Genocide is a crime, ‘the crime of all crimes.’ It stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attaches to genocide ~ilana

Because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is neither war nor war crime ~ilana

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 Israeli 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 Israeli 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.

The Israeli State, 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 the 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.

HASBARA AND A FLORET OF BABY FLESH

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. (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.

Hasbara to help leave refugees with no redoubt, and nothing to their name but a nylon dome above their heads. Gaza’s homeless must wait to parry whatever next thrust Israel will deliver in… “self-defense.”

In-the-heat-of-battle Hasbara greases the skids for a Jewish Taliban and his posse of soldiers, whooping it up, as they explode one more mosque among the hundreds they’ve already vaporized.

Hasbara to ostensibly explain away another possessed IDF demon grimacing maniacally while reciting The Shmah, our “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” prayer. He then levels a mosque. “Have an explosive Sabbath,” roar these particular IDF, before bursting into popular song, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” and sharing that they had just wired up a house of prayer in Khirbet Khizaa, Khan Younis, in the central Gaza Strip. Next I want to see their faces, scores of them, appear on our screens from the Hague. But will Hasbara tools like Matthew Miller, ensconced in the State Department, allow it? Rhetorical.

Israel’s Hasbara facilitates “Israel’s conceit of invincibility,” in the words of commentator Mouin Rabbani. It has marred the West’s morality, but will never contaminate the natural law, and has yet to fundamentally change the common law.

Civilizing systems of ethics still stipulate that no one has the right to kill a single innocent human being, directly or indirectly, let alone hundreds of thousands of them—for by the time the Israeli serial killers are cajoled into stopping the carnage, there could be, in the informed opinion of American patriots like Ralph Nader, between 250 to 500,000, maybe more, Palestinian deaths brought about by Israel.

Easily—that is if the Lancet, the medical journal of record, and the human rights community don’t obfuscate the truth. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that they, too, have been compromised.

MINARCHIST, ANARCHIST OR STATIST: GENOCIDE IS FORBIDDEN!

International law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law on the matter of industrial-scale mass murder. For reasons obvious, there should certainly be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axion in this context. Minarchist, anarchist or statist; genocide is verboten in libertarianism.

Craig Mokhiber, one of this country’s most principled specialists in “international human rights law, policy, and methodology,” explains:

International law does not allow a claim of self-defense to justify crimes against humanity and genocide. Nor does it magically overcome the international humanitarian law imperatives of precaution, distinction, and proportionality, or the protected status of hospitals and other vital civilian installations.
In addition, the presence of people associated with armed resistance groups (even if proven) does not automatically transform a civilian location or protected structure into a legitimate military target. If it did, the common presence of Israeli soldiers in Israeli hospitals would equally render those hospitals legitimate targets. Attacking hospitals is not an act of self-defense. It is an act of murder and, in systematic and large-scale cases, of the crime of extermination.
A claim of self-defense does not justify collective punishment, the siege of civilian populations, extrajudicial executions, torture, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the targeting of children, the murder of aid workers, medical personnel, journalists, and UN officials- all crimes perpetrated by Israel during the current phase of its genocide in Palestine. And all shamelessly followed by claims of self-defense by Israel’s defenders in the West.’  (Via Mondoweiss)

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.”

WHEN MONEY MEDIATES MURDER

If words matter, then boy! does money count.

The Israel Lobby, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is an almighty fifth column which ought to have long since come under corruption investigations and dismantled (ditto the ADL). At the very least, AIPAC, a blatant Israel operative, ought to have been forced to register as a foreign agent and scrutinized.

The first such endeavor was attempted by William Fulbright decades back. In 1963, by Wikipedia’s telling, Fulbright—academic, statesman and politician—had implicated AIPAC in laundering five million tax-deductible dollars “from philanthropic Americans,” by ostensibly sending the money to Israel “and then recycle[ing] it back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.”

On April 15, 1973, Fulbright told Face the Nation, a current affairs television program, that “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. … [and that we] should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel … The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much.”

That was the end of Fulbright’s campaign.

Underscored in 1973, Fulbright’s reality has reached its nadir in 2024. On July 23, American law-makers-cum-Israel-lap-dogs leap to their feet some 50 times, with cheers and deafening applause, to express adulation for mass murderer Bibi Netanyahu, who is named as an offender by the International Criminal Court.

From Fulbright whose re-election bid AIPAC helped torpedo in 1973, to Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two charismatic Americans with grassroots support, who’d refused to do Israel’s bidding, in 2024: AIPAC (track it) continues to buy influence, and to subvert Americans whenever they attempt to exert their popular will against that of the Israel donor-class.

Progressive representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush of Missouri dared to voice disgust for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. That was the end of the Bush/Bowman bids for office.

While we’re deconstructing Israel’s lexicon of crime, do please quit calling its “Operation Swords of Iron” in Gaza a war. It’s not.

GENOCIDE IS NOT WAR

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza—from my diligent daily tracking, the Israelis have comfortably settled into massacring between 30 to 100 individuals, each day—is not a war by any definition.

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 bullyboy’s aerial blitzkrieg carried out against a trapped civilian population. In terms of matériel, not the quality or morality of its men, the Middle East’s most powerful army is also among the world’s top 20 military forces.

The IDF’s extermination campaign against a population of cornered civilians has indeed been disrupted by pockets of asymmetric guerilla warfare from non-state resistance fighters. Their exploits are available in full on the X platform  of military analyst Jon Elmer.

Gleaned from my close observations over 11 months; the Gaza-based Hamas fighting brigades are no fat cats; they are skinny young Ghazzawi men, some in sandals, slinking among their ruined homes, darting in-and-out to defend what is left of their communities. These fighters are indubitably of the Palestinian people and for the people, as Palestinians see them.

And the way Palestinians see things is all important. The art of getting along, differences and all, is imperative in conflict resolution. Realpolitik demands not dominance, but that dueling perspectives be taken into consideration. Israel and America should not foist their reality on their opponents.

At any rate, let us try to avoid a dialogue of the deaf, and remember that words matter. They mediate action. Use them accurately: Genocide is the kind of crime that stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attach to genocide. By extension, Israel is waging genocide, not war, and … Americans want it stopped.

For all their initial stated eagerness; most of our countrymen (61 percent now) want Israel’s genocide halted. Americans, moreover, want to stop arming Israel, as a June poll from CBS showed (via The Intercept). This includes 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.

Beholden to donor-class dominated politics, the regnant villains of the Stupid and the Evil Parties are, nevertheless, refusing to end the genocide in Gaza. Yet it must be stopped. Actively and urgently so, given that, in an attempt to bury the crime of all crimes; Israel has shifted the focus to its northern front, to Lebanon.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 20
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, September 23
LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market, October 5

Ilana Mercer is paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist. Her new book is “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024). Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish and grew up in Israel from which she fled, aged 19, never to return.  She had refused the military. Her focus, since October of 2023, has been genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization. Or, as one sage succinctly put it, “At a time of genocide; genocide is the only issue.”

The post Genocide Is A Crime, Not A War Crime: Israel Is Waging Genocide, Not War appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Crime is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the Israeli army. Yes, do not dub a first-degree felony a ‘war crime.’ A crime is a crime is a crime. A criminal is a criminal. A serial killer, state or lone actor, must be stopped ~ilana

Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by ~ilana

The Israel defense Forces (IDF), and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law ~ilana

The totem words and adjectives we use to describe Israel, a perverse and pornographically murderous society, fail. One day flows into the next, each indistinguishable in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.

As televised vignettes at July’s end showed, the Israelis, a “bizarre specimen of moral laxity,” in the 1728 words of Southern gentleman William Byrd, had been openly rationalizing the need to codify in law the rape of Palestinian hostages.

From Knesset members to the distinguishably dumb panelists who festoon that country’s tv networks, “Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian [hostages] shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide.”

The crimes of genocide, the making and mass-marketing of online snuff films featuring murdered Palestinians, and the commission of extra-judicial assassination the globe over—these Israel has already de facto legalized in what passes for law in that thugocracy.

By the Middle East Monitor’s telling, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.”

Like Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the rape in Sde Teiman was captured on camera. Watch! Have an emesis dish close by.

According to Truthout.org, the Knesset, at July’s end—Israel’s lawmakers, no less—was debating whether or not sexual abuse à la de Sade Teiman was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) … Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the [rapist] reservists.

I say Palestinian hostages, because most of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners held indefinitely in Israel’s Gulag-like prison complex are held without charge under administrative detention—absent conventional due process of law. Originating in “English common law, and even the Magna Carta in 1215, due process encompasses procedural and substantive requirements,” and is very much an element of international law. Essentially, “no state” may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military said, Monday, July 29, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.”

Next, via Democracy Now’s account, “A right-wing mob, including members of the Knesset, broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.”

When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about mass rape by their enemies (read Ali Abunimah’s “Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film”), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the Israel defense Forces (IDF), and Israel’s other policing agencies, in conjunction with the societal structures that support them, are striving to codify their de facto daily criminal conduct in law.

Halachic Right To Rape?

In both word and deed, Israelis have systematically and systemically agitated for the legal right to gravely mistreat their enemies, justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and a plurality of their countrymen.

The canvassing I conducted in “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?”, a May essay, is seconded by Oren Ziv of the +972 Magazine (“A riot for impunity shows Israel’s proud embrace of its crimes“). Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the [pro-rape] riots, and the apathy of the military police, all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ [rape] charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are ‘mainstream’ views in Israeli society.”

Mainstream approval in Israel of genocide, rape, and snuff-film production explains why one of the reservist rape perpetrators, like so many members of the Israeli security establishment, proudly pleads his case on a YouTube video. In Israel, he is a patriot. Crime is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the Israeli army. Yes, do not dub a first-degree felony a “war crime.” A crime is a crime is a crime. A criminal is a criminal. A serial killer, state or lone actor, must be stopped.

Across the occupied territories, the Israel Security State summarily detains people absent due process, often deploying rape as a weapon to shame traditional men and women, and it loots and demolishes their homes. You see, Lockean homesteading principles, by which many Palestinians have come to own ancient land, flouts the Israeli Administrative State. The Israel security forces commonly also steal Palestinian money at checkpoints, as Middle East Eye editor Daniel Hearst has attested in conversation with award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Both veteran reporters vouch for the veracity of the shakedown routines.

Silver-tongued Israelis and their Hasbara office at Foggy Bottom (The US Department of State), in the persons of Matthew Miller for Crime Boss Antony Blinken, continue to deny this existential Palestinian reality, framing it as outlier cases. The “most moral military in the world” will investigate … itself.

But Israel is a lattice of lies.

A deception embedded deep in this lattice of lies is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself. Indeed, a new report authored by the aforementioned +972 Magazine, “for the human rights group Yesh Din, shows how the main role of Israel’s military law-enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.” (“How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza“)

In this case, the greater goal of Israel’s legal apparatus and jurisprudence is to fend off charges of genocide and war-crimes in international courts of law. Be mindful, then, that any investigation ever launched or any arrests made by Israeli authorities are symbolic, cursory and inconsequential, part of a well-established strategy to safeguard the greater criminal enterprise.

