Category Archives: Crime

WATCH & READ (UPDATES 5/27): ‘The Real Israel Vs Hasbara History’

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

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

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

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

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

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

My invitation was graciously accepted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you,
In solidarity,
ilana

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

UPDATE (5/24/2025):

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

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

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

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

And, Stephen Carson:

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

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

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

And Do Not Analyze:

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

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

(With apologies to petri-dish organisms.)

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

Here they are in action:

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

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

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

UPDATED (4/6): Red Crescent Society Martyrs. Israel: Intentionally Genocidal From The Start

Crime, GAZA, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Law, Media, Middle East, Morality, Palestinians, Propaganda, Psychiatry, The Therapuetic State

From janitor to general, from foot-soldiers to supreme court justices; in deeds and in words—Israeli society is genocidal. This, by now, is well-established. At all echelons of society, the intent to commit genocide had been established widely and early in the Jewish State’s industrial-scale mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza and, now, the West Bank.

In Israel, genocide is a national project, not just a state project, says Norman Finkelstein.

Also known by now is that criminality is codified in Israeli law; that genocide, snuff films, extra-judicial assassinations and rape are de facto legal in Israel.  Late in March of 2025, came a ruling from the highest court in this rotting country, the Israeli Supreme Court, “explicitly and directly legitimizing Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.”

Both imbecilic and depraved, the Israeli court used, in support its ruling,

 … the ‘argument’ that the State of Israel is exempt from the obligations of belligerent occupation under international law in all cases pertaining to the Gaza Strip.

Stupid, because, even if you wish to assert a right not to feed the starving occupied besieged people under your rule; you have no right to stop others from doing what international law obliges. The obligation to stop Israel, says Craig Mokhiber, expert in international law, is “an affirmative one, not a passive obligation. ”

Before the ugly gob of a former IDF colonel, Gabi Siboni, came at a pliant West with the latest in Israeli public expressions of genocidal intent. Said this unthinking member of Israel’s think-tank ranks:

“Hamas is not the problem in Gaza. Hamas is a symptom of a bigger problem. The population in Gaza is a barbaric mob. If we don’t wish to bleed our soldiers for decades—because in Gaza there will be Hamas B and C—the only solution is Trump’s ‘vision.'”

https://youtube.com/shorts/7yHv7zA3gGA

https://youtube.com/shorts/7yHv7zA3gGA?feature=shared

As I’ve documented throughout the genocide, “The Jewish State and Israeli Society are equally sick” (May 21, 2024). No doubt, the Israeli State is genocidal, but, by the numbers and by their own statements enacted on the ground—Israeli society is sociopathic.

As uncomfortable as this is for the libertarian methodological individualist; the facts are clear. On the matter of the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza; Jewish-Israeli society does not stand apart from the Jewish State.

The remarkable Norm Finkelstein has said so recently, too—also with empirical backing and proof galore. For example, the archival material of Lee Mordechai, an Israeli historian’s examination and documentation of the genocide. As has Professor Finkelstein mentioned one Omer Shatz, an Israeli law professor, who has focused his research on the “distinct crime of incitement to genocide.” Many others have shown that, by their actions and words—Israeli society is genocidal to its rotting core.

As if verification is still needed. For heaven’s sake, listen and look—believe your lying eyes. Given the number of American Idolaters still claiming that conditions in Gaza belie what our “lying eyes” tell us—I continue to recommend a variation on Richard Pryor’s wry logic about he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. The reader must believe his eyes, not the lying Israelis and the mainstream media which will teach you obfuscation, and, more crucially, rob you of the ability to express and correlate reality with language. Believe the evidence in front of your eyes. The Israelis and their Israel First American enablers are, plainly put, lying.

Personally, in my sourcing, I’ve privileged Palestinians, whose lived experience this genocide is. I’ve found that Palestinians have done the best job of transmitting what Western journalism has buried. Palestinian journalists are paragons of virtue and courage. Owen Jones, while not an intellectual (for example, like many others, he fails to understand that “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War”), is, nevertheless, a deeply devoted and feeling British podcaster. Please take the time to watch his tribute to twenty-three year old Journalist Hossam Shabat, murdered, the other day, by Satan. How does a parent live after losing a son such as Hossam Shabat, noble, kind, and brave? With difficulty.

