Category Archives: Morality

8/27: New Essay.’Where Are The Men? Military Action Against Israel. NOW!’ + Aug/Sept News Updates

America, Argument, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Politics, War

NEW ESSAY+NEWS UPDATES (5/9): Genocide’s Back: Trump-Backed Israel Defense Feces (IDF) Gets Extra-Brutal

Anti-Semitism, Britain, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Judaism & Jews, 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, standing for individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, on 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. Just the same, during a press conference with the US president, on April 7, the Israeli prime minister’s face 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 exceeds 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 such a documented “tradition” of defecating and urinating in the West Bank and Gazan homes they occupy and vandalize is backed by other reports, not least that of Philip Weiss’ Mondoweiss article, “S-it Israeli soldiers did in Gaza.” A 2014 account in the Guardian seconds the same: “Palestinians returning home find Israeli troops left feces and venomous graffiti.” As has the august author of Drinking the Sea At Gaza, Amira Hass of Ha’aretz, documented the defiling ways of the Israel Defense Feces.

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

NEWS:

May 9, 025: Where are the animal activists for these innocents; these devoted, long-suffering companions being butchered alongside “their” humans. This is censored on many social media sites. Not even Palestinian animals are considered deserving of mention.

https://twitter.com/swilkinsonbc/status/1920563004782899613

https://x.com/swilkinsonbc/status/1920563004782899613

From Gaza, exquisite, poignant writing by Dr. Ezzideen, on the DNA deformities that live on, courtesy of American weapons of mass death:

“… Teratogenic damage. Developmental failure. Genetic disfigurement, not by chance, but by war. Bombs struck not only buildings, but chromosomes. The weapons, steel, shiny, American, fell not just to destroy the present, but to corrupt the womb. To poison the idea of tomorrow….”

Stopping Israel is imperative, never too late, and doable. I etched a plan, hardly ambitious, here in this January 8, 2025 essay, “BRICS And Pan-Arabism Revived To Tackle Israel, Militarily.”

MAY 8, 025: When on January 15, 2025 Trump instructed a ceasefire; I wrote then that “Trump ordering a ceasefire into being within 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.” And Trump, Team Genocide II, could do the same, if he were not, well, I don’t think this odious ignoramus deserves the effort of my sobriquets.

But no. Trump persists in fellating Israeli representatives: they want Gaza to starve, then starve Gaza Trump will. The “US is pressing the UN, and aid bodies to accept Israel’s aid distribution plan for Gaza.”

Rightfully, the “UN has refused to participate in Israel’s aid distribution ‘plan’ for Gaza saying it ‘contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles.‘” Israel and the US are trying to seize aid-distribution, and give over food supplies for Gaza to their war-profiteering mercenaries (traced back to a phony Geneva-based shell company, surprise, surprise).

As Bill Clinton once said, when Israel infuriated him, “Who’s the fucking Super Power.” Trump could do what I dreamed up at the end of my March 31 2024 piece, “ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law.”

MAY 7, 025: The headlines generated by the actions of the State of Satan. You know their contents. You’ve seen the images of four-month-year old starving babies, extremities, digits like those of a dainty hatchling.

First via Euromed Monitor.

“Reported Israeli aid distribution plan in Gaza is inhumane, aims to engineer starvation”

“Gaza: Famine reaches catastrophic levels as sharp rise in death rates documented”

When you have no medium of exchange:

“Liquidity crisis: Israel’s financial blockade intensifies civilian suffering in Gaza”

THE FINAL SOLUTION. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights: “Israel’s Annexation and Displacement Plan Signals Final Stage of Gaza Genocide”

Electronic Intifada:

“Gaza food stocks depleted”

“Ben-Gvir touts bombing food depots while at Mar-a-Lago”

+972 Magazine:

“Palestinians awoke to bulldozers. Their village was destroyed by noon“: the West Bank hamlet of Khilet al-Dabe’ is gone. Erasure

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.

*Screen picture courtesy of Mondoweiss.

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.

To have a son like #HussamShabat is a gift from God.
To have a son like this taken is unbearable. Excruciating.
An angel taken by human detritus, by specimen–#JewishIsraelis–so grotesque, so pornographic, so kinky and cowardly that words—my forte—fail.… https://t.co/AYbVN2FY8x

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) March 27, 2025

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.

Don’t restart as if we are in a game. pic.twitter.com/gmx8uyQa0G

— Bisan Owda (@bisanowda01) March 23, 2025

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.

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

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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.