“When small men cast big shadows it means that the sun is about to set”
Editors Note: This is a re-post of an article published 07.19.25 from Psychsphere author Sobia Quazi, the original can be found here. Sobia provides excellent analysis of the current affairs in Western Culture. This writing engages the reader on the current conflict in Palestine. This article was reproduced with the author’s permission.
The Falling of the Curtain
How did we get to a place where 1.9 million people are sealed into a narrow strip of land and relentlessly bombarded with heavy duty missiles every single day, whilst being starved? A world where we watch in livestream, young children covered in dust and rubble streaked with blood, dying on the floors of hospitals that have been torn apart by relentless bombardment over almost 2 years? Parents standing in silent tears over tiny forms swaddled tightly in white – children who once played in joyful mischief?
We watch the most devastating footage – interspersed with adverts of high fashion or the latest slick utilities and appliances, intercut with images of glamour and opulence, of gleaming kitchens, show home interiors and other “aspirational” lifestyle highlights, so that our attention spans that are increasingly accustomed to the flickering pace of social media imagery, can barely keep up with our own transition of emotions.
Never before has there been such proximity of disparate images from different worlds, different existences. In a unique display of virulent pro-Zionism and staggering lack of empathy, the clothes giant Zara in December 2023 ran an advertising campaign featuring mannequins with missing limbs and white shrouds, widely attributed to its pro-“Israel” head designer Vanessa Perilman.
The casual co-opting of the imagery of another’s death, devastation and loss in order to gloat about “success” in relentlessly bombing a country with little military means of defence highlights in stark relief, the depths that Zionists have plummeted to, but also displays again, a world in which high fashion is transformed into a playground of gruesome propaganda that some types of people actually revel in.
The modern world – with its high paced frenetic existence, constant sensory overload and the habitual outsourcing of true thinking and reflection to AI has resulted in a new type of conformity and blandness.
While we may think ourselves the least socially conventional and most accepting of generations, the truth is that this is only a surface illusion in a world where words are heavily policed, memes sweep social media in a matter of hours, and the liberal left thought police ensure that our words are so sanitized that we become incapable of independent thought.
A time where we may look like multitudinous exotic birds with our tattoos, unique styles, proudly displayed individuality; but this misleading veneer belies a homogeneity of thought that is dependent on the vicissitudes of social media trends and 2 second snippets of “wisdom” that flash up on our insta feed and that we consume with that peculiar passivity borne of the extreme ease of modern consumer society.
Political Fiends and Optimal Thought Control
Searching for the factors that make a disease like Zionism cast its stranglehold over the world is not easy, but part of it is rooted in mediocrity. Sure, there are the theories about Epstein, blackmail, political secrets and underground conspiracies; but there is also the ease with which our politicians have succumbed to blackmail and flattery, the greasy fingers of ubiquitous bodies like the UK Fiends of “Israel”.
Labor Fiends of “Israel” who are closely linked with the “Israeli” embassy in London, are one of the major donors of the Labor government, and part of the pro-“Israel” lobby that has donated hundreds of thousands to Starmer and his Labor cabinet members since they were elected.
The role of lobbying within the political machinery has become ever more prominent and concomitantly more murky since the 1990s, with a lack of transparency and accountability for what have become little more than governing networks of narcissism and corruption. The utterly low calibre of our current politicians matches the declining calibre of independent thought in today’s world.
Yes, the imperialist war machine of global dominance has always existed, there has always been corruption; and yes, “Israel” has been brutalizing Palestinians for decades with zero accountability and a thick shroud of secrecy that was the result of people not having access to independent news sources – there have been some positives to social media.
But the outcomes of a system within which there is a devastating lack of critical thinking and a sweeping influence of social media; an outsourcing of independent thought to AI systems and a passive consumption of digital imagery, has resulted in an immunity to emotional nuance and a need for escalating shock value in order to actually feel something.
“Think tanks” (or thought control lobbies as they might more realistically be called) push their agendas to influence public opinion, and advertising executives study consumer psychology in order to construct the optimal adverts to influence our thinking and habits – and we know who owns those organizations – while we at the other end, swallow their “advertising pills” like compliant consumer-zombie patients in an asylum.
