors. Its military and civilian squadrons have not only adopted Israel’s inverted reality and morality, but have made it their own.
The thing, the West, is in a state of putrefaction.
You’d think, then, that the conservative commentariat—many of whom rose through the military- or media-industrial-complex—would finally quell their yelling about “western civilization,” in the context of metastasizing, protracted western genocidal pursuits.
Not a bit. They continue to rabbit on about The (Christian) West vs. The Rest. They continue to figuratively remind us, with a sniff and a sneer, that The Rest once could not make iron or roll a wheel.
One notable exception to the warped rule, aside Jeffrey Sachs—a prince among intellectual and moral scullions—is Professor Stephan Walt, the intellectual in the famous pair that authored the seminal book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
During an August interview, Walt firmly but affably told Tucker Carlson that “people sometimes forget” about the “collapse” of norms against the use of violence, courtesy of the Super Power and its supremacist sidekick, Israel. In his words: …”
“We’re the United States. We’re not an agent of Israel. We have specific interests at play.” So said Trump Special Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler to Zionist enforcer Jake Tapper, on CNN.
Boehler had been deputized by President Donald Trump to bypass Bibi Netanyahu and negotiate directly with Hamas. More to the point, Boehler had described Hamas, whom by now very many around the world consider resistance fighters, as holding points of view that merit a hearing. He even suggested, as Jewish Insider reported, that—lo—! “they’re actually pretty nice guys.” Hamas, that is.
Whatever was he thinking! Boehler was off his leash. Israeli officials were scurrying about in an attempt to get him back on it.
Talking to Hamas? Now Trump was talking!
Unlike the president’s Gaza Rivera plan to evict Palestinian survivors from Gaza; negotiations with Hamas do indeed constitute “out-of-the-box thinking,” if not original thinking. Unoriginal, because diplomacy, namely talking to adversaries, is standard statecraft. At least it ought to be.
Excerpted but barely in the Washington Examiner, the testy Boehler-Tapper televised exchange took time to propagate to the Internet. You see, US Deep Tech, Google included, generally cover for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), which is also business partner to American tech. These multinationals are not about to throw sand in the IDF’s military bearings.
Tech multinationals (or Deep Tech, as I call them) have, after all, supplied the IDF with the killer infrastructure required to “build artificial intelligence (AI) programs designed to produce human targets with little human oversight.” (The other reasonable conclusion is that these multinationals are undisturbed by genocide.)
Talking to Hamas would certainly have been inconceivable under Joe Biden, alias Genocide Joe, remarks commentator extraordinaire Mouin Rabbani, a Palestinian. And while Trump has prioritized negotiations over American dual-national captives; his bold move broadcasts some salient facts about the situation:
Israel is an obstacle to an accord; to closing out the genocide. It is especially eager to avoid phase II of the January 17, 2025 ceasefire agreement. Not that the media system had noticed, but Israel never quite quit the killing.
By March 13, Israel had violated the ceasefire agreement upwards of one thousand times, in the estimation of Jon Elmer, military analyst at the Electronic Intifada. Staggering, perhaps, but utterly predictable historically. “Israel,” reminds a dejected Chris Hedges—he is a famed war correspondent—“has assassinated more people than any other people in the Western World.”
In the hours right after the ceasefire deal was announced; Israeli forces killed at least 87 Palestinians, 23 of them children. Quipped the late Refaat Al-Areer: “A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.” As in “expire.” A mild-mannered, bookish Palestinian scholar, Dr. Al-Areerwas murdered in his Gaza residence, in December of 2023.
Indeed, the low-grade killing across the coastal strip had continued throughout phase I of the “ceasefire.” To be exact, Israel had started up the killing fifteen minutes into the ceasefire’s implementation. Since January 15, 2025, Israel has murdered an average of three people every 24 hours—150 Palestinians since the start of the ceasefire on 19 January 2025.
No sooner were the Israelis steered by Steven Witkoff, in January, to a ceasefire; than the urge to kill overcame them. Israeli newspapers were telling about the “salty” language Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, had deployed with Netanyahu, instructing the Israeli prime minister’s aides, as follows (and I paraphrase), “I don’t care that today’s your Sabbath. Get down here and sign this [old] ceasefire on the dotted line.” I ad-libbed “old” in, because the January-15 accord was modeled after one Hamas had composed in May of 2024.
Did Witkoff remind Netanyahu that the Israeli army, the IDF, does not rest up on the Seventh Day from the slaughter of innocents, and that, surely its commander-in-chief could get off his duff to make peace on the holy Sabbath?! Probably not. Still, what transpired was refreshing, even delicious.
The March 2025 violations of the agreement have seen Israel halt the meager aid let into starving Gaza, and cut off the remaining supply of electricity to Gaza. Because the main desalination water-treatment plant is producing a fraction of its prior output, running as it is only on generators—only one-in-ten Gazans currently has access to safe drinking water.
From the start, Israel had failed to allow into Gaza the agreed-upon medicines, fuel, food, housing units (15 out of a promised 60,000), tents (20 percent of the requisite 200,000), heavy earth-moving machinery, spare parts, construction material, and alternative energy systems, like generators.
Still regionally omnipotent, still resistless—Israel has now put its exterminatory foot to the floor again. The Jewish State continues to bleed the region like a leech, seizing Lebanese and Syrian territory, including the Golan Heights. As I write, via the chyron scroll across the screen comes news that Israel has just extinguished nine lives in Northen Gaza, and two in southern Lebanon, where a ceasefire is in effect.
Unless it is killing things, Israel is just not happy. Flora and fauna, too. Israeli genociders, candid economists might say, have a high time-preference mindset. In such an uncivilized society, impulses (to kill) are privileged over contractual commitments (to quit killing). Not some of the livestock, but all of the livestock. As hard as it is to believe, but under decades of a medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people. Croplands, irrigation systems, batteries of greenhouses, living things that produce flowers then give fruit: everything has gone the way of cattle, poultry and family pets: dead. …
MARCH 21: Conservatism’s genocide exclusionary clause. Conservatives can be such natural clots, with no philosophical acuity. Those among the influencers who mercifully object to genocide; all-too-often protest on the ground that the murdered are “women and children,” for the most. Or, that among the murdered are Christians.
Oh, Buddha. People—conservatives—who champion the centrality of men and manliness to society are incapable of applying their scatterbrained philosophical inclinations in real life. Or consistently, for that matter.
Double Down News’s Lara Elborno is a Palestinian woman who knows a thing or two about consistency. Here she speaks beautifully about Palestinian men, whom we’ve seen on our screens, first to the scenes of slaughter, digging, evacuating, comforting, praying, and crying when a lull allows.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 wayworse: 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.
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
