Category Archives: libertarianism

HASBARA UPDATES (11/26): ON TOM WOODS TV: GAZA IN RETROSPECT: BLOCK V. MERCER

Argument, Crime, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, War

ILANA MERCER: Israel, state and civil society, is a degenerate, genocidal entity engaged in an extermination campaign against Palestinian Resistance. Solidarity with this resistance-based society is the ONLY libertarian position.

I was hoping to refute many more Hasbara points. But Walter’s format of presenting a long lecture packed with many Hasbara points did not allow me to puncture his disquisition with counterpoints, so as to address each of his points.

Please post your comments to these two spaces:

  1. The Comments section of this Tom Woods TV debate:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g2XEGSyDk
  2.  The Unz Review, without which there is no truly diverse, dissident writing, left and right. The comments space to post your thoughts is “On Tom Woods TV: Gaza in Retrospect, Block V. Mercer.”    https://www.unz.com/imercer/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/
  3. The blog Comment space is open to you, too.
    https://barelyablog.com/on-tom-woods-tv-gaza-in-retrospect-block-v-mercer/#comments

Many thanks,

ilana

UPDATES (11/21) from X:

https://x.com/UncleFlapjacks/status/1991917293572612546

https://x.com/DerekWheeler42/status/1991917079306322137

UPDATE (11/22): Thanks, Pilot Dave on LinkedIn, for taking the time to support.

UPDATES (11/26):   One of the fallacies I was hoping to get to dispute during the Tom Woods TV debate was this myth-history:

“…the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel.” (Ha’aretz, Nov. 26)

The Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG)has submitted the resolution for a “U.S. Bill [that] Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations.”

“If approved, Nov. 30 would commemorate the departure and expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Arab countries following the founding of the state of Israel. The holiday was first adopted by Israel in 2014.” (“U.S. Bill Proposes ‘Jewish Refugee Day’ Commemorating Expulsion of Jews From Arab Nations“)

NEW ESSAY (NEWS 10/6): Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu

America, Anti-Semitism, Argument, Constitution, Donald Trump, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, GAZA, Government, Individual Rights, Israel, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Middle East, Natural Law, Palestinians, Racism, The State

Freedom needs no justification. It is an end unto itself. You are deficient in American solidarity if you don’t stand up for non-violent protest and all speech ~ilana 

New essay is “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu.” It is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com, anti-state, anti-war, pro-market.

You can now read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

Excerpt:

Let us be clear about what freedom of speech à la America truly means:

The words people speak, chant, write and tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia; the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they muck around with—provided no physical aggression is involved (violence against animals included), all this counts as protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored privately or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior; so long as your mitts stop at the next man’s face (or at the next mutt’s fury face, Kristi Noem): SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as can be.

At their worst, expressions of ostensible antisemitism, Naziism, racisms or other antipathies amount to thought crimes, nothing more, if expressed as a belief system severally or collectively, rather than in palpably violent actions.  Whether your thoughts are spoken, chanted, written or preached; be they impolite or impolitic: they are, at worst, no more than thought crimes.

Thought crimes are nobody’s business in a free society. Thought crimes ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of antisemitism, Naziism or other antipathies and racisms, are especially suspect when emitted as a meme from American institutionalized power structures.

One such obscenely wealthy and worthless power structure is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), or Defamation League—a more apt moniker once suggested by Elon Musk, before he joined the ADL in severely censoring some speech on the X platform. The ADL is a meddlesome shakedown operation, in the mold of the Southern Poverty Law Center (“Smear Artists for the Total State,” wrote Tom DiLorenzo). It has taken it upon itself to decide who lives and who dies socially and financially on the basis of the unfortunate individual’s ideas, spoken and written.

In the American tradition, thoughts and words spoken or written that are politically impolite—again, racism; Naziism, antisemitism—retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

Sniffing out racists or anti-Semites is an absolute no-no for any and all self-respecting, libertarian-minded Americans, or any American, for that matter. Like creedal libertarians, Americans don’t, or should not, prosecute thought crimes or persecute thought “criminals.”

