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

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

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

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

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

WATCH:

We appreciate your Follow here.

RELATED READING:

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

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

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

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

If Israeli society is sick; then so are its cobelligerent backers and boosters ~ilana

Inarguably, to condemn Israel’s industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza ought to be ethically straightforward. Basic really.

That Israel is committing the “the crime of all crimes” against the Palestinians of Gaza is not within the realm of opinion.

That the Global North is standing stock-still in the face of this well-documented holocaust is not in dispute.

That the United States is an active participant in war crimes, funding and arming Israel in contravention of international humanitarian law , a plethora of US laws (having, without attached conditions, delivered more than 100 arms shipments to Israel since October 7), and the natural justice, articulated by Cicero as early as 106-43 B.C.: these are all fact.

That America has provided the Jewish State with diplomatic cover—running interference for it, so that it may continue to its evil ends—until recently vetoing three (albeit symbolic) international attempts to stop Israel: this, too, is immutably true.

Right and wrong are universal, not relative. The Sixth Commandment is not opinion, but a species of the inviolable natural law. Neither is it optional. “Thou shalt not murder” is called a commandment for a reason. There are no tribal privilege clauses attached to it. Like gentiles, Jews are enjoined against murder, to say nothing of mass murder.

Yet Israelis now flout the Sixth Commandment with ugly audacity. They appear to believe that their sectarian supremacy transcends the universal moral order to which international law, the natural law and the Decalogue give expression.

With its actions, so “conspicuous and outrageous,” Israel has “knocked the cosmos out of kilter” (a lovely line by novelist Kathryn Harrison). Such is the moral turpitude of the Israel Über Alles crowd—Jewish and gentile, stateside and abroad—that they appear incapable of distinguishing evidence from assertion, and facts from feel-good fiction; they can’t tell right from wrong. By necessity, then, any preface to an essay about Israel’s manifestly intentional annihilation of the Gaza Strip must turn into a primer in ethics.

Clearly, if Israeli society is sick; then so are its cobelligerent backers and boosters.

AMERICA’S CEASEFIRE DECEPTION

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

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

“Ceasefire” in previous U.S. drafts amounted to Orwellian News Speak. Having never once called for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire, the U.S. had perfunctorily predicated temporary ceasefire resolutions on the return of Israeli hostages. Whereas it was obligated morally to compel Israel to forthwith cease and desist its systematic and sustained onslaught on Gaza’s civilians; the US had opted, until March 25, to merely condition the temporary cessation of immoral and illegal mass murder of innocent Palestinians on the release of Israeli hostages, in effect tethering a “ceasefire” to the return of the Israeli hostages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were the International Court of Justice an effective and just organization it would have issued, not temporary ceasefires, but some sort of binding cease and desist order, some manner of restraining order, if you will, instructing the Israel Defense Forces to stop its depredations.

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

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

UN SECURITY COUNCIL CEASEFIRE IS BINDING

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

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

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

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

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

If left to the rudderless Europeans and Americans—they’ve done not a thing to stop what Ron Unz has termed the first televised mass murder in history—it is for a heavenly tribunal that we will be waiting.

Scars will knit, but the dead don’t rise, and spry young limbs won’t grow back. More than ten children lose their legs daily by the IDF. Spare a thought for the lot of these children hobbled for life, for the US and world leaders have not.

Again, these judicial and political knaves and curs (with apologies to the canine community) could have cut off the supply of munitions to the culprits. (Some have. God bless Canada for placing an embargo on the export of kayaks and maple syrup to Israel.) Without Americans (you and me, the taxpayers); Israel would not last a day in its brave battle against mothers and their babies. To repeat: We could hobble Israel’s offensive by the imposition of sanctions and boycotts, by freezing Israeli assets worldwide, as was done to Russians. Arrest warrants could have been issued, as the International Criminal Court had for Russians.

In essence, stop murdering and maiming Palestinians, no conditions attached.

ANNIHILATION, NOT WAR

Israel’s war is not a war by any known definition

A ceasefire is called upon in war. This is not a war.

Ceasefire is defined as “an agreement, usually between two armies, to stop fighting in order to allow discussions about peace.” Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is not a war by any definition. These are not two armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between opposing warrior forces. There is no parity here.

Why is Gaza 2023/2024 not a war?

If combat veteran Alan Shebaro, U.S. Special Forces, fails to convince you with his experience, I will follow with fact, law and reason. Listen to Shebaro tell it to a Texas City Council in McKinney:

“I know war. What is going on in Palestine right now is not a war. It is the dehumanization, it’s the genocide, it’s the ethnic cleansing of a specific people to take their land. This is wrong … I’ve seen horrible things, but this [Gaza] takes it to an entirely new level.”

Does any military man half-decent swallow the lie that, in its orgiastic annihilation of Gaza, Israel is fighting another army fair and square?! Also a misnomer is the phrase “military operation.” It mocks out of meaning any linguistic convention that attaches words to the things they signify.

Valor was thus lost, not stolen, when, on October 24, 2023, Colonel Jack Jacobs, a retired US Army veteran—and a man who valiantly spoke up against the invasion of Iraq (ditto)—noodled on about Israel’s “expanding ground operations.” Once a principled voice, Colonel Jacobs lost respectability, right there, for there is no military operation an upstanding military man can get behind in Gaza, where easily 80 percent of the casualties are innocent civilians.

Hip to this last fact is U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. In a quickly retracted statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Congress, on February 19, “that more than 25,000 women and children had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7.”

The Pentagon later “clarified” that estimate, insisting that, because the figure came from the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, not U.S. intelligence; it was unreliable. During that February congressional hearing, Austin had been asked how many Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israel. “It is over 25,000,” he had reflexively blurted out: This, according to the Pentagon, was but a monetary lapse of reason.

US bafflegab contradicts what I referred to, on January 4, as the “your lying eyes” standard, to use Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto:

“As they were turning Gaza into Dresden on TV, before our very eyes, Israel’s quicksilver state propagandists were also telling us, their American funders, that ‘this is not happening. …Who are you going to believe? Democratic Israel, or your ‘lying eyes’?’ I believe my ‘lying eyes,’ thank you very much. Those ‘lying eyes’ speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. … [And the numbers of dead, injured and displaced] are deemed ‘broadly reliable,’ by all reputable humanitarian, aid-rendering organizations worldwide, backed as they are by the science of satellite and radar.”

Let us indulge Secretary Austin’s already out-of-date estimate, in order to establish here that Israel’s “operation” is not a military operation behind which any military man worth his salt can stand:

Assume that 25,000 is the number of women and children murdered by Israelis, although it is more, not less, considering that thousands are buried beneath the rubble and more souls are being assassinated as we speak: To wit, in the 24 hours following the Security Councils’ vote, 76 Palestinians were murdered in Gaza.

IF 30,000 is the total—men and women, combatants and civilians—murdered heretofore; then women and children make up 83.3 percent of this total. (25,000/30,000) *100

IF 32,000 is the total number of souls slain to date; then the percentage of women and children is 78.1. (25,000/32,000) *100

IF a total of 33,000 human beings were slaughtered; then the percentage of women and children among them is 75.5. (25,000/33,000) *100

And if the number killed rises to 35,000, as it has, and the number of women and children assassinated is, by some miracle, held constant—their percentage would still constitute (25000/35000) *100= 71.4.

Israel’s war is not a war by any definition.

Unctuous UN ultimatums notwithstanding, as of March 21, Netanyahu had vowed to continue his evil clown’s campaign—so “handsomely equipped to fail” I observed in November—executed by a corrupt, clownishly inept and consistently depraved army.

Why, then, are Israel’s 2023-2024 actions in Gaza genocidal?

WHY GENOCIDE?

Four conditions of genocide fulfilled; not one law of war heeded: In the course of its genocidal campaign; Israel has violated every law of war codified in Customary International Humanitarian Law ~ilana

How do you compensate a people whose society you’ve cannibalized? ~ilana

In a November 2, 2023 essay, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” I explained why, logically at least, Israel has met the threshold for criminal intent, mens rea.

“If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands-upon-thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy.”

“The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which tens of thousands civilians are dying: This is murder with malice aforethought, a concept that includes ‘deaths resulting from actions that display a depraved indifference to life.‘ Further depraved indifference to life was Israel’s throttling of supplies of water, food and power to the millions of aid-dependent Gazans, as Israel knew full-well this would imperil civilians indirectly.”

More than industrial-scale mass murder of individual people—Israel is engaged in the eradication of Gazans as a People. Objectively speaking, what Israel has visited on Gazans and their little enclave is not self-defense; but irreparable, wanton mass murder, a “blitzkrieg, by any other name,” combined with ethnic cleansing, and an orchestrated program of starvation against helpless civilians, who are still being indiscriminately and daily bombed, buried—alive and dead—evicted for life.

Even though over 80 percent of the Palestinians of Gaza have been driven from their homes—have no homes to return to; and though over 70 percent of structures in Gaza are gone, pulverized by the IDF—so-called interdiction missions by the IAF, Israeli Air Force, are ongoing, in “flagrant violation of its obligations under international law, both as an occupying power and as a party to the hostilities” (via Gisha), and “in blatant breach of core provisions under the Geneva and Hague Conventions.”

So says an international law consortium out of a Middlesex University London. So say countless reputable human rights organizations, who have submitted amicus briefs in American courts to enjoin President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Austin from providing weapons and other forms of support for Israel’s Total War on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Hoping to skirt jurisdictional limitations, “the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights” has been joined by “an esteemed array of individuals and organizations from around the world, including 139 NGOs.”

Evidence of Israel’s trespass is everywhere.

As I write, raids on the Al Shifa hospital, begun on March 19, continue apace. As of March 22, Israel’s fourth raid on what remains of this hospital was in progress. Over 140 doctors, patients, journalists and other refugees had been summarily executed, reports the indefatigable Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” Thousands of refugees crammed into the hospital are currently being turned out, evicted.

All to “thwart terrorism.” Its missionary pursuit of murder in hospitals; Israel blankets with tidy lies.

Israel’s Hamas-made-me-do-it religious doctrine—this concealing of the truth for the faith—insults the intelligence. To listen to the Taqiyyah practiced by these Uncle Sam-sponsored Svengalis; “Palestinians are all terrorists.” Or “terrorist accomplices.” “Israel has effectively characterized the whole population in Gaza as human shields or terrorist accomplices as a matter of legal policy,” observed Francesca Albanese, speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where she presented her report, “Anatomy of a Genocide.” Ms. Albanese is a scholar, and a UN special rapporteur on the human-rights dispensation in the West Bank and Gaza. On March 27, she issued her report which found “reasonable grounds” to conclude that Israel is culpable of genocide in Gaza.

Gamely repeating Israel’s mantras; Matthew Miller, spokesperson for the United States Department of State, labeled and libeled Ms. Albanese as an “antisemite.” Yes, terrorism. Also, antisemitism if you disagree with Israel, or dare to disbelieve a country’s whose coin of the realm has become state terror.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, the United Nations detailed the warp and woof of survival as a woman in Gaza. At that time, 9000 Palestinian women had been slaughtered by the IDF; 63 women were being slain daily by the same force, including 37 mothers, each and every day.

While the women’s guerrilla movement stateside is galvanizing to go to the polls to ensure their right to evict fetuses from their wombs; Gaza’s women are fighting to keep their fully formed babies alive, fed, safe from unguided bunker-buster bombs lobbed by Israel, and provided by America.

Again: Around 80 percent of Gazans have been driven from their homes. More than 70 percent of structures in the Gaza Strip were reported demolished or damaged, three months ago by the Wall Street Journal. More current satellite radar is available, courtesy of researchers like Jamon Van Den Hoek. His March 13 mapped destruction via satellite reads thus:

IN North Gaza, 69.7 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged.

IN Gaza City, it’s 73.7 percent.

IN Deir El-Balah, it’s 54.1 percent.

IN Rafah, an Israeli “work” in progress, 29.5 percent of buildings have been destroyed or damaged.

Gazans have no residences or industries—no life-sustaining infrastructure—to return to upon the implementation of a permanent ceasefire. Gone are their homes, places of work and worship—businesses, agriculture, fisheries, food-production industries and the arable land attached. Gone are the roads, power plants, sanitation and drainage-works, water wells and wastewater treatment plants conduits of electricity, potable water, shelter and food distribution.

Mosques, churches and schools (primary, secondary, tertiary) have been vaporized. Most hospitals, too. Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian academic, clinician, and longtime volunteer in the occupied territories, speaks to “never-before-seen viciousness; sadism beyond evil.” Gaza had a network of European-style, teaching hospitals, where evidence-based medicine was practiced. Out of over 30 such hospitals, about three remain in tatters. Hundreds of the Strip’s top healthcare providers, who served heroically until hit, have been murdered, often while ministering to patients. The Palestinians of Gaza are now perishing from sepsis, curable and treatable diseases, starvation and dehydration, overseen by Israel. (According to Gisha, which means access in Hebrew.)

Lost with Gaza’s infrastructure is the very fabric of a society—immeasurable human capital—including indissoluble, extended-family networks, the kind of generational bonds we in the West can only dream of, whittled down and depleted in numbers and in their native energy. A people’s cemeteries and archived history have been decimated, their antiquities and artifacts bulldozed and pillaged; their universities flattened; their artists and intellectuals hunted from house to house and extinguished.

