Category Archives: War

PODCAST: ‘Iran Tries To Restore Regional Balance; Israel Continues To Murder And Get Away With Murder’

Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Individual Rights, Iran, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Military, Neoconservatism, War

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In “Iran Tries To Restore Regional Balance; Israel Continues To Murder And Get Away With Murder,” a HARD TRUTH podcast, David Vance and I have a heated discussion about Iran’s response, on April 13 and 14, to Israel’s murder of senior commanders in Damascus, on April 1. Six other Iranian nationals and six Syrian citizens were assassinated. In all, Israel murdered 13 people in its April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

I detail Israel’s lengthy, illegal, immoral and extra-judicial assassination program against Iranian civilians and military ongoing for decades, coupled as it is with Israeli cyberterrorism directed at Iran’s infrastructure and state apparatus.

All things considered, I think Iran’s restraint was quite commendable in launching what was a theatrical, victimless, precision attack on Israeli military targets alone. This was the first time Teheran had directly struck Israel proper. Israel, conversely, regularly strikes on Iranian soil.

All the more so is Teheran’s restraint commendable considering that its attempt to make a point, as it deescalated a conflict begun by Israel in Damascus, occurs against the backdrop of a US-led crippling program of sanctions and embargoes directed at the Iranian people, and Israel’s American-backed and sponsored mass killing and land confiscation programs underway in Gaza and the West Bank.

Both myself and David Vance agree that the Israel First neoconservatives have always aimed at regime change in Iran. David, however, pushes back: He sees even greater forces at work in creating global chaos.

WATCH:

We appreciate your Follow here.

RELATED READING:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/03/israel-violation-gods-law-natural-justice-laws-war-customary-international-humanitarian-law/

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2020/01/u-s-globes-judge-jury-executioner/

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2012/03/onward-to-iran/

IMPORTANT ESSAY: ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War & All Customary International Humanitarian Law

America, Crime, Europe, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Just War, Law, Media, Morality, Natural Law, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, UN, War

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Over and above industrial-scale mass murder of individual people—Israel is engaged in the eradication of Gazans as a People ~ilana

NEW ESSAY in its totality is on The Unz Review: “Israel: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War & All Customary International Humanitarian Law.”

AND serialized on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market:

“The State of Israel Abandons Law and Morality in Its War on Gaza,” Part I, April 2
“The US Vetoes International Action on Gaza,” Part II, April 3
“Why Genocide?: Every Law of War Has Been Violated in Gaza,” Part III, April 4
“Gaza: What If America Were the Good Guy?” Part IV, April 5

The title is self-explanatory. In this new essay I comprehensively show Israel to be In violation of all laws of war and much of Customary International Humanitarian Law. God’s Law and
Natural Justice are close corollaries.

I go through the US ceasefire farce and lies—the ceasefire is BINDING!–I exposit the laws of war all violated, and expound on at least four laws that make up the genocide standard, flouted by Israel. Rafah appears to be a Final Solution of sorts.

I visualize what a Super Power could and should do. The visual of the essay’s coda is that of a patriot. Alas, and sadly, there is not much to be patriotic about.

Please share, for truth-tellers on Israel’s war of annihilation against Gaza’s Palestinians are being banned and excommunicated.  Go figure: WE CANNOT BE BOUGHT OR SILENCED.

Short excerpt:

 AMERICA’S CEASEFIRE DECEPTION

 America has conditioned the inalienable right to life of Palestinians on the return of Israeli hostages, in effect nullifying that right ~ilana

For throwing-up clouds of obfuscating sepia over its abstention vote on  the United Nations Security Council’s ceasefire resolution, March 25, the Biden Administration and its UN representative must be exposed.

“Ceasefire” in previous U.S. drafts amounted to Orwellian News Speak. Having never once called for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire, the U.S. had perfunctorily predicated temporary ceasefire resolutions on the return of Israeli hostages.

Whereas it was obligated morally to compel Israel to forthwith cease and desist its systematic and sustained onslaught on Gaza’s civilians; the US had opted, until March 25, to merely condition the temporary cessation of immoral and illegal mass murder of innocent Palestinians on the release of Israeli hostages, in effect tethering a “ceasefire” to the return of the Israeli hostages.

Against the wishes of citizens of our country and the world, America has deployed its veto power, repeatedly and reliably, in previous United Nations Security Council votes, so as to prevent an immediate, unconditional cease-fire in Gaza.

By so doing, America had conditioned the inalienable right to life of Palestinians on the return of Israeli hostages, in effect nullifying that inalienable right.

Recognizing that the right to life of innocent men, women and children is unconditional; Security Council member states, aside the United States and its protégé Israel, had refused to tether the fate of Gaza to hostage negotiations.