Ours should be The Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking (which I articulated in August 2022). What is The Skokie Standard of free speech? In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took a stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived. The Skokie Standard of free speech is one that champions unpopular expression, and vigorously defends all marginalized speakers and thinkers, rather than purveying and protecting state and corporate ideology du jour.

…    Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, RIP, got it. On May 2, 2024, Kirk wrote the following: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t get it. No wonder even Glenn Greenwald, once a practicing constitutional attorney—and a man of manners and decorum—regularly appends “dumb” and “lacking any grasp of constitutional law” to any mention of Bondi, who said this after Kirk’s murder:

The Justice Department would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech…

…  Left, Right and libertarian; we can and must, then, join in unapologetically rejecting the very idea of policing, purging, persecuting or prosecuting people for holding and expressing politically unpopular ideas in action or in speech.

THE REST:  “Free Speech After Charlie Kirk: An American Lesson For Pam Bondi, Donald Trump & Netanyahu” is featured on The Unz Review (as a leading essay), on The New American, and on LewRockwell.com

Read it on IlanaMercer.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/10/free-speech-charlie-kirk-american-lesson-pam-bondi-donlad-trump-netanyahu/

NEWS UPDATE (10/6):  Jeremy Scahill
“Hamas’s Strategic Gamble” by the dedicated and able Jeremy Scahill: “While President Trump enthusiastically welcomed Hamas’s response to his Gaza plan, the White House and Israel deal in deception.” (Drop Site News)

ESSAY & UPDATES (2/13/025) On BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

America, Argument, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, GAZA, History, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East

NEW ESSAY is “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily.” It is currently featured on The Unz Review, home to dissidents, where it was a main feature, and on LewRockwell.com.

Now on IlanaMercer.com

Excerpt:

I grew up decades back in the Middle East, when the American Empire was still nascent. Backed by the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), the Arab World was a formidable force. It was neither managed nor handled by the Soviet Union, but, rather, a partner with the USSR in an uneasy balancing act: maintaining the global balance of power.

In those days, it was not unusual for BBC World Service, radio then, to respectfully and professionally lead with news about this or the other Arab-bloc maneuver, in the service of pan-Arabic interests. These news Ledes were announcements—not imperial pronouncements, as they are today—about the Arab World as a global, oil-producing wielder of soft power.

OPEC Before AIPAC

Like Empire, the grubby influencers of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were still on the ascendancy; AIPAC mattered far less than OPEC.    In fact, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, largely Arab, routinely and energetically acted to disabuse the Anglo-American Oligopoly of its dominance, in the interest of the oil-producing countries. Scholarly foreign-service Arabists—the likes of ambassador Chas J. Freeman—exerted influence in American and British statecraft.

Naturally, no free-market libertarian would ever argue, as a matter of economic theory, for a cartelized commodity market. This OPEC certainly was. Every half-decent libertarian would, however, champion Arab national sovereignty in the control of Arab resources, over American ownership of these means of production, invariably achieved through the unceasing carnage of regime-change political subterfuge and economic sanctions.

Another vestige of a proud Pan-Arabist impetus was the Arab League. All but neutered nowadays, the Arab League was founded in 1945, by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan (now Jordan), Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, acting in unity of purpose to  “strengthen and coordinate the political, cultural, economic, and social programs of its members and to mediate disputes among them or between them and third parties.”

Other members are Libya (1953); Sudan (1956); Tunisia and Morocco (1958); Kuwait (1961); Algeria (1962); Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (1971); Mauritania (1973); Somalia (1974);… Djibouti (1977); and Comoros (1993).

Count among them the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO; 1976), too. Different times, indeed.

In addition to economic cooperation among signatory states, a little-known fact is that the Arab League was bound by a NATO-like commitment, signed on April 13, 1950, to mount a joint coordinated military defense in the case of an attack on a member.

Structures and alliances that were once de rigueur in the Arab world now lie in ruins, nixed or neutered by Israel and America. The Israel-America menage (well, it’s as though Americans and Israelis share a household) is joined by that pathetic poodle, Perfidious Albion—reliving an imperial moment in the sun. In-tow are the genocidal German State, which has reverted to historic character, and other western European vassal countries.