Broken, Tariq Haddad, MD, an American cardiologist, told of 100 members of his extended family eliminated. Images of beautiful people, in the full flowering of their vitality (most were highly educated) flashed across the “Democracy Now!” broadcast’s screen. In February, Dr. Nasser Abu-El-Noor, dean of the Faculty of Nursing at the Islamic University of Gaza, along with seven members of his family, sheltering in their home, were murdered. Dr. Medhat Saidam, a renowned plastic surgeon, is buried beneath a building.

Were the High Court in the Hague ever to do its job and engage forensic electronics to that end—it could easily trace the psychological warfare waged, say, against Dr. Refaat Alareer. He had figured out that, “There’s nowhere safe in Gaza, so he chose to stay in his house.” By guerrilla journalist Max Blumenthal’s telling, Alareer and family were sadistically hounded, telephonically, by IDF officers, as they fled from one abode to the next. The IDF finally assassinated he and six members of his family. Myself, I followed a young journalist, Ayat Al Khaddour, who vlogged heroically from her home in Gaza until she was no more, stopped by an IDF-lobbed “precision” bomb, along with members of her family.

Israel has clearly and systematically eliminated the human capital of Gaza in ways diabolically purposeful, irreparable and unforgivable. The best of Gaza are gone; entire Palestinian family trees truncated forever. Why purposeful? Just as the U.S.-backed Israeli military knows the precise azimuths of their targets, including that of the assassinated Refaat Alareer—in the same vein do Israelis have the GPS coordinates of “major infrastructure projects funded by the U.S. government.” These, reports the Associated Press, have been largely spared.

All this is what Article II of the Genocide Convention means by clause number four: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” (Amnesty International: Genocide: The Legal Basis For Universal Jurisdiction.)

To Israel’s rap sheet add at least three additional genocidal actions stipulated in Article II of the Genocide Convention, perpetrated “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (Ibid). These are:

* Killing members of the group.

* Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

* Direct and public incitement to commit genocide.

As after the Holocaust, responsibility for decent reparations—Israelis to the Palestinians of Gaza—will need to be worked out. But how do you compensate a people whose society you’ve cannibalized?

EVERY LAW OF WAR FLOUTED

Genocide is a process, not an act. It is the destruction of a population from its roots ~Francesca Albanese

Four conditions of genocide fulfilled; not one law of war obeyed. In the course of its genocidal campaign; Israel has violated every law of war, codified in Customary International Humanitarian Law:

Israel has violated the law of proportionality:

‘Launching an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated, is prohibited.’ (Jean-Marie Henckaerts and Louise Doswald-Beck, Customary International Humanitarian Law, 2012, Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Israel has violated the principle of distinction:

‘The undisputed cornerstone of international humanitarian law (IHL) is the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants, which obliges belligerents to distinguish at all times between persons who may be lawfully attacked, and persons who must be spared and protected from the effects of the hostilities. In order to avoid any ambiguity, these two categories of persons must be mutually exclusive…’ (Ibid)

The law of distinction is an “intransgressible principles of international customary law” (Nils Melzer, The Oxford Handbook of International Law in Armed Conflict, Oxford University Press, 2015)

Israel has violated the principle of precautions in attack:

‘In the conduct of military operations, constant care must be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects. All feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.’ (Jean-Marie Henckaerts and Louise Doswald-Beck, Customary International Humanitarian Law (2012), Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Only neolithic beasts like Jonathan Conricus or IDF mouth Keren Hajioff, former IDF spokesmen for Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, would have the gall to praise the care uniformed IDF take with human life. In case you’ve missed these Israeli bulwark bureaucrats, Conricus and Hajioff are now fellows at the American Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as a perusal of the FDD member page would indicate. Following stints in which these two mindlessly chorused for and covered up the goings-on in Gaza—Conricus and Hajioff have migrated to an American “think tank,” likely promoting the interests of entities not the United States, and overriding the balancing forces of regionalism in the Middle East.

In any event, it is writ in Customary International Humanitarian Law that “Specifically Protected Persons and Objects” be protected: Medical (“685 health workers have been killed and 900 wounded”), religious personnel and objects, humanitarian relief personnel (196 killed) and objects, personnel and objects involved in a peacekeeping mission, civilian journalists (103 dead), cultural property, and the natural environment. In Gaza, these numbers are rendered obsolete by the hour.

Still, nothing excites shame in Israeli leaders. Very many of them, including the prime minister, have called on IDF soldiers to show no mercy. This, too, International Law forbids. Quaintly put, prohibited are “directions to give no quarter,” as in  “threatening an adversary therewith or conducting hostilities on this basis.” Prohibited.

“Genocide is a process, not an act,” explains Francesca Albanese aforementioned. It is the “destruction of a population from its roots.” Lara Elborno, another articulate human-rights lawyer, has ventured the following clincher, and I paraphrase:

Had Israel not dropped a single bomb on Gaza, but had done no more than cut off food, water and electricity to its 2.3 million residents—these action alone would suffice to constitute genocide under the treaties.

RAFAH

Devil stretches; devil flexes ~Hilary Mantel

Violence hangs in the air. In truth, it was mid-February when the Israel Defense Forces had commenced its onslaught on 1.5 million Palestinian refugees, who had been corralled from the north to the south, and now huddle helplessly in Raffah.

In its ravening appetite for destruction, Israeli leadership had explicitly conveyed that it would “not relent in [its] assault on the Gaza Strip until they’ve effectively accomplished the destruction of the entire strip. And their attacks now on Rafah, in particular, demonstrate that the last refuge, the last piece of the Gaza Strip that hasn’t been effectively destroyed, is not only in their sights, but already under their bombs.” (Criag Mokhiber, “Democracy Now!,” March 26)

According to Customary International Humanitarian Law, cited so far, “Directing an attack against a zone established to shelter the wounded, the sick and civilians from the effects of hostilities is prohibited.” (Jean-Marie Henckaerts and Louise Doswald-Beck, Customary International Humanitarian Law, 2012, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Chapter 11 – Protected Zones.)

Israeli leadership, political and other, pollute the ear with an unbroken stream of genocide-justification jargon. The barbaric nature of their discourse complements their army’s actions. “Conspicuous and ostentatious” about their depredations; the uniformed IDF appear proud to revel in terrorizing and murdering Palestinian civilians forsaken. In general, YouTube runs cover for the IDF. Still, there are countless videos of nauseating brutality, in which, as though in a video game, IDF soldiers vaporize young men picking their way through rubble; they mock their victims, invade their homes; filch from their businesses, and rummage through the piteous intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed. Other acts of defilement are too lewd to recount. (See BBC News’ “Israeli soldier videos from Gaza could breach international law, experts say.” Or, watch the Glenn Greenwald’s “Shocking IDF Social Media Videos Mock Gazans—Expose New Atrocities.”)

GOOD PEOPLE: GALLOWAY & BUSHNELL

 Wars are a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight ~ilana

 How many generations of young people can you raise on Big Lies—such as that Israel and its sugar daddy are prosecuting a fair, legitimate war, rather than waging Total War against innocent civilians? ~ilana

“Genocide Joe” and the foreign agents known as the “American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose Israel-First focus makes them a fifth column; Trump with Jared Kushner and his better-half: These are America’s 2024 election options.

The Biden-AIPAC bloc has begun whispering sweet nothings in the ears of Israel’s Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival of Bibi Netanyahu (Likud). The AIPAC-run Biden bloc would like you to believe that a chasm in “Israel’s wartime leadership” has opened up. Biden’s bedroom talk with Benny is intended to impress upon the two Jewish supremacists the danger of approaching some sort of political precipice. In the end, Netanyahu and Gantz, who both officiate in their country’s War Cabinet, are philosophically one, inseparable, spherical Gluteus Maximus.

Or, “two flapping cheeks of the same ass,” in George Galloway’s delightfully ribald language. Galloway was describing the political amalgam arrayed against truth and justice in the United Kingdom. As I noted in 2005, Galloway is a master flyter: the ancient Scottish form of invective for which a quick mind and a masterful command of the English language are a must.

Galloway’s capacity for extemporaneous verbal swordplay is not the only thing that distinguishes this jousting member of the British parliament. MP Gallaway and his Worker’s Party ran on foreign policy, in Rochdale, UK, and, in particular, he secured “thumping majorities” in a protest vote for Gaza—and against our overlords, stateside and in Israel, whose new norm is to be out-and-proud about genocide.

There will be flyting words aplenty to come.

The normalization of genocide is what U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell was protesting when he set himself alight, on February 28. Airman Aaron Bushnell, of blessed memory, self-immolated to protest that upon which Galloway secured his victory in Rochdale: Israel’s war on Gaza.

Bushnell died horrifically, yet heroically, like a man—calm and rational—as he recited his reason for self-immolation: “I will no longer be complicit in genocide. This is what our ruling class has decided is the new normal.” Airman Bushnell was driven not by mental disease, but by a morally depraved society that supports de facto terrorist state Israel, with American moral imprimatur, its money and materiel.

Wars are a rich man’s affair and a poor man’s fight. American soldiers have always served as collateral damage in the nefarious projects of Uncle Sam and its client states. Their causes and concerns, unless jingoistic and Fox-News friendly, seldom rate a mention. But, following Aaron Bushnell’s demise; many members of our military symbolically burned their uniforms in disgust, only to be mocked by Conservative Inc (or ConOink, as I call them). But they are right, and “this is wrong,” inveighed Alan Shebaro. “There’s nothing more American than speaking out against what’s wrong.” Like elite soldier Alan Shebaro, “Bushnell decried U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide.”

At its core, what Bushnell was protesting is something even-more fundamental. For words are symbols. They are used as agreed-upon conventions to make sense of the world. What happens when these shared linguistic constructs no longer correspond to the things they are supposed to describe? Bushnell, who was in-the-know militarily, must have grown angrier and angrier as the symbols his society deploys clashed with the reality these symbols were supposed to signify. Particularly did he appear susceptible to the schizophrenogenic communications transmitted, on an ongoing basis, by the many Orwellian Ministries of Truth.

For how many generations of young people can you raise on Big Lies—such as that Israel and its sugar daddy are prosecuting a fair, legitimate war, rather than waging Total War against innocent civilians? Total War is a term to describe an all-out war against any and all. “What I saw was not war, but annihilation,” lamented Dr. Ifran Galaria, volunteer in Gaza, to MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

CALIGULA KUSHNER

Jared Kushner, the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, and an empty husk of a man, is coveting the waterfront property of a conquered and dying people ~ilana

These days, “bloody Blinken, secretary of genocide”—a moniker given to him by the grand ladies of “Code Pink,” who have camped out at the Blinken mansion—has been coming and going to the Middle East. In dizzy rapture over Israel, Blinken shuttles to-and-fro on missions to smooth over Israel’s assault on Gaza; make it more genteel, more sellable.

Sellable as Jared Kushner assesses “Gaza’s waterfront property” to be.

With the fey charm of a state-cutter—a coroner—preparing to carve a corpse; philosopher-king Kushner shrugged a slender shoulder, as he languidly mused:

‘I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now, and I’m looking at the situation [in Gaza] and I’m thinking: What would I do if I was there? … 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.’

This waterfront property “could be very valuable” Kushner let slip, on February 15, to an audience at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Middle East Initiative.

Kushner, you recall, had been Trump’s point person on foreign policy, the Middle East and much else. Little Lord Fauntleroy had even been entrusted with “preparing a peace plan for the Middle East.”

That Kushner had been invited to regale an audience at an elite American university is all you need to know about the intellectual and moral tenor of discourse in the USA. In this repulsive vignette, Jared Kushner, the nepotistic scion of a dodgy New York realtor, and an empty husk of a man, is coveting the waterfront property of a conquered and dying people.

For once, America’s Fourth Column (media) was in the peculiar position of covering up and finessing Kushner’s unfiltered remarks. After all, his position is that of the legacy media and their political paymasters.

BILL CLINTON: ‘WHO’S THE F–KING SUPERPOWER HERE?’

What if America were the Good Guy? Gaza is a desert of the dead and the dying. Let the American Super Power ride to the rescue ~ilana

Israel’s contempt for the United States is complete.

Unsatisfied with his butcher’s bill in Gaza, demiurge Netanyahu had, at first, cancelled Israel’s delegation to Washington, furious that the United States of America failed to veto a UN ceasefire proposal. 

“After his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 1996,” recounts Patrick Theros, of “Responsible Statecraft,” “Bill Clinton vented his fury before his staff about his visitor’s apparent presumptions about the balance of power in the bilateral relationship. ‘Who the f–k does he think he is?’ Clinton reportedly bellowed. ‘Who’s the f–king superpower here?’”

Indeed.

Gaza is a desert of the dead and the dying. Israel, however, is miring humanitarian aid in capriciously sadistic paperwork and protocol. An example is their “dual-purpose” doctrine: “Did you know that syringes, desperately stuck in Palestinian veins deflated by dehydration, can be dual-purpose items?” Yeah! Used for terrorism, found in the tunnels, propping-up the tunnels, the lot.

If you can believe it, our “allies” the Israelis are hindering the delivery of American aid to Gaza.

Come again?! You heard me. It now transpires that, in thrall to Bibi Netanyahu, the “Super Power” is planning to construct a floating pier—a run-around around the Israelis, who had also, long ago, tampered with Gaza’s little port, situated as it was, once-upon-a-time, “near the Remal district of Gaza City,” of blessed memory.  

Commensurate with Israel’s outrageous excesses, and the crazed riffs coming out of Israeli heads; Israel has established itself as a war criminal. By letting the blood of Palestinians for six months, and showing no intention of letting up; Israel has forfeited its right to protest decisive American intervention. Besides, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Under present conditions, a president who spoke like President Clinton might have made Americans proud. For once, the American Super Power could entertain ordering Israel, convulsing in paroxysms of evil, to cease and desist.