Zionism and Consumer Thought Fantasy
Hence, we worship not real people but the symbols of success; we chase the capitalist dream, we pursue identities that are sold to us like we are lost souls drifting along in some apocalyptic landscape of false images; beneath this landscape of glamour and digitally generated aspirational images is a broken world and a reality of devastation.
It is the devastation of our own inner lack of meaning in a world of reality TV over books, of superficial fleeting images over real depth of meaning, of Al over really processing information and considering its implications, of social media addiction over real life communication person to person.
I wonder if the new Superman movie is less about being pro-Palestine and more about encouraging a passive internal playing out of the dynamics of colonial domination, spoon-fed to us through this enjoyable immersive technicolor movie experience – we crunch popcorn while we watch Superman overcome the Zionist characterized villainous colonial machinery of oppressive power – while the very same network swallows up our money and provides us with a sense of having done something, taken a stand.
Turned the suffering of those people far away into a movie, reflecting their experience through the addictive and compelling prism of cinematic imagery whilst in turn perpetuating an internal distorting cinematic lens through which we view their suffering, as movie characters in a faraway land, an exotic people oppressed by a colonizer that we empathize with through watching Hollywood films; simultaneously a process of movie and reality seamlessly blending together – once again we succumb to a slumber of our senses, sleepwalking through reality while a people starve to death.
Digital Dominance and Systems of Convenience
It is the dominance of the digital and the ascension of the aspirational and superficial that is partly to blame for our own muted capacities and attenuated capabilities, in a world of growing violence where we are increasingly removed from the consequences of our actions – like collectively pressing an Armageddon button whilst sipping a Starbucks “latte” laced with sugar (the most malignly concealed 21st century drug that co-opts our dopamine networks into silent submission like the Prozac of the big Pharma companies, that are also Zionist controlled and co-opted).
Every single one of us that is plugged into the networks that ultimately serve to fund the power of the few, are part of a sterilized network of violence that we are immune to the immediate effects of, and yet an integral part of.
I am talking about things like where we shop, what we consume, what systems of convenience we have become dependent upon that make life easier and yet that increase the distances between us; between one another, when we are more interested in our phones than actually communicating; and between us and the people who appear on our social media streams, starving, injured, pleading, before we flick to the next image whatever it may be.
Systems of convenience that are fully complicit in the brutalization of people in lands far way and yet that bear intimate relevance to our own governing systems and our futures whether we are talking about Microsoft and Palantir or Amazon and Azure.
Somewhere, in the interstices of our consciousness there are pools of real emotion and the capacity to generate something more authentic. Part of this is to return to real networks of people, and to print real words rather than to rely on the digital, with its invisible yet omnipresent monitoring of us through biometrics and consumer analysis of our behavioural patterns.
The System
The system does not want us to have the capacity for real, independent thought, it does not want us to connect with one another and form networks outside of the biometric surveillance system.
It is inimical to our independence and it utilizes our own complacency as a tool with which to make us slavishly dependent so that we not only succumb to the Zionist controlled networks but we become indifferent to the pain of others and unaware of our complicity in the system.
Willing zombies in a world of manipulated imagery that is carefully curated to maximize our deference and dependenceeven as we think we are rebelling, and to provide us with the illusion that we elect our leaders freely rather than support an apparently bipartisan system that always leads back to the same outcomes.
Gaza and the People
We are living in a world where the curtain is slowly falling. The brutality of “Israel’s” US backed holocaust in Gaza is unprecedented, the worlds systems of legality and accountability are slowly being hijacked and dismantled, the noose of Zionistic control tightening around our necks as the guillotine descends – the brunt of its full weight currently being borne by the innocent people of Gaza.
As power fuelled AI systems and digital media continue to drug us into submission, environmental fluctuations ravage the biosphere and the pall of Zionism falls over the world and our capacity for humanity, we need new solutions, new ways to “exist”.
But meanwhile, time is running out for the people of Gaza. As we watch skeletal babies languishing on threadbare mattresses and mothers mourning, we need to mobilize our collective power however we can at this critical time.
Our politicians “fiddle” (taxes, expenses, funds) – while Gaza burns, bleeds, starves. What we have left at our disposal is the power of the people – both today, and in coming years. It has always been the power of the people – real, raw, unremitting. Gaza, the opposite polarity to the scourge of Zionism, needs the power of the people now.
