printTHE NEW ESSAY appeared on LewRockwell.com and The Unz Review, where it was the main feature, as well as at my home on The New American. And on Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.
You can now read “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide” on IlanaMercer.com.
This new essay is Part II, and follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
The essay was variously titled:
Defending Gaza (II): “‘Synagogue of Satan’ Denies Genocide While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”
Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide”
Defending Gaza (II): “Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation”
Explained in Part II, first, using Hoppean Argumentation, is why Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide. These tactics amount to ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE.
Next, lest I be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide is reasonably qualified and clarified. In particular, with reference to Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR! I explained why the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people is inoffensive to the natural-law libertarian.
The reason I then, and in most of my essays on Gaza, insist on CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE … of Gaza is this: We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists. However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated.
Showing how Israel CO-OPTS HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW—how Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature is essential. Of course, no matter who has committed a crime in my neighborhood or in its vicinity; Washington State has no right to turn me out of my home, which is mine, which I own. The state certainly has no right to pulverize my home because its agents believe outlaws hide in the neighborhood.
On to ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK. Did you know that, “A combined ‘effort’ between IDF- and security force soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is responsible for pogroms in which over 528 Palestinians have been murdered since October 7, among whom were 126 children“? We ought to know this.
Finally, PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION: The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening is used in the coda to to validate the Palestinians’ reality, as they have been telling it to a mostly unbelieving universe (myself included) over decades.
The Hoppean proposition deployed to trace the contours of Israel’s reality is this: Israel can’t deny it is engaged in genocide as it enacts genocide. Since it does, it must be seen as performing a lie for which it deserves the contempt reserved for those who are mired in and embody lies and contradictions.
Using the same meta-principle, Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians—their reasons for resentment and resistance—as they’ve been telling it to the world. Excerpt from the coda:
…Palestinians under Israel are perhaps the most imperiled people in the world. If the proponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza were to deny this; they’d be living a lie. To expose the liar’s life of lies; the denier of the Palestinian reality ought to be compelled to live his own lie. How would our holocaust denier be forced into performing or living his lie?
Like this: The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would have to be parachuted into the midst of the living ghosts of Gaza. He would be filmed as he lives the life of a Palestinian, running hither and yon as the tanks advance on him, or ducking-and-diving during bombardments from above, as if one can escape the death radius of a 2000- or 500 pound, American-made bomb.
The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be recorded scratching for scraps, lugging jerricans of brackish, contaminated drinking water back to his nylon dwelling, clambering over kilometers of decaying structures, through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera’s viewfinder will find the denier queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been pulverized by the Israelis. He or she would be taped up-close in the throes of dysentery, sepsis, and starvation; intubated or cannulated or amputated or C-sectioned without narcotics, writhing on a hospital floor as slippery as an abattoir, listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s killer-cum-spy drones.
QED. Points proven.
…THE REST was on LewRockwell.com, The Unz Review & The New American. And Power & Market at the Mises Institute, July 4.
READ IT now on IlanaMercer.com.
The new essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide,” is Part II. It follows on, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” June 9, 2024
The links are legion throughout; the logic unassailable.
UPDATE VIII (7/26): Ethnocide In The West Bank. If the West Bank is increasingly looking like Gaza, it’s because it and its people are being evicted and murdered, too. The great Peter Oborne (Unscripted), on “How Israel devastated refugee camps in the West Bank since 7 October.”
UPDATE VII (7/24): War Criminal In Congress. Patriot Scott Ritter, who has been fighting for his country for a lifetime: “I’d have tackled the SOB Bibi for launching a frontal assault on our people & on what makes America great: the Constitution, the 1st Amendment.” May the colluding quislings of Congress, bought and paid for by War Criminals, rot. WATCH.
UPDATE VI (July 23): LAVROV: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at a UN Security Council Open Debate on the Situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, New York, July 17, 2024:
… Israel is waging jointly with its American allies …. Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. This is twice as many as the number of civilian victims on both sides of the conflict in southeastern Ukraine over the past 10 years. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine over the past 10 years since the state coup in February 2014. According to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry that examines violations of international human rights law, Palestinians aged below 18 make up approximately half of Gaza’s population. It means that they were born and grew up in conditions of a total blockade. Apart from the current escalation of violence, they have seen other Israeli military operations, namely Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds in 2006, Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008-2009, Pillar of Defence in 2012, Protective Edge in 2014, and Guardian of the Walls in 2021.
