Category Archives: Journalism

NEW ESSAY (+NEWS UPDATES): Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israel Defense Feces (IDF) Gets Extra-Brutal

Anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Law, Logic, Media, Middle East, Military, Morality, Palestinians

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NEW ESSAY is “Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israel Defense Feces (IDF) Gets Extra-Brutal.” It was a main feature essay on the Unz Review, home of dissidents from day one, and was featured on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market. The title there is “Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israeli Brutality,” as well as the Mises Institute’s Power & Market, May 2.

Now on IlanaMercer.com

Some excerpts:

* Warning: indelicate language.

If we in the West are the most propagandized people in the world; Gazans are the least propagandized. Outwardly captives, Gazans are liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West ~ilana

WHAT has Israel been up to since March 18, 2025, which was when the “genocidal entity” formally broke the nominal ceasefire agreement in Gaza? Oracular insight here is unnecessary.

Israel has been trampling underfoot everything decent and good.

Genocide is back. This time with President Trump in fawning agreement, playing procurer and pimp for the Israeli State, and subjecting ingrate Bibi Netanyahu to no more than a curt jerk of the leash: During a press conference with the US president, on April 7, the Israeli prime minister’s face, nevertheless, grew as dark as a thundercloud on mention of possible diplomacy with Iran.

Under such favorable circumstances, Israelis are louder and prouder about killing and destroying with monomaniacal diligence. Indifferently, and for the first time, Israel openly admitted to targeting journalist Hussam Shabat for “elimination,” in December of 2024, and executing the him on March 24. The sadistic serial killer stalked its prey, then pounced.

The predator has so far singled out and assassinated 232 other Palestinian journalists.

Shabat thus knew, as he put it, that “journalism meant Israel would kill him.” Only 23, so full of promise, Shabat wrote his epitaph in advance of his death. It read:

“If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. … For [the] past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury.

I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side.”

By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to tell the truth, and now, at last, I have found rest—something I have not known for the past 18 months. I did this because I believe in the Palestinian cause, in our right to this land. The greatest honor of my life was to die defending it and serving its people.

I ask you now: Do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories—until Palestine is free.

For the last time,

Hussam Shabat, from northern Gaza.”

Trampling underfoot everything decent and good: Fatma Hassona was to be the subject of an upcoming documentary, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Israel could not allow that. So, Air Force Genocide bombed the 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist, also murdering nine members of her family.

After a brief, relative lull, eighteen months into the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel has resumed its slaughter of civilians at an average rate of 103 souls a day, with 223 individuals dealt life-altering injuries, also daily. Since March 18, reports Ha’aretz, Israel has killed 1,652 people and wounded 4,391 in strikes on Gaza. (Ha’aretz “Israel News” newsletter, Wednesday, 16.04.2025.) The number murdered now approaches 2,000.

With 62,000 Palestinians missing, over 52,000 confirmed dead; and indirect deaths ranging from three to fifteen times the number of direct deaths, by the Lancet’s account—the fake, fossilized media should be obligated to report the official number of Palestinians dead by Israel as well over 100,000. That too is a vast undercount.

The mind is crowded. Palestinians murdered melt into a montage of faces. Yet remember we must men like Rifaat Radwan. Radwan was among fifteen medical and humanitarian workers who were summarily executed pointblank, on March 23, by the Israeli regime in Gaza.

The underworld that is the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)—the world criminals and lawbreakers inhabit—is premised upon lies. By now you know The Liar’s lines, as he drops American “earthquake bombs” on kids at community kitchens:

“Hamas. Terrorism. If Palestinians die; they needed killing.”

But Satan’s non sequiturs can’t conceal the truth—or silence the deeply felt devotionals of the righteous. As the SS IDF stood above him, riddling his colleagues and himself with thousands of bullets, Radwan, Palestinian Red Crescent Society medic, did not beg the agents of his demise. Instead, he recorded their crime for posterity while righteously reciting his last prayers. These are achingly beautiful:

“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 he expired.