Similarly, when I watch Bisan Owda’s videos from Gaza, I think, “If only I could protect this mere child, spoil her, spirit her away to safety.” What a beautiful and rare gem is Bisan. Kind, courageous, sweet, despite being forced to chronicle the genocide of her people at so young an age.  I’ve never heard a cruel, crude word from this young woman. Her parents must be so proud. G-d Damn IsraHel for threatening this soul, this treasure, and protect Bisan.

For that matter, never believe any Hebrew-English translation come to you via Israel (ask me, first). If Israelis are moving that grimacing cavity on their faces; they are lying. Here Genocider Israel Katz, a defense minister, broadcasts in real time his intent to commit the crime of all crimes. His is the sound of impunity, says Craig Mokhiber, another stellar thinker in law, international and natural.

Should you choose to follow the malfunctioning mainstream media—left & right—you will be years out-of-date with respect to facts and Truth, analytical and empirical.

Katz’ precise words:

“Residents of Gaza, this is the last warning. The 1st Sinwar destroyed Gaza. The second Sinwar will ruin her completely. The assault of the air force against the Hamas terrorists is just the first step. The rest will be many times harder, and you will pay the full price. Evacuations will soon start from areas of battle. If all the Israeli hostages are not released, and Hamas is not expelled from Gaza—Israel will act with the kind of force unfamiliar to you. Take the offer of the president of the US: return the hostages and expel ‘The Hamas’, and other options will then open before you, including migration to other places across the world, for whomever wishes it. The alternative is destruction and complete ruin.

“A child collects up the blood and flesh of his mother.”

https://twitter.com/drr_palestine/status/1903002446000959782

https://x.com/IlanaMercer/status/1903647647606718773

GAZA ESSAYS:

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

GAZA BLOG:

https://barelyablog.com/

UPDATE (3/27): QUIT CORPORATE MEDIA. You must quit the media system, which is heir to Julius Streicher. (He was founder of Der Stürmer, and a Hitler propagandist.) If you don’t, you will fall into error, lose touch with reality; speak with a forked tongue — and think as the abettors of genocide at CNN (or FoxNews, for that matter) do.

Your thinking will be infested with bogus concepts and constructs that do not reflect, but rape reality. Such as: both-sideism (there is no “other side” to genocide), conflict (this is no conflict; Israel wants to exterminate all Palestinians; Palestinians want to LIVE), war (genocide is not war, not legally, not morally), battles (there are no armies arrayed one against the other; Israelis have an Air Force, not a fighting force). And, as media report, “Palestinians were not killed [using the passive voice],” on any give day. Rather, than innocent Palestinians are being executed en masse by Israel. No reference is made to the power differential between genocider and genocided.

An example of mainstream-media propaganda via CNN:

The image of mass-casualty murder over which Gaza’s civilians pray stoically and spiritually is described by CNN as occurring “amid ongoing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas.”

This is the worst of agitprop. As was said above, and as I explained in “Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War” (September, 2024), “In Gaza, there are no armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between equal, opposing warrior forces. There is no parity on the battle field, only, for the most, the bully-boy’s aerial blitzkrieg carried out against a trapped civilian population.”

Craig Mokhiber has underscored that the use of “conflict” nomenclature allows the culprits to leave out the concepts of criminal culpability and genocide.

A day in the life of this poor, poor people forced to live alongside Satan:

https://twitter.com/s_m_marandi/status/1904864530309541891

https://x.com/s_m_marandi/status/1904864530309541891

UPDATED (4/2): Victimizers as victims.

Israel has slapped a classification “over 20,000 Israeli Children … as victims of terror since Oct 7.” In the style of the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for manufacturing illness. The criteria for manufacturing illness under DSM or similar mental-illness manuals are hardly stringent.

In actual life, not according to a manual, tens of thousands of Palestinian children are actually dead, mutilated, permanently and mentally scarred, orphaned without a soul in the world. No psychiatric manual required.

