The Axis or Resistance enunciates The Only Truths, licit in natural and international law, to be found in the clutch of ceasefire documents. ~ilana

Allow me to vent spleen over the many ceasefire “agreements”—10-point (April 2026), 15-point (August 2026), and the MOU, Memorandum of Understanding in-between—whose details the “experts” continue to belabor and rehash.

Enough already!

Can we quit the cretinous, make-believe commentary over fakery? Consult a Ouija board if you are in doubt as to how these unilateral things progress. But quit making a mystery of what are manifestly cover operations.

I’ll unburden you if you find it hard to untangle and flush what are layers of loo-paper.

The MOU, the “Hormuz talks,” the 10-point plan, the 15-point plan, the Gaza ‘Peace’ Plan, are all pointless as anything other than cover operations.

Ceasefires à la Israel and America, the two symbiotic, congenital liar entities lording it over the universe, are just one more weapon wielded to destroy the Axis of Resistance, or any resistance to Superpower and Sidekick.

Who the dominatrix is and who is the submissive in the US-Israel relationship—that vexation, I venture, has been adjudicated by reality, as well.

Each one of these farcical ploys, the ceasefires, is meant invariably to end in bombs, with blame imputed to the victims. How do I know? In the same way you ought to know. Reality. Res ipsa loquitur. The thing itself speaks. Screams. Writhes in agony under the rubble.

Did not all of these preordained “negotiated” traps begin with fanfare and end, as described above, in “bombs, with blame imputed to the victims”?

Islamabad was a burlesque to begin with. To arrive at their destination, in April of 2026, the amiable Iranian negotiators had to circumnavigate Israeli assassins, only to confront the tricks and turns and greasy chicanery of the diplomats deputized by another criminal Svengali: Trump.

No sooner was the agreement signed than the US violated it. The Islamabad burlesque continues with an ostensible extension. By the caprice of the same one man, it ended almost as soon as I concluded typing the previous sentence.

The same thing transpires daily in Lebanon, where yesterday, August 17, the Israeli terrorists murdered 11 souls.

When Trump is gone, there’ll be a new Barnum to oversee the US-Israeli ceasefire circus.

More obscene even than this is the fate of Gaza. There, so-called ceasefires and prattle about them coincide with bombs.

Kushner’s August-16 papal visit to Cairo, to meet with Hamas negotiators, leaders and senior officials; who came to Cairo as an effort “to ‘preserve’ the Gaza cease-fire”—this had no bearing on the bombs. They kept falling.

For all we know, strikes and talks could have been timed to coincide. For the Jewish-Israeli terrorists, fugitives from justice, kept up their fiendish “operations” across Palestine, irrespective. On the 16th, Israelis killed a “14-year-old boy in Gaza.”

That’s about the score!

The process-based case against these ceasefires rests on another pedestrian, uncontested reality: The ceasefires reflect power differentials untempered by a shred of American and Israeli honor or decency.

Distilled, the reality on-a-loop is this:

The victim parties (Axis of Resistance) righteously assert and defend their negative, natural, leave-me-alone rights to live unmolested in sovereign territories, to enforce their riparian rights, namely their control over the waterways that abut their lands, and to trade freely and free of US-Israeli violence.

The impugned victims further insist on their right to reject and eject from their midst the overpowering, enervating presence of the Superpower and its Sidekick.

Media pontificating, picking apart, dignifying these make-believe ceasefire games are partaking in The Big Lie. Layering the loo-paper. This Brownian motion, this constant white noise around the US-Israel ceasefire gambit, is a game. The perpetrator block’s victims are like mice before cats.

For those for whom recognition is yet to dawn, the US and Israel lead this orgy of evil and ugly. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, powerless peoples are being corralled, bribed or terrorized by the duo, financially, economically and militarily.

Why? Because, this Axis of Evil views the very acts of asserting and enforcing national sovereignty and self-determination as acts of terroristic resistance, if in defiance of the US-Israeli elite interests and ideas.

Palestinians have been sequestered in an America-approved and assisted genocide for three years. Since Israel’s actions have been sanctified at the highest of political altitudes; the genocidal entity has seen fit to add to its extinction list a few more Axis-of-Resistance member states:

The Lebanese, the Yemeni and the Iranians.

This Axis or Resistance enunciates The Only Truths, licit in natural and international law, to be found in the clutch of ceasefire documents:

The right of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians to live free of Israeli and American violence and to defend that right and each other. The right of the brave people of the Resistance to use their native intelligence and natural resources to benefit their own people. Their right to freely trade the bounty from these natural gifts with other willing entities. To have what was stolen from them returned; and what was damaged and destroyed restored, made whole. In other words—

Not only do Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemeni and Iranians have the right of resistance and the obligation to stop genocide—rights and obligations which are licit in natural and international law—but so do they have the right to recompense. To reparations. Because—

After two genocides and the crimes of unprovoked aggression—the crimes-of-all crimes—comes justice, not peace.

The complicit, impunity conferring Superpower and the Serial-Killer State must cough-up and then f-ck off.

The celebrated Palestinian poet Refaat Al-Areer, RIP, perfectly summed-up the ceasefire farce: “A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.” By “cease,” I believe Al-Areer meant not cease-to-fire, but cease-to-live, as in die; be deprived of life. The same demons came for him in his home before the year 2023 was out.

When, then, will recognition dawn? In Bushspeak: “Fool me once, shame on … shame on you. Fool me … You can’t get fooled again!” (And, W was an expert in untruths.)

In English: Not allowing the clouds to cap your vision is an admirable quality, but allowing them to cloud reality is hardly praiseworthy.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

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©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, August 18
LewRockwell.com,  August 19
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, August 19

The post Flush ‘Em: Ceasefires À La Israel And America Are Layers Of Loo-Paper appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

HOLISTIC BEAUTY, natural and built, a place where “the architecture” is “fully integrated” into the landscape: This is something “real estate developer”-cum-explorer Ivanka Trump knows all about.

Or, so Mrs. Kushner tells us, in a misty promotional production, in which viewers are tutored about the person, Narcissus herself, and the new “developments” she is pursuing, personal and material. A friendly podcast serves as Barbie Trump’s vanity press. Its title: “Ivanka Trump on Building an Authentic Life.”

As in the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology, we have here malignant narcissism, cruelty, as well as a body of water. But it’s all terribly pretty, you understand.

Ivanka’s plot (as in scheme) is in the same vein as other assets and investment holdings in the Trump-Kushner crime family’s real-estate portfolio, in which Exhibit One is Gaza.

Late in January of 2026, husband Jared Kushner, a criminally acquisitive, empty husk of a man in his own right, presented a slide show in Davos even more garishly hideous than father-in-law’s earlier iteration of the production dubbed the Gaza Plan. The milieu was as ugly as any Trump family venture, or gathering, or trashy cotton-candy colored “couture.”

Kushner’s Master Slave Plan for Gaza—a cover for genocide, much as is the family’s Board of Peace he oversees—was presented before some of the world’s wealthiest men, all parading their greed for the property of the poorest, most-imperiled people in the world, the Palestinians.

Barbie’s sepia-tinted podcast presentation of the plans for the uninhabited Sazan Island, off the coast of Albania, involve conquest and usurpation, but of a better variety.

Like south Lebanon, currently being pulverized by the terrorist state, Israel, which the couple canonizes and runs cover for—Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Like south Lebanon, Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of the Trump White House and ballroom, or of Ivanka’s many darling, dinky “little” pads.

As to the kitschy interior of the mystery “friend’s boat”: It relates to the “authentic” Gaza or South Lebanon as a centuries-old church relates to a Methodist, big-tent revival pavilion. “Authentic” is another adjective Barbie Trump has appropriated to telegraph her essence.

Did I not dilate on Ivanka’s friend’s “boat”? My bad. Back to the more material aspects of the first daughter’s otherworldly quest:

Nat Rothchild’s superyacht, “Planet Nine,” is obscenely lavish—almost long enough for a 100-meter dash, it has space for two, eight-seater, explorer helicopters onboard, a helipad, a “surround cinema,” spas, desalination facility (the kind bosom buddies of the Kushners destroyed in Gaza), elevator to get you to all 5 levels, a “3,000-square-foot owner’s apartment,” and respectable ice classification.

The Kushners were sailing on this “friend’s boat,” as Mrs. Kushner relayed,   when—Lo!—the acquisitive habit overpowered their conjugal happiness. Embarrassing.

Overcome—and fresh from pillage and rapine in Gaza—the insatiable lovebirds hit on a way to keep their urges in check. First order of business was to cool off. Unlike Narcissus, the two did not come to harm. They allegedly jumped off “the boat,” and proceeded to swim to an Albanian Island that beckoned in the offing.

If Americans are silly enough to dismiss Ivanka’s killer credentials and cultivate scented memories of her, which is what she craves, I urge that searing doubts be put aside in favor of the certainty of 2017. It was then that the first daughter had nagged daddy into strafing Syria. All for The Kids, she claimed. After all, Mrs. Kushner has always been “super mission-driven,” to use another of her phrases. She speaks and thinks in cliches. Brother Eric Trump confirmed: “Sure, Ivanka influenced the Syria strike decision.”

Truth be told, Ivanka is not new to the dark arts. She was as valuable to Trump’s first administration as Laura Loomer and the Israel über alles crowd are to the second. Ivanka has certainly been the driving force behind that androgynous, anemic, shrimp, Jared. Her dilemma, however, is this: The first daughter is delighted to have power, but not at the cost of popularity. Ivanka prefers that husband Jared draw the public’s radiating disapproval away from herself, leaving his wife safely antiseptic. Jared and Ivanka, of course, are twin spirits in every way—both are cunning and coldhearted and not too bright.

What Ivanka lacks in cerebral agility and a sense of propriety, she makes up in swimming prowess. Boy, can the two, husband and wife, swim to sate their greed. Or, as Ivanka put it, she likes it when people “swing for things.” Well, Ivanka and Jared swung for Sazan.

