Category Archives: Ethics

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

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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

UPDATED (10/21/023): Gaza And The Meaning Of Mens Rea, Malice Aforethought, Or Intent

Bush, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Israel, Just War, Justice, Middle East, Morality, Russia, War

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If you know in advance that you will be killing thousands of civilians; you have, attached to your actions, malice aforethought, or mens rea, aka intent ~ilana

From the Ukraine-Russia conflict’s inception; your columnist wrote many an essay (https://www.ilanamercer.com/2022/03/uncle-sam-still-king-invaders-ukraine-realpolitik-wests-failure/) motivating against the Neocons, Neolibs and NATO Inching Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia, via the Ukraine proxy war.

The rejection by Joe and his Uniparty accomplices of diplomacy, framed by myself as realpolitik, was my focus. “It’s Biblical, Zelensky,” I urged. “A Leader Who Fails To Haggle For The Lives Of His People” is a failed leader.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2022/03/biblical-zelensky-leader-fails-haggle-lives-people-failed/

I vehemently now protest the greenlighting of the razing of Gaza by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices.

About “intent,” a bedrock of Western judicial philosophy and Jurisprudence, I said the following on the Hard Truth podcast last Tues (Oct. 10) (https://rumble.com/v3oicx4-hamas-israel-and-the-anatomy-of-state-treason.html):

If you know in advance that you will be killing thousands of civilians; you have, attached to your actions, malice aforethought, or mens rea, aka intent.

Moreover, just pretend for the sake of argument that there is no way to kill the Hamas culprits other than via a ground invasion; why-oh-why would Israel throttle the supply of water, food and power to millions of Gazans, when Israel knows this will also kill thousands of civilians indirectly?

Israel has, sadly, squandered much of the goodwill generated by the heinous, diabolical, October 7 pogrom, executed by spawns of Satan.

BACKGROUND: “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason”

* Screen capture credit here:
https://www.strategiccriminaldefence.com/faq/mens-rea-vs-actus-rea/

UPDATE (10/21/023): Yes, this is refreshing via Josh Paul (even though I don’t share his support for other incursions and foreign-policy “moral compromises”)—I didn’t know there were people in our bureaucracy who could speak English, much less write it and reason in it.

Paul, who worked for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, has resigned from this Biden-staffed bureau, because of its policy of transferring lethal weapons to be used, invariably, against civilians in Gaza. Paul recounted in interviews how he had been instrumental in drafting a cessation to arms transfers under Biden’s new Conventional Arms Transfer policy, which allegedly reconsidered “weapons sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates over the civilian toll of the war in Yemen.”

It was the policy of Donald Trump, as this columnist’s warned, in 2018, through weapons supplies to the Saudis, to enable “our bosom buddies the Saudi’s” in their “barricading of Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one. Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.”

Whatever one’s political sympathies, as I wrote here above, “If you know in advance that you will be killing thousands of civilians; you have, attached to your actions, malice aforethought, or mens rea, aka intent.”

The same obtains if you are a third party, aiding and abetting the carnage that is collective punishment. These are natural, immutable laws. They attached to George Bush’s actions in Iraq. (https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq/ The Hague ought to have long since nabbed him. They apply to the razing of Gaza following Hamas’ monstrous mass murder on October 7.

UPDATED (10/14): NEW COLUMN: Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason

Ethics, Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Military, Morality, Neoconservatism, Relatives, Terrorism, The State, War

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NEW ESSAY, “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason,” has been published at The New American, The Unz Review and WND.COM. As you see from its headings—LOW TECH INVASION, MAGA AND ISRAEL, TREASON, DEPLOYING GIZMOS TO GAZA, GEOPOLITICS, TREASON IN THE HOMELAND—it is a wide-ranging analysis contextualized to the American homeland. This analysis is of the backdrop to the treasonous abrogation of Israeli citizens’ rights to life, liberty and property, by the security entities, the IDF and the Israeli intelligence community, who were entrusted to uphold these natural, G-d-given rights.

READ IT NOW ON IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/10/hamas-israel-and-the-anatomy-of-state-treason/

Excerpt:

… TREASON

Witnessed in Israel on October 7 was the utter forsaking by the State of its most elementary—and only—obligations to the citizenry: Defend their natural rights to life, liberty and property.

Seventy-two hours on, and a top banana for the Israeli Defense Forces was blaming Hamas for duping Israeli “experts.” D’oh! Why of course: After all, it is expected that a blood-lusting cabal of satanical sub-humans would apprise targets of its comings-and-goings.

Ok, but if you’re deaf and dumb, why not heed Egyptian intelligence, whose officials now claim Israel ignored repeated warnings that “something big” was going down? Google the phrase “What went wrong?” and you’ll discover that the patsy press has received Israeli officialdom’s memo. The efforts of the State to deflect blame, to reject responsibility for treason, have begun. Thus was Danny Dannon, another top banana, recounting to BBC’s HARDtalk what terrible characters are the Hamasniks. D’oh! Again.

Stendhal, a French writer, said there was no hypocrisy in mathematics. Hamas is mathematically honest about what it wants to do to all Jews.

It is the custodians of Israeli security whose calculus is off. If you correctly think Hamas is so horrible, why had Israel opted to deploy gizmos to the border with Gaza?

DEPLOYING GIZMOS TO GAZA

As your columnist divulged in 2008, Israel opted for “Robo-Snipers” instead of flesh-and-blood men and women. The nation’s “19- and 20-year-old soldiers” were still deployed to the front—but virtually. They sit at a safe distance “behind computer screens,” waiting on “approval by a commanding officer” before “pushing the kill button.”

Yes, Israel automated the process of defense against Gaza, creating a set of “auto kill-zones” “by networking together remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones along the 60-kilometer border.”

Gizmos are useless against the stuff of Gaza—and Latin America, for that matter. In 2005, with great enthusiasm from the Israeli Left, Gaza was given over to the dogs of war, Hamas and their avid constituents. Despite the fertile, coastal land they were handed, the precious ground water they sit on, and generous international assistance, the place soon went to the dogs. Egypt, Jordan and Israel are all terrified to open their borders to the seething snake pit that is Gaza.

It matters not whether you think the cauldron of cruelty that is Gaza created its inhabitants or whether it’s the obverse. The reality is that every nation in the region fears the Gazans. Nobody in the region wants immigrants from Gaza—although given the US Uniparty’s appetite for progressive, smug preening (aka treason); one can envisage Gaza being air lifted to America by the same Special Ops forces who rushed to import Afghanistan. In any event, hearth and home are best defended by men, military or militia, on the ground, carrying guns and grenades.

Besides, all defense systems are fallible and finite in their capacity. Air-defense systems fail. The Russians have the best possible air-defense system, yet they too, on occasion, are overwhelmed by barrages of British cruise missiles supplied to a flailing Ukraine.

If military experts were doing the work currently done by neophyte chicklet reporters; they’d explain, in newspapers like The Hill, that no defense system can intercept 3000 missiles lobbed all at once. Instead of military experts, alas, we have girls cutting-and-pasting from Wikipedia about Israel’s Iron Dome air missile defense system.

Digital docility was never going to ward off a hissing enclave like Gaza, where people, young and old, writhe in hate (watch the children of Gaza bully a Jewish little boy held captive).

GEOPOLITICS …

… Not unlike the United States, Hamas aims to disrupt any productive, cooperative alliances arising out of the forging of regional powers in the Middle East, and has thus made its malign presence felt. …

READ THE REST … “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason” can now be read, free of pop-up ads, satanical antisemitism, and other such grotesque spam, on ILANAMercer.com. A warrior is unafraid of Little Men and their impotent hatred.