As Monday of April 7 dawned, a Wi-Fi rigged world watched a funeral pyre of Palestinians, except that the people Israel lit up were alive. The IDF incinerated “a tent housing Palestinian journalists in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.”

Late last year, when teenager Shaban al-Dalou smoldered alive, the presstitutes did what they always do: Fudge the English language in the service of Israel. …

… Back to the malodorous cauldron of death and decadence that is the Israel Defense Forces. (Or perhaps the Israel Defense Feces?)

A new load of grief came, in March, to residents of the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, in the northern occupied West Bank. Slatternly IDF soldiers have a familiar signature. They leave behind human waste in the homes they wreck:

“Feces, urine and used condoms—these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in these Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault [in March],” reports the Electronic Intifada.

That the IDF has a documented “tradition” of defecating and urinating in the West Bank and Gazan homes they occupy and defile is seconded by a 2014 account in the Guardian: “Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left feces and venomous graffiti.”

And backed by in Philip Weiss’ Mondoweiss article, in “Shit Israeli soldiers did in Gaza“.

Somebody should rub IDF noses in their own mess to teach them a lesson, once and for all. Nobody has.

Yes, Israel makes atrocities past and present look like sandbox play. Still, …

…READ THE REST. “Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israel Defense Feces (IDF) Gets Extra-Brutal” can be read on the Unz Review, on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market, where the title is “Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israeli Brutality.” As well as the Mises Institute’s Power & Market.

Now on IlanaMercer.com

*Screen picture courtesy of Mondoweiss.

MAY 3, 2025: Genocide is becoming a bad look for organized British Jewry. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is getting antsy.

The Board, of course, is reliably reprehensible—it has spearheaded Hasbara for Israel’s Gaza genocide.

It helped Britain’s mainstream media, the Army and the rest of the Israel lobby to ensure Jeremy Corbyn did not become prime minister, and was tarred as an anti-Semite

https://twitter.com/BoardofDeputies/status/1670848802452799504/photo/1

Now, some of the same loathsome characters are posturing as lifelong supporters of a peace process, who had no part in a diaspora that did energetic Hasbara for Israel.

BEWARE. There will be many such cobra-heads galvanizing the Iraq Defense: Nobody Knew. Or, it was Netanyahu, nobody else. Israel was mislead by Netanyahu. When in fact, Netanyahu had simply fulfilled the average Israeli voter’s wish list:  They want their hostages back, but not Gaza.

The Board of Deputies is vehemently against one Kneecap, who must be a stellar fellow, or a good outfit, for raising their ire.

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

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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.

UPDATE VIII (3/13/025): Israel Breaks Ceasefire. BACK TO Fellating Bibi. Trump’s Gaza Ceasefire Proves That Biden Could’ve Easily Stopped Genocide

Argument, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Judaism & Jews, Media, Middle East, Palestinians, Psychiatry, Sex, The Therapuetic State, War

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As Trump tells it, nobody quite knows  how or why Gaza became a ‘demolition site.’ …The other thing nobody can quite determine is which of the two countries, America or Israel, is the Great Satan and which is the Little Satan ~ilana

UPDATE VI (3/2/025): Israel is resuming its open killing sprees in Gaza (low-grade killing had continued throughout the “ceasefire”), and is halting the meager aid temporarily let into a starving Gaza.

The serial-killer state is hoping, with Trump’s backing, to wriggle out of the ceasefire agreement.

If past is prologue; this stage of Israel’s Genocide of the Palestinians will also be permitted by the co-belligerent in crime, America.

“Make no mistake; serial killer Israel ought to have been militarily resisted; its victims protected. You don’t placate a John Wayne Gacy and a Jeffrey Dahmer…You stop them.

In fact, in international humanitarian and customary human rights law there is what is called a ‘responsibility to protect’ a community that is being evicted and eradicated. Arguably, #resistance fighters are heeding this highest calling: The “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).”