Essentially, expect the Jewish State’s stooges (Alan Dershowitz in the lead) to be trotted out to huff and puff indignantly at the very notion that a manifestly lawless thug of a state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of unfathomable thuggery and cruelty, is incapable of investigating itself. Antisemitism.

Ultimately, Israel has become adept at narrative, at manufacturing mantras about its unsurpassed morality, this, as it is mired in illegality and criminality. (Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW,” in the essay, “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide”.)

Metaphysically, the Midrashic force behind rape and the rest of the crimes informally institutionalized in this de Sade society often comes from the halachic top, from movers-and-shakers in Israeli moral precincts. In my June, 2024 essay, “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism,” the delightful Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim made a cameo:

“His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that ‘as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .’ News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s own YnetNews.com.” Before Rabbi Karim, there was Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad, who “urged a genocide in Gaza and excused rape by soldiers.” (Via Electronic Intifada.)

As lamented in the opening to this essay you are reading, “One day flows into another, each indistinguishable from the next in the level of sadistic torture and carnage dreamed up by the IDF Einsatzgruppen.” Hipper and more happening than the rape of Palestinians in Israeli prisons—that’s old news—is the use of Palestinian civilians, often children and the elderly, to clear potentially booby-trapped tunnels in Gaza. “Our lives are more important than theirs,” boasted members of the low-inhibition, atavistic Israeli death squads, just the other day.

Israel Einsatzgruppen’s horror du jour comes courtesy of a Haaretz investigation, which reveals that “Gazans not suspected of terrorism are detained and sent as human shields to search tunnels and houses before IDF soldiers enter, with the full knowledge of senior Israeli officers.” So say “several sources.”

Agile liars that they are, the “IDF claims this practice is forbidden.” (So it happened, and then was mildly protested?)

The things the Israelis tell us are so much eyewash: These people—this “bizarre specimen of moral laxity”—think that all of us lack the mental equipment to detect crude circular reasoning, such as that which Maj. Nir Dinar, an Israeli military spokesman, served up to the corrupt, sub-intelligent New York Times: The Israeli “military acts upon ‘operational necessity,’” Dinar vaporized in reply to an atrocity query. It “follows laws of war.” “Every target that is being eliminated, there is a good reason for that elimination.”

Maj. Nir Dinar is deploying Israel’s penchant for the backward-reasoning fallacy. To wit, if a Palestinian is dead by IDF—it is because he deserved to die, was a “terrorist.” But, “Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes,” observed Dr. Thomas Young, a philosopher, “applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the … evidence exists.”

The Nuremberg Defense

I’ve heard friendlies, righteous commentators all, express sadness over the fact that the IDF death squads will invariably suffer years of assorted Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Please don’t! There is a glut of legal evidence for serving arrest warrants on hundreds of individual Israeli soldiers. If only there were some imaginary UN Marshal, to enforce customary, international humanitarian laws prohibiting mass murder and genocide.

Neither should the Nuremberg defense, “I was only following orders,” be floated in mitigation of the IDF. The evidence is conclusive. IDF shoot and loot for fun. Pleased to dilate upon their crimes, IDF common criminals shared with the +972 Magazine that they “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.”  (I translated from the more brutal Hebrew version of the magazine article, whose Hebrew URL cannot be transposed here.)
Nobody ordered the IDF to shoot kids in the head; they do it for the love of it, because of who they are. American volunteer surgeons Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa are the latest angels of mercy and morality to attest that “without a doubt” and with steeliness of purpose; Israeli ace snipers deliberately shoot Palestinian children and toddlers, aiming precision shots at hearts and heads.

With every incriminating, choreographed Tik Tok or Instagram upload, the IDF have proven themselves murderous and without morals. By volition, by the numbers. “What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans” was curated by the New York Times, belatedly. New snuff films come online every day courtesy of IDF dreck. “There is a new film,” announces one sneering Jewish supremacist. He names it “Crushed.” (Revealing is the soldier’s greeting, هْلًا وَسَهْلًا ahlan wa sahlan. It’s Arabic for welcome. To be cool, second handers like this soldier must culturally appropriate the local patois from the indigenous people.)

That the “Goyim” are clearly repulsed is no deterrent. The “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.

Essentially, snuff films.

As I had remarked before, such patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are tied to psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” The revelation came via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.

The latest instantiation of Israeli society’s impenetrable, clannish sense of entitlement, borne of an imagined grant of divine rights, comes courtesy of journalist Mehdi Hasan’s documentary, “Israel’s Reel Extremism.”

There is the familiar fare—IDF joyously vaporizing Palestinians, individuals and building blocks as though in a video game; mocking their victims, invading their homes; filching from their businesses, and rummaging through the piteous intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed. Some acts of defilement are too lewd to recount.

Saturating the new “Reel Israel” IDF interviews is an attendant pride in criminal conduct. IDF hubris is expressed in snide, supercilious, self-satisfied, supremely confident, asinine quips. These speak to an unadulterated, manifestly unfounded sense of Jewish supremacy:

‘I don’t see any problem with humiliating the Palestinians.’
‘I don’t think there should be life in Gaza on the day-after.’
‘If we have to kill a million [Palestinians]; then it’s a million.’
‘Naturally, there is a sense of superiority. Daily I go about with a sense of superiority to Gaza. Who would not feel superior to the people of Gaza?’

Rape of hostages held in detention without charge, and the use of Palestinian children and the elderly, in combat, to clear Hamas tunnels—these IDF grotesqueries bleed “nicely” into extra-judicial assassination.

Extra-Judicial Assassination

Ismail Haniyeh, formerly the fourth Palestinian prime minister and a leading political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, was executed extra-judicially—how else?—by rogue state Israel at the end of July.

As polls clearly show, Haniyeh enjoyed wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well, and was widely viewed among the people of the Arab world—not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide—as a political moderate and a uniter of Shia and Sunni. Haniyeh was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp, where he was raised.

According to historian Ilan Pape (starting at around 18 minutes into this Electronic Intifada interview), such repulsive executions have been part of the Israeli State’s founders’ modus operandi since its inception, and before. Here is a likely inexhaustive Wikipedia list of the “zombie state killer’s” extra-judicial kills over the years. “Eight other times had Israel been accused of assassinations in Iran.”

From diplomatic attachés, to university professors, to scientists, to thinkers and mere men of words—as in activists—to military men, to jailed prisoners, to resistance figures and fighters, and some just “unknown” collateral-damage, for-fun kills: you name them; Israel has targeted them.

As I pointed out in “The U.S. As The Globe’s Judge, Jury And Executioner,” a 2020 column dissecting the murder of Qassim Soleimani by America, “blind patriotism stateside is predicated on accepting that it is up to the U.S. government and its ruling elites to determine who lives and who dies around the world.”

Some say war criminal Netanyahu pushed for the 2020 murder of Soleimani, an Iranian major general. On the Axis of Genocide, with respect to extra-judicial, illegal assassinations—it is safe to say that, while America emulates Israel, Israel is a kingpin crime boss on this front. Israel is unmatched in picking off legitimate leaders with whom it doesn’t wish to liaise diplomatically. Theoretically, that is almost everyone.

Ismail Haniyeh, “who served as the third political leader of Hamas, … [Hailed] from a family of refugees expelled from historic Palestine during the Nakba in 1948. [H]e grew up in northern Gaza’s beachside al-Shati refugee camp. Haniyeh ascended through the ranks of Hamas, starting as the secretary to the group’s founder, Ahmed Yassin, and eventually leading its political bureau.”

“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.” (Middle East Eye) Yet, to publicly express sadness over the gratuitous taking of Palestinian life is verboten by the Axis of Genocide. Righteous commentators on the side of justice thus confine their comments to the strategic aftershocks of Haniyeh’s murder by the rabid-dog state—that he was, for example, also lead negotiator in the matter of the hostages, Palestinian and Israeli.

Alas, the saga of the Palestinians and their relentless leaders is also terribly sad. Haniyeh had lost upwards of 60 members of his family. He knew the risks of resistance and took them. Haniyeh’s murder, on Iranian territory, “came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on the Tuesday evening, killing three civilians,” as well as murdering another human being, “Fuad Shukr, Hizballah’s most senior military official and its leader Hasan Nasrallah’s close confidant.”

Hizballah represents a large swathe, not exclusively Shia, of Lebanese society. Established to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon—an aspiration shared by most Lebanese—Hizballah is a political party with a presence in the Lebanese Parliament and the unity government. It has become “a mainstay in the Lebanese polity.”

When Ismail al-Ghoul, a young Gazan journalist, and Rami al-Rifi, his cameraman (both “terrorists” by Israeli backward logic, given that they were between 16 and 50) went to report from Haniyeh’s humble home in the al-Shati refugee camp, where kids had congregated to commemorate their neighbor, also the political leader of their resistance–Israel bombed the two to bits. As is the case with all journalists targeted by Israel, they were “in a clearly identifiable press vehicle when a missile directly hit them. It killed both reporters and a young boy walking by. The strike left young Ismail al-Ghoul headless.” (Mondoweiss)
(Image Via MiddleEastEye)

Al-Ghoul’s colleague, Al Jazeera’s Gaza-based reporter Hind Khoudary, a reserved young woman whose courageous reporting I’ve watched for ten months, broke down on air, inconsolable. Hind’s hopeless despair was that of one who has followed the rules, but found that those were no deterrents to Israel’s wanton—clearly intentional—vampiric slaughter of Gaza’s best, brightest and bravest, young people in the full flowering of their vitality.

How could any half-decent woman who has born a child—Hind is but a child—watch this girl weep and not yearn to comfort her and keep her safe? A philosopher at Mondoweiss ventured something quite simple. Truth is often simple.  “… if someone … 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.” (Good enough, although “awful” is toddler-level vocabulary.)

The Do-Nothing BRICS (Except South Africa)

An “act of assassination”: China was quick to condemn the murder of Hamas’ political leader Haniyeh, who, as mentioned, had been acting as Israel’s lead interlocutor in hostage negotiations.

An “unacceptable political assassination,” seconded Russia’s foreign ministry. Türkiye’s president, Tayyip Erdogan, “condemned the assassination in Tehran and said the killing would not break Palestinians’ will.” (Reuters)

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had pointed out, on July 17, 2024, that,

Over the past 10 months or 300 days, nearly 40,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed and 90,000 wounded. The majority of them are children and women. The number of civilian victims [in Gaza] over the past 10 months is twice as large as the number of civilian victims in Ukraine on both sides of the conflict over the past 10 years since the [US sponsored] state coup in February 2014.

Correction, sir: These are the confirmed deaths, where Gaza’s pitifully diligent government has managed to faithfully tally each individual with his or her remains, so that relatives may lovingly shroud the bodies, some so tiny, weep over them and inter them.

At last count, then, more than 40,000 Palestinians had been murdered, 92,401 maimed, and over 85 percent of the population displaced from their homes many times over. These are direct, confirmed casualties. In character, and ever late to its obligations, as I remarked in November of 2004, during America’s onslaught on Iraq—the august British medical journal The Lancet has finally, ten months into a genocide, awoken to the 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.