As easily, and after ordering Israel to stand down; America could… commandeer Israel’s Sde Dov or Ben Gurion Airport. Or, both. This is an emergency. Fleets of our assorted military and cargo 747 aircraft would land like angels at an Israeli airport adjacent to Gaza.

Great big engines would be gunned.
Out would roar all the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks converted to a mission of mercy.
Into Northern Gaza would rush these life-saving American trailer trucks, carrying supplies and sustenance for the starving.
Down would go Israel’s fences and in would flow non-stop supplies, as though on a loop.

Landing in and delivering life-saving supplies from a well-appointed Israeli facility into northern Gaza, and throughout the Strip: This is the fastest and smartest way to succor a dying people.

Instead, America chooses to fellate Bibi NetanYahoo, his barking mad military and their berserk countrymen, 88 percent of whom “give a positive assessment of the performance of the IDF in Gaza until now. (Tamar Hermann, “War in Gaza Survey 9,” Israel Democracy Institute, January 24, 2024), 58 percent of whom grumble that not enough force has been deployed to date; and 68 percent of whom say “they do not support the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

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RELATED READING:

“Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder And Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza,” Ilana Mercer, January 4, 2024

“Gaza vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines’ Superiority,” by Ilana Mercer, December 4, 2023

“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague,” by Ilana Mercer, November 14, 2023

“Bibi Obliterates Memory of Oct. 7 Martyrs, Creates New Martyrs in Gaza,” by Ilana Mercer, November 2, 2023

PODCAST: “Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder In Gaza”:
https://rumble.com/embed/v46ks8i/?pub=fyb9t

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©2024 ILANA MERCER
Published at:
1. The Unz Review, March 31
2. Serialized in full on the Mises Institute’s Power & Market:
* “The State of Israel Abandons Law and Morality in Its War on Gaza,” Part I, April 2
* “The US Vetoes International Action on Gaza,” Part II, April 3
* Why Genocide: Every Law of War Has Been Violated in Gaza, Part III, April 4
* “Gaza: What If America Were the Good Guy?” Part IV, April 5, 2024
3. Serialized in part at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Part I
3. Serialized in part at The New American: Part I & Part II

The post ISRAEL: In Violation Of God’s Law, Natural Justice, The Laws Of War, And All Customary International Humanitarian Law appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

State ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another ~ilana

 Between the State and the Corporation, Homo sapiens has been reduced to a Hobbesian, hedonistic version of homo economicus and a sad iteration of homo solitarius ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of “The Paleolibertarian Guide” (TPG) compendium.

“Deep Tech,” my preferred term for the high-tech sector, denotes how deeply the head honchos of high-tech have penetrated and poisoned the American public and private sectors. As a coinage, Deep Tech is superior to Big Tech. Drawn from the term “Deep State,” the term “Deep Tech” better captures Big Tech’s overarching, enervating and tentacular reach into state and civil society.

“Deep State,” of course, is no conspiracy. Before the Left turned the term against the Right; it had long since been deployed on the Left and by libertarians to denote the state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally. To all intents and purposes, Deep Tech has become almost as powerful as the State in molding the Little Guy into a right-thinking Global Citizen.

In The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, I make the case that state ideology and the corporate creed have converged. Between them, they suborn the individual in one way or another. The State no longer merely silhouettes civil and commercial society; but is absorbing it. What’s more, corporate culture, my purview in this volume, has been thoroughly co-opted by the State. Willingly so.

It has become the reflexive habit of corporations, not necessarily malevolently, to work together as well as to collude with government, to snuff out all lineaments of subversion in labor. After all, the progressive ideology is a gospel which these industry leaders never cease to proclaim and act upon. And if you fail to conform to it; they’ll fire you, isolate you, expose you, silence you, cancel you for good. These observations apply across party-lines.

“The Aberrant Economy” in this work denotes the attitude of the multinationals toward economic growth. This attitude is today rooted not in healthy, community-based practices stateside and abroad, but in some aberrant economic gigantism. The derogatory diagnosis of economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris, greed, and devout woke religiosity is warranted, I believe. Acromegaly is a physical deformity. In the human body it is caused by overproduction of certain compounds and is characterized by aberrant enlargement of the structure under discussion.

A diagnosis of economic acromegalia in Deep Tech is warranted ~ilana

The economic acromegalia or giantism diagnosed here in Deep Tech is one that manages to trample individual rights and other elementary decencies. Let us thus not confuse the metastatic multinational, motivated mostly by stratospheric wealth and a woke worldview—itself a gutter-like philosophy—with a business propelled by the good old-fashioned profit motive, whose growth is sustained by individuals and families tethered to corporeal communities, as opposed to colonies of imported laborers. Individuals, families, living in authentic, organic communities: These misty attachments are anathema to, and enemy of, the multinational’s clubby elites.

I underscore, as if in red ink, and deconstruct in detail how the awfulness of the COVID years, in particular, was underwritten by giant government, Big Pharma, and its latest malignant offshoot, the COVID Cartel—Disease X ad infinitum, if you will—in informal cahoots with social media. Again, a state within a state, operating, for the most, extra-constitutionally.

Just how control is achieved—more reflexively than conspiratorially—I demonstrate by taking the reader through the COVID years, when “Agency And State Capture” were consolidated. I show how and why the Grand Old Party, Republicans, will always be missing in action on matters of individual and constitutional rights. On all matters, actually:

The overton window alludes to a range of ideas once considered unthinkable, but now normalized. With their flaccid, crushingly stupid responses to most situations—Republicans have helped to normalize tyranny ~ilana

And I touch on the deformed foundations of the American Third-Party run healthcare system, down to how Deep Pharma’s patent privileges subvert market-based profits and free market medicine. Fault Deep Pharma, I counsel, not China.

In fact, not mere jobs, but “the very stuff of life is outsourced” by High-Tech, which loathes a labor market. (Chapter 7.) After reading “Homeless In The Homeland” (Chapter 6), the most heartbreaking of the book’s chapters, the reader will understand not only how “High-Tech Compounds Homelessness,” but that “homelessness in the United States is both physical and metaphysical”:

When your home belongs to The World; it’s everybody’s home, and nobody’s home, not even yours, which means you could find yourself homeless ~ilana

Ultimately, the sundering of cherished natural and constitutional rights by entities whose market penetration and capitalization equal those of many countries combined is why a solution is urgent.

Free-traders such as myself contend that it is worse than corrosive for big, powerful business to usher in a mind-controlling creed which they enforce against the Little Guy—on pain of social and financial demise—so that his speech is confined to politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars, the kind that sap and leach away the individual’s native power. Such an immoral drive ought to have miscarried a long time ago. A solution is provided in Chapter 9, “Dispatching Deep Tech; Enforcing Natural Rights.”

In the “Epilogue: On Globalism & Giving,” I round up by juxtaposing global integration with regionalism and localism, and spotlighting the last inspirational capitalist heroes of international standing. I hope to leave the readers with thoughts about charity, grace and what distinguishes The Good Giver from the Showy Giver.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FRAMEWORK

Analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science ~ilana

The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy, as mentioned, is the first in a series of volumes, to form part of The Paleolibertarian Guide (TPG) compendium. The TPG’s polemical impetus is analytical in nature. The framework of this and future works in the series will systematically demonstrate that analytical thinking precedes empiricism and is at the root of solid thought as well as good science—and liberty itself.

To wit, certain propositions in life need no “empirical evidence” for their validation. If anything, the constant insistence on scientism is in itself evidence of a deep corruption of reason. While solid empirical data are never to be dismissed, these are supplemental to a solid philosophy of science.

Derived from the Aristotelian method, the method I follow, Austrian-School thinking, is based in the laws of reason. To the extent that research contradicts reason, to that extent research is rubbish. The idea that science without the philosophy of science is nonsense comes alive for readers in Chapter 2: “COVID’s Cartel Of Cretins,” where, vivid and fun examples of a priori truths are provided.

THE MOST IMPORTANT LESSON of this volume and those to follow is how to repatriate thinking outsourced to the expert class. For, these days, the simplest of logical deductions often appear to evade the ordinary man or woman.

The cognitive class, a managerial malignancy now glommed onto the Managerial State, will often cloak itself in the raiment of “science” and is instrumental in generating consensus. The insidious Expert Class that shapes and manages perceptions about public affairs I see as an extension of James Burnham’s Managerial State.

New Yorker James Burnham (1905-1987) began his intellectual odyssey as a Trotskyist before abjuring Marxism altogether and becoming a passionate anticommunist. He coined the phrase “managerial revolution,” which was extremely influential in the 1940s, and which served as the title of his bestselling book, one that had a marked impact on Orwell’s philosophy.

Lilliputian Man now finds himself pinned down like a butterfly, incapable or unwilling to derive and arrive at the truth without outsourcing his thinking to some authority or another. Restore we must the ancient philosophical notion whereby some things are simply axiomatically true (or false, for that matter), for it has profound ramifications for liberty.

A free-thinking people does not outsource thinking—the very business of life—to anyone.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
WND, February 29
Unz Review, February, 23
The New American, February, 24

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When it was first released, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy claimed a nice No. 1 spot in the category of Ethics & Morality.

I’m buoyed to report that today, March 3, The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy is No. 31 in the Kindle category of “Best Sellers in Philosophy Criticism.”

The post BOOK: The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

To refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane ~ ilana (12/2023)

If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands-upon-thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy ~ilana (11/2023)

For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, as I hope we have established here before, Whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is still murder. Murder by ‘democratic’ approval is also still murder, however many approve of it ~ilana (1/2024)

Israel has rendered Gaza a “moonscape in war,” uninhabitable for years to come, reduced to rubble by “the most intense air campaigns in the modern record.” Not only is Israel murdering tens of thousands of Gaza’s civilians–25,700 Palestinians; an average of 200 to 300 souls a day–but it has gone and done a Taliban on the Gaza strip’s heritage sites, some dating back to antiquity.

Even the Wall Street Journal, in support of Israel’s “operation,” is now hip to the wanton death and destruction. Writes its Middle East correspondent:

By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged [and destroyed] Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair. Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.

Glad as I am that the War Street Journal has awoken to this unbridled barbarism—there is so much more to add to the butcher’s bill.

By November, 2023, Gaza City was gone. Anshel Pfeffer, at a Ha’aretz, an Israeli national newspaper, believed that his gimlet eye alone had spied that, “The IDF now sits on top of a mound of ruins that was once Gaza City. … Cities have been destroyed before, in the Middle East and across the world, in both ancient and recent history. But when this happens, it is a seismic event for nations.”

What a load of self-important tosh, I thought at the time, to claim as an “insight” what was in plain sight. But Pfeffer was right: Gaza City, the largest Palestinian city, was gone and Israel’s lickspittle supporters stateside, and in the civilized world, had not noticed, much less protested, aside Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who threatened to raise an army on Israel.

So, the Devil rolled on. He, שטן, was loosed in Gaza.

The “Hamas Made Me Mass Murder” Argument

By December 3, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) was unleashing on the “safe” Southern Gaza, the enclave to which it had directed the refugees to flee. Those little grey donkeys, indubitably dropping dead, too, for lack of food and water—ostensibly carting their owners and their meager belongings to safety: They were going… nowhere.

Little donkeys dying in the rubble conjured Shai Agnon, Israel’s greatest writer, whose masterpiece novels I read and reread in the Hebrew, in thrall to the perfection of the writer’s sentences and the purity of his soul.

In his 1966 acceptance speech—Agnon, a devout Jew, won the Nobel Prize for literature when it was still worth something—this pious, humble, righteous soul (the term for his ilk in the Israel of my youth was “beautiful of soul,” יפה-נפש) paid spiritual tribute to the critters:

Lest I slight any creature, I must also mention the domestic animals, the beasts and birds from whom I have learned. Job said long ago (135:11): ‘Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?’ Some of what I have learned from them I have written in my books, but I fear that I have not learned as much as I should have, for when I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account.

In truth, Israel owns the killing field that is Gaza, circa 2023/2024. The offensive it has waged on Gaza is as close to Total Warfare (a term reserved for war against any and all), as modern war has gotten.

And war against civilians is war on civilization.

Yet, all Israel has to do to make world leaders turn tail is intone psychopathically that “Hamas made me do it. Hamas ate my homework; I mean my conscience.”

The “Hamas made me murder 25,700 souls (at least) and displace two million men, women and children” excuse-making “argument” will not wash as an argument for mass murder. For one thing, he who offends against innocents is responsible for his offenses; not a third party. For another, as I hope we have established here before, Whether it is committed by decree of the one or by the will of the many; by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’—murder of innocents is still murder. Murder by “democratic” approval is also still murder, however many approve of it.

Besides, mass murder is never “unintentional” when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your “mission.”

Annoying as they are, neither do the pitiful caches of arms, ostensibly located in hospitals, begin to justify the grotesquely disproportionate sallies against Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital and all other hospitals, murdering patients and refugees. A hospital should never be demolished.

Instead, demolish we must the demented “argument” that claims for Israel a right to drop dumb bombs, on Gaza’s doctors and patients. The former, apparently, are expected not only to palliate their imperiled patients, but also account for Hamas’ whereabouts.

Ha’aretz (Israel News, Thursday, 14.12.2023) relays that, “Nearly half of the munitions Israel’s Air Force used in Gaza have been unguided, also known as ‘dumb bombs’ [imprecise], according to a new U.S. intel assessment.”