Albania is abuzz over Ivanka’s “incubated,” “super mission-driven,” “spring-out-of-bed,” “daunting”-in-size plot for their one-and-only loved and protected Island.  (The other crap words are Ivanka’s.)

Albanians want the flamingos to stay and the Kushners to fuck off.

The acquisitive couple was helped not at all by Ivanka’s affectatious video attempt to cast her land grab in that country as a return to some primordial, wholesome way of life. (The sibilance of her enunciation might be because of the outsized chicklet veneers in her mouth.)

Ok, “think” is too ambitious a verb to attach to anything Ivanka and Jared. Nevertheless, Barbie Trump believes that people like you and me have a secret yen to live on a one-of-a-kind, pilfered Albanian island. And she’s going to show us how it’s done. 

As to the aesthetics of Project Authenticity (images shared look positively fungal): It’s fair to say that the only spots in the universe more packed with toxic waste than Gaza are the faces and minds of The Don’s family and their loyalists. A look at the Kushner couple and at Laura Loomer, Trump’s other prized, plasticky adviser (who was actually once pretty)—and one thinks Madame Tussauds, the wax museum founded in London in 1835. The three, the Kushners and The Loomer, belong in the museum’s Chamber of Horrors section.

No, Ivanka; the great mass of us would like to live as far from toxic Barbie and her beau, their sticky paws and sticky-sweet presentations and performances.

Sorry to say, but Ivanka is an idiot, as is her husband subpar in every way possible. They both come from crime families. The Don, Trump, has made a present to Israel of everything Palestinians and Lebanese own. His idiot progeny’s “humanitarian concerns” have revolved around the return of Israeli hostages and assorted acts of solidarity in Israel, alongside Witkoaf and the other oaf, Jared. Trump’s daughter “thinks” she can porcelainize her own crimes and those of her husband by appealing to an ostensibly earthy quest we all share to live the “simple” life, like herself—

On stolen land, which she will commercialize and vulgarize to death, and whose critters her uprooting earthworks are already displacing or killing.

Like their beloved Israelis, the Kushners will deform and poison any landscape they touch.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

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©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, August 10
LewRockwell.com,  August 11
ilana mercer’s FPV Resistance, Substack, August 11

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

The post Ivanka Does Albania: 1st Daughter Expands Crime Family’s Real-Estate Portfolio, Spins It Like Cotton Candy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Without demarcation, Vance has blended into an administration that is terrorizing the world financially, economically and militarily. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. ~ilana

DEVOUTLY AND LOUDLY do various media organs of the establishment—CNN, The War Street Journal, The Hill, Politico or Israel’s Axios—dazzle you with flattering depictions of JD Vance’s foreign-policy stance, almost always based on unnamed sources, which have conveniently slithered out of dank corners, at this point of the election cycle. Experts in untruths, these media tell you that Vance, vice president in the Trump regime, has all-along roared about foreign-policy restraint.

If he has, it’s the least leonine roar ever heard in this neck of the woods.

Or, the most “private” political protest ever, as Politico would counter. “Private” is how this particular Deep-State tool dubs VP Vance’s foreign policy bent.

In short, Vance confines his “subversive” murmurs to carefully leaked and curated after-the-fact comments, credited mostly to unnamed sources.

The following facts need to be stated, too:

Juvenile quips from craven politicians like Vance notwithstanding, the United States of America continues to play planet to Israel’s sun. Israel’s genocides in the Levant are Made-in-America. Not once in the course of Israel’s carnage in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Lebanon, all ongoing, have two genocidal administrations, Democrat and Republican, budged in materially directing resources to the missions of mass murder currently conducted by Israel.

America underwrites Israeli evil financially and diplomatically, running diplomatic cover for the Israeli executioners. To that end, the US even sanctions and persecutes countries and individuals who dare disagree with its Israeli deity’s mass murder; dare agitate for justice, or demand that the laws of the land be levied against the Serial Killer State.

The US has even sanctioned judicial and UN officials tasked with investigating the crimes of U.S. or Israeli nationals. “Sanction” is a weasel way to frame America’s theft of their assets, banning of their travel, and restriction of their rights to trade with American business.

In all, Israel remains the holy of holies for American politicians.

With the reverence reserved for that country, VP Vance’s administration has never stopped the Jewish State from en masse execution of civilians and from the eradication of entire communities who refuse to submit to American and Israeli hegemony. 

The next fact probably also bears repeating: Not once has JD Vance ever personally conveyed to his constituents a principled objection to the crimes of his administration and for those of Israel. No revulsion or reservations from VP Vance. His most coruscating critique of genocide has amounted to strategically intoning about “Israel’s right to defend itself,” a synonym for the practice of state-sponsored terrorism. From this stupid line, Vance has not strayed.

To hear VP Vance tell it, Israel has a bad hand to play. You know—nudge-nudge, wink-wink—it must deal with the caprices of the People of the region. “A ceasefire in that region of the world just means they’re shooting a little bit less at each other than they were before,” the jocular, pompous Vance told the presstitutes present at a June 18 presser. There, Vance also boasted about sending the Iranian economy into “a freefall,” and causing “a trillion dollars of damage to their industrial base over the last three months.” 

Again, I have never heard JD Vance utter a meaningful, principled word in opposition to any depravity, much less Israeli depravity. I have, however, heard Vance echo Trump, the genocidaire. Without demarcation, Vance has blended into an administration that is terrorizing the world financially, economically and militarily. From Greenland, to Latin America to West Asia to Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

Vance should repulse you, down to the garish eyeliner, which only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he and his administration represent.

With respect to the criminal, collaborative assault on Iran, Vance has been a “servile cheerleader for the war his boss …launched alongside Israel,” as more honest comment has characterized the Vance stance. Throughout Trump’s many ceasefire farces—all a fig leaf for US-Israel resolve to slowly dissolve Iran, and with it the Axis of Resistance—Vance has eagerly played his part, seconding Trump’s venomous genocidal threats against the Islamic Republic, as well as aping Trump’s idiotic atavistic aggression against other countries.

The insubstantial JD Vance might direct stale, totem words of warning toward those Israelis who speak ill of the Butcher of DC, Trump. But, for the Butcher of Tel Aviv Vance reserves the velvet glove: He took care to exempt Bibi from this particular wrongdoing, during the same June 18 presser, where Vance assured the presstitutes present that he speaks regularly with Bibi and has good rapport with him.

Essentially, Vance, Bibi and Trump are solid partners in vice.

Nonchalantly, VP Vance might opine, as he has, that Israel “can’t kill its way to security.” But that’s the extent of it. The carefully choreographed dance that American and Israeli “leaders” do for the benefit of the perfect American fools who vote for them continues uninterrupted.

A plurality of Israelis, on the other hand, are tickled pink by Bibi’s genocides in Lebanon and Palestine. As the brilliant Diana Buttu gloomily reported, Israeli political candidates are running on a plank of who can inflict more pain on their barely surviving Palestinian victims.

So don’t be swept to sea again, this time by Vance whom the irremediable corporate media (as well as some in the alternative media, regrettably) is portraying as a strident opponent of the war on Iran and wars for Israel. It’s nonsense on stilts. 

What the VP is doing now is what he has done since the auspicious start of his political career:

Vance launched his career with a smug, self-aggrandizing book, in which he slimed his hillbilly relatives, even naming names. The book was very badly received by authentic “hillbillies.” The Establishment, however lapped it up and loved its author. Still does.

During the 2024 campaign, and before he was tapped by Trump, Vance did the same. He made the right noises, ones the voters wanted to hear, against “costly and unsuccessful interventions,” as he put it.

Stoutly strategic, in suiting-up for the 2028 race, Vance has dropped a book about his Catholicism. Nothing if not theologically inventive, the triangulating candidate has coopted his Catholic faith as a reason for his fealty to … Israel.

Israel is another exigency of the moment. Vance is reading the room again. America is just not that keen on Israel any longer—although, sadly for their souls, Americans have yet to turn on the Jewish State completely and altogether.

While opinion of Israel has undeniably plummeted in the US, the “bottom line,” sums Gallup soberly, is that “Americans retain a more positive view of Israel, with 46% viewing it favorably, than of the Palestinian Territories, at 37%”:

‘… Americans still have a more favorable view of Israel, as a country, than of the Palestinian Territories, though views of Israel are among the least favorable Gallup has measured historically. Meanwhile, views of the Palestinian Territories are the most positive to date, albeit still negative overall.’ (Gallup, February 26, 2026)

In all, don’t let your imagination run fevered with respect to Vance. Don’t get played again (and again, and again). When the powers that be, their sub-par publications and their strategists, pool their power to portray JD Vance as something other than what (as opposed to who) he is—one would hope your psychological-warfare antennae begin to transmit robust signals.

The reason I say that Vance is a “what”, not a “who”—that “what” is the better syntactic determiner to attach to VP Vance—is because the VP is a political production, not a real person. A production of the worst pedigree.

Vance is a creation of a tech billionaire PAC, a “tech-aligned super political action committee.”

Vance is the personal creation of Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal. Thiel was/is his mentor. Together, the wild-eyed Thiel and the ugly in-and-out Alex Karp founded, still manage, Palantir Technologies. How intimate are the Israel Genocidal Forces and the “CIA-backed” Palantir?

Conjugally intimate.

If the gateway to the internet is Google, and it is; not even Google—algorithmically set to defend Israel at all costs—can conceal the bonds that bind Palantir to the Serial Killer State’s crimes. Put it this way, Google (an aggregator for Zionism) and pro-Palestine sources are in agreement over the Palantir-IDF connection.

Palantir works closely with the IDF’s notorious Unit 8200, which is comprised of a select group of mama’s boys and girls, who snoop, hack, and assassinate in code and in practice. Unit 8200’s killer AI algorithms both calibrate and codify mass murder into the SS IDF’s military’s legal code. They have given themselves imprimatur to Press Kill on locating a single resistance fighter, amid up to 100 non-combatant family members, friends and neighbor. It’s not in violation of Israeli law. The individual is impugned by the flimsiest evidence.