American Israel Idolaters are still claiming that all this is a tidy lie via the “Hamas-run government.” Coincidentally, this remnant of the government in Gaza is obviously “Hamas-run”; much like Israel’s government is Netanyahu-run, and as America’s government is Genocide-Joe fronted. The first is a crime boss, a Neolithic beast of a man. The last is a degenerate, corrupt and demented old git. More so than these putrefying men does Hamas legitimately represent the Palestinians of Gaza—that is if we are to listen to what Palestinians tell us.

I continue to recommend to you, dear reader, a variation on Richard Pryor’s wry wisdom about he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. The reader must thus believe his eyes, not the lying Israelis. The Israelis and their Israel-First American enablers are, plainly put, lying.

Gaza’s landscape is Gothically grotesque for what is says about the agents of destruction who’ve reduced it thus. It is also apocalyptic, IsraHell having demolished most dwellings, and displaced most of Gaza’s inhabitants many times over. The nylon dome is now their home.

Believe the evidence before your eyes, such as the July 2024 satellite imagery via of UNOSAT. “Gaza Strip 8th Comprehensive Damage Assessment,” imagery and analysis courtesy of the United Nations Satellite Center, is already obsolete.

Once the “runaway Zombie Killing Machine” (Rami Khouri‘s coinage) is stopped, I believe it quite possible, given the scale of destruction, that as many as half-a-million Palestinians will have been exterminated, with America at Israel’s elbow, and only the faintest protest. The IDF, with near-full acquiescence from a plurality of its own countrymen, has, so far, likely killed hundreds-upon-thousands of Palestinians, directly, via blitzkriegs ongoing, and indirectly. And it continues to murder daily guided by a quest for a Final Solution to its Palestinian Problem.

BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, with BRICS announcing the admission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina as new member states) might want to consider an urgent course of action to stop Israel—an amoral pornographically violent terrorist state by any other name—or their leaders will be next. I venture that dissidents, activists or writers (whose careers have not yet been destroyed decades ago by Israel First neoconservatives), are in danger, all, of death by demon state.

‘Topography Of Cruelty’

With Israeli flesh merchants inflicting a new level of the grotesque on the Palestinians every day, the totem nouns and adjectives used to describe Israel fail.

Thus, as is the custom in these essays of mine, let us cede to the heroes who help bear witness to some of IsraHell’s handiwork.

Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa have witnessed the Israel-created “topography of cruelty” and the deliberate creation of famine in Gaza. Picture, if you can, the static sight of “thousands and thousands of semi-trucks parked alongside the highway for nearly 30 miles … —convoys of lifesaving aid turned into static walls.”

By Israel.

Upon that “topography of cruelty” these two humanitarian surgeons have laid healing hands in the operating room:

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, ‘she’s just a fucking kid.’

In just a couple of weeks, Mark Perlmutter said he saw more carnage inflicted upon civilians than he had in the combined total of his previous thirty years of humanitarian visits to war-zones around the world.

The account rendered by these humanitarian surgeons is titled “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.” Images accompany the account. Yes, little Juri is beautiful. The oxygen mask does nothing to conceal the delicate sweep of her dark eyebrows, which frame the largest eyes imaginable, fringed with black lashes. Should she survive debridement and be given the many surgeries she requires, Juri will live with a colostomy and “a lifetime of severe and permanent disability.” Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s teaching hospitals, and specialized pediatric Intensive Care Units. Juri’s chances and those of tens of thousands like her are slim.

( Screen-picture capture via Politico)

The next screen-picture captures the devolution of Tamer, a young Palestinian nurse, over three encounters with IsraHell. In the first image, Tamer’s leg has been blown to bits, but he is still otherwise youthful, handsome. In the next two images, following detention and torture by his Israeli tormentors, we see a husk, a man who is a shadow of the first image. An eye is missing. The man in the wheelchair’s wasted legs can no longer ambulate.

Some Of What Palestinians Taught Me

In Mehdi Hasan’s “Israel’s Reel Extremism,” the new documentary mentioned, Israeli society’s best and brightest reveal their staggering pomposity. With jollity and bonhomie, thirty-three seconds into the Reel Israel’s trailer, a smug young Israeli invites us to stare into a …cavernous emptiness. He says:

“Naturally, there is a sense of superiority. Daily I go about with a sense of superiority to Gaza. Who would not feel superior to the people of Gaza?”

Far from feeling superior to the People of Gaza; I am humbled by them. In my homeward journey away from all things Israel, since October 7, I have made it my mission to learn all I can by observing Palestinians and Israelis through every prism available to me. I’ve studied both peoples as closely as is humanly possible for ten months.

In the process, I have learned as much as I have unlearned about both peoples.

My matured impression is that Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians are temperamental opposites. Jewish Israelis—they truly hate Palestinians—give vent to their loathing in the hurried cadence of the histrionic. They are excitable, congenitally irrational and pathologically solipsistic in their me-me; us-vs-them monomania. It is fitting that Israel’s verbally flatulent “cognoscente” and TV vulgarians (I watch i24 Hebrew so you don’t have to)—their accents so broad and guttural, their Hebrew so anglicized and pidginized—are incapable of disgorging a single ennobling or original thought.

On the other hand, Palestinians—in Palestine and the diaspora—do not voice a hatred of Israel, their nemesis. Rather, they describe Israeli actions toward them, as they cradle their destroyed limbs and dead children. They look to the heavens and ask, “Where is the world, where are the Arab nations?” They do not question their God, but simply say He will deliver them. Although they must be seething inside; Palestinians seem of a quiet, thoughtful, stoic temperament. They exude a self-containment, in contrast to the irrational emotional abandon of the Israeli type, to which I, a Jew who grew up in Israel, was always temperamentally unsuited. Gaza’s Palestinians behave as a dignified, reserved and refined people would, superior to the vulgar Israelis in every way.

In the process of learning as much about the Palestinians as I’ve unlearned; I’ve learned about myself. I now know why I fled Israel, aged 19, never to return.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
* The Unz Review, August 21
* The New American, published, August 21, then promptly cancelled, author fired for adhering to Christian, not AIPAC, values.
* LewRockwell.com, August 22
* Power & Market, Mises Institute, August 23

* Screen post of sneering IDF videographer, an introduction to “Crushed.”

The post De Sade At Sde Teiman: When Genocide, Snuff Films, Extra-Judicial Assassinations & Rape Are De Facto Legal appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide.

The Jewish State is genocidal not because it has been denounced as “genocidal” by ostensible “antisemites” and “terrorist sympathizers,” but by virtue of its actions. Israel is genocidal by virtue of what it has done to Gaza, the people and their land.

Shortly after October 7, 2023, conceptions of vice and virtue were crystalized like never before. It was then that certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. For you are what you do. Israel’s actions within Gaza and without it have shown the world—myself, a former supporter of Israel included—in cruel relief the barbarity of Israeli state and civil society.

By closely observing Israel in action over nine months, in Gaza and beyond, and then, as closely, listening to and chronicling Israeli and Jewish leaders, stateside and in Israel, as they walked the walk—immutable truths about the Jewish State were easily deduced commensurate with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Thumping majorities across Israel’s public sector, private sector and “third sector,” you name them—have been justifying, finessing and fibbing about their army’s “high-tech murder spree” in Gaza, a campaign that Israel and its American underwriters have taken to the West Bank, and are poised to continue in Lebanon, if allowed.

Thus, the labels “antisemite” and “terrorist sympathizer” amount to a blood libel leveled at millions, perhaps billions, in the Global South, in particular—although the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred hearts across the world.

So far, the watching world has been peacefully protesting genocide through the written and spoken word, or by marching and voting.

Caught in the act, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to demand cavalierly the right to kill and deceive. The world is instructed to, first deny Israel’s genocide, then justify it or risk defenestration.

To no avail.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). Verbatim, Matthew 7:20 reads: “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

In pointing to human action as the undeniable key to man-made reality—Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Ethics of Argumentation go even further than did Jesus in Matthew 7:20.

ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

Our overlords who art in D.C. and their overlords in Tel Aviv strive to condition us, at once, to watch Palestinians die daily en masse, and either justify or deny the holocaust visited on them by the Jewish State.

Countering this parallel universe being enforced by the Axis of Genocide are Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Ethics of Argumentation. Particularly handy here is “the legal theory of ‘estoppel,’” attributed by Dr. Hoppe to Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian legal theorist. It is “the legal principle that bars a party from denying or alleging a certain fact owing to that party’s previous conduct, allegation, or denial.” (Emphasis added.)

I’d venture that still stronger than legal estoppel apparently allows is the fact that Israel is denying current and ongoing genocidal acts at the very same time it is committing them! Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide while committing genocide.

It is a performative contradiction, then, for Israel and its backers to dispute that the Jewish State is committing genocide at the very same time that the Jewish State is carrying out the denied deeds.

Genocide, ethnocide and domicide are, obviously, never justified and can never be exculpated. Therefore, to assert that you are just and justified as you carry out the manifest genocide, ethnocide and domicide of a people; is to not only perform a contradiction, but to embody one, all the while demanding the unique authority to carry out all of the above.

To be mired in such grotesqueries, as Israelis indubitably are, is to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane. The Greek philosophers would have concurred.

ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR

Laws against genocide impose no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

Lest we be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide must be reasonably qualified and clarified. And, in particular, the reference here to the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people.

Natural-rights libertarians are seldom enamored of legal positivism, which generally conflates justice with the law of The State. Our all-too-small cohort is, for the most, wedded to the natural law, a higher law—a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation and common sense.

“By natural law,” propounded the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, in Liberty, Order, And Justice, “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

I would further argue that even as he is mired in evil—as Israelis certainly are—man knows right from wrong full-well. He knows he is perpetrating evil even as he does so.

Since it is anchored in the very nature of man, the Natural Law is the highest law known to man, and is therefore a priori just. More often than not, any vestiges of natural law still present in the positive law have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

So, while it is a rare occasion when natural-rights libertarians defer to the positive law in a positive way; it can and does happen that this or the other state law is inoffensive in that it does nothing to undermine the natural rights of man—those to his life, his liberty and his property.

To the extent that the positive law comports with the natural law—to that extent it is inoffensive. Such is the case of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which articulates, mostly, a set of negative rights, whose enforcement imposes no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

To Israel’s beefy genocide rap sheet one can now add another qualification: The Article II injunction that enjoins against the imposition of “measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

There are no maternal facilities left in Gaza.

It’s now well-nigh impossible to give birth safely in Gaza—unless genocide adjudicator Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, thinks that, under her own power, a woman and her newborn can survive squatting within a spitting distance from a sewage ditch to expel that baby. Or, having her abdomen opened without anesthesia to extricate the neonate. Or trusting her preemie’s life to the oxygen “supplied” by Israel and staving off post-operative septicemia, also under her own power. Sullivan was the US point person who unveiled a dodgy dossier that commanded fusspots to quit the fuss and feathers over Israeli genocide. There is none.

Standing in for a complicit America, the dissembling Sullivan has denied that anything our Israeli “friends” have done or are doing is perpetrated “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

You be the judge, dear reader. These are the four genocidal actions that preceded Israel’s last:

* “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
* Killing members of the group.
* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
* Direct and public incitement to commit genocide. (https://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/ij/ictr/3.htm#_Toc62641378)

On top of this, holocaust denial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has, too, devolved into a grotesque burlesque. In its May 24 order to Israel to “immediately halt military operations in the governorate of Rafah”; the ICJ appeared to bolster the bogus demarcation between carpet-bombing Rafah and carpet-bombing the Greater Gaza.