Do not stop talking about Gaza. Do not stop acting on Gaza. Keep the dial moving.
A Sobering Look at the US/Israel Coalition and What Needs to Be Done
April 3, 2025
Editor’s Note: I published an article on antisemitism yesterday and later discovered that Patrick Lawrence, a master craftsman among renowned journalists, had published an article through Consortium News that addressed the same topic, on the same day. I am reposting the article in its entirety here. Please feel free to share this widely with others.
Both articles come with stark warnings. At the risk of sounding overly apocalyptic, the 10 to 15 minutes you spend reading this could help save lives. However, what is currently happening in Palestine, the USA, and elsewhere is not the will of some demonic god. These evils are being committed by a minority of disturbed human beings, and it will take a combined effort of the majority of human beings to stop it.
————————————————
PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall
April 2, 2025
The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.
Department of Homeland Security agents detaining Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk last week. (WhoIsCentreLeft/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.
Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian:
“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to….
This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….
These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”
When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Sheer Charade
Demonstrators outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 10, after federal agents targeted pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”
Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials — have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked.
I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranians in the U.S. on a student visa.
Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them.
The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law.
And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.
To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.
I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say.
Miller at the 1986 PEN Congress. (Bernard Gotfryd/U.S. Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons/ Public domain)
Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:
“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence….
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”
I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:
“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.
The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously.
Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.”
I am with Simius Cognitius on this point: While registering the strongest objection, I declared myself an anti–Semite by the offensively irrational definition imposed upon us at the time of the al–Aqsa incident in May 2021. The alternative would be coerced silence.
But if the diabolic machinations of Zionists and their lobbies have precipitated the headlong descent of our polity, America lost all access to a beautifully moral world long before its sponsorship of the Israelis’ campaign of terror in Gaza and lately the West Bank. Arthur Miller was in mourning by the mid–1970s, let us not forget.
Closer to our time, Chris Hedges published a book to this same effect not so many years ago. In Empire of Illusion (Nation Books, 2009), he looks not back but out his window — finding in the world as we have made it a morally collapsed culture wherein reality is incessantly confused with spectacle, self-deception, and illusion.
I offer readers this, my basket of apples and oranges. I do not know how else to capture in a few words the astonishing state of free-fall in which we find ourselves.
Over the past week or so three of the programs we watch on a regular basis featured guests that, to my great surprise, drew the same conclusions as to what means of response are available to paying-attention people in our blighted circumstance.
John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago foreign affairs professor, and Chas Freeman, the estimable ambassador emeritus, spoke on back-to-back segments of Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom program. Chris Hedges interviewed Katherine Franke, recently forced out of her tenured position as a professor at Columbia University Law School for her advocacy in behalf of those who have demonstrated for the Palestinian cause.
August figures all. And how curious that all three got asked the same question. We have an administration that is openly unresponsive to its citizens, indifferent to their constitutional rights, and abusive of the law; the judicial system appears on the way to failing: What do you think people should do?
I thought the question alone was an interesting reflection of our shared predicament. And I liked Ambassador Freeman’s reply best for his calm matter-of-fact delivery. He effectively paraphrased the others, in any event.
“Well,” Freeman said, “there’s the street.”
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Breathe
All my work is reader supported. If you learned something new please show your appreciation by buying me coffee at the links below. Peace, Guy
Editor’s Note: I published an article on antisemitism yesterday and later discovered that Patrick Lawrence, a master craftsman among renowned journalists, had published an article through Consortium News that addressed the same topic, on the same day. I am reposting the article in its entirety here. Please feel free to share this widely with others.
Both articles come with stark warnings. At the risk of sounding overly apocalyptic, the 10 to 15 minutes you spend reading this could help save lives. However, what is currently happening in Palestine, the USA, and elsewhere is not the will of some demonic god. These evils are being committed by a minority of disturbed human beings, and it will take a combined effort of the majority of human beings to stop it.
PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall
April 2, 2025
The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.
Department of Homeland Security agents detaining Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk last week. (WhoIsCentreLeft/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.
Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian:
“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to….
This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….
These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”
When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Sheer Charade
Demonstrators outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 10, after federal agents targeted pro-Palestine student activist Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”
Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”
Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials—have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked.
I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranians in the U.S. on a student visa.
Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them.
The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law.
And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.
