Category Archives: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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, GAZA, Hebrew Testament, History, Ilana Mercer, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, War

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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 (12/17): NEW COLUMN: Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?

America, Constitution, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

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Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come ~ilana

To refuse to bear witness to the war on Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane ~ilana

NEW COLUMN IS “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority“. Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?” It was featured on The New American, at The Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity,” and the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

I thank all my publishers.

I did some simple math—whose core truth obtains, although the numbers are already out of date, given the scale of the carnage. My editor provided another ratio, at the end, here https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/ , which speaks to the proportionality imperative of Just War Theory, sundered by Israel.

Please consider that my last four tracts on Gaza, and that scroll of a blog, “Constantly UPDATED (12/13): ‘Total Warfare’ On GAZA: War Against Civilians Is War On Civilization“—all anatomizing the war on Gazans: These are tremendously painful to write, as a Jew and a former fierce defender of Israel.

But to refuse to bear witness to the war on Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

Excerpt:

“… Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most ethical fighting force in the universe; I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, comparison. I compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theatres of war: Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” in late 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.

The battle in Fallujah is considered “the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam.” “Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city.” Officially, it is described as a “battle to retake the key city of Fallujah from a violent insurgency that was taking root across Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.”

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Fallujah was a compact city of about 400,000 people. “Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah.”

Gaza’s population is about 2.4 million strong. The administrative chaos in war-time Gaza would hamper accurate records-keeping. That considered—and not counting individuals buried beneath the rubble—approximately 15,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel. (Haaretz, Israel News, Friday, December 2, 2023)

Let’s extrapolate:

Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians dead in Gaza—and climbing.

Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill so far, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.

Let that sink in.

On the numbers, I have been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, are still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1.

Both the Israeli and the U.S. militaries come in here for rough treatment. The fulminations of the Israel Firsters stateside aside, however, some American patriotism is owed amid the sorrow over Israel’s barbaric blitzkrieg.

Damning with faint praise though this may be, Americans, in the persons of our U.S. Marines in Fallujah—in the dubious theater of another unjust war—were righteous, compared to the monstrous Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. …

… THE REST is here: “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights US Marine’s Superiority.” Or, “Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Just How Vampiric Are The ‘Vaunted’ Israel Defense Forces?”

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

The complete column is always posted eventually at IlanaMercer’s Weekly Column Archive.

UPDATE (December 17, 023):

These people at ZeroHedge, December 17, 2023, are, well, dishonest. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/4th-generation-devastation-west-has-been-targeted-cowardly-globalist-mind-war

Over the pages of The New American, first, this column mocked the Fourth Generation Warfare categorization—and ostensible benevolence. On December 4, 2023, I applied this the 4th Generation Warfare vs. 3rd Generation Warfare analysis to the current global woke military.

In an intellectually honest America, my iteration of the idea would have been credited on Zero Hedge:

In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations.
The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy’s defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel.
Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form of warfare; it was the contours Fourth-Generation Warfare that they were tracing. Fourth-Generation Warfare was to be the distinguishing characteristic of the modern military. Boosted by technology, “advanced” armies would be relying on “small, highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers, armed with high technology weapons.” These precision units and attendant weapons were expected “to range over wide areas seeking critical targets.”
In addition to technology; predicted and depicted was a military whose central impetus was augmented by ideas. In America, the controversial changing of hearts and minds, historically, has included fomenting coups around the world with the connivance afforded by psychological operations.
Near as I can tell, Fourth-Generation war was meant to be smart; to see Mind dominate and direct materiel.
What is underway in Gaza, at 2023’s end, however, is the very opposite. I see madness for what it is. Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come. The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden, his Uniparty accomplices and a complicit West: This appears to capture the kind of Third-Gen “capability” delivered by the modern, standing, Woke military.

https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/ (December 4, 2023)

* Screen pic of Gazans reduced to pre-industrial life, scrounging.