With particular relish, Israel has continued carpet-bombing both Rafah and the Greater Gaza. Why, then, did the ICJ’s order single out the attack on Rafah alone, as “an underlying act of genocide”? Hasn’t Israel’s ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip in its entirety “pos[ed] … irreparable risk to the rights of the Palestinian people to be protected under the Genocide Convention and further threaten[ed] their physical destruction in whole or in part”?

There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after. The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, exists on one craven continuum of crime against humanity.

What, then, was the thinking behind Rafah-as-a-red-line? The ICJ’s attempt to manufacture an imaginary line between mass murder in Rafah and genocide in the Greater Gaza is perplexing.

Reading between the lines of Washington’s pretense is hard, but I suspect the reflexive impulse in Washington was to separate genocide before Rafah from genocide after the invasion of Rafah with the aim of counting the 113,918 Palestinians murdered and maimed before Rafah as somehow “lawful,” legitimate casualties of a just war.

Washington’s attempted connivance was not reciprocated by its clients, the ingrate Israelis. The line the assassin’s sponsors had attempted to draw between murder before Rafah and murder after its invasion, soon vanished in the blood-soaked sand of the Strip’s southernmost tip. That line itself was blurred… by blood shed by Israel.

CHRONICLING A DAY IN THE LIFE …

We owe it to the holocaust survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists.

Without let, then, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) continues to martyr, maim and displace Palestinians up and down and across the Via Dolorosa that is the Gaza Strip.

However insurmountable, and to bear witness to genocide, as we must—Gaza’s dead must be counted, recited and commemorated. We owe it to the survivors and their families, and to the historical record, which is vulnerable to the revisionism of Zionists.

Selfless angel that she is, Nurse Johnston had flown to Gaza on a medical mission of mercy organized by the Palestinian American Medical Association. Back at home, in northeast Portland, after three weeks in Rafah, she wept for Gaza:

People have explosive injuries, and we are giving them Tylenol, we’re giving them Ibuprofen for an arm that’s been blown off or burns on 30 percent of their body. We went to find there was no soap, no hand sanitizer, no linens to put your patients on. So, we would come into the ICU and find patients on these plastic sheets that are degrading, lying in a pool of blood and fluids and nothing to change them on. …We can see off to our left side a puff of smoke. We can hear all the rounds of artillery and knowing we had to drive parallel to that. …Will I make it the rest of the way?

Still in Gaza, Dr. Dorotea Gucciardo of Glia had reported three weeks back that healthcare workers are now prohibited from running to the rescue without a … permit. Healers are not only being targeted, in what remains of Gaza’s systematically sundered hospitals—but they are being hampered by bureaucracy, by the Arendtian “banality of evil.”

They wait on the signature of an Eichmann.

By the time you read this—and as I write—the already underestimated number of Palestinians murdered (37,084+), maimed (84,494) and displaced (1.7 million) by The Devil’s agents will be, and is as I write, out of date. The previous sentence is already obsolete: Please substitute these updated figures of upwards of 37,396 murdered, 85,523 maimed.

Beneath Gaza’s surface lie many thousands more, buried under over 37 million tons of debris. Scrap that. Since the above sentence was penned; the figure has been updated. As of June 18, an “initial assessment” is that, “After eight months … Gaza is littered with more than 39 million tons of debris.” The debris is replete with 800,000 tons of asbestos and assorted contaminants, including 7,500 tons of unexploded ordnance (Wikipedia). It could take 14 years to clear rubble generated by the equivalent of more than three Hiroshima-strength bombs, dropped on a strip of land 25 miles long, and 3.7 to 7.5 miles wide. The time-table estimate was made in the “distant” past, January of 2024.

Notwithstanding the Israeli army’s declared “tactical pause,” the IDF wiped out 17 people on June 18. By the end of the first week of June, approximately 800 Palestinians lay dead and over 2,400 had been afflicted with life-altering injuries.

According to reports by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), those admitted to the MSF-supported Nasser and Al-Aqsa Hospitals “bore the hallmarks of intense strikes: dismemberment, severe trauma, burns, and open fractures.”

‘These attacks are the latest in a broad litany of atrocities and illustrate the type of war that Israel is fighting. Israel and its allies have repeatedly shown that there is no watershed moment or red line in this violence. The attacks now known as the flour massacre and the tent massacre—as well as the killing of aid workers and their families and the annihilation of hospitals and the health system more generally—have led to no more than weak diplomatic posturing, empty words, and staggering inaction.’

Before that, on Thursday, May 23, the Al-Aqsa Hospital treated dozens of Palestinians injured in an Israeli shelling on a welfare ministry site. Twelve people were killed in that attack. According to Dr. Khalil al-Degran, “Most of the bodies [recovered] were burnt.”

After that, between the afternoons of May 25 and May 26, more than 80 Palestinians were murdered in the span of 24 hours. Make that 81, says an updated dispatch. As I said, no sooner does one frantically jot down the numbers, than these figures become obsolete, only ever accreting.

Also on May 26, 30 people were butchered in a tent city, designated a “safe zone,” West of Rafah, close to the UNWRA headquarters. So reported the Middle East Eye.

The following day came the Rafah camp massacre. By the 27th, the butcher’s bill had soared some more: Forty five human beings were executed by the Israelis. Among their human remains were a “headless child and charred bodies.”

Two minutes and 55 seconds into a May 9 report curtesy of “Democracy Now,” a small Ghazzawi child cries: “We were baking bread… My friend died. They picked him up in pieces. Everything is in pieces.” (“Aid Worker in Gaza: ‘To Say There’s Not an Incursion in Rafah Right Now Is Patently False.”)

Behind the swirl of statistics are human beings, whose lives are grieved and whose untrammeled resilience is celebrated not by the loutish Jake Tapper or Erin Burnett or Dana Bash or Wolf Blitzer of CNN; not by BBC News, nor Sky, or MSNBC, or foofy French TV, or Fox News, or Newsmax bobbleheads. For these louts, the value of Palestinian life just doesn’t rate a mention compared to Jewish life.

On June 8, Israel, aided by the media mafia across the Global North, confirmed that over seventy Palestinians were murdered for every one of the four Israeli hostages retrieved in an American-supported raid on the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.

During that massacre, described by the same media as a rescue, Israeli commando perfidiously, and thus illegally, used humanitarian relief vehicles as cover. This too is in character: Earlier in their genocide program, Israeli coward commando had committed a massacre in the Ibn Sina hospital in Jenin, dressed in scrubs.

Among the 274 displaced people robbed of their lives at Nuseirat were “at least 64 children.” Upwards of 700 people were wounded. “Children were shot dead. Elderly people were shot dead. Women were shot dead,” reported Gaza-based journalist Akram al-Satarri, who was at the Nuseirat refugee camp that Saturday.

Two days prior, on June 6th, the IDF had warmed up with slaughter at a United Nations-linked school, also in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 40 displaced Palestinians, among whom were 14 children, and injuring dozens more, according to officials and local media” (Al Jazeera & EI). On June 16, 41 Palestinians were killed in assorted IDF attacks.

Everything I just told you is old news. On June 23, Israeli forces hit yet another UNRWA center serving Palestinian refugees. They killed at least eight people. This murder of people queuing for food coupons followed a previous tent-city terrorist attack by Israel in Mawasi, on June 21, where 25 displaced Palestinians were killed and 50 wounded.

A new news crawl alerts me to an updated butcher’s bill: 37,598 souls have been slain since October 7; 86,032 maimed.

Scrap the above. For the fourth time within the temporal confines of this essay, I update the number of Palestinians murdered (37,626) and maimed (86,098).

One of Israel’s latest victims is Hani al-Jafarawi, a healer, the director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza. On June 24, Israel murdered him. Rage from the heavens, Hani.

IDF war criminals appear to be programed much like their companion, Artificial Intelligence, auto-kill computer systems. Known as “Lavender,” the killer code has been applied to Gaza at large. “Lavender” is the brainchild of Israel’s notorious Unit 8200, which is comprised of a select group of mama’s boys (and a few girls), groomed to snoop, hack, and assassin in code. (Regularly recruited to Silicon Valley, to Boston’s high-tech corridor, and, presumably, to Washington State’s techno-town; these characters could be coming to a community near you, near me.)

“… I know the blasphemy of those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan,” said Jesus to John in his vision at the beginning of the Book of Revelation (2:9). This “Synagogue of Satan” (Jesus’ phrase, not mine) makes up its own law of war. So long as the IDF can claim they are targeting a “Hamas fighter,” all the more so a senior Hamas resistance fighter—they, with the imprimatur of their “judiciary,” allow themselves to murder up to 100 Palestinian civilians.

As astounding and courageous as the efforts of volunteers like Nurse Johnston, her Palestinian and American team members, and UN workers have been; they pale in comparison to what Gaza’s own healthcare worker do and endure daily.

Gaza’s doctors and nurses are no longer being paid. Most are homeless, hungry and dehydrated. Many walk miles a day to tend to their patients in what remains of the teaching hospitals in which they once proudly practiced first-world medicine.

Hors de combat? Not on your life. Gaza’s healers should be out of action. They are not. On these remarkable people soldier. Salute their fallen, salute their spirit.

CO-OPTING HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW

Eviction notices floating down on Gaza are framed as merciful Evacuation notices, the obligation of ‘a moral military’ discharged.

With increasing regularity, the “use of air power” has been extended to the West Bank, “regardless of the collateral damage to children and other civilians caught in the blasts,” reports the Intercept.

Under all sorts of diabolical legal lies and loopholes—such as  that the West Bank is, too, a theater of war and that Israel is true to the international laws of war—Israel’s legal institutions, its Supreme Court included, are inclined, invariably, to exonerate the Israeli occupation forces of their crimes.

For instance, in 2006, and after making all the appropriate noises about Israel’s legal obligation to protect civilians under customary international law, the highest court concluded that it would not outlaw “targeted executions,” as the petitioning party requested, because international law was too murky about the concept and the practice.

Israel’s Supreme Court of the Non Sequitur ruled that the “lawfulness of such killings, according to the court, was to be determined according to the particular circumstances of each case.” (“The Public Committee against Torture in Israel et al. v. The Government of Israel et al., Supreme Court of Israel, 14 December 2006.”)

Israel’s systemically slippery approach to Customary International Humanitarian Law is illustrated in the “Anatomy of a Genocide” by Francesca Albanese. This UN special rapporteur on the human-rights dispensation in the West Bank and Gaza had analytically and quite brilliantly illustrated how the Israelis cloak their murderous rampages on civilians in the raiment of human-rights nomenclature.

Essentially, whoever gets hit in Gaza is forfeit by default. After all, has not the IDF, “the most moral military force in the world,” showered Gaza with Kafkaesque leaflets, sending Gazans scampering hither and yon? Has not this force for evil droned and drowned Gazans with information on how to save their sorry selves? Of course it has! Ergo, if Gazans die by US-supplied high-payload munitions; it’s on them.