To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.
I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say.
Miller at the 1986 PEN Congress. (Bernard Gotfryd/U.S. Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons/ Public domain)
Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:
“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence….
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”
I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:
“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.
The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously.
Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.”
I am with Simius Cognitius on this point: While registering the strongest objection, I declared myself an anti–Semite by the offensively irrational definition imposed upon us at the time of the al–Aqsa incident in May 2021. The alternative would be coerced silence.
But if the diabolic machinations of Zionists and their lobbies have precipitated the headlong descent of our polity, America lost all access to a beautifully moral world long before its sponsorship of the Israelis’ campaign of terror in Gaza and lately the West Bank. Arthur Miller was in mourning by the mid–1970s, let us not forget.
Closer to our time, Chris Hedges published a book to this same effect not so many years ago. In Empire of Illusion (Nation Books, 2009), he looks not back but out his window — finding in the world as we have made it a morally collapsed culture wherein reality is incessantly confused with spectacle, self-deception, and illusion.
I offer readers this, my basket of apples and oranges. I do not know how else to capture in a few words the astonishing state of free-fall in which we find ourselves.
Over the past week or so three of the programs we watch on a regular basis featured guests that, to my great surprise, drew the same conclusions as to what means of response are available to paying-attention people in our blighted circumstance.
John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago foreign affairs professor, and Chas Freeman, the estimable ambassador emeritus, spoke on back-to-back segments of Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom program. Chris Hedges interviewed Katherine Franke, recently forced out of her tenured position as a professor at Columbia University Law School for her advocacy in behalf of those who have demonstrated for the Palestinian cause.
August figures all. And how curious that all three got asked the same question. We have an administration that is openly unresponsive to its citizens, indifferent to their constitutional rights, and abusive of the law; the judicial system appears on the way to failing: What do you think people should do?
I thought the question alone was an interesting reflection of our shared predicament. And I liked Ambassador Freeman’s reply best for his calm matter-of-fact delivery. He effectively paraphrased the others, in any event.
“Well,” Freeman said, “there’s the street.”
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for The International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism, please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
For a one time donation buy me coffee at the link below
“We have the crisis of planet, poverty, and peace… We have nothing to lose except everything. So, let’s go ahead. This is the wager of our generation. If we are to fail, it is better in any case to have stood on the side of those who choose life rather than those on the side who are destroying life.” -Albert Camus
Antisemitism Defined
Sociologists, anthropologists, archeologists, as well as other scholars have used the word Semite as a linguistic or language designation for ancient cultures who spoke, or contemporary cultures who speak a Semitic language as their native tongue. Current Semites would include those who speak Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, as well as numerous other languages, Arabic being by far the most prolific (500 million users). The use of the term antisemitic in reference to the Palestine/Israel conflict has no linguistic or intrinsic value.
In 1879 German journalist Wilhelm Marr, convinced that the Jews and Germans would never coexist but that one would eventually destroy the other, founded the League of Antisemitism to advocate for the forced expulsion of Jews from German territory. In this case, Marr interpreted the word antisemitism to mean anti-Judaism. Many claim that this colossal misrepresentation was one of the catalysts that led to Nazi Germany’s Jewish extermination program.
To address this particular connotation, religions were and are constructed in an attempt to answer three questions that have agitated philosophers since the beginning of thought. Who am I? Where did I come from? And, why am I here? Throughout time, cosmologies from many different cultures were put forward to address these inquiries. Discoveries in the sciences of Astro and Quantum Physics have made significant leaps over the years in edging us closer to the answers of these questions. However, these investigations and their manifestations are situated in the realm of ideas. Judaism, among other things, is an idea. Due to a distorted understanding of the term “race” and its conflation with language, a European nation waged war on an idea. This in turn, led to one of many genocidal campaigns in the 20th century.
This notion of blotting out an idea is a phantasmagorical nightmare concocted by disturbed minds. You could exterminate every person known who practices Judaism and slap your hands together announcing, ‘job done.’ Then, on some future day, a young seeker stumbles across a copy of the Torah, reads it, and thinks, ‘This makes sense to me,’ (and why wouldn’t they, the book contains some of the most profound words ever written)- and the whole process would start again.
Today, nefarious political actors whose ancestors were the victims of Marr’s interpretation have revived his disfigured definition of antisemitism, in order to justify their colonial aims and genocidal actions against the people of Palestine.