Instead of in the dock, in the Hague, these computer killers, you should know, are also found in Silicon Valley, Boston’s high-tech corridor, and, presumably, in Washington State’s techno-town. These characters will certainly be coming to a community near you, near me, when JD’s friends and sponsors facilitate the assimilation of this human detritus into our communities, as they flee future International Criminal Court subpoenas.

Israel and Unit 8200 are the face of this global death industry. The SS IDF’s Artificial Intelligence products, out of Unit 8200, have, in particular, perfected the auto-kill computer systems known as “Lavender,” Daddy’s Home, and The Gospel, whose killer code has been applied to Gaza and Lebanon.

Palantir works with Unit 8200, on “war-related missions.” Coward Karp, Thiel’s partner, has proudly spoken of his company as being involved in “crucial operations in Israel.”

In backing Vance, co-founder Thiel and CEO Karp are joined by former tech executive and podcaster David Sacks, an influencer in the Vance orbit. Sacks is close, too, to censor-for-Zionism Elon Musk. Both backed Vance. AI-traders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz hobnob too in the Vance hood.

Speaking of Google, Vance’s venture capitalism company, Narya Capital, was sponsored by both Thiel and Google’s Eric Schmidt. So, it’s pointless asking Vance to ease up the Google algorithms.

Vance’s Deep Tech billionaire backers are anathema to human flourishing. Theirs is a system of plunder. They are princes who pauper the universe by their deadly fiat pursuits, financial, technocratic, environmental, military. These people and their necro-industries move humanity further away from community, from the locality; from honest industry, from real knowledge and production and into a consumer, bubble-driven technocracy, anchored in illiteracy, gambling, speculation, buying and selling intangible derivative products.

As if American communities are not already distressed; the infrastructure for AI promises to suck the life out of their natural environment, leaving bereft the communities in whose midst these hideous “data centers” are planted. AI Data centers are an assault-on-the-eye and on ethics. Their stratospheric costs as always are socialized; their profits privatized. 

As I say, VP Vance is a slick production. The man is a particularly oleaginous political product, astroturf down to the (alleged) rug on his head.

Lest I forget, in his new book Vance cites Charlie Kirk, a mention that was probably focus-group tested. Metaphorically speaking, Vance is boiling the bones of poor murdered Mr. Kirk to make soup. Mr. Kirk is being exploited posthumously to shape discourse in politically advantageous ways.

**********

Podcast: Beware The JD Vance Political Production

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance” on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 12
LewRockwell.com, July 6
Substack, July 13

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

The post Here’s JD: The Unbearable Lightness Of VP Vance: A VERY Short Primer (+Podcast) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be ‘no checks, no real balances,’ thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a ‘powerful and mighty empire.’

On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more.

The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry’s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation.

Two hundred years into just such “consolidation”—in the magisterial Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government—constitutional scholar James McClellan distilled the Anti-Federalist argument with the respect it deserves.

As “strong advocates of States’ Rights,” Anti-Federalists held that “self-government, independence, and individual liberty were best protected at the local level. A distant and powerful central government,” the kind cooked up at the Philadelphia convention, was anathema to these “cherished values.” To that end, Anti-Federalists fought to preserve the “loose-knit relationship” that had existed between the “Confederation government and the States.”

Should the Federal Constitution be ratified, there would be “no checks, no real balances,” thundered Patrick Henry. Instead, the country would live under a “powerful and mighty empire.”

Writing under the assumed name “Agrippa,” yet another Anti-Federalist scoffed at the idea of an enormous “uncompounded republic,” then containing six million inhabitants, all “reduced to the same standard of morals or habits and of laws.” This “in itself is an absurdity,” mocked “Agrippa.”

Twenty-first century America is home not to six but 350 million alienated, antagonistic individuals, philosophically diverse to the point of distrust. These modern-day Americans, some of whose ancestors were brought together by a “profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty,” possess little by way of “social capital” to unify them.

Surveys say Americans today avoid one another and hunker down unhappily in front of the TV, instead. This would have hardly surprised “Agrippa.”

So, too, did Anti-Federalists predict the problem of representatives who had been imbued with excessive power. “Once elected, representatives would be far from home, comfortable in their jobs, enjoying a big salary … living in some distant, yet-to-be-built city far removed from the watchful eye of the people they represented.”

Sound familiar?

From “Brutus” came perhaps the most “perceptive and far-reaching examinations of congressional power from the Anti-Federalist perspective.” Writing in the New York Journal, “Brutus” observed that “the ‘most natural and grammatical construction’ of the General Welfare Clause in Article I is that it authorizes the Congress ‘to do anything which in their judgment will tend to provide for the general welfare, and this amounts to the same thing as general and unlimited power of legislation in all cases.”

“If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind,” I lamented in 2008. “Brutus” was not nearly as charitable. Bitterly did he complain about a Constitution that was “written ‘in general and indefinite terms, which are either equivocal, ambiguous, or which require definition.’”

The Commerce Clause, for example, was the focus of scathing Anti-Federalist critique. “What is meant by ‘the power to regulate?” they demanded to know. “What, precisely, is ‘commerce’”? The new Constitution, argued the prescient Anti-Federalists, is mum on these matters, providing little by way of precision in definition.

Brilliant too was “Brutus” in his prediction that, if instituted, the “new system of government” would see the Federal judiciary “swallow up the State courts.” Back then, “Brutus” saw Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution as vesting the judicial branch with the kind of power that would bring about “the entire subversion of the legislative, executive, and judiciary power of the individual states,” to say nothing of the individual human being.

As the saying goes, “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”

To observe our rulers in action is to realize that Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry and New York Anti-Federalist “Cato” were prophets who deserve a lot more honor in their own country. Both forewarned of an imperial presidency in the making. “‘The president,’ wrote “Cato,” has so much power that his office ‘differs very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain.’”

Correction: The power vested in the American presidency dwarfs that of the largely titular, ceremonial British monarchy.

Indeed, presidents have habitually used executive orders to circumvent federal legislation. They have also exempted their “friends or political cronies” from laws their subjects must obey. And they have ordered the suspension of “duly enacted law”—even “barring enforcement”—because they disliked said law.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

To deny that the Anti-Federalists were right is to deny reality.

Having prophesied that Philadelphia was the beginning of the end of the freedoms won in the American Revolution, our Anti-Federalist philosophical fathers fought to forestall the inevitable. They failed.

****

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance “ on Substack.

https://ilanamercersfpvresistance.substack.com

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, July 4
LewRockwell.com, July 6
The New American, July 6

The post The Anti-Federalists, America’s Unsung Heroes, Predicted Evil Empire & The Imperial Presidency appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon …~ilana 

In examining the causal factors in the criminal psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel, I have questioned “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation,” namely the convention, accepted among solidarity commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, that there is a strict divide between Judaism and Zionism.

Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as a faith largely beyond reproach—humanistic, universal, and peaceful; Zionism as its opposite. In this asserted split, it is assumed that Judaism is naturally antagonistic to Zionism and always arrayed against Israel.

The zealotry with which our camp, in solidarity with the Palestinians, adheres to the Judaism-Zionism divide can’t but catch one’s attention. It is as though mouthing these platitudes was The Charm, a protective amulet of sorts.

Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I noted that the idée fixe of “The Chosen People” goes a long way to account for the unwarranted sense of supremacy that animates Jewish Israelis. A biblical aspect of Judaism such as “Chosenness” appears to have encouraged, animated and privileged a factional preference among Jews, to the near exclusion of universal fellow-feeling.

Biblically based Chosenness and the corresponding supremacy certainly help explain the indelible reservoir of evil, a bottomless pit of it, expressed and acted out by the Jewish Israeli commonwealth’s most faithful representatives: The People’s army, the IDF, or the Israel Defense Forces.

There is no grimness in the IDF’s approach to the “mission” of mass murder. Undaunted, they go about their “business” with barbaric gaiety. (Remember, I watch the Hebrew-language tv channels. No filters there.) This Israeli “citizen army” is on its second genocide, uninterrupted.

From Gaza, to the West Bank, to Southern Lebanon; from sun-up to sun-down—Israel continues its genocidal deformation of the Levant’s landscape and its people. Now, generations of Lebanese agrarians—food producers, their well-appointed residences, built to blend into, not lord over, the undulating hills—the very means of production: wiped out. Ancient religious heritage sites, Muslim and Christian, gone (although it should be noted that the magnificently spirited Shia community is the prime target of the Terrorist State and its American enabler). Over a million people displaced. Upwards of 4100 murdered. Israel is not on a killing spree; it’s in a comfortable groove, a second-nature killing groove. Jewish Israel is flying close to the sun, and nobody dares to swat it down.

In marked contrast, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levi and the inimitable Norman Finkelstein were quick to implicate “Chosenness” in the psychopathy on display in contemporary Israel. In August of 2024, in conversation with Current Affairs’ editor Nathan J. Robinson, Levi, a veteran dissident journalist, had been commenting about the unexamined lives Israelis lead. Although he has since vacillated; in his better days, alluded to here, Levy had also remarked in anguish that Jewish-Israel shapes its genocidal media, not vice versa. In other words, genocide is market-driven. The general average of Jewish Israelis throughout the country knows and likes what’s going on.

Or, as Levi put it, “They couldn’t be bothered.”

It makes sense that Jewish supremacists—a term I deployed as early as March 31, 2024, in the essay, “ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law”—would lead unexamined lives. They believe they are divinely-anointed superior beings in whom a birthright to commit genocide is inherent.

Lone Israeli voices like Levi and Amira Haas, another Haaretz pro-Palestine columnist, would be first to tell you that, in Israel, “they represent absolutely nobody,” confirmed Norman Finkelstein, also to Current Affairs’ editor on June 6, 2026.