Cunning without courage: This is how knaves, for the Israelis I’ve observed so far are shifty, not clever, co-opt human-rights law language to execute innocent human beings.

Or evict them. Think about it: Eviction notices floating down on Gaza are framed as merciful evacuation notices, the obligation of “a moral military” discharged.

Nonsense on stilts.

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.

As to the mercy of eviction-cum-evacuation à la Israel: Gazans, one million of them, as detailed already, had been shooed from Raffah, up to Al-Mawasi, and other barren coastal stretches, rendered barren because of prior IDF blitzkriegs. There, these Palestinians many times displaced were supposed to “safely” await the next phase of Israel’s holocaustal war and twisted psychological warfare against them. A merciful evacuation, promised the sadists. “By the book,” The Torturers told the tortured.

I’m sad but not surprised to report that Al-Mawasi, “designated a humanitarian safe zone, was bombed on May the 28th. Twenty-one displaced people were murdered in their tents; “64 people were injured, including 10” with life-altering injuries.

ISRAEL’S LAW OF RULE IN THE WEST BANK

Strictly sectarian, the sensibility instantiated in Israeli law is this: ‘If a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.’

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.

By their lonesome, the soldier-supported West Bank settlers have murdered ten Palestinians in the territory in this time. No arrests are made. Israeli “lawlessness has become the law” in the West Bank, concedes the New York Times (NYT).

The NYT has facilitated Israel’s October 7 hoaxes of mass, systemic rape, butchered bellies and beheaded babies—“atrocity propaganda” originally debunked by the Gray Zone, the Electronic Intifada and zei_squirrel, then seconded, belatedly, by the Times of London. A small concession though it was; the NYT has seen fit to excoriate the settlers, dubbing them “The Unpunished.”

The Washington Post has also deigned to document the “Israeli settler rampage” against Palestinians whose “homes are burned and animals killed” across the West Bank. (April 16, 2024.) “[I]t is in the West Bank [that] the corrosive long-term effects of the occupation on Israeli law … are most apparent,” write New York Times magazine correspondents Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti. “The long arc of harassment, assault and murder of Palestinians by Jewish settlers is twinned with a shadow history, one of silence, avoidance and abetment by Israeli officials.” (“The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” May 16, 2024.)

In all the West Bank cases examined by the Times’ authors, “involving [settler] misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo.” (Ibid)

Strictly sectarian, the sensibility instantiated in Israeli law is this: “If a Jew is killed, that’s terrible. If an Arab is killed, that’s not good, but it’s not the end of the world.”

Adjacent, in the Negev, Bedouin homes are demolished, too, and hundreds evicted, their land grabbed. Eviction or demolition: Fear of the same is part of Palestinian life in the West Bank and beyond.

Palestinian farmers and the sheepherders of the South Hebron Hills live in daily fear for their lives and the lives of families and livestock. Spite and sadism drive settlers to slaughter these helpless creatures with biblical cruelty. (Proud members and donors would like to hear PETA say/do something about saving animals dying alongside their owners in Gaza and the West Bank.)

It is said that serial killers start with animals. Animals and children: For Israeli soldiers and settlers, assaults on the most vulnerable of living beings is all in a day’s work.

PALESTINIANS VALIDATED VIA ARGUMENTATION

The Hoppean principle applied in this essay’s opening catches Israel in the act of denying genocide while committing genocide. The same argumentation serves, in our coda, 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.

Palestinians have told us they’re being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their reality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7.

Gaza is a desert of the dead and the dying. It has been rendered thus by Israel’s unrelenting, methodical extermination operations carried out against the people of Gaza, against the infrastructure and against the verdant land that had supported the Strip’s people.

Differently put: 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.

Over nine months, in real time, Gazans have been worn to a shadow before our eyes. We thus know the ontological truth about Palestinian plight under Israeli occupation. It is as they have been telling it.

QED. Points proven.

***

READ: “Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism”

*Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. Her new book is “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024). Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish and grew up in Israel.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
Unz Review, June 28
The New American, June 28
LewRockwell.com: “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation,” June 29
Mises Institute’s, Power & Market: “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Indicted, Palestinians Validated In Fact, Law & Hoppean Argumentation,” July 4

The post Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus ~ilana

 Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality—the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes ~ilana

 

When Americans reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they habitually extol the virtue of Pax Americana, but never the horrors of it. Having shaped the annals of the past, regime historians, naturally, speak a great deal about Hitler, but hardly at all about Hiroshima.

With regard to the historic retrospective on the American-enabled genocide in Gaza—you know, when the agile liars who monopolize the discourse plead their case—the Electronic Intifada’s director, Ali Abunimah, renders his verdict on humanity’s inaction in response to Israel’s barbarity.

Mr. Abunimah gets to the quick of the human experience, and I paraphrase:

If you did nothing and said nothing during the genocide of the Gazans, we know exactly what you would have done during the genocide of the Jews.

Nothing.

With the exception of countless, selfless healers and humanitarians, heroes all, humanity has, by and large, abandoned the Palestinians of Gaza. This collective silence must not be forgiven nor forgotten, seconds Dr. Tarek Loubani, a physician, and the medical director of the Glia project, currently operating with great difficulty in Gaza.

“When I was in Ukraine,” attested Dr. Loubani, who had brought his medical team to that battle theater, too, “I never worried that the Russians would bomb me.” The Russians absolutely obey the imperative to protect and respect medical teams. In Gaza, all medical teams are forfeit, fair targets for extermination by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

On that grim score, “More than 685 health workers have been killed and 900 wounded during attacks on medical facilities and medical transport” in the course of Israel’s onslaught. This last Wikipedia account is likely, you guessed it, already outdated. How many more of Gaza’s healers have disappeared into the maw of the Israeli Security State? Many hundreds, reports The Intercept, an influential American news site.

Speaking to the Electronic Intifada, which is described as “Palestine’s weapon of mass instruction,” Dr. Loubani gave one of the most lucid renderings of the unremitting acts of a “genocidal, maniacal army in Gaza,” operating unhindered. Like Mr. Abunimah, he spoke emphatically to the imperative not to forgive those who’ve done nothing and said nothing, conveniently, until now.

If you have been silent so far—or, enveloped by the warm smell of a growing herd are conveniently piping up eight months into the sacking of Gaza—you must not be forgiven.

Historically, Mr. Abunimah’s aphorism tracks with the manner in which most of conservatism’s celebrity pundits had comported themselves during the ramp-up to the war on Iraq, for that war’s duration, and with how most have been conducting themselves in the course of Israel’s unimpeded genocide against Gazans (the Ghazzawi?).

Kelly Conservatives (Bonus Material & Background)

I am not here speaking of unserious conservatives, like podcaster Megyn Kelly, for example, who deserves mention if only because, dear reader, you deserve some levity and laughter occasionally.

If nothing else, it is amusing to hear the Kelly vanity production call out America’s campus kids, selfless souls protesting a holocaust, for being unattractive, ugly. To an empty vessel, there is nothing worse than forgetting your facial fillers and falsies.

Myself, I think that Mohammad Khatami, a software engineer arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York, is beatifically beautiful. Techie Ray Westrick, arrested in California, also in protest of Project Nimbus—some kind of killer-Cloud-AI collaboration with IsraHell—is supermodel lovely. (Roll the tape or scroll down this text to look.)

Still on the topic of the Kelly conservatives who missionize for mass-murder: I have to wonder who’s truly ugly deep down, Megyn?

How about the pampered LA Zionist thugs who took metal rods to the sculls of peaceful encampment protesters? How about those doing their evil utmost to logistically hamper “humanitarian aid deliveries at scale” to Gaza? How about the sated Jewish settlers and their doughy offspring, fat families, instructing their larded young on how to help starve other human beings? How about the observant IDF soldier, tooting, during a telephone interview, his religious platoon’s acts of murder and torture in Gaza, all in fluid, contempt-dripping, American-accented English?

Bombastic without and barren within: The IDF collective might wear fatigues, but it does nothing to camouflage its libertine, licentious, sexually depraved, pornographic culture.

The culture comes from the top:

His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that “as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .” News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.

Similarly, before it discovered that the “Goyim” were repulsed—the “Most Moral Army in the World” had been operating an “exclusive-content” “channel to share the gruesome killing of Palestinians.” This IDF-run public war-porn channel, out of Israel, served up content in which murder was sauced-up or overlaid by sex talk.

Such patterns of arousal—the commingling of serial killing and sex—are associated with psychopathy. The psychopathic fusion of lust and murder appears endemic among IDF soldiers. The channel, which catered to Israeli audiences, was called “72 Virgins – Uncensored.” How cruel. The revelation comes via Ha’aretz, an august Israeli news source.

National-Interest Pragmatism

Back to the point: To the extent they oppose the genocide in Gaza; conservatives, some with enormous populist and political sway, have confined themselves to disinterested mumblings about the national interest: Gaza is of no national interest to the United States of America. Bye-bye. Off to distract the masses with prattle about the wokerati.

This is how podcaster Matt Walsh obtained absolution from Pope Ben Shapiro, who declared Walsh kosher to continue “creating” content on Shapiro’s Israel First, talentless platform. Walsh is purported to have told Grand Inquisitor Shapiro that supporting a war on Gazans isn’t in the US’s interest. Since he did not say that Total War on Palestinian civilians is wicked and wrong; Walsh was good to go.

The only inquiry this national-interest pragmatism permits is a cost-benefit calculus: Will this or the other assassination or military maneuver pay strategic dividends for America or Israel in the long run—although even then, the benefits of so-called national-interest military interventions redound to special interests, not to constituents.

For many reasons, such stark, statist utilitarianism is “the lazy man’s dodge” (to use a phrase by Jeffrey Sach, a prince among intellectual and moral scullions). I need not remind media conservatives that the US is already an interventionist hegemon, and is now aiding and abetting a war of extermination in Gaza.

The premise of pure, national-interest political pragmatism, moreover, leads to the following, perverse conclusions:

If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and the murder and displacement of Iraqis happened to be in the American national interest; then those “endeavors” would have been—are—justified, in accordance with national-interest standards. What a way to let the regime wriggle out of responsibility for wanton killing and perpetrate more: “It was good for the country. USA. USA.”

I’m well-aware that the killer conclusion does indeed follow logically from the national-interest premise. Behold Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where mass murder was calculated by American leaders to be in the “national interest,” and was, consequently, deemed legitimate. Their logical consistency aside, both premise and conclusion are, nevertheless, perverse in the extreme.

National-interest utilitarianism is thus not wrong in logic, but it is often wrong in ethics.

Natural-Law Principles

Whereas the paleolibertarian’s fidelity is to natural-law principles anchored in thinking as ancient and as true as Cicero’s; the foreign policy of the conservative hard right is largely a reductive, national-interest-focused statism.

By virtue of its crass pragmatism, the national-interest camp only ever debates whether the U.S. government or Israel should or shouldn’t act on their divine rights as judge, jury and executioner. It is never over what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s plain wicked.

To be fair, many good, conservative-minded individuals abhor Israel’s deeds, but have an issue with restraining the mass-murdering Jewish Taliban through United Nations mechanisms such as the Security Council, the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They are opposed to U.S. membership in the UN on sovereignty grounds and do not recognize or support UN Security Council actions or those of the ICC/ICJ.