A Mass Grave in Gaza 2025
These same political operatives attempt to equate the term ‘antizionism’ with Marr’s classical definition of ‘antisemitism’ which is categorically false. Zionism is a political movement that has been rejected by the majority of Jews; Semitism is a language characterization. Any definition of anti-semitism that does not include all Semitic peoples or favors one Semitic group over others is incomplete and non-functional. Any remedy to discourage, prevent, or criminalize anti-semitism that does not include the protection of all Semitic peoples is prejudicial.
This would include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism that was introduced as Bill (H.R. 6090) and passed by the US House of Representatives on May 1st, 2024. The intent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023 was “the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes.” The bill did not pass the Senate, but could be later included with another bill.
The bill was introduced by New York Congressman Michael Lawler who has received over a half a million dollars in AIPAC associated funds during his political career.
The Reality
Anyone, regardless of their affiliations or religious orientations, who holds the Zionist Supremacist of Israel and their supporters to account for the numerous war crimes that they have committed over the last 80 years, are being tagged as antisemitic and punished in some form or fashion. Many have been arrested and detained. We are seeing this plastered all over mainstream and social media on a daily basis.
The Zionist Supremacist ideology is a carbon copy of the colonial supremacist mindset we have read about throughout history. It goes like this, ‘We will do whatever we want, whenever we want, to whomever we want, which includes our victims, and we don’t want to hear any complaints from anyone about it! We are the favored and you are the fodder.’
And to make sure we understand their intent, we get to watch them do exactly that, as human rights defenders, medical practitioners, citizens in Gaza and elsewhere, when they are not being starved to death, are mowed down by Israel’s perpetual US funded and supplied killing machine.
In closing I leave you with the sobering words of the former United Nations human rights official and specialist in International Human Rights Law, Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his post four days before his retirement in protest of the UN’s weak response to the Gaza Genocide. You know what to do.
Due to the article’s length (5580 words- 26 minute read) Gmail will clip the article in your inbox. You can view the article in its entirety by clicking on the “View entire message” hyperlink at the bottom of the email.I apologize at the start to those who find themselves treading on familiar ground. I have been discussing much of this with some of my readers who are dear friends for the last two years. Those conversations provided a solid foundation from which these words sprung. Due to an influx of new viewers some further context was necessary.
In the week after the election, I received an email from a friend of mine who had been keeping me up to date on the Democrat’s campaign against Donald Trump. This is what came of it.
The Context
The US colonial projects exercised by the US government were largely hidden from the view of the US public until Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers in 1971. After this, imperial colonial operatives used different methods to hide their wares. Today, due to the global network of instant communication and cell phones, it is near impossible for the colonialists to hide their atrocities and control public opinion. This is why censorship of free speech is so widespread in the West, and independent publishers and journalists are being arrested and imprisoned for writing and publishing news. Julian Assange being a good example.
I am a late baby boomer which typically is defined as those who were born between 1946 and 1964. My year is 1961; I am the ninth of a traditional, conservative Catholic family, and some of my older siblings are ten years my senior. As noted above we had no idea what imperial colonial projects were taking place during those boomer years. Today, with hindsight, the National Security Archive, competent, independent, investigative journalists, honest historians who tell all of the history of the US, and extensive personal research, one can clearly understand that our government, which has been controlled by US economic elites without major interruption since WWII, is the most dangerous political predator the world has ever known.
Some of my older siblings who were not up to speed with the behind the scenes workings of the US government, these siblings who voted on both sides of the two party fence, were not happy with the information I was providing them about these colonial projects. Information that exposed the fact that after WWII the US economic elites and their political operatives had intended to use whatever means necessary to continue the conquest of the world at large, under the guise of defending the US and spreading democracy. Knowing that the general US population was often altruistic and would have no reason to accept the amount of tax dollars necessary to pursue such an endeavor, the elites determined that they would have to significantly expand the propaganda mechanisms that were in place before and during the war to manufacture consent for their plans. For more on this you can read the US Director of Policy Planning George Kennan’s Planning Report PPS/23 dated 02.24.48, in particular Pg. 524-525, or see Fred Kaplan’s book, The Wizards of Armageddon, Pg.139 , 140 , or thumb through ex-State Department employee William Blum’s, Killing Hope, US and CIA Interventions Since WWII.