With similar certainty, Dr. Finkelstein has ventured that Jewish supremacy is augmented by economic success. It’s “because Jews are rich,” qualified Finkelstein: They are the wealthiest religious ethnic group in the US. “The Jewish supremacist billionaire class”—Finkelstein’s coinage—is exerting its power. This class is behind the clamp-down on anti-Israel demonstrations and on American constitutional freedoms. “You can’t say anything now critical of Israel,” inveighed Dr. Finkelstein, to podcaster Robinson Erhardt.

Finkelstein has declared “the Jewish supremacist billionaire class” and their proxies as his inveterate enemies, promising that he’ll never ascent to their demands. The upbeat doctrine that these “Jewish supremacist billionaires” have enforced in American campuses is the requirement that everybody be “inclusive and pluralistic toward Israeli students,” or else. Finkelstein, in his inimitable fashion, declared he would never become “inclusive and pluralistic” toward child killers. May they burn in hell, he added.

Over and above the concentration of wealth in Jewish hands, Finkelstein further fingered, on December 12, 2025, a penchant for community organizing and networking among Jews, as well as the impunity that has come with the weaponization of the Holocaust in forming a “lethal combination.” He was speaking to Double Down News. (“Norman Finkelstein Exposes Israel’s Darkest Secret.”)

So, before the curtain falls on this informal inquiry of mine; I’ll ask again: The bloodiest era in Israeli criminal annals—are they not an organic extension of some biblically based, base, atavistic, shared Jewish superiority, grown more regressive, more savage with time and impunity?  

The late great exegete Pope Benedict XVI of the brilliant mind and beatific smile delivered an address, in 2006, to the students at the University of Regensburg, in which he worried out loud that Islam may be a closed system, impermeable to reform.

I now believe the Holy See was wrong, possibly swayed, like the rest of the world, by osmotic Hasbara.

Pope Benedict’s opinion, however, has always been wildly popular in the West, having been propagated by a contingent of ersatz experts, which, it so happens, were also ardently Zionist. Arab scholars attempted, respectfully, as is their wont, to counter. “What is aggravating is that the pope has been free with assumptions, and liberal with its first cousin, innuendo.” In vain. It didn’t help Muslims.

In the address aforementioned, nevertheless, the Holy Father spoke of reason as integral to the Christian faith. He went on to recount how the university formed a “universe of reason,” in which, through rational inquiry, even the existence of God was questioned. Had not the “erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus,” in his exchange with his Persian interlocutor, circa 1391, counsel that, “Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats”? Indeed.

Observed Pope Benedict: “The decisive statement in [the Paleologus] argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”

Inescapably, it is not Muslims of the Ummah, in the name of Islam, who have acted out “contrary to God’s nature.”

It is not members of the Ummah who have committed the Twenty-First Century’s two Holocausts—in Gaza and Southern Lebanon both in progress. It is, rather, a cohort of Jews, not insubstantial, who purported to do so in supplication to their faith.

I ask, then:

If it was acceptable for the Pontiff to have tried to puncture the pieties of one of the three major religions, why is it that another faith—the one into which I was born—may not be poked and probed as well?

Is the question, then, purely a Jewish-Israeli question, or is it perhaps a Judaism question?

Could it be that Judaism is in need of a Reformation? And is this Jew, myself, even permitted to ask?

***

SUBSCRIBE to “ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance “ on Substack.

Part 1: The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness
Part 2: The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Tikkun Olam

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, June 25
LewRockwell.com, June 25

The post Two Genocides Down; Does Judaism Need A Reformation? And Is This Jew Allowed To Ask? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. Although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not. ~ilana

Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. ~ilana

Contra classical natural law theory, my own religious order, Judaism in its popular rendering has always appeared to me quite sectarian. The faith to which I was born frequently seemed a we-only litany, more about Jews and for Jews than about the world, or for the good of the world.

For “a spectacular sense of otherness and unity” (Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, p. 262), only the Mormons, tethered to their territory of Utah, equal Jews, with whom Mormons also strongly identify.

Myself, I came alive ideologically when I reached the New World, in the mid-1990s. It was as though a new world of ideas heretofore unknown had unfurled to quench the soul and the intellect. Alas, it did not come from Judaism, to which I was born.

I discovered the very American libertarian non-aggression axiom, which flows, at least in my opinion, from Thomist Catholic philosophy, Just War theory, and the Stoic doctrine of natural law, whose first “interpreter and transmitter” was Cicero,[1] to be followed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Roman Church.

As plain as plain is the idea of charity. It’s a religion surety, I had surmised, that benevolence is meant to improve society, not the State; and to do so through personal, not political, acts in the community. Charity ought to be about fellow-feeling, not factional preferences. As instructed in Leviticus 19:18, “You should love your neighbor as you do yourself,” וְאָהַבְתָ לְרֵעֲךָ כָמוֹךָ.

Consider the concept of Tikkun Olam, תקון עולם, the Jewish obligation to repair the world. Perhaps willfully—and to comport with my natural-law bias—I had always interpreted Tikkun Olam as a sublimely modest Jewish obligation.

Developed by the scholars and sages of a dispersed people, Tikkun Olam, I had hoped, was intended as a humble thing—as the duty of the Jewish individual to help, bit-by-bit, to bring about a better world in unassuming, day-to-day righteous acts. In his community and beyond.

In the best sense of that much-abused term “Orthodox” is a reader of ours, “a Torah observant Orthodox Jewish man,” and an attorney at law. JBS, Esq. speaks of Jewish “Chosenness” as follows:

As you are likely aware, Judaism is an ancient religion based upon God’s revelation of Himself to Hebrews at Mt. Sinai. Zionism is a recent [19th Century] political movement associated with Judaism but is not Judaism. Most Jewish people conflate and blur the distinction.
The ‘Chosen People’ concept is misunderstood by most Jews.  God ‘chose’ the Jewish people to receive, accept, keep and fulfill His Torah and teach it to the world, to be a ‘light unto the nations.’ That is all being ‘chosen’ ought to mean, not a Jewish ego trip.
As to Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel: fulfillment of their Godly duties is required.  I think Zionists believe otherwise; that military capture is sufficient. God twice banished Hebrews from the land for their failures and sins.  Many Orthodox Jews (myself included) believe that Jewish entitlement to the land of Israel will require the appearance of Mashiach, the Jewish messiah.  I don’t know much about that. (May, 2026)

Although there is a certain degree of comic protest about my next question; I ask it not to be a smart Aleck:

Does what our laudable reader say mean that, come Mashiach, real or imagined, ultra-orthodox Jews could be given religious license to rob Palestinian homesteaders? That, you see, is unclear. With respect to the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist Jewry; although the question of messiah’s arrival is more than likely immaterial—the question of ethics is not.

In particular, the question of situational ethics and ethical relativism.

Having, attached yourself to the Palestine solidarity movement as an ultra-orthodox Jew; I’m not yet lavish in my praise for you. What excites suspicion is that your conduct, vis-à-vis Palestinian possessions, could be tied to the religious edicts surrounding the coming of messiah. History, more significantly, is replete with people who followed a false messiah. There is even a concept for this eventuality in Hebrew lore: משיח שקר (mashiach sheker).

These days, my own humble perspective on the daily practice of piety is a mirage in the desert.

Certainly, my modest, morally universal interpretation of Tikkun Olam is not the one adopted by Jews who are “chosen”; namely favored, esteemed and elevated by gentiles and by institutional Jewry.

Starting with the barefaced Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, Jews and non-Jews alike have lent spiritual credibility to hubristic insolence. Suffused with such hubristic insolence, during the war on Iraq, Friedman had praised former Prime Minister Tony Blair, demonstrably a war criminal, for “always [leaving] you with the impression that for him the Iraq war is just one hammer and one nail in an effort to do Tikkun Olam, to repair the world.”

“Tikkun Olam in this modern sense,” confirms the encyclopedia Britannica, “has become the predominant ideology” following World War II. “Healing the world after its fundamental breakage in the Holocaust” is seen to require “a robust social and this-worldly project.”

In every way more extreme than laptop bombardier Thomas Friedman is a rabbi who shares a vastly different take than mine on Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world (“Israel: The Narcissistic State,”). The rabbi begins his teachings with an assertion few would quibble with: Tikkun Olam prevails when good dominates over bad.

But wait. When does good best bad? (11:46 minutes into “Israel: The Narcissistic State,”). “When clal Israel rules the world.” Translated from the Hebrew: When the Jewish collective rules the world. When the nations of the world are subjects of the Jewish People, says this rabbi, during his shiur (“lesson”).

A “goy” has “Tikkun” (rectification), avers the same rabbi, when said “goy” realizes the supremacy of the Jewish People and assists them in any way. Gentile existence is “for the betterment of the Jewish People.” (11:35-13:06 into “Israel: The Narcissistic State”) Under the rule of the Jewish People, he claims, the world and its people achieve rectitude and correction. In other words, the gentile must recognize the (putative) supremacy of the Jewish People for Tikkun Olam to prevail.

Is this rabbi’s ruling a fringe doctrinal position? Do those ultra-orthodox rabbis who stand bravely against “Zionism,” also reject the indubitably hubristic concept of “Chosenness”—of Jews as His Chosen People? Or, do they, like most other rabbis, simply reassuringly frame “the Jewish idea of a chosen people” as “the most liberal and tolerant approach to religion possible”; a burden only to Jews; but a blessing to gentiles, as does another rabbi, Shmuel Kaplan, of Maryland.

With similar certainty does one Rabbi Pini Dunner labor to distance Tikkun Olam from manifestly universal biblical values, such as the one about loving thy neighbor as thyself. Dunner’s shell-game is a rejection of what he dubs progressive values, on the ground that these can alienate a Jewish person from “the past,” as well as hamper his respect for his “heritage.”

The intra-faith cacophony is indeed confusing.

For my part, I suspect the idea of Jewish Chosenness is the kernel of the maniacal and murderous contempt for The Other, manifest in contemporary Israel.