MORE: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/10/why-israel-occupied-levant-must-be-liberated-sos/

READ: “Why The Israel-Occupied Levant Must Be Liberated, S.O.S.“

“UPDATE IV (2/4/025): BACK TO Fellating Bibi.”

A continuum of evil. First, America, under Genocide Joe, participated in and facilitated the genocide of the Palestinians; now, under Donald Trump, the country is committing to cover up the Crime of all Crimes; remove the pitiful exhibits, and bail out the Demon State, Israel.

Who said crime doesn’t pay? When the Superpower inverts the moral order of the universe; the Crime of all Crimes pays—and then some.

The American president continues in the tradition of fellating Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump, duly, promises to assume control over Gaza, rebuild it and evict the survivors of a genocide committed by his ostensible client state, Israel.

Not that you’d know it; and as Trump tells it, nobody quite grasps how or why Gaza became a “demolition site.” Somehow the soil is soaked through with the blood of Palestinians, and a toxic mix of 50-million tons of building debris. Somehow, piles of bodies decay beneath the surface. And garbage is piled as high as the bodies, were they to be stacked. Open sewage runs through what remains of the streets, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, such as unexploded ordnance, are everywhere.

Again: It’s all a big mystery.

But none of that matters: What counts is that America will be there to cover the crime scene for the love of Israel and remove the pitiful exhibits.

The other thing nobody can quite determine is which of the two countries is the Great Satan and which is the Little Satan.

UPDATE VI (2/16/025):

UPDATE V (2/13/025):

What a force of nature. What a little poet. May The Force be with this fiery, brave Palestinian child. She puts us all to shame.

Population transfer plotted in …1937. The document in Hebrew. I vouch for its contents.

I bet your American kids don’t endure a checkpoint and hours of bartering before being allowed back into their neighborhood.

January 15, 2025: The ceasefire.

It appears that Donald Trump, an Alpha Male, does not like a kept man, Bibi Netanyahu, to order him around. Fellating genocider Bibi Netanyahu as foreign policy is now over.

We hope.

In a nutshell, Steven Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides, and I paraphrase: I don’t care that today’s your Sabbath [they seem to continue killing during the Sabbath]. Get your ass down here and sign this old ceasefire on the dotted line. “Old” because  Hamas has not changed its reasonable stipulations.

Via Ha’aretz:

[Bibi’s] aides politely explained that was in the middle of the Sabbath but that the prime minister would gladly meet him Saturday night.

Witkoff’s blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear. Thus in an unusual departure from official practice, the prime minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Witkoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal.

Note that it was the bitch Bibi who had been allowed by Team Genocide, Biden and Blinken, to do as he pleased and reject the terms just agreed upon.

In fact, Witkoff has forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year. Hamas has not budged from its position that the hostages’ freedom must be conditioned on the release of Palestinian prisoners (the easy part) and a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (the hard one). Netanyahu rejected this condition and thus was born the partial deal proposed by Egypt.

Initially, the talk was of a limited humanitarian deal. More and more conditions were slowly appended until it grew into a much bigger proposal with clear outlines – a hostage release, new regional arrangements and full withdrawal. The Philadelphi Corridor, which Netanyahu last summer termed the bedrock of Israel’s existence, is part of the deal. At Egypt’s request, Israel will fully withdraw from it in the first phase.

Trump ordering a ceasefire into being within in days indicates that, at any point, Team Genocide, Biden and Blinken, could have done the same: stopped genocide at its inception. Team Genocide took a decision not to stop genocide.

MORE.

UPDATE I (1/31/025): There is great evil in fudging language, in using euphemisms or just being too stupid to accurately distill the truth so as to accurately label events and situations:

The image below depicts IDF serial killers and psychopaths rummaging through the effects of those they killed or dispossession. This time in the West Bank.