I said 25,700 souls murdered, “at least,” because many are still buried beneath the rubble. There are now over 1.9 million displaced persons in Gaza, reports Human Rights Watch. These include the littlest of children: Babies in incubators, their tiny bodies pierced by IV drips (which must be deftly inserted by dedicated healthcare providers), evacuated; shuttled from hospital to hospital, in constant peril. Some of Gaza’s  preemies were driven to Cairo, most without their parents for the babies may be orphans. Egyptian doctors were to try and stabilize these critically ill, malnourished neonatals who had been deprived systematically of oxygen, nutrients, and medicine.

By The Devil.

If murder of the unburn is evil, as we are frequently lectured, one might ask those who live by the light of truth, what about fully formed little people? Is it okay to make repeated attempts on their lives?

No opinion poll poses direct questions. It is, however, becoming less difficult to divine what the Israeli public thinks of mass murder and displacement of civilians committed in its name. The gateway that is Google is in defend-Israel-at-all-costs mode, offering sparse information. It has, however, allowed into the “Israeli public support” search the fact that, “More than 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support the twin goals of crushing Hamas and saving the hostages.”

Combine that reasonable sentiment with the fact that fully 83 percent of a representative sample of Israelis replied favorably to this “Direct Polls” question: “To what degree do you support encouraging the voluntary emigration of Gaza Strip residents?” Since nothing that has befallen Gazans has been “voluntary”; the question is as cynical as the enthusiastically supportive answers are sincere.

By and large, Israelis are down with their leadership’s orgiastic, indiscriminate bloodletting in Gaza. Most are merely demanding a return of the hostages, and the continuance of the assault on Gazans, punctured by cease fires. Israelis appear oblivious to the unutterable, irreversible, irremediable ruin adjacent.

Israel In Which I Grew Up: Gone

Indeed, today’s Israel is qualitatively different from the Israel in which I spent formative years. Progressives dismiss any “back then” insights as nostalgia: Obsolete people making obsolete observations about a past long gone, they say.

Like left-liberals, lite libertarians (“The Kochtopus” now supporting Nikki Haley”) also seem to suggest that the past has nothing to offer, and all change is good, always. Memorably reviewed by libertarian philosopher Dr. David Gordon, Virginia Postrel’s book, The Future and its Enemies, fits this category. All that glitters is gold was the essence of Ms. Postrel’s second manifesto, The Substance of Style.

From a position on the opposing libertarian hard right, and as a reactionary, I see reactionaries as enlightened conservators. One of the advantages of age, then, is historic perspective, harking back to the past. There is value in looking back, even if it is only to lament what is no longer. Doesn’t the Left preach the merits of processing grief?

The country in which I was raised, Israel, is no longer. It is now “Little America on the Mediterranean.” By this moniker I mean to denote a country that is now run—and overrun—by diaspora-supported religious fanatics and neoconservatives, Jewish and gentile. A slick, monied American and immigrant Jewry and attendant gentile interests stateside have the run of the place, especially in the West Bank. ( See “More U.S. Jews Moved to West Bank Settlements in 2021…”.)

Little Jewish America lives on “beyond the Green Line.”

With plenty comes complacency. This is to be expected. Israel no longer has the pioneering spirit of its inception. Witness the lazy, lumbering, and late-to-the-rescue military. The IDF reflects the mindset that comes with development. Its failure on October 7 is, to an extent, an adjunct of affluence, the typical standing army of a regional, well-to-do power.

But there is more. The Israel in which I spent my formative years was led by the country’s founding generation. This more sober, secular left had permeated early Israel’s institutions. The German Jews, the Yekkes,  in particular. Religion was not taught or even alluded to in our public schools, unless one attended a private religious school. These were not genocide-preaching madrassas.

In my experience, Israel’s German Jews, especially, were not Jewish supremacists. Rather, they were influenced by the secular (Haskalah) השכלה , a Jewish Enlightenment. Of that formative generation of German Jews was Uri Avneri, an early ethical voice against Israeli state aggression and war.

Avneri, editor of the now defunct העולם הזה  (HaOlam HaZeh), was to later feature on America’s Antiwar.com website (where my work appeared, too). HaOlam HaZeh was  aptly described by the Financial Times as “oscillating between path-breaking investigations and scurrilous gossip, between the sensational and the salacious.” All true. The saucy pictures on the back cover were a magnet for most males. My father, who certainly qualified, had introduced me to Uri Avneri’s thinking.

Later in life, dad, of blessed memory, drifted into inchoate American neoconservatism, along with the rest of an Americanized world. Growing up in Israel, however, he was a man of the Old Left. Center-left Ha’aretz was thus a staple in my reading. Then the most highbrow of Israel’s dailies, Ha’aretz had intellectual ballast, and was known for its solid news reporting and exposes. The other two broadsheets, Maariv and Yediot, were markedly inferior. I don’t know if, in those days, there was anything as intellectually debased as “Israel Hayom,” because I was expected to read the aforementioned newspapers, in that order.

Grubbier than Fox News, if you can believe it, “Israel Hayom” was founded by American billionaire, gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, a big Bibi patron. The reader can see what I mean by “Little America on the Mediterranean,” but with a touch of Vegas.

For reading on the Right, I had sought out and read erudite thinkers like Menachem Begin, who brokered peace with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a more Misesian classical liberal.

In time, this eclectic influence would smooth my transition into the Old American Right. The American Old and Only Valid Right—Murray N. Rothbard and Lew Rockwell leading the paleolibertarian flank; Russell Kirk at the helm of paleoconservatism—had rejected unjust war. The Old Right’s brief I see as very much congruent with the Biblical injunction of “Justice, and justice alone, you shall pursue” (Deuteronomy 16: 18-20).

Murder And Ethnic Cleansing Mainstreamed

These days, Israel’s political discourse is marred by the likes of Eliyahu Yossian, a mainstream opinionator. Listening as I did with difficulty to Yossian, I detect the delicate Iranian twang in his accent, although there is no sign of delicacy in this zealot’s worldview. Nothing authentically American, either. “Hamas is not the enemy,” he vociferates, “Gaza is. You level the area, and you kill the largest possible numbers, because the woman there is an enemy, the baby there is an enemy and the first grader is an enemy …and the pregnant woman is the enemy.” Yossian goes on to explain that Israel must not entertain “Western values” because these “blur basic logic.”

And so the IDF has done. Should you want proof that this man’s views have gone mainstream in Israel; look at Gaza. It’s a moonscape. What are your lying eyes telling you, to use Richard Pryor’s wry phrase for he who has been caught in flagrante delicto? As they were turning Gaza into Dresden on TV, before our very eyes, Israel’s quicksilver state propagandists were also telling us, their American funders, that “this is not happening.” Who are you going to believe? Democratic Israel, or your ‘lying eyes’?”

I believe my “lying eyes,” thank you very much. Those “lying eyes” speak to the scale of Israel’s depredations against Gazans. By any other name, this is evil incarnate. You cover up this truth at your peril—fail to bear witness to it; and your soul is doomed. Yet, many Christian Israel Firsters have turned away from those whom God commands them to succor. Some even proceeded to deny the Gaza holocaust as it was unfolding. The number of dead, via “the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s,” is suspect, I have been lectured.

Ha’aretz is Israel’s newspaper of record. Daily, they relay “the Hamas-controlled health ministry’s” numbers. Ha’aretz, which supports the war, would not be using these figures, were they not “broadly reliable,” a phrase used widely by reputable humanitarian, aid-rendering organizations worldwide.

“The numbers may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis,” said Michael Ryan, of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program. “But they largely reflect the level of death and injury.” (“What is Gaza’s Ministry of Health and how does it calculate the war’s death toll?”)

Essentially, believe your “lying eyes.”

Satellite-radar science certainly doesn’t lie. Satellite companies had restricted images of Gaza, reported SEMAFOR, effectively concealing crimes against humanity. My educated guess: They’re beholden to the clientèle, the military-industrial-complex, and the National Security Agency (NSA). The Top Dog client is the U.S. military. The client state is Israel’s defense force.

A counter—and a cause for patriotism—came via Scientific American: “Amid restrictions on optical satellite images, [American] researchers had developed a radar technique to gauge building damage in Gaza.” The charred smudges from space, where once the Gaza Strip was, are apocalyptic. Dystopian. Undeniable.

The science belied the holocaust denial, and other good souls bore witness to it too:

“We are no strangers to human suffering—to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes—but we’ve seen nothing like the siege of Gaza”: So wrote leaders of some of the world’s top humanitarian organizations, in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday, December 13. (Via Jake Johnson, of Common Dreams.)

You are what you do.

The IDF has hunted down and killed its own with the same zeal it has reserved for letting the blood of Gaza’s civilians. A preliminary IDF Report about those Israeli “hostages killed by soldiers, as they waved a white flag, and yelled for help in Hebrew,” revealed the following: “IDF soldiers had spotted a building two days prior with the inscription ‘SOS’ and ‘Help! Three hostages,’ inscribed on a wall.” (Ha’aretz, Sat., 16.12.023) On encounter, the three had indeed waved a white flag, and had stripped down to their skinny torsos. Still, the IDF opened-fire on them. The hostages were hunted down. They died running from the Jewish State’s soldiers.

The IDF’s appetite for destruction is worse than unwholesome. The near-gleeful chase and murder of hostages by IDF soldiers exists on a continuum of depravity. Extrapolate one can from this—the IDF’s killing of surrendered, manifestly unarmed men—to the IDF’s Rules of Engagement with Gaza’s civilians, evident in the orgiastic bloodletting and heartless ethnic cleansing winding to a close (as there are no more ethnic Gazans to uproot). Killing their own with such unexamined ease says something about this army’s Rules of Engagement with its prey, Gaza’s civilians.

Honest military experts, including Avner Gvaryahu, who heads “Breaking the Silence,” a whistleblower group that documents testimonies of former Israeli soldiers, concurred: “The army said this happened in violation of the rules of engagement. I’m skeptical of that, based on what we know of previous operations in Gaza,” he said.

More evidence that Eliyahu Yossian’s genocidal talk is normal currency in Israel was provided, in October, by a Netanyahu government policy paper. I read Israel’s population eviction document in Hebrew, in English, and in incredulity.

Where does The Devil wish Gaza’s two-million-plus displaced and hobbled civilians to go? Option C of the “Israeli Intelligence Ministry[’s] Policy Paper On Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023″ had spelled it out:

To the Sinai desert!  The “policy” paper expounds on, “The evacuation of the civilian population from Gaza to Sinai” and the creation of ערי-אוהלים  (“Arei Ohalim, “tent cities”), in the Sinai desert! It has since been “doctored,” denuded of the ערי-אוהלים  phrase pursuant to national and international grumbling.

From the vertiginous heights of his contempt-dripping arrogance, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen has mock-asked that “countries interested in taking in Gazan refugees send his office an email, including ‘the address of the country.’” In the same vein, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, has said that, “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”

Point proven! QED! Quod erat demonstrandum, or משל, which is how my Russian-Israeli math teacher taught us to sign our mathematical proofs. There is good evidence to show that Eliyahu Yossian does not appear to be an outlier in Israeli civil and political discourse.

By contrast, many of the October 7 victims were lefties, peace activists, lovers not haters, nowhere as ideological as their West Bank counterparts and the illiterate bobble heads of Israeli TV.

I wonder, then: Were the Israeli communities in the South, victims of October 7, political outliers? Is it perhaps more than symbolic that forsaken by the Jewish State, on October 7, were poorer Israelis, politically less influential communities, who more resembled the Israel of Old to which I harken here?

Ehud Barak, a remnant of that older left, is a former prime minister, defense minister and decorated soldier. Parroting American constitutional and natural rights, he told a reporter that the pursuit of happiness is predicated on the right to life, which the IDF failed to uphold. It was worse than that: The rights to life of the Israelis on the southern front were treated as forfeit by the Jewish State.

The spectral IDF took nine hours to arrive on the scene, but just in time to rain indiscriminate helicopter Hellfire missiles on survivors (as יואב זיתון attested in a Ynet article, on 15.10.23), and count the dead. Israeli reservist pilot, Colonel Nof Erez—speaking in good Hebrew, not in the excitable, anglicized Pidgin Hebrew heard from most of the TV operatives out of Israel—described the Israeli army’s response to October 7 as “mass Hannibal.”

Again: after observing what has been done in Gaza—an obscene, operationally idiotic offensive, in which 70 percent of the casualties are women and children—almost anything appears possible. In conversation with broadcaster Aryeh Golan, Yasmin Porat, a survivor of October 7—quiet, calm, logical, she too orating in fine Hebrew, absent the ugly Anglicisms—attests to the same: IDF forces shot their own civilians. Listen.

Was a doctrine such as “Hannibal” still extant? God help Israel if this is so.

Fox News, War Porn Militarytainment

To explain their support for willy-nilly mass murder in Gaza, Israelis often send me articles from another country, America, in a language not their own, English. Their source, in particular, is the intellectually subpar Fox News, the war porn channel. The channel that produced the “Militarytainment” that accompanied Genghis Bush’s war against Iraqi civilians.

Back home, on Fox News, “Israelism” is the gospel which they never cease to proclaim. Everything Israel is papered over, excused, and finessed.

In Fox News’ neoconservative nirvana, the broads and their enablers are ever turned-on, tuned-out, and hot for war, inadvertently and reflexively. It’s the nature of the high-time-preference character. People who are in a constant state of heightened emotional arousal tend to want to remain that way; the emotions have a self-reinforcing urgency. War—for Bush or for Bibi—its propaganda and its prosecutors get the Foxettes hot. Perverted warpath patriotism gets these folks and their followers hot. The military-industrial-complex thrives when women on display, enabled by their male accomplices, shake their wares for war.