What I can further tell you is that my own notion of Tikkun Olam was imbibed by reading, in the Hebrew, the shtetl authors, who wrote originally in Yiddish. These authors—Sholem Aleichem and Peretz are examples—evince little of the hangovers of politics or Zionism. Their story-telling is purely descriptive, non-polemical and poignant. Heavily Jewish, it has heart for humanity, too.

On Mencken’s recommendation (AI confirmed), I purchased a 1950 used copy in the Hebrew of America, a book by Sholem Asch. Yes, no other than H. L. Mencken put me on to the author named Sholem Asch, which Mencken reviewed in English. With aching simplicity, Ash describes the cultural shock and the New York heat that bring about the demise of a small Jewish boy on arriving in America. The child had been uprooted from the diaspora’s intense bonds of faith, family and community, and plonked into the atomistic, hedonism and consumerism of American life.

Asch’s frail Jewish boy expires longing not for Zion (Israel), but for the cool, snowy beauty of his east-European home village. In addition to Zionism, also absent from the early literature in this genre is the Jewish Supremacy, which I first fingered on March 31, 2024, in the essay, “Israel: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law.” This Jewish supremacy is a mutation of Jewish Chosenness.

I am not alone in opining so openly—although other than Dr. Norman Finklestein, Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levi and Ron Unz; few are the Jewish individuals who dare acknowledge, for fear of Israel and its Western lobbies and lickspittles, that the “Judaism-Zionism bifurcation” should be legitimately and critically examined, given the erasure of Palestinian life ongoing, the genocidal onslaught on swathes of Lebanon, and Israel’s fight-to-the-finish with Iran. And considering that this trespass was commenced with overwhelming Jewish-Israeli acquiescence, and with the cover of institutionalized Jewry; a cohort that, combined, forms a sizeable portion of our Jewish community worldwide.

Organized world Jewry is an arm of Israel. Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, goes through the litany of genocide-supporting entities that had checked their humanitarian facade at the Ben Gurion airport, but would now like to reclaim luggage “lost,” for the purposes of being accepted into polite company. “Major British and American pro-Israel Jewish organizations have in their majority remained fully supportive of Israeli actions,” writes the jaded Palestinian scholar.

In the event that Jewish leaders, belatedly, caper about this or the other Israeli or American atrocity; the protest is almost solely anchored not in moral argument, but in utilitarian, sectarian, outcome-based concerns. Nothing else matters to them, other than that this or the other massacre, one among thousands, is bad for Jewish hostages, could impact Israel’s long-term viability, would encourage antisemitism. Or, as when “U.S. Jewish organizations criticized Trump’s diabolical Gaza plan, purely because they were “concerned” it would jeopardize the ongoing “hostage-release agreement.”

By Pew’s April, 2026 poll, “Jewish Americans and White evangelical Protestants have mostly positive views of Israel, at 64 percent and 65 percent, respectively.” In every meaningful way, too many Jews have supported this ebulliently evil entity, Jewish-Israel. 

RELATED:
Part 1: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation: Chosenness.”

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, May 30
LewRockwell.com, June 1

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization. 

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[1]. Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law, A Study In Legal And Social History And Philosophy, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1998

The post The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom? appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Is Zionism not, to some extent, an excrescence of Judaism? Why the near-religious divide between Zionism and Judaism? And, am I permitted at all even to ask? ~ilana

Pro-Palestine commentators and activists, Jews and non-Jews, are religious about maintaining a bifurcation—a divide—between Judaism and Zionism. Advocates of this duality portray Judaism as humanistic, universal and pastoral, and Zionism as its opposite. In the commingled rumble of commentary over Zionism; Arab commentators have been conditioned, by necessity, to internalize the split and the exact fissure-lines, as though mouthing these were a protective amulet, a matter of survival; theirs, ours. It is, in a sense.

Why this near-religious bifurcation between Zionism and Judaism? Is Zionism, to some extent, not an excrescence of Judaism?

Biblical Chosenness is certainly a facet of Judaism. Does it relate not at all to the Jewish supremacy that animates Jewish-Israeli expression and express action? Are these not connected? If so, should the question posed, then, really be a Jewish-Israeli question? Or, perhaps a Judaism Question is more apropos?

And, am I permitted at all to even ask?

Composer of some of the best, most exquisite English prose, with insight to match, was novelist Anita Brookner. Through her Jewish protagonist in the novel Making Things Better (2002, p 22), Ms. Brookner writes that the gentleman’s Jewish “ancestral religion,” which he did not practice, “seemed to him an affair of prohibitions, of righteous exclusiveness for which he could see no justification.”

Miss Brookner, a rare gem and a genius, was a secular, unaffiliated Jew like myself. “Although resolutely secular in outlook,” Ms. Brookner also conveyed what I have long-since felt. It is that “the mystery of the Holy Spirit,” expressed in good will, gratitude and graciousness, seems absent from the encounters we Jewish outsiders, lonely people, have had within our “ancestral religion.”  (Loneliness is the theme that threads Brookner’s novels.)

Like Brookner, I do not speak ex cathedra of the vexation that is Jewishness. It is indubitably a delicate matter. And, although knowledgeable, I am not an “expert.”  However, to deny that eddying around the Jewish child is a sense of, or talk of, Jewish specialness—this would be dishonest. Whether you choose to imbibe “Chosenness” or not—I chose not to—as a Jew, you are likely to have been raised hearing about “Chosenness.”

The supremacy fallacy, it would thus seem, issues surely not strictly from “Zionism,” but from “Chosenness.”

The Chosen-People belief is as old as the Hebrew Bible itself. It is thus in the “Chosen People’s” philosophical marrow. For what—pray tell?—are foundational, early teachings like Deuteronomy 14:2, if not a declaration of Jewish superiority for posterity?

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth.

Alongside all the commentators and broadcasters who insist on upholding the division between Judaism and Zionism; I, too, very much hope that Zionism is not an instantiation or an extension, on some elemental level, of Judaism. I really do.

There are certainly universal elements in the Hebrew Testament. Deuteronomy, an early book, showcases an advanced concept of Jewish Social Justice, and is replete with instructions to protect the poor, the weak, the defenseless; the widows, the orphans, the aliens, even the animals who, as Deuteronomy 11:15 enjoined, must be fed first.

This ethical monotheism, developed centuries before classical Greek philosophy, was certainly expounded upon by the classical prophets, my own heroes. The Hebrew prophets railed against power and cultural corruption so very magnificently. Indeed, the Prophets of the Hebrew Testament are magnificent and munificent, heroes.  In speaking truth to power, Jesus followed in the footsteps of the classical prophets.

Yet how can one forget, if one is remotely “knowledgeable,” that, for their righteous, wrath-filled universal message, the Hebrew Prophets had consequently been hounded by The People—by עם ישאל—just as Jesus was persecuted and then crucified at the People’s behest. Did not the crowd cry out “Crucify Him!”? (Matthew 27:15–26)

No doubt, the hounding the classical Prophets had received was an “existential promotion” to crucifixion.

But today, for their words, the classical Hebrew Prophets and Christ would have been chased, excommunicated, throttled on social media, shadow-banned and subjected to death by algorithm—prosecuted legally, too, for “antisemitism”—at the behest of Israel and its Western lobbies and lickspittles. Like many of us who’ve been consistently both anti-woke and anti-war; dissidents since day one, the Hebrew Prophets would have had free speech, but no reach, to use Bassem Youssef’s aphorism.

Still, a faith is more than a doctrine; it is the manner in which the faithful act and speak. I want to believe in the strict bifurcation of Judaism and Zionism, in that magical division. All the same, from Jews, liberals for the most, I’ve always heard the Chosen People storyline. To wit, “The heart of Chosenness,” states one Rabbi Meir Soloveichick (eleven minutes into “Israel: The Narcissistic State”), during a “Jewish Review of Books” symposium, is that Jews are superior, having been chosen as “the eternal nation,” and having made a greater contribution to humanity than any others.

Soloveichik, who officiates on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, is wrong; his assertion is untrue on its face. Aristotle (384 BC) was not Jewish. Neither was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685). On the basis of my bias alone; I’d close the case right there. For the reader’s edification, I’ve shored-up my bias with the help of Charles Murray’s tome, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950 (2003, HarperCollins Publishers Inc., NY).

Here are some of the “giants” who dragged their fellow men out of wattle-and-daub hovels, materially, spiritually and metaphysically:

The Buddha (563 BC)
Confucius (551 BC)
Euripides (480 BC)
Hippocrates (460 BC)
Aristotle (384 BC)
Euclid (300 BC)
Virgil (70 BC)
Al-Mutanabbi (915)
Thomas Aquinas (1225)
Zhao Mengfu (1254)
Dante (1265)
Sesshu (1420)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452)
Michaelangelo (1475)
Raphael (1483)
Titian (1485)
Galileo (1564)
Shakespeare (1564)
Rubens (1640)
Isaac Newton (1643)
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685)
Voltaire (1694)
Euler (1707)
James Watt (1736)
Goethe (1749)
Mozart (1756)
Beethoven (1770)
Louis Pasteur (1822)
Thomas Edison (1847)

There has been an attempt to claim for Pasteur and others a “Jewish connection,” but none was Jewish—not even Rubens. The reader who wants badly to see certain faces in the clouds is reminded to refrain from confusing charm and cleverness with transcendent greatness. As Joyce Carol Oats has quipped, “Charisma is just another word for bullshit.” (Fox, p. 387, Hogarth, NY, 2025.)

Part 2: “The Judaism-Zionism Bifurcation (Part 2): Tikkun Olam: Fixing The World, But For What, For Whom?“

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, May 20
LewRockwell.com, May 20

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

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First, The modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, Israel, has done crimes many times more wicked than the crimes for which God erased the biblical sin city by that name. Second, a merciful God did not send Abraham over to ask the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah to weigh in.
‘Tell me, oh degenerates of Sodom and Gomorrah, what your opinion is about your own mass butchery, mass thievery, mass looting, and raping.’ Oh no!

THE BIBLE has great significance to religiously-minded conservative Americans.

