What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.
Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.
Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.
Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.
Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.
In essence, talk to the hand about October 7, 2023; because the face isn’t listening. Just as there are no legal or moral extenuating circumstances for genocide, so it is that there are no historical defenses for this “blackest of all crimes,” for genocide.
To assert that you are just, justified or even coherent as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified—this is to embody a most grotesque incoherence and contradiction.
At minimum, Israel deserves—and has yet to receive—the unanimous revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.
Reality is truth, past and present. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. From the facts of this Twenty-First Century Genocide; certain truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time have emerged. Truths about Israel.
Through Gaza, the world has come to know Israel’s ways with the Palestinians, with their lands and homesteads—down to what Israeli terrorists habitually do to the intimate bits-and-bobs that make up a household.
Through Gaza, we have come to know Israel’s ways across the Levant and beyond. They unground and salt the earth forever. They uproot ancient communities and their olive groves. For fun. They deform babies and the baby faces of children for life. …
Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.
….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.