This is invasion, looting and vandalism of private property, following on the murder or eviction of the rightful owners.

“Machismo” is how a writer at Ha’aretz labels the act of invading homes, looting, vandalism.

ANOTHER SUCH EXAMPLE:

UPDATE (3/4/2025):

Mentioned above is the evil of fudging language, or using soft, imprecise words, thereby mislabeling that which is brutal and criminal.

Example of such Fake News bafflegab comes via Ha’aretz (the only reasonable newspaper in Israel).

Ha’aretz turns the realities of IDF invasion, occupation and the violence of conquest into nothing but an “overbearing embrace”:

“Israel’s Overbearing Embrace Threatens Syria’s Druze at Critical Juncture”

On, bout those condoms to Ingaza, in Mozambique.

UPDATE II (1/23/025):

Trump starts to channel Jared Kushner.

If you recall, Kushner, the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, and an empty husk of a man, had his eye on the waterfront property of a conquered and dying people.

READ. Scroll down to read what the vulgar Kushner said. It is in the essay, “ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law,” Ilana Mercer, March 31, 2024

In essence, some of the world’s wealthiest men are coveting the property of the world’s poorest and most persecuted people.

Via Ha’aretz:

“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site. It’s really … it’s gotta be rebuilt in a different way. Gaza’s interesting, it’s a phenomenal location. On the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it. It’s very interesting. Some fantastic things can be done with it.”

AND:

“It’s not our war, it’s their war. But I’m not confident. But I think they’re very weakened on the other side,” he said, adding he “can’t imagine” Hamas playing a role in post-war Gaza.

“You certainly can’t have the people that are there – most of them are dead. They didn’t exactly run it well,” Trump added. “They ran it viciously and badly. So you can’t have that.”

UPDATE III (1/24/025):  On the other hand, this is purity of soul:

UPDATE VIII (3/13/025):

Decadence and death = Israel.
A very Woke country, mind you.

Check out the Electronic Intifada report of filled condoms left by the IDF, in evicted and vandalized West Bank homes.

During “military” raids, the IDF is a male-only “fighting” force.

Leaving behind human waste is another IDF signature.

The screen-picture image of Purim, a children’s festival, comes via Ha’artez: Wholesome.

Women don’t partake in IDF so-called ‘combat’ raids, so the condoms in vandalized Palestinian homes, during the bacchanalia in the West Bank, are for what… ?

Oh yeah, Republicans. Oh yeah, conservatives. I give you your protégés.

The IDF equals moral filth and actual filth.

“Feces, urine and used condoms – these are just some of the things that Israeli soldiers left behind in #Palestinian homes during their 11-day assault on the al-Faraa refugee camp in the foothills of the Jordan Valley, south of Tubas in the northern occupied West Bank, last month.

As I wrote in ‘Why The Israel-Occupied Levant Must Be Liberated, S.O.S‘:

‘Israel’s soldier sons and daughters are the stars in the country’s #genocide constellation.’

Douglas Damien Murray For IDF Beefcake & Other Such Creepy Curiosities

BAB's A List, Communism, Critique, Foreign Policy, GAZA, History, Intellectualism, Iraq, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Media, Propaganda

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BY R. J. STOVE

Herewith, a few disordered (and shamelessly impressionistic) thoughts on the current Australian political scene, as it is impinged on by the Middle East horrors. Before specifying these thoughts, I should stress the fact that I consume far less mass-media news reportage than most of my compatriots do. Besides, I don’t own a television set at all.

On the other hand, what I lose in terms of the ability to acquire up-to-date data, I perhaps gain in terms of detached observation. This is what I’ve observed here over the last few months.

Australia’s Likudniks – many of whom of course are either helots of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire, or Pentecostal fundamentalists, both groups being seldom more ethnically Jewish than I am – are furiously trying to dial up the volume to eleven, SPINAL TAP style. So shameless is the truckling to Bibi, that entire issues of THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN and SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA, entire talk-shows on Sky News, appear to consist of press releases from Mossad.