Ben Shapiro, a stupid and sickening influencer, once referred to the Hebrew Bible as the Torah. It’s Tanach, dummy.

The Tanach has three sections: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim, for a total of about 37 books.

To me, the Hebrew Tanach is a great literary work. I know it in the Hebrew, through secular study as a school girl. It’s a literary accomplishment that sports a lot of shit-hot writing.

A story worth considering is Sodom and Gomorrah, and, in particular, how The Almighty approached Sodom and Gomorrah, the Sin City of antiquity.

The all-knowing Almighty possessed full-knowledge of the evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah’s utter debauchery and murderous decadence.

In front of Him, The Almighty had the totality of the crimes. The cumulative evidence was spread before him.

What did He do?

Did He dispatch a group of wise men to further “investigate” the Sodom and Gomorrah Sin City, a place where crime was law?

Did He solicit the perspective and opinion of the City’s top criminals about their crimes?

No. He had in evidence His infinite knowledge, much like an AI archive.

In other words, did the Almighty do what the complicit, narrative-shaping, collaborator, Western corporate media do, at this stage of Israel’s crime spree?

Of course not.

Take UK’s Channel 4 collaborators, and all western media, for that matter.

“Oh, Almighty Israel, give us your side of The Story,” these media persist in pleading with the Serial-Killer State.

“Give us your take on your latest mass butchery, thievery, looting, and raping. We’re listening, Oh Almighty Israel.”

What is wrong with the Sodom and Gomorrah media!

Even “Democracy Now!”, decent dissident journalists, even they insult reality, this way. Still! They reported, on April the 23rd, that Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil “was killed by an Israeli strike.”

WTF. And what dross!

Like hundreds of Gaza’s journalists before her, Amal Khalil was first targeted by the serial-killer thugs. Next, she was threatened by the serial-killers, who warned her that her head would be separated from her body, if she didn’t quit reporting on their crimes.

Finally, Ms. Khalil was martyred in a triple-tap hit:

Double-tap or triple tap attacks are all terms from the genocidal entity’s lexicon of crime and cowardice:

First, they hit the target, almost always civilian, a journalist in this instance. They follow up with a strike on survivors and rescuers. For good measure, they repeat the “feat.”

The biblical Sodom and Gomorrah was a city whose crimes, the least of which were carnal, did not come close to those of the modern Serial-Killer State.

By bringing up the Sin City of antiquity analogy, you have not heard me advocate that The Almighty’s solution to Sodom and Gomorrah be applied to the modern-day Serial-Killer State.

What you hear me point out, rather, are three things.

First, that The modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, Israel, has done crimes many times more wicked than the crimes for which God erased the biblical sin city by that name.

Second, I am alerting you to the fact that a merciful God did not send Abraham over to ask the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah to weigh in.

“Tell me, oh degenerates of Sodom and Gomorrah, what your opinion is about your own mass butchery, mass thievery, mass looting, and raping.”

The Almighty simply said to Abraham that he’d spare Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham could locate 50, and then 10, righteous people in Sin City of antiquity.

Abraham failed. He could not. There were not even 10 righteous individuals to be found in ancient Sodom and Gomorrah.

Here I come to the third thing I am pointing out:

The near-none—near-none—number of righteous people present in ancient Sodom and Gomorrah obtains in the modern-day Serial-Killer State.

Capital-Crime-by-state-proxy (and plenty Cardinal Sin) is very, very popular in the Serial-Killer State.

I’ll provide you with an update of the accurate percentages of just how popular Capital Crime-by-state-proxy is in Israel.

These numbers have not changed since I wrote, in May of 2024, an essay titled, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?” The answer then like today is, “Oh yeah.”

(Another essay I thoroughly recommend in helping you distinguish real from fake journalism is “Gaza Genocide: The Coverup Begins. Johnny-Come-Lately Journos & Politicos Start Covering Keister,” September 2025.)

In his many media appearances, Ori Goldberg, a longtime, pro-Palestine Israeli academic, has remarked repeatedly that he is among a few thousand righteous souls in Israel. A few thousand! This explains the indelible reservoir of evil, a bottomless pit of it, expressed and acted out by Israeli society’s most faithful representatives: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), which is a citizen army.

So, what did heroic Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil do that got her murdered? In essence, that is the illegitimate question that the toady, fake journalists of Channel 4 and mainstream corporate media have posed to Israel—and have been posing to the Serial-Killer State for three years of a killing spree.

Actually, Israel is in a comfortable groove, a second-nature killing groove, not on a spree.

The act of asking this question must earn the inquiring fake journalist nothing but your revulsion, your contempt.

Ms. Amal Khalil did what hundreds of Gaza’s journalists did before they were targeted by the Serial-Killer State and then martyred, often with their families:

Khalil and colleagues had reported reality on the ground. Ergo, they resisted.  Reporting has become an act of resistance!

At this stage of Israel’s crime spree, channel 4, and similar collaborators (like the BBC, Fox, CNN, etc.), persist in asking the Serial-Killer State for its side of the story.

Enough. And what is wrong with these people?

They must do us a kindness and quit their enacted cover-up and deception.

Would these monstrous media collaborators have cozied up to Jeffry Dhamer to inquire, “Mr. IDF Dahmer, please give us your side of the story regarding the last young man you murdered and cannibalized”?

This is “both side-ism.” Would the Sodom and Gomorrah media do “both side-ism” with Jeffry Dhamer?

At this stage of the Serial Killer State’s crime spree, media collaborators, stateside and abroad, have no right—have absolutely no right—to dish up their reality-defying “both side-ism” bullshit.

WATCH: 

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, April 28
LewRockwell.com, April 29

**

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization. 

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The post Sodom & Gomorrah Media Vs. God: How The Almighty Would NOT Approach The Modern Serial-Killer State appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

…[Israelis] don’t have to explain themselves to the world. Israel [should just] focus on the things that make them incredible …their ingenuity, their innovation, their compassion, …on being exceptional. ~ Jared Kushner

Jared, You forgot killing. Israeli pleasures and pastimes are killing. ~ilana

The US is violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory. ~ilana

We have a “good negotiating team, the best,” blathered Trump, with respect to the individuals he dispatched to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, April 10, to dictate the terms of surrender to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Team Trump was led by Israel firsters and Israeli assets like Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoaff (sic), and Vice President JD Vance, whose eyeliner only enhances the “degeneracy of manners and morals” he embodies and represents.

I’ll make this very simple. Against the Islamic Republic, victim of the US-Israel’s untrammeled criminality, the president’s men have committed the most egregious crime, the crime of aggression, categorized as such in international customary law—and in all systems of law, codified and uncodified.

By violating Iran’s territorial sovereignty and denying that country’s riparian rights in the waterways that abut its territory—by strafing Iranian cities, targeting life-sustaining infrastructure and industries; hospitals, healers and first responders.; historic sites and schools; wantonly murdering thousands of Iranian people, assassinating esteemed political and scientific leaders—Trump has demonstrated that he has assimilated Israel’s military doctrines. The president of the United States of America has Israelized the US Military and is ‘going Amalek’ on the Jewish State’s designated enemies.

The “accumulated evil,” another legal term invoked in international customary law with respect to the “supreme crime” of unprovoked aggression—this rot is evident in all Trump’s dealings and deeds. It is etched on his decaying Dorian Gray like countenance and is manifest in what is disgorged from the American president’s mouth.

By extension, it was quite clear what tone Trump’s team of choice would set for any and all “negotiation” proceedings with Iran.

Once the talks in Islamabad predictably collapsed, it transpired that Vance had likely been holding all information in reserve for Bibi Netanyahu’s edifications and approval.

Confirmed Netanyahu: “I spoke yesterday with Vice President J.D. Vance. He called me from his plane on his way back from Islamabad. He reported to me in detail, as this administration does every day, about the development of the negotiations.”

One wonders why Iran’s foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, would sit down at the negotiating table with this coterie. After all, “in a phone call with his German counterpart, … Araghchi had proclaimed that Iran entered the failed April 10/12 talks in Islamabad with full distrust because of the US repeated breaches and betrayals of diplomacy.”

Foreign Minister Araghchi is certainly a class act. Team Trump/Netanyahu are class enemies. To wit, during the farcical negotiations, the US sneakily attempted to breach the Strait of Hurmuz, over which Iran has natural, riparian property rights. Simultaneously, the Washington Post ran an article by Marc Thiessen, a mediocre neoconservative, calling for the assassination of the Iranian negotiators if they refuse to submit.

Was it, then, prudent for Iran’s finest to grace with their presence such proven bad-faith actors? More important still, why trust Israel’s proxies—the detritus of humanity, human waste by any other name—with your life, Mr. Araghchi? Had not Mr. Araghchi’s predecessor, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharazi and his wife, been murdered in “a targeted United States-Israeli strike on their Tehran home”? Indeed. So, too, is the supreme leader’s successor, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, said to be languishing after wounds inflicted on him by this merged criminal cabal.

Just how duplicitous and vicious a people are we and our Israeli overlords?

A man is only as good as his word. Knowing that America’s word is shit, the Pakistan Air Force is purported to have “deployed an aerial shield” to escort the Iranian delegation, led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf,” safely into Pakistani airspace. On departure, their Pakistani hosts scrambled “advanced fighter jets” to protect the Iranians (to whom they had given a rock-star welcome).

True, one negotiates with foes, not with friends. Known, too, is the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Iranians and their leaders. Hours before his murder by Murder Inc., the equally impressive late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had stated that, as long as 90 million Iranians are without bomb-sheltering bunkers, so too will he, their spiritual leader, remain above ground, outside the shelter. He did. He died.

Iranians and their leaders seem to have so much more love and loyalty in them than their oppressors. But this does not mean you sacrifice your finest to Israel’s American idolaters. Trump and team are capable of surprising calculated, calibrated evil. Jared Kushner, in particular.