Not for naught do Fox types give frequent ode, as do all in the Israel First media, to the hotness of distaff IDF. It’s called war porn, and is a feature of the high-time-preference individual who follows, and performs on, Fox News in wartime.

The Antisemitism Libel And … Set Theory

Holding forth in favor of pulverizing the people of Gaza and their meager belongings is Fox News’ Tyrus (real name George Murdoch). Among his repertoire of factoids is a lot of belching about antisemitism, allegedly rife in America. This antisemitism nonsense is more offensive than Tyrus’ inked flesh, spilling over copiously into a studio armchair. Wailing about “antisemitism,” as perceived by the opposition’s speech or protest against Israel, is intended to silence opposition to mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

The words people speak, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly or burn, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, the goose-stepping, the Hitler salutes they muck around with—all that is protected speech. You may not like it; but it’s licit in natural law.

Again: The “antisemitism” claims-making is meant to silence and sunder free speech, one of the most cherished American (Voltairean) values, clearly not shared by our Israeli “democratic allies.”

Americans are hardly deficient in their solidarity for the Jewish State and for Jews, in general. American society is philosemitic, even Zionist. If anything, it is not antisemitism that plagues American institutions, but systemic anti-whiteness.  Jews, generally, offer daggers if one dares to suggest that gifted Caucasian American men are being ejected from all echelons of society.

It so happens that in the United States, the overlap between the two solitudes, whites and Jews, is near complete. Picture a Venn diagram in mathematical set theory. Most Jews in America are manifestly Caucasian. Therefore, Jewish complaints about endemic antisemitism might just redound to the benefit of American Caucasians, in general, who do endure real, systemic discrimination. And that will be a good thing for our society.

The ILLOGIC Of The Justification

In sum, and quite simply, vis-à-vis Gaza, anyone born in His Image (b’tselem) בצלם, should be able to grasp these rules, instantiated in the Decalogue. In particular, by The Sixth Commandment, “Thou shall not murder.”

Often mistranslated, Exodus 20:13 enjoins against murder, not against righteous killing, as in the right of self-defense, instantiated in our Second Amendment. The biblical text reads לא תרצח (“Lo tirtzach!”), which means “do not murder.” In the original (unless mistranslated from the Hebrew), it does not say לא תהרוג (“Lo taharog”), which is “do not kill.” Big difference.

There is nothing righteous about Israel’s murder spree in Gaza.

If one is enjoined against aiding and abetting in the murder of a single innocent individual; by logical extension, we Americans should not knowingly aid and abet in the murder of the many. Not in our name.

“But what else could the Israelis have done,” asks reader Rich, a question posed to me by quite a few smart people. The question, “What else could the Israelis have done?”, is rooted in a logical fallacy. This is so, for the question sets up a false dichotomy or a false dilemma not in evidence, and is thus an error of reason.

The Hoover Institution’s Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. traces the contours of this illogic:

In classical logic, the false dichotomy, or false dilemma, is defined as an argument where only two choices are presented yet more exist, or a spectrum of possible choices exists between two extremes. False dilemmas are usually characterized by ‘either this or that’ language but can also be characterized by the omission of choices. This insidious tactic has the appearance of forming a logical argument, but under closer scrutiny it becomes evident that there are more possibilities than the either/or choice that is presented.

It’s too late, now, but “it was indeed possible to defeat Hamas and prevent the carnage in Gaza.” Outlined in “How To Defeat Hamas And Stop The Carnage In Gaza,” a podcast, https://rumble.com/v3t9lwv-how-to-defeat-hamas-and-stop-the-carnage-in-gaza.html , was a worldwide judicial plan. It’s prefaced with a caveat: The plan seems lefty and weak. It’s not. It’s strong and just and would have been far and away more effective than the mass murder and ethnic cleansing conducted, which equals recruits for Hamas in perpetuity.

My focus was on the judiciary, at first: The Israeli high court could have initiated criminal proceedings, engaging the International Criminal Court in issuing arrest warrants for all members of Hamas. It could have demanded that the civilized world refuse to succor or give them safe passage, arresting Hamas and its henchmen forthwith. Independent agencies would have easily been corralled to do the processing, as we know just how effective the Surveillance and Security State is, American and Israeli, in gathering intelligence on us, its law-abiding subjects.

Israel’s borders would have then been closed temporarily to all Gaza’s workers. In this, Israel would be following Egypt and Jordan, and merely enforcing the negative rights of its citizens to live violence free. These actions do not infringe on the Other’s right to life. Nobody is owed a job in Israel proper.

Here’s an even more radical idea: Place the useless IDF and its celebrity generals on the border, before the citizens, not behind them. If the IDF practice enough, they can reach the kibbutzim and yishuvim they had abandoned, on October 7, in less than nine hours. With the best of its special-operations units, be it the “Golani” or “Sayeret Matkal,” Israel could then have conducted regular precision operations into Gaza’s tunnels.

What world admiration would Israel have garnered. And how effective would the world have been in galvanizing on behalf of the stricken Jewish State. Instead, Jews in the diaspora have become targets; the Jewish State’s leaders rightly regarded as butchers of babies.

The world was with Israel, on October 7, 2023, as it was on July 4, 1976, at the Entebbe Airport, in Uganda, where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine held 100 hijacked Jews and Israelis hostage. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, Bibi Netanyau’s late, brave brother, 100 members of the “Sayeret” traversed 2,500 miles to rescue their brethren. They righteously killed only those who needed killing.

Unlike the October 2023 Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip; Entebbe was a courageous and moral military mission. The world was with Israel, as it was on October 7. In the same year, an Israeli girl, Rina Messinge, was crowned Miss Universe. Goodwill toward Israel ran eternal, because its men had acted justly and heroically! They knew they could die. Yet they came to claim their own, despite the odds of not returning. In that mission, Bibi’s brother perished leading his men into battle.

It used to be that leaders like “Yoni” Netanyahu charged with their men into battle. Not anymore. Nowadays, celebrity, champagne-swilling generals give the order, after appearing on Fox News, to chubby men in front of AI consoles to bomb the anthills from above and afar. The broad and short of it is that, no reparations can fix an irreparable Gaza, although these are owed.

The Israel of my formative years was no Eden before the Fall, but it was not a terrorist state. Jewish supremacism, like the American exceptionalism driving the United States’ foreign policy, breeds barbarism.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
The New American, January 4
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, January 6
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, January 8
The Unz Review, January 25, 2024

RELATED READING & VIEWING:

HARD TRUTH PODCAST: “Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder In Gaza,” ilana mercer & David Vance, 14K views

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/01/memory-indictment-todays-jewish-taliban-not-israel-grew/

“Gaza vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines’ Superiority,” by Ilana Mercer, December 4, 2023

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/12/gaza-vs-fallujah-barbaric-blitzkrieg-highlights-u-s-marines-superiority/

“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague,” by Ilana Mercer, November 14, 2023

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2023/11/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-dock-hague/

“Bibi Obliterates Memory of Oct. 7 Martyrs, Creates New Martyrs in Gaza,” by Ilana Mercer, November 2, 2023

“Hamas, Israel, and the Anatomy of State Treason,” by Ilana Mercer October 12, 2023

GAZA ONGOING: (Oct 7-March 9, 2024): Total Warfare: War Against Civilians Is War On Civilization. International Women’s Day? 9000 Gazan Women DEAD

The post Hermetically Sealed Indictment Of The Jewish Taliban’s Mass Murder And Ethnic Cleansing In Gaza appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come ~ilana

To refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane ~ilana

In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations.

The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy’s defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel.

Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form of warfare; it was the contours Fourth-Generation Warfare that they were tracing. Fourth-Generation Warfare was to be the distinguishing characteristic of the modern military. Boosted by technology, “advanced” armies would be relying on “small, highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers, armed with high technology weapons.” These precision units and attendant weapons were expected “to range over wide areas seeking critical targets.”

In addition to technology; predicted and depicted was a military whose central impetus was augmented by ideas. In America, the controversial changing of hearts and minds, historically, has included fomenting coups around the world with the connivance afforded by psychological operations.

Near as I can tell, Fourth-Generation war was meant to be smart; to see Mind dominate and direct materiel.

What is underway in Gaza, at 2023’s end, however, is the very opposite. I see madness for what it is. Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come. The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden, his Uniparty accomplices and a complicit West: This appears to capture the kind of Third-Gen “capability” delivered by the modern, standing, Woke military.

By an odd reversal, the Gaza offensive will do nothing to eradicate Hamas, for Hamas is not ISIS (Islamic State). ISIS is an international terrorist organization. Hamas is not. Dimly, Israeli propagandists like Dan Gillerman—former ambassador to the UN—have implied that Hamas was the same as ISIS. This particular agitator bamboozled an American news anchor, on November 30, by rasping at him that, “We are fighting for you as well as for us.” Contra Gillerman, however, Hamas had no global aspirations. While ISIS is an international terrorist organization, like it or not,

Hamas is indigenous—it is of the Palestinian People, by the Palestinian People, and for The Palestinian People, at least as these people perceive it

Israel’s blithe butchering of Gazans may change that. “Operation Swords of Iron” in the Gaza Strip not only guarantees Hamas recruits in Gaza and the West Bank for posterity; but may just see Hamas go global, given the Western world’s refusal to stop 58 days and counting of depravity.

Most Republicans and Democrats, Israel Firsters all, deploy a squalid little phrase—our “democratic values”—to allay the American taxpayer’s misgivings over the fact that we’re funding the destruction of the lives of millions of defenseless people.

The Israel Defense Forces is a deserving military partner, they intone at us, because Israel shares America’s “democratic values” (as a former fierce defender of Israel; my tongue here, now, is firmly in my cheek). Into this category falls a pillar of American virtue known as Woke. The Israeli military is Woke alright. To wit, right after October 7, the Knesset quickly minted new legal rights for gay partners, who will forthwith enjoy the financial windfall that comes with being widowed. Omer Ohana can now claim a widow’s benefits from the Israeli military following the tragic October-7 death of his betrothed partner, Sagi Golan.

Indubitably, Israel would never deprive any Palestinian man of marrying another. So far, however, the due-process rights of Palestinian detainees are spectral. In the wind, perhaps?

Most of the Palestinian prisoners released, reports the intrepid Nima Elbagir, “were held under a murky military justice system that theoretically allows Israel to hold people for indefinite periods without trial or a charge. Israel has been operating two distinct justice systems in the West Bank since it captured the area in 1967. Palestinians living there fall under the jurisdiction of Israel’s military court system, where judges and prosecutors are uniformed Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers there are subject to civilian courts.”

Have I come among lunatics? For how does indefinite “Administrative Detention,” absent due process of law, comport with the values instantiated by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?

Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most ethical fighting force in the universe; I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, comparison. I compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theatres of war: Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” in late 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.

The battle in Fallujah is considered “the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam.” “Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city.” Officially, it is described as a “battle to retake the key city of Fallujah from a violent insurgency that was taking root across Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.”

Before the American invasion of Iraq, Fallujah was a compact city of about 400,000 people. “Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah.”

Gaza’s population is about 2.4 million strong. The administrative chaos in war-time Gaza would hamper accurate records-keeping. That considered—and not counting individuals buried beneath the rubble—approximately 15,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel. (Haaretz, Israel News, Friday, December 2, 2023)

Let’s extrapolate:

Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians dead in Gaza—and climbing.

Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill so far, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.

Let that sink in.

On the numbers, I have been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, are still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1.

Both the Israeli and the U.S. militaries come in here for rough treatment. The fulminations of the Israel Firsters stateside aside, however, some American patriotism is owed amid the sorrow over Israel’s barbaric blitzkrieg.

Damning with faint praise though this may be, Americans, in the persons of our U.S. Marines in Fallujah—in the dubious theater of another unjust war—were righteous, compared to the monstrous Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

*Editor Ryan McMaken, with updated numbers, highlights wryly this next ratio, which speaks to the proportionality imperative of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Just War Theory, obliterated by Israel: “The casualties ratio in this war is now more than 12 to 1. About 17.7K murdered Palestinians to 1.3K murdered Israelis. I wonder at what ratio the Gazans will have been ‘deterred’? 50 to 1? How about 100,000 dead in Gaza versus 1300 dead in Israel? That’ll teach ’em!”

†Please consider that my last four tracts on Gaza, and that scroll of a blog, “Constantly UPDATED (12/8): ‘Total Warfare’ On GAZA: War Against Civilians Is War On Civilization“—all anatomizing the war on Gazans: These are tremendously painful to write, as a Jew and a former fierce defender of Israel. But to refuse to bear witness to the prosecution of Total Warfare against Gazans—also the defining event of 2023 and the decade, twinned with COVID—is to be inhuman, insane, incoherent. To the Greek philosophers, to be mired in such contradiction was to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane.

©2023 ILANA MERCER
The New American, December 4
The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity December 5
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, December 7

* Screen pic courtesy the Telegraph.

The post Gaza Vs. Fallujah: Gaza vs. Fallujah: Barbaric Blitzkrieg Highlights U.S. Marines’ Superiority appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Hamas’ culpability does not absolve Israel from blame. One agenda of wrongs doesn’t change another ~ilana

You can’t gussy up what’s going on in Gaza ~ilana

If you know in advance that your actions will cause the death of thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy.