People were shocked when I provided evidence to them about the death tolls associated with carrying out these plans. Drawing from 26 different sources, mostly US affiliated, the IBON Foundation concludes that US military engagements overseas since WWII have caused the deaths of over 56 million people. This includes the current conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine. According to the US Historian Nick Turse’s analysis in 2013, the updated accounting of the US war in Vietnam alone caused the deaths of 2,012,000 soldiers, and 3,865,000 civilians. This does not include the Nixon/Kissinger terror campaign of carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos. Legitimate sources that project these numbers, like the two cited above and the Brown University, Costs of War Project, commonly state that their numbers are underestimated.
The Election Fog
In the email that was shared with me by a friend who has kept me up to date on the Democrat’s campaign against Donald Trump, a Harvard professor of Ethics and Public Policy, Christopher Robichaud claimed that the core reason that Kamala Harris lost the election was “culture.” (A copy of his comments posted on twitter/x are attached in the notes below)
“America, culturally, has completely abandoned a politics of decency and respect” he wrote, “and has embraced instead a politics of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia, and bullying.” I assume that Robichaud was indicating that had the US voters chosen Kamala Harris that the virtues of “decency and respect” would have been maintained.
Then Robichaud makes a surprising, yet accurate, observation, “The old GOP will never return, and the Dems have nothing to say to American culture at the moment. Nothing.” This surprised me because this statement seems to fly in the face of a statement that Robichaud made earlier, that “The problem isn’t that Dems didn’t have the right message.”
On my part, throughout the years I typically voted Democrat thinking that the Dem’s represented the working class. After a solid study to determine whether that belief held any weight, it became obvious that the Democratic Party had long abandoned the working class since 1975. In the three decades that led to the 2016 election, they held the working class underwater until little breath was left. This is what gave MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s words so much poignancy,
“If you want to pull the major party that is closest to the way you’re thinking, to what you’re thinking, you must, you must, show them that you’re capable of not voting for them. If you don’t show them you’re capable of not voting for them, they don’t have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn’t listen or have to listen to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party because the left had nowhere to go.”
I wanted to gain more context on Robichaud’s cultural cause and this led me to another Harvard Professor Michael Sandel, who is professor of political philosophy. He was interviewed on PBS to discuss “What Trump’s Win Says About American Society.” Sandel claims, like the Robert Reich article hyper-linked above, that economics played a decisive role,
“For decades, the divide between [economic] winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics, and setting us apart… For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike had carried out a kind of neoliberal, market friendly globalization contracts that delivered enormous rewards to those at the top, but left the bottom half of the country, basically, with stagnant wages and outsourced jobs.”
Sandel also points to something Robichaud missed in his analysis, political party elitism.
“The governing elites, Democrats and Republicans had told the working people, if you want to compete and win in a global economy, go to college. What you learn will depend on what you learn. You can make it if you try. What they missed was the insult implicit in this bracing advice. If you are struggling in the new economy, and you didn’t get a degree, your failure is your fault. That is the implication. “
This oozed out of both political campaigns by the truck load. Some incidents are noted below. When most of the population’s cost of living dramatically rises, and their quality of living increasingly declines, which has been the case for decades, this is a recipe for political revolt, and neither party has bothered to grapple with this.
Harris gained significant media attention in 2017 when she tore in to Attorney General Jeff Sessions during the senate hearings on the Russia gate debacle. She became the rising star in the Democratic party being one the party’s top fundraisers in less than seven months on the job as a US senator. In a short stint in 2020, she is a presidential candidate who drops out of the race just before the Iowa caucus, and this gets her name on the ticket. When Biden fell off the ballot on July 21st of this year, Harris was held up as his replacement with the election less than 4 months away.
In August as the campaign was underway, I read the post that came across my Twitter/X feed. In between the leaked videos of IDF soldiers gang raping Palestinian prisoners in Israeli torture facilities, people began stating in so many words that they weren’t exactly sure what the Harris campaign was about, other than she kept telling people that she was not the orange clown that was running against her. Then one day toward the end of the month, this appeared in front of me:
What? Kamala Harris was 3 years old when the “flower power” counter culture scene was center stage in 1967. Could this be Democratic operatives taking a page out of the Trump playbook and trying to sell what Christopher Robichaud’s defines in his twitter/x post as “false nostalgia” to the voters? I was speechless. ‘What the hell does this mean,’ I thought, as I stared at the colorful nothingness.