Behind Kushner’s sylphlike appearance is a boa constrictor anticipating its next meal. Jared Kushner is the “man,” whose “master plan” for stealing Gaza had been in place for the better part of two years.

That’s correct. Because, when Kushner interests himself briefly in the world at the window, it is to covet things not his. Big things. And Trump’s main “man” in the Middle East does not exactly have a pickpocket’s light fingers.

Kushner is the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, a former convict, now Trump’s ambassador to France. Kushner senior’s criminal shenanigans had been described by U.S. District Judge Jose L. Linares as “disgraceful and reprehensible.”

The son, Kushner Jr., an androgynous-looking, empty husk of a “man,” had been coveting the waterfront property belonging to Gazans for some time—openly since February of 2024. At the time, Anthony Blinken, secretary of state under Joe Biden, the previous genocidal America president, had been shuttling to-and-fro on missions to smooth over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, so as to make it more sellable.

As sellable as Jared Kushner had assessed “Gaza’s waterfront property” to be.

In 2025, on the Sunday, October 19 edition of 60 Minutes, a CBS current-affairs program, Mr. Steve Witkoff revealed inadvertently what we had already gathered: Jared and sidekick Witkoaff (sic) had “been working for two years,” and “Jared had been pushing ‘it.’”  “It” being the grand theft of Gaza, following the commission of the genocide by the Israelis, enthusiastically aided by two American administrations.

Back in March of 2024, in a repulsive vignette, Ivanka’s spouse had let slip that the Gaza “waterfront property could be very valuable.” Kushner was speaking to an audience at an elite American university, which he had been invited to regale. (That tells you all you need to know about the quality—and elan—of intellectual and moral discourse in the USA.)

“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” mused little Lord Fauntleroy to the audience at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Middle East Initiative, “and I’m looking at the situation [in Gaza] and I’m thinking: What would I do if I was there?

Less enlightened people like you and me would want to flood the zone, Gaza, with good food. Minister to the sick and the injured. Rebuild residences destroyed. Exact reparations for survivors. Serve the culprits in their thousands with subpoenas to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. See that these Israelis and their enablers are punished and their victims made whole.

You know, petty quotidian stuff.

Not Kushner. His calculus is different: 

… I would just bulldoze something in the Negev; I would try to move people in there … I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job. … I do think right now opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out, and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.

Soon to follow was Trump’s first gaudy production dubbed the Gaza Plan. After that, late in January of 2026, came Kushner’s Davos Master Slave Plan. There, the dull-witted Zionist presented a garish, hideous slide show to some of the world’s wealthiest men, who paraded their greed for the property of the most imperiled people, the Palestinians.

Parenthetically, I’ll say that I’m sick of Gaza being reduced to no more than an “open-air concentration camp.” Legally, this is true. But Gaza before the Holocaust was quite beautiful, certainly unique. It was a quaint community with a character and a history, some of it ancient. All of it well reflected in its public spaces. Gaza had nothing of the vulgar gilt of a Trump tower. To compare Gaza of yore to the Gaza dreamt up in the Kushner consortium’s Master Slave Plan for the Strip is like comparing a centuries-old church with the heavily adorned Trump White House and White House ballroom.

With Jared, you just don’t know when he will strike. You just know it’ll be as fast as a snake’s thrust. Kushner’s contacts, of course, came to him quick, “by marriage rather than merit.” Jared used his first White House stint, during the first Trump administration, to secure certain connections. “Monetized access,” Fortune Magazine calls it.

Kushner’s firm, Kosher Finances (fine, my tongue here is firmly in my cheek), “earns more than $US80 million a year looking after the money of “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed (known as MBZ); and Emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.” So reports the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Trump, like Kushner and Jewish-Israelis (93 percent of whom support a continued assault on Iran), is outside all moral gravitational pull. Put it this way: You don’t have to marry a Trump to get Trump to betray America.

When the hostile bids for TikTok, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery were initiated by Larry Ellison—the multi-billionaire who is the Israel Defense Forces’ largest donor, supporter and promoter—Trump jumped to it.

Ellison, who is heavily invested and vested in the IDF and their necro-industry, successfully led a Trump-approved financial putsch on American media conglomerates that’ll entirely curtail, even criminalize, speech critical of Israel.

Let not Kushner’s cool antiseptic façade conceal that he is a limbic creature whose deadpan delivery helps him to push the boundaries of propriety and exploit gentile slavishness. Until he can’t. For a while, he was all in on some of the Ellison schemes, ostensibly trying to tilt the bid to favor Ellison. Until he was not. Jared suddenly withdrew his involvement on December 8, 2025.

Luckily for him, Pater had matters in hand. Putty in Israeli hands; Trump muscled TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell their company—it had allowed unfettered pro-Palestine content—to Ellison. That was the end of the voices of so many of us. Especially affected were America’s impassioned young, at whose expense Trump was greatly and illegally enriched, claiming at minimum $10 billion as his TikTok deal ‘brokerage fee’.

Kushner and Trump are certainly partners in vice. In-and-out of “the Warner brawl between Paramount and Netflix.” In-league with the House of Saud, and “backed by Saudi billions”—all that remained was to put Kushner in charge of negotiating with Iran.

Memorably, on the same edition of 60 Minutes mentioned above, and with the fey charm of a state-cutter (a coroner) preparing to carve a corpse, Kushner shrugged a slender shoulder, and languidly mused the following about the genocide in Gaza. The full exchange for the reader’s edification:

LESLEY STAHL: Before the hostages actually come out, you decide to go to Gaza.  …And what did you see?
JARED KUSHNER: it looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area. And then you see these people moving back. And I asked the IDF, ‘Where are they going?’ Like, I’m looking around. These are all ruins. And they said, ‘Well, they’re going back to the areas where their destroyed home was, onto their plot, and they’re gonna pitch a tent.’ And it’s very sad, because you think to yourself, they really have nowhere else to go.
LESLEY STAHL: Would you say now, having been there, that it was genocide?
JARED KUSHNER: No. No.
STEVE WITKOFF: Absolutely not. No, no, there was a war being fought.

Reflexively, Kushner refers to Palestinians as “these people.” They, the Palestinians, are perceived as many times removed from the waxy perfection that are Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. Or, from the perfection of their serial-killer hosts, the divinely appointed Israelis.

So, Kushner, who cannot conceive of the Palestinians as being the proper owners of the land on which they now live homeless—and who plans to appropriate land in which Palestinians have inalienable title—the same Kushner is fit to negotiate with the protectors of the Palestinians, the Iranians?

What am I saying?! The Kushners don’t even see Palestinians as beings. They have, however, made a religion of Israel’s uncontested superiority.

To correspondent Lesley Stahl’s contention that “Israel has become increasingly isolated because of this ‘war’—because of the pounding in Gaza”—and to her attendant inquiry about “what [Israelis] need to do … to—reestablish the good reputation they had”; Kushner never for once bared his fangs. In dizzy rapture over Israel, Kushner intoned quietly:

…[Israelis] don’t have to explain themselves to the world. I think this war has taken a big toll. But if Israel focuses on the things that make them incredible, which is their ingenuity, their innovation, their compassion, they focus on creating and—and just being exceptional, I think that in a couple years from now you’ll see Israel going from controversial to very, very popular again on the world stage.” (CBS News)

That’s right. Israel can do no wrong. The Jewish State has effectively asserted, and been granted by its Western lobbies, a birthright to do genocide, extended to southern Lebanon, which Team Trump says falls outside of its faux ceasefires.

Consequently, and with American imprimatur, Israel is on a “genocidal rampage” in Southern Lebanon, where it blew-up 350 human beings in the span of minutes, on April 9, and where its genocidal forces are erasing village after villages—a way of life—as well as entire city blocks in Beirut’s Dahiya neighborhoods.

To which Trump has responded by huddling even closer: The American president continues to play procurer and pimp for Israel. Team Trump’s message to Israel is, “just be the lovelies that you are.”

To the civilization of Iran, however, Israel’s American flunkies are full of sound and fury. Your “whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” (1). “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” (2)

As if his violent actions so far have not already placed Trump in succession as the most evil individual in the world, he now threatens to blockade a waterway in which Iran has God-given, natural riparian property rights.

**********

Post your comments here: https://barelyablog.com/new-team-netanyahutrump-sinks-iran-talks-kushner-beefs-up-rap-sheet/#comments

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, April 15
LewRockwell.com, April 17

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

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To Israel’s unbridled barbarism, America has responded by joining in. Trump has naturalized the ideas of conquest, ethnic cleansing; genocide and mass murder.~ilana

The Axis of Epstein seeks to destroy the Axis of Resistance.~ilana

Decent, moral people will root for Iran to hold the line against a Satanic confederacy, Israel in the lead, seeking the fragmentation and Gazafication of Iran and Lebanon.

To that end, President Donald Trump had convened “hucksters and shysters” to head his diplomatic corps to the Middle East and beyond, Iran included. In the commission of the greatest Sins known to Man, the “populist” president had recruited billionaires to his White House, who also happen to be Israel-first fixers and assets. Like their boss, both Trump’s point “men” are regarded as “Israeli assets,” as “one Gulf diplomat with knowledge of the talks” told The Guardian, on March 17.

This, the president, to whom Bibi Netanyahu’s word is law, did with a purpose, the outcome of which is in evidence:

The final and full Israelization of the American military, and the attempted Gazafication of Iran and Lebanon. The “Gaza doctrine applied to a new front,” concludes Jonathan Whittall, a humanitarian and fellow South African. “And the American state is in compliance, providing firepower and striving to finally and fully Israelize the American military.”

The crime of aggression is “the supreme international crime” in international customary law. Why so? Because “it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The aggression is not only “a crime against the state that is attacked,” but it is “a crime against individuals who are killed or harmed as a result of war.”

Think “accumulated evil” when you look at Trump, a “second-rate gangster who strove to be Bibi Netanyahu” and has finally and fully arrived.