The razing of Gaza and the ongoing murder of tens of thousands of civilians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with western imprimatur, is a war crime. Strafing civilian populations and pulverizing entire neighborhoods to ostensibly “soften” the few embedded targets within—this violates natural law, international law, libertarian law and Just War Theory.  

It was true when Genghis Bush dropped daisy cutters and cluster bombs on Iraqi civilians, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of them; it was true when allied forces firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, and it was true when Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians.

Not that it helped his victims, but Truman icily expressed some “regret” for “the [beastly] necessity of wiping out whole populations”: “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare,” Truman told an ardent supporter, “but I can’t bring myself to believe that because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.”

Likewise, the mildly sociopathic supporters of the war on Gaza’s civilians assert that Gaza can be “a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare,” to commandeer Truman’s elegant line. They say that the sympathies expressed by Gazans toward their neighbors, victims of the October 7 slaughter, are meager and grudging.

It is true that leadership in Egypt and Jordan is less than forthcoming as to why they refuse to welcome Gaza’s refugees into their midst as the Polish welcomed the Ukrainians. In fact, the Egyptians have no intention whatsoever of allowing Palestinians, whom they view as a radicalizing element, into their country. Like President Hosni Mubarak before him; President El-Sisi is fearful of swelling the already-swollen ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Mubarak had periodically conducted mini-massacres against the Brotherhood—the organization that sired Hamas—with no particular outcry from the West.

Not that pro-war agitators know anything about the history of the region; but it is true too that, in 1970, King Hussein (ibn Talal) of Jordan massacred thousands of Palestinians for fomenting a coup against the Hashemite monarchy. The King then expelled the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and many thousands of Palestinians to Lebanon.

Inarguably, the West’s Disneyfied, angels-and-demons foreign policy meme, whereby Hamas is an oppressor of its people, is a mirage. The Palestinian People had voted for the “Islamic Resistance Movement” (Hamas). In the last election, Hamas got a majority in all but two of the 16 districts in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. According to Mark Mellman, a pollster, “If new presidential elections were held with two candidates, Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, Abbas would receive 37 percent of the vote, and Haniyeh would win in a landslide with 58 percent.” Substantial majorities in the West Bank and Gaza favor “armed conflict” over peaceful, political solutions to the conflict.

Still, these uncomfortable facts do nothing to invalidate another immutable truth: Murder with majority approval is always murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without the State; by the designated “good guys” or the “bad guys”; murder of innocent, non-combatant civilians is still murder.

Thus, the razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which tens of thousands civilians are dying: This is murder with malice aforethought, a concept that includes “deaths resulting from actions that display a depraved indifference to life.” Further depraved indifference to life was Israel’s throttling of supplies of water, food and power to the millions of aid-dependent Gazans, as Israel knows full-well this will imperil civilians indirectly.

Silly soliloquies poured into our ears about “Hamas using civilians as human shields” amount to morally bankrupt non sequiturs. True: Hamas has invited the IDF to “come get us if you can find us among Gaza’s civilians.” The IDF and its handlers, however, have accepted Hamas’ invitation to pulverize communities of civilians.

In other words, Hamas’ culpability does not absolve Israel from blame. One agenda of wrongs doesn’t change another.

As to the utilitarian aspect of its mission; the IDF is handsomely equipped to fail. “To be very good at something inherently stupid,” said a great English novelist, “is not the mark of high intelligence.” In addition to betraying its own citizens by abysmally failing to defend their basic rights on October 7; the unthinking IDF has effectively bombed Gaza back to the stone age. This will do nothing to eradicate Hamas; to the contrary; it guarantees it recruits for posterity! Previous forays into the West Bank and Gaza signally failed to accomplish this mission.

Gazans, in an extremity of suffering, are instructed to “evacuate to the southern part of the strip.” That exhortation reminds me of Ivanka Trump’s counsel to men in hard hats, whose occupations had become obsolete: “Learn how to code.” “Evacuate to the southern part of the Gaza strip” is but a cruel meme, given that Gaza has been levelled. There is nowhere left to run.

Tragically, Israel has squandered much of the goodwill generated by the diabolical October 7 pogrom. In the end, Bibi has obliterated the memory of the October 7 martyrs by creating new martyrs in Gaza. Never did I think I’d say this, but Mr. Netanyahu may just find himself in the dock, in The Hague.

It’s too late now, but “Was it possible to defeat Hamas and prevent the carnage in Gaza”?

Yes. IN A HARD TRUTH PODCAST, your columnist argued that needed was a smarter, more effective response that targets only the culprits of the October 7 slaughter, and not innocents. Such a response was outlined in detail. In all circumstances, David Vance and I both agree that the US/UK interference in the region is not helpful and that REGIONALISM ALWAYS BEATS GLOBALISM.

https://rumble.com/embed/v3qo82m/?pub=fyb9t

VERSIONS OF THESE THOUGHTS (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague”) were published by only three exceedingly courageous publications: My home at The New American, The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/november/03/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

And, The Mises Institute’s Power & Market (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague.”)

https://mises.org/power-market/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-himself-dock-hague

Note that this column is penned by a systematic rightist. It offers facts about Palestinian voting patterns and agency in order to dispel the Disney world foreign-policy worldview of the West. This antiwar argument, coming as it does from the hard, libertarian Right, is made from a place of reality, and not hippie naiveté.

The point: Whatever you might think of people as a group; ethical human-beings can never-ever endorse their wholesale murder, now underway.

I thank my editors at TNA for standing by The Truth. https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity have always stood for the Truth. As has The Mises Institute.    https://mises.org/power-market/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-himself-dock-hague

That Truth is now visible from space.

I thank my podcast partner, David Vance, for sharing a moral commitment, and, well, having the proverbial male bits so few men have.

I am still hopeful there will be others on the Right.

Alas, little has changed since Iraq. This response to the razing of Gaza has elements of an Iraq redux, where you tell the unvarnished truth, from day one, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq/   https://www.ilanamercer.com/2003/04/murder-by-majority/, and become persona non grata forever. Twenty years hence, you get to watch fools slowly feel their way to the truth as you and your ideological ilk had articulated, at the time it mattered, and against your own professional interests, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/05/iraq-liars-and-deniers-we-knew-then-what-we-know-now/ in dozens of essays, https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/iraq/page/2/ , starting on September 19, 2002: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq .

Many are the good people who learn to trust you; the rest remain as dumb and as diabolical as fuck—diabolical because you can’t gussy up what’s going on in Gaza.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast

©2023 ILANA MERCER
The New American, November 2
The Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity November 3
Power & Market, The Mises Institute (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague“), November 14

*Screen pic courtesy Ha’artez

The post Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘bad guys’; murder of innocents is still murder ~ilana

The razing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which civilians are dying: This is murder with malice  aforethought, a concept that includes ‘deaths resulting from actions that display a depraved indifference to life! ~ilana

It’s simple: If you know in advance that your actions will cause the death of thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea), which means malice aforethought, also known as intent, in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy.

The razing of Gaza and the ongoing murder of thousands of civilians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with western imprimatur, is a war crime. Strafing civilian populations and pulverizing entire neighborhoods to ostensibly “soften” the few embedded targets within—this violates natural law, international law, libertarian law and Just War Theory.  

It was true when Genghis Bush dropped daisy cutters and cluster bombs on Iraqi civilians, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of them; it was true when allied forces firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, and it was true when Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians.

Not that it helped his victims, but Truman icily expressed some “regret” for “the [beastly] necessity of wiping out whole populations”: “I know that Japan is a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare,” he told an ardent supporter, “but I can’t bring myself to believe that because they are beasts, we should ourselves act in that same manner.”

We know ineluctably that Gaza is “a terribly cruel and uncivilized nation in warfare.” The sympathies expressed by Gazans toward their neighbors, victims of the October 7 slaughter, were meager and grudging, coerced by media, for the most.

Leadership in Egypt and Jordan is less than candid as to why they refuse to welcome Gaza’s refugees into their midst as the Polish welcomed the Ukrainians. In fact, the Egyptians have no intention whatsoever of allowing Palestinians, whom they view as a radicalizing element, into their country. Like President Hosni Mubarak before him; President El-Sisi refuses to swell the already-swollen ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Mubarak had periodically conducted mini-massacres against the Brotherhood—the organization that sired Hamas—with no particular outcry from the West.

In 1970, King Hussein (ibn Talal) of Jordan massacred thousands of Palestinians for fomenting a coup against the Hashemite monarchy. To avert the anarchy Hussein associated with the Palestinians and their simmering resentments, the King then expelled the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and many thousands of Palestinian troublemakers to Lebanon.

Contra the West’s angels-and-demons foreign policy narrative, the mirage of Hamas as an oppressor of its downtrodden people is just that: a mirage.

Last I looked, the Palestinian People had voted with a vengeance for the “Islamic Resistance Movement” (Hamas), an organization whose existence revolves around Israel’s destruction. In the last election, Hamas got a majority in all but two of the 16 districts in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

According to Mark Mellman, a pollster, “If new presidential elections were held with two candidates, Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, Abbas would receive 37 percent of the vote, and Haniyeh would win in a landslide with 58 percent.” Substantial majorities in the West Bank and Gaza favor “armed conflict” over peaceful, political solutions to the conflict.

The Arab Street has always been more militant than its leaders. Said Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami: “It is a peculiarity of the Arab political order that many of the rulers and the dynasties are more moderate than the populace.” This is why Iraqis turned out en masse for Sharia law. And why, enabled by George W. Bush and Ms. Condoleezza Rice, the people of Egypt sought to replace Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party with the banned Muslim Brotherhood. The people’s proclivities catapulted Hezbollah into government in Lebanon. And they account for the smashing success enjoyed by Islamists in Saudi and Afghani elections.

These uncomfortable facts notwithstanding, murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by actors within or without the State; by the designated “good guys” or the “bad guys”; murder of innocents is still murder.

Thus, the razing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden and his Uniparty accomplices, in the course of which civilians are dying: This is murder with malice aforethought, a concept that includes “deaths resulting from action that display a depraved indifference to life.” (Read “Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason.”) Further depraved indifference to life is Israel’s throttling of supplies of water, food and power to the millions of aid-dependent Gazans, as Israel knows full-well this will imperil civilians indirectly.

Silly soliloquies poured into our ears about “Hamas using civilians as human shields” amount to morally bankrupt non sequiturs. True: Hamas has invited the IDF to “come get us if you can find us among Gaza’s civilians.” The IDF and its handlers, however, have accepted Hamas’ invitation to pulverize civilian communities.

In other words, Hamas’ culpability does not absolve Israel from blame. One agenda of wrongs doesn’t change another.

“To be very good at something inherently stupid,” said a great English novelist, “is not the mark of high intelligence.” In addition to betraying its own citizens by failing to uphold their basic rights; the unthinking IDF has effectively bombed Gaza back to the stone age. This will do nothing to eradicate Hamas! Previous forays into the West Bank and Gaza signally failed to accomplish this necessary mission.

Gazans, in an extremity of suffering, are instructed to “evacuate to the southern part of the strip.” That exhortation reminds me of Ivanka Trump’s ludicrous counsel to men in hard hats, whose occupations had been outsourced forever: “Learn how to code.” “Evacuate to the southern part of the Gaza strip” is but a ludicrous meme given that Gaza has been levelled. There is nowhere left to run.

Tragically, Israel has squandered much of the goodwill generated by the heinous, diabolical, pogrom, executed by spawns of Satan on October 7. In the end, Bibi has obliterated the memory of those martyrs by creating new martyrs in Gaza.

So, “How To Defeat Hamas And Stop The Carnage In Gaza”?

IN A NEW HARD TRUTH PODCAST, your columnist argues that needed was a smarter, more effective response that targets only the culprits of the Oct. 7 slaughter, and not innocents. Such a response is outlined in detail. UK’s David Vance and I further discuss the idea that Netanyahu has desecrated the memory of the Oct. 7 martyrs, creating new martyrs in Gaza, via his crude— nay, diabolical—response to the Hamas massacre. The world’s sympathy has been squandered. In all circumstances, David and I both agree that the US/UK interference in the region is not helpful and that REGIONALISM ALWAYS BEATS GLOBALISM.

https://rumble.com/embed/v3qo82m/?pub=fyb9t

ADDENDUM

THE COLUMN YOU HAVE JUST READ, “Bibi Obliterates Memory Of Oct. 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza,” was published by only three exceedingly courageous publications: My home at The New American. The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/november/03/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

And, The Mises Institute (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague.”)

https://mises.org/power-market/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-himself-dock-hague

Note that this is a column penned by a systematic rightist. It offers facts about Palestinian voting patterns and agency in order to dispel the Disney world foreign-policy worldview of the West. This antiwar argument, coming as it does from the hard, libertarian Right, is made from a place of reality, and not hippie naiveté.

Whatever you might think of people as a group; ethical human-beings can never-ever endorse their wholesale murder, now underway.

I thank my editors at TNA for standing by The Truth. https://thenewamerican.com/opinion/bibi-obliterates-memory-of-oct-7-martyrs-creates-new-martyrs-in-gaza/

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity have always stood for the Truth. As has The Mises Institute.    https://mises.org/power-market/bibi-netanyahu-may-find-himself-dock-hague

That Truth is now visible from space.

I thank my podcast partner, David Vance, for sharing a moral commitment, and, well, having the proverbial male bits so few men have.

I am still hopeful there will be others on the Right.