In such milieux, the term “antisemite” is promiscuously applied not only to brain-dead mullahs who now and then chant nasty things about Jews at a public protest outside the Sydney Opera House, but to the coolest and most reasoned criticisms of Israel’s official policy since October 7,  of whom some are even Jewish. And yet …

It isn’t working. Even I can tell that it isn’t working.

In the 21st century’s first few years, when most of these same people furiously defended the buccaneering expedition to Iraq, the policy of shouting down all disagreement with Israel’s regime did still work. As recently as a decade ago, it did still work.

Not now, though. The opposition to the Gaza ethnic cleansing is now too widespread among intelligent Australians, and, I suspect, too confidently maintained, for the toothpaste to be reinserted into the tube. It appears that the time when even the mildest criticism of Netanyahu was equated with mass-murdering Einsatzgruppen has now – for better or for worse – ended.

I’ve also noticed a marked demographic split, on the issue of who is currently supporting Netanyahu and who isn’t. As a general rule (there exist, needless to say, exceptions), the demography is as follows:

* PEOPLE UNDER 40: Pro-Palestinian, except for a handful of neocon dittoheads in the above-named, mostly Murdoch-controlled, outlets.

* BOOMERS, APPROACHING PENSION AGE, FROM THE VIETNAM-DRAFT-DODGING GENERATION: Overwhelmingly pro-Netanyahu.

* RETIREES IN THEIR 70S, 80S, AND 90s: Surprisingly inclined to give Palestinians the benefit of the doubt. I wonder if bitter memories of America’s Anglophobic behavior over Suez in 1956 are figuring in this age group’s memories.

In a way, I could almost feel sorry for the Murdoch-controlled dittoheads. With them, as with Comrade Zhdanov chewing out dissident writers and composers in Stalin’s Russia after World War II, there’s clearly a sense of bewilderment that anyone should show such base ingratitude as to exhibit opposition. To quote Orwell’s comments on the Stalinist cultural purges of 1947-1948:

The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorizing everyone into conformity. A writer’s inventive faculties will not work unless he is allowed to say approximately what he feels. You can destroy spontaneity and produce a literature which is orthodox but feeble, or you can let people say what they choose and take the risk that some of them will utter heresies. … They [the Soviet politicians] don’t know what literature is, but they know that it is important, that it has prestige value, and that it is necessary for propaganda purposes, and they would like to encourage it, if only they knew how. So they continue with their purges and directives, like a fish bashing its nose against the wall of an aquarium again and again, too dim-witted to realize that glass and water are not the same thing.

Strangest of all, to me, is the fact that even the cleverest of Bibi’s apologists (and that’s not saying much) – to wit, Deviant Douglas Murray, neoconservative armchair Clausewitz, and accordingly a tireless apologist for every dirty deed now being carried out by uniformed IDF beefcake – is no longer, as hipsters would put it, “cutting through.” Not on this topic.

Goodness only knows what all of the above portends. What I can say with a measure of certitude about the Australian scene is a variant of the ancient aphorism about New York. Namely, that if the Likudniks can no longer make it here, they can no longer make it anywhere, other than in the United States of America.

***************

Melbourne-based historian and organist R.J. Stove is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times and of a forthcoming book (Kings, Queens and Fallen Monarchies, scheduled for 2024) about Europe’s monarchist movements between the two world wars. Dr. Stove’s  innumerable disastrous career decisions include a total refusal to regard Rod Dreher* as the greatest Christian theologian who ever lived.

*Screen Pictures of Douglas Damien Murray For IDF Beefcake is courtesy of this site:

https://www.fanpop.com/clubs/damien-thorn/images/30060000/title/damien-photo?card

& here:

https://nypost.com/2023/11/15/opinion/on-the-ground-inside-gaza-where-israel-is-trying-to-save-civilians-from-hamas/