Without half trying, Trump has made us all confederates in Israel’s crimes. The Israel-US criminal regimes are in contravention of the laws of war, and the Charter of the United Nations—Articles Two and 51, in particular—by which “armed force” shall not be deployed against “the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State.”

For reasons obvious, the twinned Trump-Netanyahu regimes are also an affront to God’s law, the Ten Commandments—according to which you must not covet or murder—and the natural justice, subsumed within which is the libertarian law. The latter pivots on the universal injunction against unprovoked aggression, not on the “national interest fiat standard.” 

Most of all, this obtains “regardless of a declaration of war”! In other words, the murderous parliamentary procedures and protocols of Israel or the US do not usurp eternal codes of morality and ethics. Codified or uncodified, all laws that govern the comity between the community of nations and uphold individual rights have been trashed by the US-Israel coalition of evil.

By rights, Iran then is not only expected to defend its people—but to defend them against any “State [that] allows its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State [USA] for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State [Iran].” By the letter of the law, Iran is fighting fair when it targets the Persian Gulf states, from which attacks on the Iranian people are staged.

These eternal universal laws have been sundered by two rogue, nuclear powers, whose nuclear proliferation is undeclared and unsupervised. Obscenely, the US and Israel have justified their attack on a third state [Iran] that has no nukes and has not initiated war in centuries, by invoking nuclear control and non-proliferation, comments Craig Mokhiber.

This is enough to make one gag.

Trump’s team of choice gave tone to all negotiation proceedings. The Three Amigos—Trump and his Israel-first fixers—have recruited America into their unbridled barbarism. In progress is a system of plunder developed by this coterie. Don’t, however, let the sweep of destruction they leave in their wake fool you. Trump and his loyalists are amassing fortunes. So too are sons Odai and Qusai making money hand over fist.

The one oaf sent abroad to “represent,” Steve Witkoff, is an old pal of the president. A real estate developer and investor, the man knows less than nothing about most things, the world of stocks and bonds excepted.

As we know, Trump is economical with the truth. Like him, Witkoaff has told lies right and left. About the long-suffering, patient, genial Iranian negotiators—a class act if ever there was one—he piled up a heap of lies to a receptive media:

“There’s almost no stopping them; they have an endless supply of [enriched uranium] … They thought they could strong-arm us. … It was very, very clear that it was — it was going to be impossible, probably by the second meeting…

They bragged about having 60% enriched fuel, enough for 11 bombs,” Witkoaff prattled on elsewhere to reporters seven days into the conflict. “They told me and Jared, ‘We’re not going to give you diplomatically what you couldn’t take militarily.’ So you know, I think they’re gonna need a change of attitude. …In a year, if you had someone who didn’t have the courage to do this action, you’d have 30 or 40 nuclear bombs,” Witkoaff crowed in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday.”

Swap family names and place names with current names and place names—and my description of the ramp-up to the onslaught on Iraq obtains today as well as it did in July of 2003 (minor adaptations are italicized):

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous report ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iran that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes and missiles; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.
By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the ‘lattice of lies’ leveled at Iran: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible ‘meetings’ with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iranian—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.
But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Trump’s sub-intelligent case for war on Iran for what it was. He saw Trump as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals’ which James Madison warned war would bring—the same ‘bring ’em on’ grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of ‘war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,’ he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator, Trump.” (“Bush’s 16 Words Miss The Big Picture,” Ilana Mercer, July 16, 2003.)

The difference: Trump’s “degeneracy of manner and morals” was already on display in Gaza. “Genocide was Trump’s gateway crime.” Like the vanquishing of Venezuela, the assault on Iran should’ve been easily foreseen by devotees of the codes of justice aforementioned.

The drift of events being what it is; Wittkoaff is begging Iran “to resume talks.” According to reliable pipelines, the worn and wary Iranians now ignore Wittkoaff’s desperate texts.

The other oaf involved is Jared Kushner, Trump’s “best friend and his son-in-law.”

Initially, Trump had puled about being doubly indebted to Kushner. Kushner, Trump had insisted, was the brain trust of his administration, who “was giving [him] ‘valuable expertise’ on Iran while … working as an ‘informal, unpaid advisor.’” Genuflection has since turned to bitching. Still impenitent himself, Trump now concedes that the war on Iran is a result of Kushner’s “expertise,” “because Kushner told me,” quotes Haaretz.

To Israel, Trump has offered nothing but service and subservience. Yet in 2011/12, Netanyahu, then a defense minister, with Prime Minister Ehud Barak in tow, tried to impose the Iran “ticking-clock deadline” on Barack Obama. We’re attacking, he and Ehud Barak threatened. They failed. Subject to the same Israeli shakedown tactics, even President Biden managed to steel himself. Biden refused to “support an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities or oil installations.”

In his devotion to Israel, Trump has bested Biden, a senile, creedal Zionist.

As expected, in amoral Israel, state and civil society, there is no rankle of conscience. Ninety-three percent of Jewish-Israelis love the assault on Iran. The country operates outside all moral gravitational pull, its finest are currently transmitting footage of the trashing of Lebanese lives and land.

Clearly, to Israel’s unbridled barbarism, America has responded by joining in. Trump has naturalized the idea of conquest, ethnic cleansing; genocide and mass murder.

American forces are strafing Iran’s cities and civilians à la Israel—and in coordination with that odious entity. Like Israel, America is giddy over the prospects of illegally and immorally assassinating those Iranian leaders who heroically volunteer to succeed their many colleagues assassinated. Vulgarly, emulating the Israelis, the US State Department has placed a $10 million bounty on the head of supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, whose father they murdered.

It all has a kind of yeehaw quality to it.

Big Daddy Beelzebub and the “Synagogue of Satan” (Jesus’ words, not mine, in Revelation 2:9 and 3:9) are crass, boorish entities. Countries and cabals whose philosophy is plunder hate refinement and cultivation in others. That Ali Larijani certainly was. A mathematician, computer scientist, PhD in philosophy with an interest in Kant: murdered! What a waste. President Masoud Pezeshkian “has confirmed ‘the cowardly assassination’ of Esmaeil Khatib, Iran’s Intelligence Minister and others: On the homes of the commander of the Basij and the head of the Basij intelligence directorate Israel dropped bombs, for the IDF is an air force, not a fighting force. (To a man, the Israeli Air Force should be served with subpoenas to the Hague.) Murdered too was the spokesperson of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Two (alleged) omissions are noteworthy in the inexhaustive Wikipedia list of Israeli assassinations since 1956: The one dated November 22, 1963; the other occurred on September 10, 2025. 

Americans are now also party to Israel’s chemical warfare, a particularly dastardly war crime prohibited under international humanitarian law. Israel illegally spews banned chemical weapons—white phosphorous—over land across the Levant.

Iranians are thus “gasping for air,” inhaling “airborne crude,” following Israeli airstrikes on “major oil depots and infrastructure in Tehran neighborhoods … as well as in the nearby city of Karaj.” The sky is a blackened dome. The rain has turned acid. Trump’s dissembling  notwithstanding, the airstrikes on the South Pars Gas Field in Iran were, too, a joint, Israel-US effort. Operation Epstein Fury has seen the dropping of “5,000-pound deep penetrator munitions on Iranian missile sites along Iran’s coastline near the Strait of Hormuz,” because, “How dare Iran defend its sovereignty.”

According to UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced. “At least 10,000 residential homes have been damaged or completely destroyed,” all courtesy of the Epstein Alliance. “US forces have struck more than 5,000 targets in Iran since last Saturday.” In all, said Trump’s mini-Israeli Pete Hegseth, “over 15,000 targets have been hit in Iran, while the Iranian Red Crescent reports strikes on over 21,700 civilian sites.” At least 1,444 people have been killed and 18,551 injured by US-Israeli attacks on Iran since February 28, Iran’s Health Ministry says.

With the acquiescence of the collaborator Lebanese government, Israel has murdered more than 1000 of its citizens, amid ongoing airstrike assaults on Lebanon’s infrastructure, a crime to which Israel’s defense minister has copped. With one million people displaced,” Lebanon is nearing “breaking point,” reports Drop Site News.

Since writing the previous paragraph, the number of murdered Iranians has risen to 1500. All figures curated above are already obsolete. Understand: This is in the nature of the serial-killer state and its pathetic, perfidious American poodle.

Fact: Israel poses a grave existential threat to its neighbors! As if the enormity of this threat is not terrifying enough—Iran (Lebanon and Yemen) must now contend with a distinctly flippant approach taken in the West by “credentialed” elites (and some stellar people, inadvertently) in discussing the possibility that Israel might use tactical nuclear weapons on its victims. 

Predictions, classifications, derivations, etiologies: Man has always performed these mental operations. However, the war gaming going on under the guise of military scholarship is both repulsive and dangerous, given the “place of massive impunity” that has been carved out for Netanyahu and his complicit countrymen. As I see it, the gaiety someone like Robert Pape affects, while huffily flogging his war-on-Iran predictions, comes under the “Ugly American” category.

As a method of war, as a military doctrine, Israel is conducting annihilatory campaigns with the intent to bring about the disintegration of Iran as a functioning, sovereign state capable of defending itself. An ideal Iran, from rogue state Israel’s perspective, is a place to which Israeli “fighter” pilots “can return every six months to ‘mow the grass.’” (See Double Down News)

Heightened by American collaboration with a genocidal entity; flippant, morally debased exchanges are a consequence of decreased public and pundit sensitivities to all this legalized crime.

The use of tactical nuclear weapons must be decried with the lash of logic, not logistics, and in clear moral language. Protest, rather than prattle to show how much you know or how predictive your war gaming is.

While Col. Douglas McGregor had underestimated the age of the pre-Christian Persian civilization by a few thousand years during an interview; the colonel is commended for dubbing Iran “a civilizational nation.” In Iran, the Axis of Epstein, whose combined age is 327 years, is trying to destroy a civilization 6000 to 8000 years old. Pray they fail. 

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©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, March 25
LewRockwell.com, March 28

Ilana Mercer, paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA 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, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization.

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