UPDATED (4/6):

Satan can’t silence the deeply felt devotionals of the righteous. Righteous Palestine Red Crescent Society medic recites his last prayers, as SS IDF riddle the medical men with thousands of bullets.

“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 his last breath, which this young man took on March 23. “As he lay dying,” reports Soumaya Ghannoushi of Middle east Eye, “Rifaat Radwan recorded the slaughter of his colleagues, debunking the Israeli army’s version of events.” Habitual liars.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lczq10K1iew

I do, incidentally, believe South Africa, where “anger grows over failure to prosecute nationals fighting for Israel,” will be the first country to successfully prosecute and jail the twisted creeps who travel to Israel to aid in its genocide. Activists, who “allege that authorities have deliberately dragged their feet over prosecutions of individuals believed to have taken part in the war,” are acting.

BREAKING (12/8): ASSAD. Amnesty International. Amsterdam Antisemitism Hoax. Grotesque IDF Grinning, Gyrating, Twerking, Howling Devotionals For Genocide

Anti-Semitism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War

The media give us to understand that even in murder—nay, mid-murder—Israeli-Jews must be seen and described as mere victims.

DECEMBER 8: The ISRA-ISIS Axis of evil won in Syria. The ghouls on Israel’s sub-intelligent TV networks are celebrating the Jihadist victory; Netanyahu is taking credit for Regime Change by HTS, formerly known as ISIS in Syria.

American mainstream media morons just love the rebranding. McCain grins from grave.

Sad day for the Palestinians, because the Syrian part of the axis-of-resistances has fallen. McCain grinning from grave. He was a big fan of ISIS in Syria

See “Lies About Putin, Syria & The Alawite Alliance”

Palestinians are even more alone now. Supply chain of weapons from Iran via Syria, and on to Gaza and the West Bank is all but shut now.

The TRUTH:Lies About Putin, Syria & The Alawite Alliance” Ilana Mercer, July 12, 2018

DECEMBER 5: Finally. “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today.”

That it took them so long—14 months into a genocide—only bolsters the contention that, together with the organs of international law—so too has the human rights community been compromised. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of the seminal Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that this is the case. The report’s remarks concerning the Resistance are certainly proforma nonsense.

READ IT: “‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.

NOVEMBER 16: Juxtapose the the ugly Israelis loosed in Amsterdam with this saint of a human being: “Surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down as he told the international development committee what he witnessed when working as a surgeon in Gaza.”

NOVEMBER 15, 2024:  Amsterdam Antisemitism Hoax. Israel is exporting auxiliaries of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—civilian terrorists—who’re still invited, disgustingly, to partake in European civil society, or what remains of it.
The best and most forensic anatomy of the antisemitism hoax, perpetrated in Amsterdam by Israeli psychopathic football hooligans and their willing enablers of the Western political and media class, is “EXPOSED: What REALLY Happened in Amsterdam,” published on 14 November 2024, by stellar truth-teller Richard Sanders, under the Double Down News auspices.

YouTube:

UPDATED:

“Consider this paradox,” writes Marc Owen Jones, an academic specializing in media disinformation: “The New York Times ran the headline, “Israeli soccer fans injured in attacks linked to antisemitism in Amsterdam,” but the body article contained only verified evidence of anti-Arab racism. Its lede emphasized antisemitic motivation, while the body of the article cited footage by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting anti-Arab and racist slogans – footage that the New York Times had actually verified. The only basis at the time for claiming antisemitism came from a single tweet by the Dutch prime minister, while the linked Amsterdam police’s own statement made no such attribution (subsequent police statements did condemn ‘antisemitic behavior’).”