Let me try and help dispel this mindset with an example.

A Palestinian woman is being raped by IDF in the Occupied Territories, where the rabbinical injunction on rape, handed down by Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, aforementioned, obtains. (The evidence for sexual violence in Gaza is credible, says the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls.)

A United Nations trooper passes by on patrol. What shall he do? He calls his paymaster, an American conservative, a strict ideologue who opposes the UN and thinks Israel hung the moon. This conservative confuses levels of abstraction—reality vs. ideology. Since our conservative lives in the arid arena of pure thought—he tells the soldier, “Oh no. You work for an organization my group hates. We refuse to deploy a UN soldier to rescue the woman. Walk away.”

Those of us who live in the here-and-now, and refuse to levitate between “what is” and “what ought-to-be,” say the following:

“Never mind who you work for, sir. Quit dawdling. Rescue the woman. Apprehend the rapist.” The means of administering a modicum of justice here are immaterial. You take what you’ve got. Better that the UN soldier does something, than not one person does a thing.

The Sin Of Abstraction

In other words, the opposition among the national-interest camp to the only flaccid response mounted against Satan-on-earth rests on theoretical abstractions.

The confused camp commits the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and, in so doing, avoiding reality, the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.

The idea, moreover, that upholding the negative rights of a butchered, stateless people is tantamount to calling for foreign intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state, Israel, is, if not problematic, certainly open to debate.

Is not the concept of national sovereignty bounded by the idea of The State? Is the paleolibertarian a fan of the State? No, he isn’t.

Theoretically, at least, many libertarians do not recognize The State. Certainly most libertarians would concede that The State now acts extra-judicially, and that any vestiges of the natural law once embedded in the US Constitution have long-since been buried beneath the rubble of legislation and statute.

Why, then, would libertarians lay off a State, Israel, that uses its military might to pulverize population centers and has systematized the mass murder of innocent Palestinian civilians as targets for Total War?

One can say, then, that to the extent the law, most law—local or international or tribal—upholds no more than natural rights, the law is good. To the extent it violates the right to life, liberty, and property—the law is bad. In the matter of Israel’s genocidal program against the Palestinians of Gaza; it is my position that, it matters not who upholds Gazans’ inalienable right to life, liberty and property, just so long as someone does.

For no one has the right to kill an innocent human being, let alone tens of thousands of them, without let. (June 8: 210 Palestinians have been murdered and more than 400 wounded in Israel’s latest massacre, this time at the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.)

By logical extension, it matters not who saves innocent human beings—which state, which federal official or international organization, or which quixotic private platoon—just so long as someone does.

In America, federalism means “divided sovereignty,” which, if we are to take James Madison seriously, ought to make it difficult for states to begin executing their citizens. Why would it be a matter of respect for a country’s “sovereignty” to allow Israel to systematically execute its subjugated populations?

***

*Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece  since 1999. Her new book is The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy (February 2024). Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish and grew up in Israel.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
Unz Review, June 9
The New American, June 9
LewRockwell.com, June 9
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, June 12

Contra Kelly, behold beautiful protesters:

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Truth to tell, the Titan resembled nothing so much as a ‘Hold My Beer’ contraption, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot …

…a carbon fiber cylindrical hull, topped and tailed with Titanium hemispheres. Titanium glued to carbon fiber with an epoxy-type resin and fastened with bolts: Just image the iffy quality of joiners that meld dissimilar materials under the pressure of 376 atmospheres! ~ilana

The Titan’s submersible’s CEO, Stockton Rush, RIP, once declared that he didn’t “hire ‘50-year-old white guys’ with military experience to captain his vessels because they weren’t ‘inspirational.’ Mr. Rush, 61, added that … ‘anybody can drive the sub’ with a $30 video game controller.”

“Speaking to CBS News in November,” RT reported, “Rush explained that the vessel was entirely controlled with a generic Bluetooth video game controller, which online sleuths discovered had a dismal reputation for reliability.” To which the rest of us might as well add: So much for the need to build redundancy into such a system.

The vessel reached its destination… in bits, having imploded on June 18: “Wreckage of the Titan submersible was located on the ocean floor approximately 500 meters off the bow of the Titanic,” said the Coast Guard, which has “convened a Marine Board of Investigation (MBI) into the loss of the Titan submersible and the five people on board.”

In his philosophy of whom to hire, Mr. Rush clearly prized the cool quotient over cool-headed competency. The result for him and his passengers was an exceedingly expensive mistake.

OceanGate—which “sounds like a scam waiting to happen,” quipped engineer podcaster “Two Bit da Vinci”—was an outfit out of Everett, Washington. It had been aggressively marketing the Titan as a vessel fit for deep-sea exploration. Yet, rather than use a metal that withstands compression, in order to equip the main composite of their subpar submersible, the anti-white ageist brainiacs of OceanGate chose carbon fiber.

Some reports contend that “NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama helped build the lost Titanic submersible.” Charitably put, it is unclear how involved NASA engineers and the Washington State academic dumbassery were with Titan’s cool kids. Disavowals from NASA, Boeing and the University of Washington notwithstanding; on this count, I intuitively believe Titan CEO Rush. Daily Mail alleges that Rush “had hired interns from Washington State University who … boast[ed that] … a PlayStation remote was used to run the Titan.”

Well might we stare, and stare again, at that last Daily Mail passage. Rush chose to use consumer electronics for a high-reliability application! In all likelihood, however, the Sony PlayStation controller would have been the more reliable node in the Titan’s intern-devised electrical network.

For it is quite clear that systemic, institutional rot now defines American institutions, commercial, civic and state. My 2011 book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, warned, by way of an example, that ridding Eskom, a South African electricity public utility that once helped power the continent, of its best engineers—experienced white men—would in the most literal sense plunge South Africa into darkness. So it has.

What is also clear is that the mission of the white-hating Deep-Sea techies of the Titan is shared by Deep Tech (aka Big Tech) in general: marginalize whites and the attendant issue of competency.

The Coast Guard and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates civil transportation accidents) are the only two offshoots of the United States federal government your columnist finds inspiring. To distinguish from the federal government; the Coast Guard’s beneficent motto is not “open borders and open-ended regime change, if we don’t like you,” but, “That others may live.”

The beauty of the depiction of that mission in “The Guardian,” a 2006 movie, is that you cannot exaggerate the mettle of a man, a Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer, who “leaps from a helicopter to swim after unlucky souls who have been swept into the cold, churning waters of the Bering Sea.”

Certainly many of the men who rushed to the Titan’s rescue—who’d already mapped the scene and collected the evidence, and who’ll do the forensics on this “crude submersible”—seemed altruistic. They also appeared white and seasoned. These cool heads have deployed phrases such as “misconduct, incompetence, negligence, unskillfulness, or willful violation of law” to describe the impetus of their sweeping  inquiry, to encompass other, international maritime authorities and partners.

‘HOLD MY BEER’ CONTRAPTION

Contra Stockton Rush, when engineers in-the-know speak of the Titan; they refer to a whole list of problems. They cite a lack of mechanical tests, an absence of a locator beacon; an indifference to the operational lifetime—namely cumulative, structural fatigue—of such an inherently rickety tube. And as if all of that were not regrettable enough, those problems were compounded by the submersible’s primary composite: carbon fiber. “Exotic in the world of materials,” carbon fiber is unsuited to the task of withstanding immense pressure.

Titan was, essentially, a carbon fiber cylindrical hull, topped and tailed with Titanium hemispheres. Titanium glued to carbon fiber with an epoxy-type resin and fastened with bolts: Just imagine the iffy quality of joiners that meld dissimilar materials under the pressure of 376 atmospheres!

Truth to tell, the Titan resembled nothing so much as a “Hold My Beer” contraption, assembled with parts as good as you get from Home Depot—a “homebuilder” in a basement. Meant to exude coolness, presumably, OceanGate workshop images depict steps descending into what looks like the close confines of your garage.

My source had consulted the best structural engineers he knows. Sources courtesy of Bill Scott, an award-winning journalist and a former flight test engineer, were laconic. Loquacity is the purview of the lippy salesman, not the authentic engineer, whose fidelity is, first, to the immutable laws of physics:

“Carbon fiber works excellently for pressure vessels (airplanes), but does not work for compression vessels (submarines). In the 1990s, I designed a tiny, one-place deep submersible. My hope was that one of my ‘homebuilders’ would find Atlantis. I did not use carbon fiber.” And there is more of the same: “The compression vessels would be built and tested in a factory; the ‘homebuilder’ would do his own equipping and sea excursions.”

Let’s go!

Who would have thought it? Breaking free of gravity is a far lesser challenge than withstanding the pressure of water at such depths. Yet the Titan was touted “as built for Titanic depths: 2.4 miles down, where the water pressure is 6,000 pounds per square inch.” That level of pressure, as illustrated by the engineer-podcaster aforementioned, is like having a 797,000-pound footboard on your chest.

THE CONSERVATIVE DISCONNECT

In a burst of Randian emotionalism, Matt Walsh, a conservative and an unsupple mind, rushed to praise adventure tourism in general, and the OceanGate submersible’s Titanic-bound endeavor, in particular. From Walsh came turgid psychoanalysis, empty adulation in the service of mindless market worship.

Walsh scolded any who dared to be cynical of adventure tourism—as I am of the masses who flock to, say, Mount Everest, turning Base Camp into a vast latrine, and making the removal of human waste a major source of employment for local Nepalese and neighboring Chinese. Yes, how ennobling an industry is that for The Other.

Noble spirit? “Bold and daring” on the Everest? No. Crass, termite-dense, despoiling tourism is what we are talking about with Everest nowadays.

Back in 1953, the first people to reach Everest’s summit were a white guy (not yet 50) named Edmund Hillary and his sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. They indubitably embodied “different, bold, and daring.”

Nevertheless, rather than admit the difference between Hillary and Tenzing, on the one hand, and subpar submersibles on the other hand, the champion scold Matt Walsh puled on tediously about the Titan’s critics:

“These are people whose envy and dissatisfaction with their own mediocre, unimpressive lives have driven them to despise anyone who does anything different, bold, or daring. They take pleasure in failure because they will never have any successes of their own to celebrate.”

The lives of Lilliputians like you and me dwarf compared to the grand life of CEO and Titan captain Stockton Rush, Walsh implied.

Larger than life, Stockton Rush certainly embodied the Woke Persona’s me-me megalomaniacal hubris: He believed he could bend the laws of nature—physics, economics, etc.—to his whimsy.

I’ll say this much: Without those musty, old, white, cool-head engineers, the atmosphere—corporate culture, they call it—at OceanGate would have been of giddy exuberance. So, there’s that.

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, July 6
Unz Review, July 6
The New American, July 7

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Based on observing The Empire’s workings over decades, I’d hazard that President Volodymyr Zelensky is probably being fiercely guarded by Americans, possibly by a private, paramilitary security company. Something like Sean McFate’s DynCorp outfit, or Russia’s Wagner Group. Or even perhaps Ukraine’s own Einsatzgruppen, the Azov regiment.