Gaza is in ruins today. Residential buildings, schools and hospitals have been turned into rubble, and the critical civilian infrastructure facilities have been knocked out of service. There is an epidemic of infectious diseases and mass hunger there. It is a real humanitarian disaster. There is no safe and reliable access to the victims and those in need amid the ongoing hostilities.
UPDATE V (7/23). BUSTED: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) Issues Momentous Advisory Ruling AGAINST Israel’s Occupation, including how these rulings must be operationalized:
“Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”
Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 is here.
Israel, moreover, is bound by this decision by virtue of being “party to several legal instruments containing human rights obligations, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 21 December 1965 (CERD), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966 (the ‘ICESCR’) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 19 December 1966 (the ‘ICCPR’).”
Some analysis is at Al Jazeera. I found Lamis Deek’s interview with George Galloway most excellent and compelling. WATCH.
(7/23/024): Palestinian beauty BELLA HADID has held strong against the genocidal forces of evil. Boycot Adidas, which caved to the Zionist lobby, which is responsible for throttling, banning, libeling and maligning all protest, written or enacted, against Israel’s genocide of Gazans.
UPDATE I: Funny tidbit regarding my essay on The Unz Review. I can’t post it on Twatter, or X, for you. The phrase used in the title, that of Jesus not mine, is considered hate speech on X. The X algorithm doesn’t discriminate between the naughty words of the putative Son Of God and those of other mortals. Banned.
UPDATE II (7/6): Categorically true. A philosopher, via Mondoweiss: “… if someone, after the horrific punishment meted out by Israel on Gaza, could still defend Israel, then this manifests a serious moral character flaw. … If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you’re an awful person.”
UPDATE III (7/8): IDF war criminals are trying to shed culpability. The English 972 article is milder, so I translate from the Hebrew version of the magazine, whose URL cannot be transposed here as it is in Hebrew: ‘We fired without discrimination. Often just for fun. We burned down homes. Every male between 16 and 50 was considered a terrorist, fair game. The bodies we bulldozed into ditches, so as to reduce visibility to service providers.’
UPDATE IV (7/10): The august British medical journal, The Lancet,
has awoken to its obligation to Truth:
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.
ONLY-FOLLOWING-ORDERS DEFENSE. I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators, express sadness over the fact that IDF soldiers will invariably suffer from years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Not so fast. With every Tik Tok upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By the numbers. Here is the latest exemplar of the “most moral military in the world”:
No shortage of shameless IDF. The Nuremberg defense is invalid: “I was only following orders. I had been brainwashed.”
? Bram Settenbrino shared these videos of himself indiscriminately shooting a gun and blowing up a mosque
He is American and his family owns the Blue Moon Hotel in NYC pic.twitter.com/S3tXEsjdZI
— Stop Arab Hate (@StopArabHate) July 22, 2024
Peace in the Middle East is about world peace. I had hoped Kennedy, Jr. would see and support such a connection. There is little time for a shift in this 2024 race. Much depends on one’s courage and honesty.
I am disagreeably surprised at how little comment engagement I see here.
I, too, briefly had hopes for RFK Jr, until he signed on with the Bibi Brigade. To Hell with him.
As an American, I consider that the very best contribution that the US could make to a peaceful Middle East would be to get the hell out of it, and to immediately cease all forms of aid to Israel, or to any other state for that matter. Absolutely no arms sales either, to anyone. As long as I’m dreaming, close all military bases on foreign soil, anywhere in the world. Reduce the size of the US military establishment to what is necessary to defend actual US territory, which would mean about a 90% reduction. The few remaining in the new, reduced military would be exclusively male and heterosexual, and IQ testing would be used to make the final cut. Then assign the new, reduced military a new, reduced mission: securing the borders of the US, starting (obviously) with the Mexican border. No one crosses north, and those attempting to do so would be greeted with gunfire. Then we could go to work on deporting the aliens already among us.
Yeah, I’m dreaming.
BAB used to buzz. We used to have a broad community of engaged, Barely a Blog participants. One of the reasons they were lost was due to a a useless web-developer, out of Oregon: nasty, bossy and shoddy. She disrespected my knowledge of my audience, told me what to do, assumed knowledge of my online universe and of my readers. And promptly insisted on closing off comment engagement so as to reduce spam. People would come every day, weigh in, and had even formed bonds. A community that Christy Kiltz broke.
Avoid Christy Kiltz https://designbykiltz.com/about-us/name/christy-kiltz/