Despite no Israelis being killed, a media system loathe to use the term genocide to describe the deaths of over 43,000 Palestinians seemed happy to use terminology redolent of the Holocaust. Suddenly, incidents of soccer hooliganism and anti-Israeli violence seemingly provoked by anti-Arab racism were being reduced to antisemitic pogroms.
…Buried or omitted in most accounts was verified evidence of anti-Arab racism that had occurred prior to these events, including footage of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking taxi drivers, and chanting explicitly racist slogans like “Death to the Arabs” and “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs.” (Marc Owen Jones)

Israelis should be excised like tumors from any state-organized affair the world over. Private institutions should also be encouraged to disgorge Israelis from their midst until they come clean, admit their prior support for genocide, not deny it, and promise to demand an end to the genocide, the occupation and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, in addition to convincingly demonstrating a commitment to pay reparations to Palestinians in perpetuity, when the Day of Judgement arrives.

NOVEMBER 3, 2024: This is now. The IDF is not tired of genocide; they are invigorated by it. These murderously grotesque IDF filmed this footage a few weeks ago, in the Zaitoun neighborhood of Gaza City.

Uploaded at 2:11 PM, October 9, 2024, the footage depicts the ecstatically distorted mugs of the IDF de Sade soldiers, resembling nothing so much as primates in heat—my profuse apologies to primates for the unflattering affiliation—after a day of genocide.

Israeli Defense Forces detritus, human waste by any other name, twerk their ugly tushes and groins, grinning and gyrating while yelling about their conquests.

Click the link, and log into X formerly known as Twatter, so as to view Israel’s finest. You see, Elon Musk, patron saint of human waste, has seen to it that the sharing code of all these kinds of videos on X is disabled.  I have this fact confirmed by an expert coder.

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1844371141487636620

In another vignette, a funeral for a member of Murder Inc, a family eulogizes Shuval ben Nathan with blood-curdling yelps. The recording website is Seventh Eye. It’s in Hebrew. The relatives of Shuval ben Nathan don’t “call for revenge,” as the article’s Hebrew indicates. Rather, they call for MORE revenge, and celebrate the revenge that has gone down, is going down, did go down under the watch of their dearly departed. “You went into Azza for revenge, the more the better: women, children, everything you saw, this is what you wanted.”

Western pro-genocide networks run morally reprehensible pieces such as, “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide.” The likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—normalizers and backers of Israel’s genocide—are hard at work framing Israeli war criminals as victims, suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and worthy of great empathy, not opprobrium. More so than the Abu Ghraib photographs, IDF malefactors, however, tell a tale, not of fleeting youthful indiscretion, but of abiding degeneracy in the military and the society.

The media give us to understand that even in murder—nay, mid-murder—Israeli-Jews must be seen and described as mere victims.

Nonsense on stilts.

The fact is, while Israeli Jews are conscripts and must enlist in the IDF—nobody, but nobody, is forced to do what we’ve seen IDF soldiers rejoice in doing. The military draft does not imply or mean the obligation to commit, chronicle and rejoice in war crimes. This joy has been entirely voluntary, prideful and organic to the wider-Jewish Israeli society’s tenor and project.

Some of the Israel Army’s body of work ongoing:

Real gutted and beheaded babies, piles-upon-piles of REAL, precious dead children, courtesy of the Demon State, Israhell. This, as opposed to the October 7 Atrocity Propaganda Israel deployed, shamelessly, to justify genocide. (Watch “Atrocity Propaganda: How Israel Sells Its Destruction of Gaza” by Max Blumenthal.)

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1844366940803887378

https://x.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1849712626378342445

Little Usamah and his love bird (parrot), both butchered by Murder Inc. https://x.com/asadabukhalil/status/1829581988329894346

Separating the men from the women, as in any concentration camp of yesteryear, and stripping them. https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1850597799793918216  The Final Solution is underway in North Gaza.

Yesterday’s produce market massacre. A little donkey, too, is martyred by Murder Inc. (Where is PETA, this donor asks?) https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/world/video/gaza-city-airstrike-digvid

Remember, though, as grotesque as the IDF uglies are, grinning, gyrating, and twerking for genocide—they are always and everywhere THE TRUE VICTIMS HERE.

MORE:

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

https://barelyablog.com/

UPDATED (11/3): And Iranian woman strips to remind us what’s important in life—so much more important than solidarity with the Palestinians and against Genocide. The Axis of Genocide is elated. Regime change, baby.

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

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

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

“…Genocide is neither war nor war crime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now at IlanaMercer.com.