MORE in support of my assumption, for that is all it is, is a revelation of some of the plans his American puppet-masters’ have for Zelensky. Via NBC:

Biden administration officials have discussed plans with the Ukrainian government for President Volodymyr Zelensky to leave Kyiv in the event of a Russian invasion, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Under a plan that’s been discussed, Zelenskyy would relocate to Lviv in western Ukraine, about 50 miles from the Polish border, the people familiar with the discussions said.

My opinion—probably a solid guess—is bolstered by Zelensky’s relaxed, cocky showman’s demeanor, inflamed as it is by wildly enthusiastic Western reinforcement of the Ukrainian leader’s bloody bravado.

I say “bloody” because of the inverted values with which the Empire and its handmaidens in the West have blanketed the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

To normies, a leader who doesn’t plead for the lives of his people is a failed leader. Diplomacy, negotiations, a cease fire: that’s the nomenclature clear-thinking people ought to wish instinctively to hear when they see the immiseration of Ukrainians and their cities. To my knowledge, not before the war and not now has Zelensky initiated, or partaken in, or been urged to pursue serious, high-level talks with Putin.

And while there is some indication that Zelensky might be inching closer to acceding  “neutrality for Kyiv and security guarantees for Moscow,” publicly, Zelensky has done nothing but snarl his contempt for Russia, roaring at the Kremlin to “hold peace talks now or suffer for generations.” This is not diplomacy, but yet more political posturing and provocation. (But then Zelensky, an actor, could be prepping to appear before the central, universal seat of asininity: Hollywood’s Oscars.)

The Hebrew Testament (though “Old,” it’s never out-of-date) is bedecked with examples of leaders pleading, even bargaining, for the lives of the Stiff-Necked People. Abraham haggled ingeniously with The Almighty over Sodom and Gomorrah. Queen Esther petitioned mighty King Xerxes (Ahasuerus) on behalf of the Persian Jews, and Moses did the same for his enslaved people before Pharaoh. Another Hebrew has written that “he who saves you from war is better than he who sends you to war.” That’s what real leadership is about—uphold and fight for the people’s natural right to live peacefully.

By these reasonable and rational criteria, Zelensky and Biden are failed leaders for doing nothing but bait and goad the Russian Bear.

Make no mistake, if the American people (an inchoate meaningless phrase I countenance here for the sake of argument) were invaded as has Ukraine—American leaders would hold court from their safe rooms and underground luxury bunkers and give cheery addresses (in syntax as fractured and similarly studded with non sequiturs), while the bombs fell on We The People.

Churchillian they’d rate themselves.

To the American Jacobins and their Ukrainian Zelenskyite puppets, talking ‘our values‘ is all it takes to make a good leader. Talk the neocon talk.

That Zelensky did in his cameo appearance before the US Congress, where the man deftly drew on all the cliches of American life in the shallow end, banalities now made global:

Volodymyr Zelensky droned on about democracy, our values, and MLK (Martin Luther King), offering his incoherent, bizarre twist on the “I have a dream” ubiquity:

(In truth, democracy has “made us dumb,” for what menaces mass society is a tyranny of mediocrity. And values “in the classical conservative and libertarian traditions are private things, to be left to civil society—the individual, family and church—to practice and police.”)

Said Z: “I have a dream. I have a need. I need to protect our skies. I need your help, which means the same you feel when you hear the words I have a dream.”

Translated: When Zelensky tells you he needs your help, you should feel the same as when you hear MLK’s “I have a dream.” Or, something.

I have a dream. I have a need, too. Some quid pro quo, perhaps, Mr. Zelensky? In 2011, during the US-facilitated Egyptian Lotus Revolution, I reminded tea partiers, now termed Deplorables, of Alexis de Tocqueville’s admonition in the mid-1800s.

When he wrote that he knew “‘nothing so miserable as a democracy without liberty,’ he spoke for me. I find myself unable to get lathered-up about democracy for others, while I live in the democratic despotism that contemporary America has become. …”

…More often than not, Americans who yearn for the freedoms their forbears bequeathed to them are labeled demented, dangerous and undemocratic. I’ve yet to hear liberty deprived peoples the world over stand-up for the tea-party patriots [now called Deplorables]. When they do — I’ll gladly galvanize on their behalf.

Zelensky is America’s perfect, prototype Jacobin puppet, beloved by both political factions, because he is the creation of the foreign policy of the UniParty.

The Republican faction thereof has reverted to the neoconservative mean.

Republicans are pushing for war and that no-fly zone. They are admonishing Biden for his so-called weakness—for that is how they frame barely avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. The War Street Journal has only rebuke for Biden’s policy of “containment against Russia.” On Fox News, it’s rah-rah for war (i. e., variations on a no-fly zone over Ukraine) all day long. The female journos and “mute-button pundits,” especially, choose to use incendiary phrases, pregnant with provocation, such as “a red line”; “this was a red line for Obama… will Biden consider it a red line?” More recently, Bret Baier and guests on Fox New have been brain-storming about “the level of atrocity” to be tolerated before war can be comfortably commenced. Cavuto floats regime change in Russia as a prerequisite for negotiations.

Never good-faith negotiations.

WATCH THE VIDEO & SUBSCRIBE:

“It’s Biblical, Zelensky: A Leader Who Fails To Negotiate For The Lives Of His People Has Failed”

©2022 ILANA MERCER
WND, March 24
Unz Review, March 24
The New American, March 24

The post It’s Biblical, Zelensky: A Leader Who Fails To Haggle For The Lives Of His People Has Failed appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

It matters not that the few “Republican governors crusading against vaccine mandates are [allegedly] facing significantly lower approval ratings on their handling of the coronavirus pandemic than their counterparts,” as Politico purports. (Don’t believe Politico!)

What matters are governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott, who “flat-out banned vaccine requirements, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, followed up by vowing to sue the Biden administration.”

These two governors are unique in upholding natural, inalienable, individual rights—the right of self-ownership, bodily dominion; the stuff mocked by President Joe Biden, wearing a ghoulish grin.

Biden’s remark came at a recent, highly contrived CNN townhall, during which “moderator Anderson Cooper noted that as many as one in three emergency responders in some major cities are refusing to comply with city vaccine mandates.”

“I’m wondering where you stand on that,” inquired Cooper. “Should police officers, first responders be mandated to get vaccines? And if not, should they be mandated to stay at home, let go?”

“Yes, and yes,” replied the president.

Disinterred for the day, Biden went on to mock the quaint notion of bodily autonomy with a demented quip, “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. I mean, come on, freedom.”

Were our representatives to frame the vexatious question of vaccine mandates in the correct language of natural rights—self-ownership and individual privacy—we’d get the right answers, more likely to be followed by rights-upholding legislation.

But are Republican representatives doing so? Are our representatives who art in D.C. doing anything but wait in Tucker Carlson’s green room?

When it comes to Covid-19, only the following arguments are permissible as an objection to the Covid vaccine mandate. “Exemptions from employer-mandated coronavirus vaccines [are] in [these] three general areas: natural immunity, religious objection, [and] medical objection.”

One hears also a perfectly calm case being made on the Left for outcome-based coercion: rights-violations work well to bring about vaccine-compliance, so let’s violate us some rights.

Dr. Leana Wen’s positions reveal the scandal of coercion:

Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, said she approves of the administration’s push for employer-based mandates because “frankly nothing else was working.”

Nowhere is a rights-based argument being made, or an argument based on the right to question the safety of the vaccine. Nowhere are individual sovereignty and self-ownership mentioned.

Indeed, Republicans prattle about religious exemptions (state granted!) and natural-immunity based exemptions (state granted!)—but they have not the faintest urge to defend the natural, God-given right of self-ownership.

Enough then of the cheering for the ineffectual GOP and its front men and women, who arrive in the Idiocracy’s version of Rome, only to do nothing, decade after decade. Oh, yes, they turn in appearances on TV and before congressional committees; get lucrative book deals, and consolidate political and corporate power for a lifetime.

But as the West careens toward the Covid-centered anthill society, nobody identifies and defends the individual’s dominion over his body and his right to reject the Pharma-State’s Hemlock prescription for that body. As emphasized, Republicans’ case against Covid mandates indirectly capitulates to coercion.

Historically, this has certainly been the case. During an October 19 appearance on the “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” civil-rights attorney Harmeet Dhillon explained the genesis of the current COVID corporate tyranny. Business is allowed to screen out and reject employees based purely and solely on their Covid vaccine status. The GOP (RIP) has, over decades, authored and facilitated laws the outcome of which is the current corporate tyranny. This fact needs the widest publicity possible.

Meantime, we have the ruling class, an example being New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, boasting about having created an additional two classes of people in her diabolical democracy, where might makes right: the unvaccinated underclass (villains all) and the vaccinated upperclass (virtuous).

In similar vein, an Austrian chancellor revealed his plans to place Austria’s unvaccinated under house arrest. Stateside, Noam Chomsky, a progressive “intellectual,” wants to see the unvaccinated underclass reduced by the state to a “Hunger Games” type fight to survive: sequestered, waiting until dark to scrounge for scraps.

Explore these and other Hard Truths with David Vance and ilana mercer:

“Toward The Covid-Centered Anthill Society: Nobody Identifies & Defends The Individual Right Of Self-Ownership”:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 28
Townhall.com, October 28
American Greatness, October 30
Unz Review, October 28
The New American, October 29
CNSNews.com, November 1

The post Self-Ownership And The Right To Reject The Pharma-State’s Hemlock appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

When Uncle Sam threatens some blighted and benighted region of the world—ostensibly on behalf of the American People and for the region’s own good—our representatives call it peace through strength.

It is then that ordinary Americans are encouraged to pipe up in praise of the State’s invariably Orwellian peace-through-strength strategies.

Peace through strength on our front porches, while being menaced by lowbrow looters and assorted louts? For that you can be incarcerated in the land where the criminal roams free.

And when practiced by pale faces, our Second Amendment rights, exercised on the perimeter of our properties, as we stand vigil against the vilest of human beings—that’s tantamount to white supremacy and privilege.

Witness the fate of some courageous home owners (the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Missouri) exercising age-old rights—also American constitutional rights—when they ventured out onto their verandas with firearms, intending to stand their ground and deter mobs from overrunning hearth and home.

Good people standing their ground were libeled and charged as criminals. Since these home owners did nothing illicit in the natural law, state authorities had to cunningly conjure charges against their naturally licit stance of deterrence.

Law-abiding Americans who practiced deterrence, or peace through strength, have all-too-often been prosecuted by a justice system characterized by institutional rot.

The Law of Rule

We live under the law of rule, not the rule of law. And the law of rule favors the criminal class. Be they illegal voters, criminal aliens, or just good old vandals, rapists and murderers—the criminal class is now the armed wing of the Democratic Party.

Duly, the Black Lives Matter and Antifa militia continue to riot in cities across the country. Their “best” work is currently being carried out in the Pacific Northwest, where the degenerate, libertine political climate is seemingly most conducive to legalized crime.

For Americans, reality is refracted through the Fake News cartel and the Deep-Tech manipulated search engine and social media. Try using the search engines to ferret out current news about “riots”—and what these’ll yield is only news about the January 6, storming of the U.S. Capitol building. Not a thing about the Democratic Party’s proxy riots ongoing elsewhere.