Alas, little has changed since Iraq. This response to the razing of Gaza has elements of an Iraq redux, where you tell the unvarnished truth, from day one, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq/   https://www.ilanamercer.com/2003/04/murder-by-majority/, become persona non grata forever. Twenty years hence, you get to watch fools slowly feel their way to the truth as you and your ideological ilk had articulated, at the time it mattered, and against your own professional interests, https://www.ilanamercer.com/2015/05/iraq-liars-and-deniers-we-knew-then-what-we-know-now/ in dozens of essays, https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/iraq/page/2/ , starting on September 19, 2002: https://www.ilanamercer.com/2002/09/why-so-many-americans-don-t-support-attacking-iraq .

Many are the good people who learn to trust you; the rest remain as dumb as fuck.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian think piece since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Gab, Gettr YouTube & LinkedIn; banned by Facebook, and has a new video-podcast

©2023 ILANA MERCER
The New American, November 2
The Ron Paul Institute For Peace and Prosperity November 3
The Mises Institute (“Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague“), November 14

* Gaza, Before and After, Screen Pic Courtesy Al Jazeera

The post Bibi Obliterates Memory Of October 7 Martyrs; Creates New Martyrs In Gaza appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Witnessed in Israel on October 7 was the utter forsaking by the State of its most elementary—and only—obligations to the citizenry: Defend their natural rights to life, liberty and property ~ilana

The Uniparty has forsaken the American border to the same digital docility to which Israelis had been forsaken. At least in Israel, an attack on the homeland is followed—however late and misguided—by a defense of the territorial homeland. An attack on the American homeland, invariably, sees our military pack up to go to … Timbuktu ~ilana

IF YOU CONSIDER THAT the IDF, Israel’s standing army, is the Middle East’s most powerful army and among the world’s top 20 military forces; then the metaphor of the Remington Rifle against slings and stones flung by indigenes lives on in Hamas’ murderous invasion of Southern Israel on October 7. Primitives against sophisticates; savagery against innocence.

From Ofakim to Ashkelon; from Magen to Zikim—the barbaric, cross-border onslaught claimed the lives of more than 1200 civilians. Two thousand Israeli souls have been injured and dozens kidnapped. Decapitation, rape and other desecration have been a feature of the orgiastic pogrom. Between them, Hamas (in the person of senior official Musa Abu Marzuk) and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad had connived to kidnap more than 130 Israeli civilians.

Perhaps unevolved forms of life is the better descriptive for Hamas, for military primitives Hamas are not. On that particular Sabbath—also the Simchat Torah celebration during Sukkot—Hamas had launched about 3000 rockets into and over Israeli communities. On its website, the not-so-intelligent Israel Defense Forces (IDF) offers up detailed “intelligence” on the terrorists’ rocket arsenal. Hamas has the long range variety (M-302), as well as the medium and short-range Grad rockets, which are old, but effective, Soviet technology.

LOW TECH

Nevertheless, this was a low-tech invasion. Hamas operatives motorbiked, paraglided, bulldozed and motorboated their way, by land and by sea, into 17 areas in Southern Israel. So much for Israel’s flimsy fences, unmanned, AI-powered machine guns and other clever, high-tech toys on the Gazan border. Post-graduate cleverness was simply no match for Hamas’ fiercely savage, hands-on guerrilla warfare.

Hamas’ low-tech operation also meant that the gang steered clear of foreign-looking plants loitering in Gaza, fat fingers stabbing at the invincible mobile device. Israeli intelligence assets are likey not that hard to spot. While Hamas deployed basic technology like cameras and sensors; they also took care to use informants that worked for their cause, not against it.

In my estimation, Israeli intelligence assets could very likely have been compromised. Israel is a progressive society recruiting for racial, sexual and cross-sexual representation, not necessarily merit and mettle. The Israelis have learned from the best, the United States of America, how to dissolve their society’s institutions in the vat of multiculturalism. All America’s satellite states are monkey-see-monkey-do appeasers on matters of “social justice.” Or, self-immolation.

Hamas’s low-tech invasion into southern Israel was also a clear demonstration of a complete failure of the State apparatus, the IDF being the face of the State. Bibi Netanyahu, prime minister, was largely in hiding during those first crucial hours.

The most candid report, sent to me, on the evening of October 7, came from my cousin, safe, thank G-d. Her words were the most truthful to date:

“Shock, betrayal, the crash of a dream; how could this happen? People are still without help or rescue. They turned to the media to call the army because there were terrorists in their homes and yards. It has been hours, and the situation has still not changed much. Total chaos.”

To my question, “Has not a war room been set up? Are not updates from the IDF and the PM’s office a constant thing on television?”

Her reply: “Nope. Nobody is talking to us. There is no point person to field questions and focus resources. People are doing the work of the army. It’s like the Wild West.”

Having lived through the 1973 War, I wrote in my “Betraying Brave Boys” column:

‘The Yom Kippur War Israel nearly lost. Israeli intelligence failed miserably. As is usually the case, the kids paid the price—a few hundred youngsters were stranded on the borders with no backup. They defended their posts heroically before being gruesomely slaughtered. Many were dismembered.When that war ended, Remembrance Day swelled to include another 2,523 casualties—about one-tenth of one percent of the population was dead. Thousands more were wounded. The casualty estimates for Egypt and Syria were 16,000.’

Egyptian President Anwar Saddat, however, attacked the Israeli military; not the citizenry. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir took the blame for what a literate Israeli population had dubbed המחדל (hamechdal). Mechdal is Hebrew for a deep, systemic failure. As I recently read (in a badly written tome, Golda: Biographia, purported to be in Hebrew, but assaulting the language with ugly Anglicisms), to blame were the generals, who refused to consider that Arab armies had massed on all Israel’s borders for anything other than a regional rave. Innocent military maneuvers, the generals asserted.

Back in 1973, Israeli society was not yet as riven by division as it is today—divisions that mirror the gashes that have opened up in American society, and, by and large, have been exported by it.

MAGA AND ISRAEL

America exports the woke worldview and many an idée fixe abroad. With these come the same tensions. Malign MAGA-hating meddlers stateside, such as Alexsander Vindman, a Democrat who somehow made colonel in the US army, blame the Israeli Right for societal tensions. From where I’m perched, the July riots and demonstrations in Israel appeared to have originated in ANTIFA-like hysteria, in which parliamentary checks-and-balances on an overweening judiciary were rejected.

Parliament had democratically reduced the powers of a woke, hyperactive judiciary. The Knesset had reclaimed some power of representation. Over this, the usual Israeli and American culprits were fulminating, for Israel’s Supreme Court better serves ultra-progressive forces than its Parliament, which represents a variegated people.

To Israel’s great credit, and unlike America’s Antifa, Israeli Wokerati were not howling, stripping, discussing and twerking their reproductive orifices, inventing pronouns, and burning the country down. At least some of these functions a treacherous State left for Hamas to do.

TREASON

Witnessed in Israel on October 7 was the utter forsaking by the State of its most elementary—and only—obligations to the citizenry: Defend their natural rights to life, liberty and property.

Seventy-two hours on, and a top banana for the Israeli Defense Forces was blaming Hamas for duping Israeli “experts.” D’oh! Why of course: After all, it is expected that a blood-lusting cabal of satanical sub-humans would apprise targets of its comings-and-goings.

Ok, but if you’re deaf and dumb, why not heed Egyptian intelligence, whose officials now claim Israel ignored repeated warnings that “something big” was going down? Google the phrase “What went wrong?” and you’ll discover that the patsy press has received Israeli officialdom’s memo. The efforts of the State to deflect blame, to reject responsibility for treason, have begun. Thus was Danny Dannon, another top banana, recounting to BBC’s HARDtalk what terrible characters are the Hamasniks. D’oh! Again.

Stendhal, a French writer, said there was no hypocrisy in mathematics. Hamas is mathematically honest about what it wants to do to all Jews.

It is the custodians of Israeli security whose calculus is off. If you correctly think Hamas is so horrible, why had Israel opted to deploy gizmos to the border with Gaza?

DEPLOYING GIZMOS TO GAZA

As your columnist divulged in 2008, Israel opted for “Robo-Snipers” instead of flesh-and-blood men and women. The nation’s “19- and 20-year-old soldiers” were still deployed to the front—but virtually. They sit at a safe distance “behind computer screens,” waiting on “approval by a commanding officer” before “pushing the kill button.”

Yes, Israel automated the process of defense against Gaza, creating a set of “auto kill-zones” “by networking together remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones along the 60-kilometer border.”

Gizmos are useless against the stuff of Gaza—and Latin America, for that matter. In 2005, with great enthusiasm from the Israeli Left, Gaza was given over to the dogs of war, Hamas and their avid constituents. Despite the fertile, coastal land they were handed, the precious ground water they sit on, and generous international assistance, the place soon went to the dogs. Egypt, Jordan and Israel are all terrified to open their borders to the seething snake pit that is Gaza.

It matters not whether you think the cauldron of cruelty that is Gaza created its inhabitants or whether it’s the obverse. The reality is that every nation in the region fears the Gazans. Nobody in the region wants immigrants from Gaza—although given the US Uniparty’s appetite for progressive, smug preening (aka treason); one can envisage Gaza being air lifted to America by the same Special Ops forces who rushed to import Afghanistan. In any event, hearth and home are best defended by men, military or militia, on the ground, carrying guns and grenades.

Besides, all defense systems are fallible and finite in their capacity. Air-defense systems fail. The Russians have the best possible air-defense system, yet they too, on occasion, are overwhelmed by barrages of British cruise missiles supplied to a flailing Ukraine.

If military experts were doing the work currently done by neophyte chicklet reporters; they’d explain, in newspapers like The Hill, that no defense system can intercept 3000 missiles lobbed all at once. Instead of military experts, alas, we have girls cutting-and-pasting from Wikipedia about Israel’s Iron Dome air missile defense system.

Digital docility was never going to ward off a hissing enclave like Gaza, where people, young and old, writhe in hate (watch the children of Gaza bully a Jewish little boy held captive).

GEOPOLITICS

Hamas’ invasion occurred against the backdrop of geopolitical subterfuge, which had served to marginalize Hamas. The US is forever doing the bidding of the murderous Saudis. At the behest of (Bret Baier and) the United States Uniparty; Saudi Arabia and Israel were forming an axis of sorts. The recognition of the Jewish State might have been in the offing. Cynicism aside, Bret Baier, lightweight Fox News neoconservative host, with the War Street Journal, have been waxing fat about the majesty of the Kingdome, a veritable Disney Land on the Desert, and its ruthless ruler in Riyadh, promoting the regime to their viewers and readers.

More threatening to the neocons were the tentative peace efforts underway between Iran, a reliable neoconservative bogeyman, and the Saudis. The neoconservative-favored dispensation in the region had been threatened. U.S. neocons and their clones and apostles do not wish to see the emergence of strong regional powers, which could serve as a counterweight to the Unites States’ malign influence in the Middle-East.

Not so long ago, Israel had maintained an oil pipeline with Iran—we still don’t quite know the provenance of the oil flowing in the pipes of the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Co (EAPC), as the information is subject to a military gag order. But, cui bono? In whose interests are these Middle-eastern feuds forever more?

In an effort to strengthen regional diplomacy, Israel had tried in vain to resist becoming embroiled with the Empire’s Ukrainian client state. So intent was Israel on remaining neutral on Ukraine that it incurred Rumpelstiltskin’s ire. Zelenskyy, in high-dudgeon (and high-heels), had warned Israel that “Putin would help Iran go nuclear in” if Israel were to remain neutral in the conflict. For, Israel had “not only refused to sell its Iron Dome missile defense system to Ukraine, but it also blocked the U.S. from sending Iron Dome batteries owned by the U.S. Army to Kyiv.”

As always, resistance and nascent regionalism proved futile in the face of U.S. pressure. Israel soon fell in line, although, to its credit, the Jewish State has been consistent and energetic in offering to negotiate with Russia, a regional power the US wants neutered, but with which Israel must get along.

Not unlike the United States, Hamas aims to disrupt any productive, cooperative alliances arising out of the forging of regional powers in the Middle East, and has thus made its malign presence felt. Colonel Vindman, aforementioned, and the neoconservative claque—piping up are Pompeo, Pence, Haley and Graham—have had their way with Russia with respect to foreign policy. Now that the appeal of the Ukraine project is fading; the neoconservatives will want to keep Iran in their sights.

Republicans, almost to a man—the likes of Darrell Issa and Tim Scott having been vocal on the matter—already blame Iran for Hamas’ murderous spree, without solid proof, although proof will in time be manufactured, as it was for the invasion of Iraq. What it did for the invasion of Iraq, the War Street Journal will diligently do to gin-up regime change in Iran.

TREASON IN THE HOMELAND

Here in America, death waylays us daily, due to similarly treacherous forces. Except that the carnage stateside is a daily drip-drip of racially driven murders and maimings. These deaths Americans have been habituated to accept—for everywhere and always, institutionalized treason is aided by an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.

The carnage in our country results from the prying open of the borders and the jails; from a promiscuous legal immigration system that privileges the undeveloped underclasses, and from the inversion and nullification of the country’s laws, so that ordered liberty cannot be sustained.

The Uniparty has forsaken the American border to the same digital docility to which Israelis had been forsaken. At least in Israel, an attack on the homeland is followed—however late and misguided—by a defense of the territorial homeland. An attack on the American homeland, invariably, sees our military pack up to go to … Timbuktu.