With pellucid logic, Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the U.N and the Arab bloc’s current Security Council member, had stated, February 20, 2024, that, “A vote in favor of [an unconditional ceasefire] is a support to the Palestinians’ right to life.” With its prior vetoes and current abstention, the US had nullified Palestinian right to life independent of the rights of Israeli hostages to the same.

You can say that Gaza’s innocent civilians are being held hostage by Israel enablers Blinken, Biden and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield.

The general run of people around the world, however, are having none of this. We have been chanting “ceasefire” with catechetical promptness. The West’s “smart” set is belatedly getting the message that their constituents, decent citizens, are revolted by Israel’s acts and are in-revolt against supporting it.

In response, and oh-so cynically, all Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield did on March 25 was to abstain from using American veto power to stop the good guys—China, Russia, Algeria and the rest of the 15-member UN Security Council—from demanding an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. That’s all.

Expect the Biden Administration and its bi-partisan backers to keep gently cajoling brief lulls—conditional breaks—in the IDF’s bloodletting of a helpless, cornered civilian population.

Covering its wretchedness with sanctimony; the US had not vetoed the last ceasefire resolution; but had, nevertheless, worked to water it down. In its abstention vote, the US has “blocked action in the General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution, where you could have seen some real meaningful action.”

For moral compass scrambled; it’s hard to beat former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. In this protracted foreign-policy mirage, Blinken, Biden, Thomas-Greenfield and their political posse do Nikki Haley, a Republican, proud, for Trump’s appointee to the UN would have done nothing different.

CEASE AND DESIST! WHERE’S THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT?

A violent offender, a serial killer, must be stopped; not cautioned and observed! ~ilana

IDF soldiers vaporize young men picking their way through rubble as though in a video game; they mock their victims, invade their homes; filch from their businesses, and rummage through the piteous intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed ~ilana

In the world of patronage, it doesn’t get much worse. The United States is at Israel’s elbow—it is a cobelligerent: In actively sustaining Israel’s armed forces, and running diplomatic interference for its politicians; America is acting as Israel’s “principal sponsor,” complicit in war crimes, signaling  to the Jewish State that it will let it continue to its evil endgame.

As I ventured in January, the issuance of the equivalent of a legal cease-and-desist or a restraining order against a violent offender, Israel, is urgent and long overdue. It’s already too late for Gaza as a habitable landmass.

While progressives lauded the International Court of Justice (ICJ), my perspective about the Court’s indecision, some months back, was dimmer. (Disgust, actually.) Unfocused as I was on legalistic definitions of genocide; it was obvious to me that, what was indubitably mass murder and ethnic cleansing—crimes that are in process and ongoing—had to be stopped right away. A violent offender, a serial killer, must be stopped; not cautioned and observed!

Were the International Court of Justice an effective and just organization it would have issued some sort of binding cease and desist order, some manner of restraining order, if you will, instructing the Israel Defense Forces, the Devil’s emissaries on earth, to stop its depredations.

Another international tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), had “issued, in March of 2023, warrants of arrest, no less “for two individuals in the context of the situation in Ukraine,” one of whom was Mr. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, president of the Russian Federation, who was being sought for war crimes.

With respect to Israel, the inept International Court of Justice appears compromised.

For in a just society, the moral strictures that apply to the individual must also extend to the collective. Immoral acts that are forbidden severally cannot be sanctioned collectively. If the citizen must not murder; neither should The State, any state.

UN SECURITY COUNCIL CEASEFIRE IS BINDING

A Security Council resolution not defanged by the US could have included a call for diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution ~ilana

In its uncontested superiority, the United States has asserted, moreover, that the UN ceasefire resolution is “non-binding.” “Completely false,” fumes international law expert Graig Mokhiber, in an interview, March 26, with Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” And I paraphrase Mr. Mokhiber:

It is black-letter law in the U.N. Charter that all members of the United Nations are bound to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. The Charter, in Article 25, and in subsequent decisions of the International Court of Justice, has made it indisputable that Security Council resolutions are binding for all member states.

Not only is the last ceasefire resolution binding, but it opens up an opportunity, given that Israel is in breach of it, to table a resolution for enforcement under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which “empowers the Security Council to orchestrate … collective actions … through a Military Staff Committee.”

A Security Council resolution not defanged by the United States could include a call for corporeal action: diplomatic, military, political, and economic sanctions, the freezing of Israeli assets, the deployment of a protection force, and the establishment of a tribunal for future prosecution. …

... READ THE COMPLETE ESSAY:  “Israel: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War & All Customary International Humanitarian Law.”

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

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.