Entire city blocks in downtown Seattle and Portland have been commandeered with impunity by these criminals. They face no censure. From licentious city and state leaders, the rioters get not much more than mild rebuke and permissive gestures of good will (although Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, outrageously pepper-sprayed a BLM nasty when his own bodily integrity was threatened).

Riots have been a nightly happening in Oregon for eight straight months, including on the inauguration of Joe Biden, when more than 150 insurrectionists besieged “the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement building in Portland’s south waterfront.”

You know by now that when Black Lives Matter dreck roam the country intimidating, bullying, killing cops and ordinary countrymen, targeting and knocking out whites; defiling and destroying public monuments, sacking state capitols and courthouses; burning and looting the property of their fellow Americans—that this insurrection against MAGA America amounts to no more than an exercise of free speech and “peaceful protest.”

Parallel events have become a feature in the City of Seattle, where the same insurrectionists, who turn on their neighbors, continue to target businesses and courthouses and assault the police. Tacoma has also been engulfed by America-hating Antifa militia, targeting police for daring to protect people and their property.

Ad nauseum have we heard TV’s ugly mugs channel MLK to rationalize and normalize violent insurrection against MAGA America (a term used here to signify decent, non-deviant, likely non-Democratic America).

“A riot is the language of the unheard,” they chanted from their walled-off, rarified zip codes. The “billions being paid out in insurance claims,” they tell us, are mostly for peaceful protests, amounting to mere “isolated instances of property destruction.” Or, so goes the farrago of misinformation spread by the lying, malpracticing media about the terrifying carnage unleashed in hundreds of cities across the U.S.A., courtesy of Black Lives Matter and their Democratic shock troops.

Peace-Through-Strength For The People

During months of mayhem, in 2020, the message to law-abiding Americans, from city, town, county council members and other legislators, Republican and Democrat, came loud and clear: You’re on your own. Neither police nor politicians are coming to protect what’s left of your businesses or your banal, little bourgeoisie life. You’re just not that important. You have no causes, no clout, and, consequently, no constitutional rights.

More often imperiled in law-of-rule America are home and business owners and their valiant protectors. Tired of waiting on a neutered, coopted, infiltrated and compromised police and politicians to come to the rescue, law-abiding taxpayers practiced peace through strength on their properties.
Young Kyle Rittenhouse, for example, came to the rescue in Kenosha. A folk hero was born in September of 2020, and it was not George Floyd. For that, the feds jailed young Kyle.

From Fishtown, Philadelphia, to Snohomish, Washington, as columnist Jack Kerwick has chronicled, civilians resisted the rabble, in stories of organized self-defense that’ll warm the cockles of your heart.

What better way is there to keep the peace than for the righteous to deter the rabble! Meant for “The People,” alas, peace through strength increasingly is the province of the state, and not the sovereign individual.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 28
Townhall.com, January 28
American Greatness, January 31
Unz Review, January 28
Quarterly Review, January 29

The post The Ongoing Insurrection Against MAGA America appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus.

BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses.

Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—often forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.

These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves.

In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State.

Yet, in reply to the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, are purported to have concluded, in error, that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”

Wrong!

Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters.

A certain kind of libertarian, the good kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption.

For the State is an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens. The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without flinching, all the better to fatten its members and, reflexively, to increase their sphere of influence.

Libertarians who live by the axiom of nonaggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, governed as it is by force, to the man who destroys private property, rooted as that institution is in peaceful, just, voluntary transactions.

There, I’ve said it!

It’s no secret that rock-ribbed libertarians—as opposed to the lite, establishment libertarian—view the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed.

If tempted, foolishly, to argue this theoretical point, think only of the meaning of the 2020 election, whereby 81,283,098 million people, or 51.3 percent of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on 74,222,958, or 46.8 percent of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote.

Moreover, and since we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and delimited powers—all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the newly minted state dictate.

No! Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most, and with the backing of oft-brutal police powers.

Which is why, incidentally, Tucker Carlson’s question to a guest on his eponymous Fox News show, the other day, was so misguided.

The young lady’s two small businesses had been bankrupted by her state’s brutal lockdown regimen, which targeted her tiny enterprises, but not the big-box retailers around them. Why was she still paying her taxes, Tucker inquired?

Really?

Taxes are not voluntary. The State is not based on the principle of voluntary association. Tucker ought to try to withhold his taxes. Fail to fork over the shakedown funds extracted by the syndicate that is the State—and you’ll find yourself in a cell.

Incontestably, your money, as a private individual working in the private economy, comes from the avails of your labor and is 100 percent yours in natural law. As such, you should be able to withdraw it from an agency that doesn’t serve you—and even harms you—to give to one that does. But you can’t.

For that peaceful act of financial secession, the State will deprive you of your liberty.

Expose the Welfare-Warfare Surveillance State in all its depredations—and you’ll find yourself entombed forever, like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden (who, at least, lives free in Russia).

“What I saw in the Capitol on January 6,” lamented Never Trumpkin Matt Labash, at the Spectator, “made me physically sick… I couldn’t tell the difference [between the] Red Hats [and Antifa]. They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”

Truth be told, to the non-statist libertarian, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the storming of those citadels of statism we consider overheated.

Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol.

Certainly, sickening is the cowardice of the garrison city-state that is Washington, D.C. In particular, the way the political parasites who comprise it are shielding themselves from us, as they deny us the right to protect private property from them and from their moral emissaries, Black Lives Matter.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND.COM, January 21
Unz Review, January 21
American Greatness, January 24
Quarterly Review, January 24

Short, YouTube version, also on Rumble:

*Image courtesy The Mirror

The post A Hardcore Libertarian Take On The Storming Of The Capitol Building appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

On November 29, 2019, a man now called the London Bridge terrorist slaughtered British student Jack Merritt.

While the cutthroat has been named for a famous London landmark; his victim has been all but forgotten.

The killer’s family was quick to condemn the London Bridge terrorist’s actions.

The family of his victim—not so much.

David Merritt, the late lad’s dad, got busy condemning those who wish to condemn that killer and his ilk to life in a cell.

By December 2, Merritt the elder was already penning op-eds about clemency and leniency for criminals like the man who murdered his son.

Such minute-made forgiveness would have been Jack’s wish, asserted Merritt senior rather presumptuously—for how can the living speak for the dead?

David Merritt, then, proceeded to minimize what was murder with malice aforethought, by dismissing what his son’s killer did as a mere “tragic incident.”

Just how obscene is the progressive mindset can be gleaned from what Mr. Merritt wrote:

If Jack could comment on his death – and the tragic incident on Friday 29 November – he would be livid. We would see him ticking it over in his mind before a word was uttered between us. Jack would understand the political timing with visceral clarity.
He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. … What Jack would want from this is for all of us to walk through the door he has booted down, in his black Doc Martens.
That door opens up a world where we do not lock up and throw away the key. Where we do not give indeterminate sentences … Where we do not slash prison budgets, and where we focus on rehabilitation not revenge.” [Emphasis added.]

Anti-punishment ideologues like Merritt, incorrectly and condescendingly conflate punishment with “hate” and vengeance, and justice with restitution and “rehabilitation.”

They typically treat us to facile flimflam such as that the desire for vengeance cannot become the foundation of jurisprudence. By this verbal manipulation, these ideologues disingenuously advance a definition of justice that precludes incarceration and instead equates that object with restitution and rehabilitation alone.

Compared to David Merritt’s woke sentiments, the family of the London-Bridge Killer was mundane in its proper and civilized expiation:

“We are saddened and shocked by what Usman has done,” said the family. “We totally condemn his actions and we wish to express our condolences to the families of the victims that have died and wish a speedy recovery to all of the injured.”

But there was apparently no need to apologize, Mr. and Mrs. Khan. Speaking for his dead son, David Merritt appears to have already made peace with Jack’s ripper.

In their extreme versions, anti-punishment ideologues like David Merritt often plump for complete penal abolition.

Driven by parental and pedagogic progressivism, Jack, of blessed memory, had “devoted his energy to the purpose of a “pioneering program” called “Learning Together,” which aims “to bring students from university and prisons together to share their unique perspectives on justice.”

The imperative to offer up young lives to this or the other manifestation of Moloch is a progressive impulse—an obscene one, at that.

If young Merritt’s murder proves anything it is that Cambridge University’s social-justice outreach, “Learning Together,” is a costly indulgence, as Jack was murdered on the job.

More generally, the movement for restorative justice holds that problems plaguing the criminal justice system are reason enough to abolish it. Oddly, the movement’s position is starkly utilitarian, and bereft of principle:

Incarceration, assert proponents of “no-fault” forgiveness, doesn’t reduce rates of re-offense and doesn’t bring back the dead. Ergo, abolish it we must and heal the criminal in the community. After all, responsibility for individual evil actions lies really with “society.” Justice, say the activists, is therefore best sought by a redistribution of wealth and resources.

But, contrary to such pinko propaganda, our prisons aren’t loaded with choir boys.

Usman Khan was no victim of the system (although he claimed to have been fat-shamed or bullied for nurturing a prison paunch. Boo hoo). Rather, it was Jack Merritt who was the victim of a system that had automatically released a man with murder on his mind on a kind of meritless-reprieve scheme, and despite the man’s vow to do violence.

When just a teen, the killer plotted to attack the London Stock Exchange. He, then, fooled those around him by feigning remorse and a desire to reintegrate into British society.

From the dizzying heights of Platonic theorizing, libertarian anti-incarceration theorists typically point out quite correctly that crimes are committed against individuals and not against the amorphous entity called “society.” Solutions, they say, should, therefore, focus on making criminals pay restitution to their victims.

Here on terra firma, the prosaic fact is, however, that when more dangerous offenders are incarcerated, fewer innocent individuals suffer.

When fewer violent criminals are apprehended, more innocent individuals are harmed.

If innocent individuals are incarcerated—a horrible thing against which jurist William Blackstone railed, in 1769, saying “the law holds that it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that 1 innocent person be convicted”—they (and not “society”) are harmed.

Although I would not argue against compelling criminals to do penance shaped by their victims, some libertarian anarchists want to see punishment replaced by a system of financial restitution.

But in cases (and there are many) where criminals can’t remotely repay victims for the harm done (especially in violent crimes), this means the consequences to the criminal won’t be remotely proportionate. In effect, by rejecting proportionate punishment for what is usually disproportionately paltry “restitution,” libertarian abolitionists are endorsing systematic injustice.

At least among libertarians, the cause du jour should not be to reduce the involvement of the state at any costs, if it means freeing guilty offenders. Rather, it should be to reduce prison population by freeing innocent people whose activities, lawful by natural-law standards, the state has criminalized.

Whether punishment makes people feel good, whether it reforms the criminal or safeguards the public is immaterial, although I would argue that a society with a moral code is safer in the long run than one without it.

Punishment is a public declaration of moral standards. It is an extension of natural law. Descend into the anti-incarceration activist’s amoral abyss, and you abolish the very fabric of our ethical tradition.

Fortunately, David Merritt’s meritless advocacy for a man who swore to murder again is mute. The killer was dispatched, his descent into hell hastened by the city of London’s police force.

©2020 ILANA MERCER
American Greatness,
WND.COM, The Unz Review,
The Quarterly Review, Reckonin’
January 10 & 16

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