WATCH HARD TRUTH. My colleague David Vance and I anatomize the backdrop to Hamas’ pogrom, including the geopolitical and domestic forces at play, as well as the fraught history of the Gaza strip. Ilana lived through the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel; David through the IRA terrorist onslaughts in Ireland. We also examine the “ethics” of collective punishment by the State.

https://rumble.com/embed/v3lwyya/?pub=fyb9t

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, October 12
Unz Review, October 12
The New American, October 12

The post Hamas, Israel And The Anatomy Of State Treason appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

For shooting his mouth off, Trump has been designated a felon. Relays of prosecution launched against him have culminated in the Georgia arrest: That is persecution. Trump is being subjected to the Law of Rule, not the rule of law ~ilana

That Donald Trump is a political martyr is indisputable. It was already bedrock truth in January, 2021, when I first uttered the M-word. The occasion was the president’s second impeachment, passed impromptu in the House, with no due process of law afforded him whatsoever.

That the persecution of Trump is his badge of honor, a decoration of sorts, has been seconded in some unlikely quarters. Individuals calling themselves Blacks For Trump say the same. Trump is a Brother now: They designate you a felon for shooting your mouth off, and book you into the infamous Fulton County Jail in Atlanta; that means the system is messing with you, they say. You are one of us.

Brothers who speak like this are sensing a deep injustice that comes with institutional rot.

Relays of prosecution launched against Trump have culminated in the Georgia arrest: That is persecution. Trump is being subjected to the Law of Rule, not the rule of law.

Now that Trump has been martyred—we pray for the former president and salute him for his resolve and resilience in the face of unadulterated evil. For the Permanent State, Democrat and Republican, want Trump gone for good—and worse. There! I said it. It’s the truth.

The D.C. hydra head has denied Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a security detail; and they’d assassinate Donald Trump if they could. They’d do the same to you, if you mattered.

In their mild, flaccid responses to the martyrdom of Donald Trump; the Republicans remain execrable.

Neoconservatism Mainstreamed Again

Admiration for Trump the Man notwithstanding—his failures as a president are irremediable. He normalized, even revived, neoconservatism, emboldening its representatives to make a comeback, by heeding his daughter and hiring so many of them. Nikki Haley and John Bolton are examples. He heeded their policy advice too:

“It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist,’” wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. “In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without … any debate in Congress or the media.”

That Trump’s foreign policy is far and away better than that of the eight Republican pigmy presidential hopefuls is not saying much. It’s inferior to that of RFK., Jr. And foreign policy now is the defining, do-or-die issue.

Left intractable, Deep State chic grew under Trump.

Christopher Wray was President Donald Trump’s FBI director nominee. What’s more, Wray had told the president and the nation where his unalloyed loyalties lay. Wray said he was more than partial to his corrupt predecessor, James Comey. About former FBI Director Robert Mueller Wray gushed, too. He signaled to Trump that he’d gladly wade back into the same swampy polluted waters—Trump let him.

The 45th president squandered the mandate he was given. Trump failed to prevent the consolidation—and the crimes against humanity—of a Covid Cartel, the vaccine passports, the unconstitutional lockdowns, the decimation of American small business and the destruction brought by the summer of black-on-white rage, which went unpunished under his watch.

The promised Wall gave way to “multilayered technology”; to the mere “deployment of additional personnel,” and to a promise to better “vet prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors,” when Deplorables wanted criminal interlopers corralled and booted from the country.

Trump also ushered in a damaging T & A show of treacherous distaff. Head on over to CNN or ABC if you are interested in taking the measure of the typical celebutantes hired by Donald Trump during his presidency. On the progressive Fake News networks one can observe the female flotsam and jetsam—former Trump personnel—perform for the camera, hissing like cobras against the president who foolishly hired them for their ass-ets.

Trump had promised Deplorables to hire the best. Instead, he gave us a rotating, ongoing T & A parade, including his ditzy daughter.

Still Don’t Know Shia from Shinola

For Ivanka, Trump bombed Syria. For her lapdog husband, he approved boatloads of H-1B visas, and aid to Saud in bombing a starving Yemen. Like his predecessors who didn’t know Shiite from Shinola, Trump’s America was enlisted in a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war, also Riyadh’s ultimate aim; on the side of the Sunni, who don’t give a dried camel’s hump about Christians or American, and from whose madrasas come our killers.

The Shia are represented regionally by the more sedate, genteel Iranians and Syrian Alawites. Trump assassinated a uniformed official of a sovereign Shia state. Qassim Soleimani, an Iranian major general, was the equivalent of our Special Operations commander. We Americans would not tolerate it were Iranians to designate America’s Special Operations commander, General Bryan P. Fenton, a terrorist.

A just foreign policy is one that avoids what are local skirmishes and allows regional powers to emerge and arrive at arrangements advantageous to the locals. Alas, evidence abounds that when Yemeni, Saudi, Syrian, Iranian, Israeli and Russian interests make attempts at regional sovereignty and diplomacy; Uncle Sam supersedes to sunder these.

In all, both Jared and Ivanka, dubbed Jarvanka, had been eager to hobnob at Davos (Davos before Deplorables). The two trundled along to all major functions, tastelessly elbowing out the first lady, shivving her on every occasion, an audience with the Pope, included.

At Jarvanka’s behest—and spurred on by his own terrible judgment—Trump began firing and feuding with the architects of MAGA, all of whom could not stand the Davos duo. Ivanka had vaporized the excellent John Kelly, who had kept Jarvanka out of the Oval Office. As did Trump’s daughter get rid of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, a tough ice-princess, who effectively instituted and administered the zero-tolerance policy on the border and never caved over family separation.

With her house boy, Ivanka then inaugurated the Goldman-Sachs West-Wing matriarchy (Jared is androgynous, certainly her submissive). Neoconservative Dina Powel, former adviser to Ivanka, soon made it onto Trump’s National Security Council. She was a relic from Goldman Sachs and an Ivanka recruit. The affable Democrat Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor, was former president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs.

These “Kushner-Cohn Democrats” ousted Stephen Bannon from the West Wing.

Ivanka and the bimbo parade proved to be one of “The Donald’s most intractable problems.” “What Ivanka wanted Ivanka got,” at the expense of the MAGA agenda. Whether Deplorables admit it or not, the two New York liberals, a nepotistic appendage to the Trump Administration, had been a disaster for the plank President Trump had promised and for which Deplorables voted.

And I won’t even go into the press secretaries who bedecked Donald’s dais, starting with stumblebum Sarah Huckabee, obsequious, useless, forever apologizing for any America First impetus. You just know that Kimberly G-String (who makes Madonna look natural) will be waltzing straight into a role as Trump’s press secretary. (More about Kimberly Guilfoyle in “Is Political Participation Predicated On Views About Holocaust?,” November 14, 2019) If not Don Jr’s paramour, then it’ll be another such apparition. Someone like Trump’s attorney Alina Habba-Habba. She’s what Trump appoints, and will continue to appoint, because he lacks the wherewithal and the will to assess and appreciate intelligence.

Your columnist’s Trump Revolution book, published June 29, 2016, cheered “The Donald’s creative destruction.” In “The Trump Revolution, The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed,” Trump was celebrated as a,

Political Samson that threatened to bring the den of iniquity crashing down on its patrons, … an entrenched punditocracy, a self-anointed, meritless intelligentsia, oleaginous politicians, slick media, big money: You name it; Trump was tossing and goring it.

In becoming the focus of the alphabet soup of Evil Empire agencies and agents—DOJ, FBI, CIA, DNI, DAs—Trump has further exposed for all to see the putrefying innards of the Permanent State.

In the same book, your columnist had recommended that if Trump must have bling to front his administration—let him choose women like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter and Heather Mc Donald, who could  deliver intellectually, are warriors with fight in them, do not exactly assault the eye. And, will not act like Delilah turned barber.

Alas, men with fragile egos don’t like women smarter than themselves.

Otherwise, Donald Trump is admirable and adorable; his mug shot is a piece of political art, one for the ages.

*Screen Picture

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 31
Unz Review, August 31
The New American, August 31

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America has engineered Ukraine’s current existential reality to dislodge Vladimir Putin ~ilana

By America’s prescriptions, Russia should be a woke, minority white, multicultural sewer, awash with MeToo, BLM, and ANTIFA sensibilities ~ilana

Four minutes and 21 seconds into his YouTube interview with podcast-journalist Aaron Mate, John Mearsheimer, a political scientist, says this: “Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg [former Norwegian prime mMinister], made it clear that Ukraine would not be admitted into NATO until it had prevailed in the conflict [with Russia].”

The depravity of this reality notwithstanding, Mearsheimer addressed the purely pragmatic, utilitarian aspect of the geopolitical position into which Ukraine has been thrust. Ukraine cannot win the war with Russia. Therefore, deduces Mearsheimer, Ukraine will not be brought into the NATO alliance.

True. This much we all knew.

WIN OR DIE, DUMMIES

America has engineered Ukraine’s current existential reality by purging the pursuit of diplomacy and peace from its duties as the world Super Power. Mention of a negotiated truce between Ukraine and Russia is practically labeled treason by the command-and-control US media.

That the Ukraine-Russia “war is the health of the US State” was top-of-mind with one Dan Sullivan, Republican representative from Alaska, on August 3.

Following a recent NATO Summit, which determined that faithful stooge Ukraine would not be rewarded with NATO membership—Fox News, an establishment shill, entertained Sullivan for a comment.

With a demented grin you’d expect to see on a patient with end-stage syphilis (a career-destroying line I used on Genghis Bush in 2003)— Sullivan griped that Ukraine has not yet won. The question was not Ukraine’s admission into NATO, said this Republican reptile; the question was Ukraine vanquishing Russia.

“Win or die, dummies” is what Ukrainians are being instructed by the US UniParty, its NATO marionettes and their leader Zelensky, who is protected by the above forces.

The “win or die” policy imperialism, vis-à-vis Ukraine, was seconded, on August 7, by Joni Ernst, junior senator from Iowa. Ernst proves, in the end, that it is as Dr. Johnson said: “There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” Neoconservative or neoliberal; louse or flea, a pest is a pest is a pest.

SHOCK-‘N-AWE THE BOOBS

The words of this particular political pest were as follows, and I paraphrase their gist accurately with added cynical embellishment:

Once Republicans explain to Americans the nature of the mission to Iraq, oops, Ukraine—yes, where have we heard such Machiavellian GOP rhetoric before?—The People, being boobs, will somehow get behind the mission.

“Shock-‘n-awe of the old days,” beamed Joni. That will garner support for the war in Ukraine.

Oh, and, if the next cliche is new to you, dear reader: representative Ernst thinks that our “adversaries do not fear us” sufficiently.

No worries, Joni. America’s top pundits are with the pols. On August 5, also on Fox News, Victor Davis Hanson turned in his standard neoconservative performance. He critiqued Obama for the scant good 44 did: returning to Iran monies stolen by the American government and maintaining diplomacy with—rather than warring against—Russia.

Hanson has been avidly cheering for the Ukrainian project—and seems unable to quiet his vision for a more robust Manifest Destiny in American foreign-policy. His first instinct was to support the Ukrainian endeavor and he holds the most mundane neoconservative views on Russia. Being wrong and neocon earns America’s pundits plaudits for posterity.

This was just another tête-à-tête between a Fox News interchangeable anchor and the archetypal Republicans.

In any case, the depravity—the immorality—of Ukraine’s American-decreed destiny is that, the United States, via its NATO front, has used Ukraine, mercilessly dangling NATO membership before this poor people, to attempt to dislodge Vladimir Putin.

WARRING TO MAKE RUSSIA WOKE

Putin is a reactionary Russian patriot, natural ally of any sovereign, conservative nation-state. The American objective is to end Russian sovereignty and make it over in the woke image of America: a radical Jacobin stronghold. By America’s prescriptions, Russia should be a woke, minority white, multicultural sewer, awash with MeToo, BLM, and ANTIFA sensibilities.

As your columnist had remarked in commentary about “America’s radical, foreign-policy Alinskyites, in March, 2021, “Certain national-conservative governments in East Europe should be natural allies to conservative policy makers, stateside, if such unicorns existed. Vladimir Putin’s, for example. Before his death, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant sons, praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage. For example:

“In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high-school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as ‘essential reading’: ‘Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.’ … If [only] the same could be said of the high schools of the United States. (Via The Imaginative Conservative.)

For a long while, the Russian president patiently tolerated America’s demented, anti-Russia monomania. As our country sank into the quicksands of what Conservatives call “Cultural Marxism”—by contrast, and since the get-go, your columnist has framed the new, woke Western dispensation as anti-Whiteness—Putin’s inclinations have remained decidedly reactionary and traditionalist.

The Russian leader had prohibited public sexual evangelizing by LGBTQ activists. He comes down squarely on the side of the Russian Orthodox church, such as when vandals, the Pussy Riot whores, obscenely desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Savior. He has also welcomed as refugees persecuted white South Africans, where America’s successive governments refuse to acknowledge that the latter are under threat of ethnocide. Also, policies to stimulate Russian birthrates have been put in place by the conservative leader.

Ukraine, for its part, is led by a vainglorious fool. “Zelensky is a kept man, his flesh softer than sin under the khaki costume.” For all his Jewish-lineage boasting, Zelensky ought to know that, in the Hebrew Bible, a “leader who fails to haggle for the lives of his people is considered a failed leader.”

“The US is today running bigger deficits than ever.” According to gold bug Egon von Greyerz, “There is only one buyer of US debt – the Fed.” The last assertion is hard to verify, namely that nobody is now buying US debt. Nevertheless, this is entirely believable.

So, it has been ordained that Ukraine be destroyed on the altar of the imploding, decrepit, fiscally and morally debased American Empire and its European zombie satellite states.

©2023 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 10
Unz Review, August 10
The New American, August 10

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