Co-opted as well has been the organization for Arab Cooperation. Founded later, in 1989, it no longer rates a mention. By 1989, it is fair to say, Pan-Arabism had been subordinated to Tel Aviv and Washington, the latter acting chiefly to make the Middle East safe for Israel. Persian Gulf countries, especially, had become puppet states, in thrall to the Anglo-American-Israel axis.

The maelstrom of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the country’s vertiginous expansion across the Levant, and the generous forbearance the Global North continues to lavish on it, funding, exculpating, and encouraging Israel to expand its evil endeavor—this must lead to an inescapable conclusion:

The Western Woke State has entered a new phase: Humanity now faces an out, loud-and-proud Genocidal State, and the supra-state structures, financial and military, that underwrite it. It is not hyperbolic to argue that humanity, whatever race, age and ethnic origin, is existentially imperiled by the openly Genocidal Western State.

By the same token, the narrative talent of American foreign policy is such that people are persuaded by the strut of it. Exceptionalism asserted rather than enacted rubs off. Curiously—and considering the centrality of good-vs.-evil, of a values-based pretense in U.S. foreign policy—if ever a clear, moral case for American military intervention presented itself; it is on the side of the civilians of Gaza as against the Israelis, who are armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

Yet Israeli mass murder has been fenced off from any outside intervention by no other than the United States of America, that global force for “good.” With American backing, Israel, you can say, has outwitted the world. Israelis continue to murder Arabs and destroy their lands and leaders as the fancy takes them.

Abandoned by Russia, parts of it purloined by the US and Türkiye, Syria has been practically annexed by Israel. ISIS-in-Syria, an internationalist group that has rebranded itself as Hay?at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and the Israeli-Jewish Jihadis, had made common cause in Syria. While they are not exact avatars of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—the motley crew of militants based in Syria is informed by similar, illiberal habits of mind. The IDF and HTS are, moreover, also underwritten by the same regime-changing foreign interests. Washington and its Wahhabis, if you will.

With an assist from Türkiye and the US, Isra-ISIS has, for now, collapsed the genocide-fighting Axis of Resistance, the supply routes for which ran from Iran, through Syria, to Hizballah in southern Lebanon, and the Palestinian Resistance in Gaza and the West Bank.

Fifteen bloody months into a broadcasted genocide, in a markedly late, December 5, 2024 “landmark report”, Amnesty International has issued a ruling: It’s “genocide.”

Equally slow to gather seemingly hard-to-find “findings”; Human Rights Watch has also said “genocide,” and documented methods deliberate and systematic to dehydrate Gazans to death, namely to deprive them even further of potable water.

Human rights reports do not militate against murder ongoing. Day after day, the word from Gaza is the same. ….

 …. Unless stopped, Israel will continue to open up new fronts of evil. Emanations from the collective Israeli mind  flow as freely as an open sewer and are as septic. They’ll seep and spread everywhere. …

READ THE REST OF MY January, 2025 ESSAY: “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

* Israel’s uglies via Zeteo

Now on IlanaMercer.com

UPDATE (2/13/025): Another excerpt from https://www.ilanamercer.com/2025/01/brics-pan-arabism-revived-tackle-israel-militarily/:

“Haunting is the lonely figure of the sainted Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya making his way through the ruins toward his Israeli tormentors. The bulk of an approaching tank is ahead.

The lecherous, licentiousness Israelis, ‘brothers in the breed of Cain,’ had tortured to death a colleague, renowned surgeon Dr. Adnan al Bursh, at Sde Teiman, Israel’s rectal-rape center.

Already a fabled figure, Dr. Abu Safiya had refused to abandon his patients at Kamal Adwan, North Gaza’s last, listing hospital.

His belief undiminished, at one stage in this man’s heroic resistance; Dr. Abu Safiya had performed the rites of burial over his young son, murdered by the IDF, before returning to his patients.

Now the director of Kamal Adwan has vanished into the maw of Israeli torture centers, from which proud #Palestinian men emerge small, bent, traumatized, deformed, disabled or dead. …

Enough….”

If King Abdullah had the backbone, this is what he and the Arab Leaders would do. READ THE REST:

BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily

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.