In October when democratic elites campaigned for the VP. The condescending tone in which they addressed their voters was bizarre. Obama lectured black male voters for considering walking away from their nominee because she was a woman. In Georgia, Clinton encouraged voters not to vote for Trump just because the economy was better while he was in office.
Then Clinton went to Michigan, a state with the largest Arab and Muslim population in the US, and in the most grotesque display of indifferent cowardice, lied to the Palestinians who were in the audience. He told them that the Israelis had a right to Palestinian land because they inhabited it 2600 years ago and they were there first. He told them that the Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza did not care about their own families being murdered, and in so many words encouraged them, to overlook the brutal genocide of their own parents, siblings, and children, and vote for the party that was committing the crimes. I couldn’t believe it!
In the last few days before the election the Twitter/X feeds about the Harris campaign shifted. Between the videos showing a bedridden Palestinian patient being burned alive by Israeli soldiers in Northern Gaza, many people began asking if Harris was purposely trying to lose the election. Some suggested that Bill Clinton, due to his statements in Michigan, may be an undercover Trump operative. The confusion continued to mount even among Harris supporters, as former Democratic Ohio State Senator Nina Turner stated,
“My party keeps talking about joy,” said Turner, referencing the theme of the Democratic National Convention this summer. “Well, there is no joy when you can’t afford gas and food and the rent is going up. There’s no joy with 60 percent of American people saying they live paycheck to paycheck.”
In paragraph three of Robichaud analysis he designates several sentences to explain what was not the problem that caused Harris’s election loss. I think that some of the items on his list did play a part in Harris losing the election, but it seems prudent to me to spend some time looking at some of the things that were the problem. Not only the problem with the latest election, but the problem with our current political system as a whole. These are blatantly apparent realities that don’t require a lot of detailed explanations.
The Blind Cyclops
The US is in the last stages of a crumbling colonial empire. Neither candidate of the two party system was going step forward and speak out against the economic elites, or mention the colonial projects that have been a part of the political process in a big way since WWII. Regardless of who was elected, no president has the ability to reverse this irreversible decline. As one of the economic elites, Larry Fink, the CEO of Black Rock has stated recently, “it really doesn’t matter” who wins the election.
The radical changes necessary to shift our country into a post-colonial cooperative stance with our global neighbors and the domestic population, will not be able to take place until we begin dismantling the iron grip control that the economic elites have over our political system. If these changes were initiated relatively soon it would go a long way in cushioning the blow of the collapse, and possibly avoid a civil war. However, as everyone can see, with Trump’s victory that is not where we are headed.
Toward the end of Robichaud writing he warns the world that, “America’s rightward lurch is, I’m afraid, bad news for you too.” He goes on to state,
“We need not speculate what happens when countries become mired in lies, embrace resentment, and savor bullying. We know exactly what happens. Bloody conflict and global destabilization.”
I don’t know how Robichaud missed this but, the USA’s imperial “lurch” has been “bad news” for most of the rest of the globe since at least their invasion of the Philippines in 1898, when US Marines and US gunboats mowed down 600,000 of the Philippine population. Perhaps another eye opener for Mr. Robichaud, “bullying” the rest of the world has been a part of the US colonial play book from the beginning. This is not just a Trump phenomenon.
Their current preferred method is economic bullying. As of April of 2024 the US has had “15,373 active sanctions” against 1/3 of the world’s countries causing millions of civilian deaths. Colonial empires always pick the most vulnerable to prey on, 60% of the world’s poorest countries are under US sanctions. These are the hallmarks of a pariah state that is losing its teeth.
Robichaud’s understanding of a future “bloody conflict and global destabilization” has also been a part of the US colonial playbook for a long time and is the current state of foreign affairs as of this writing.
Jim Kavanagh, former professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Princeton in his article, Catastrophe at the Ballot Box, gives a brief run down,
“The United States of America is on the verge of World War III in three different theaters. Its social economy and infrastructure are in tatters. It’s actively engaged in genocidal ethnic cleansing — killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of mainly children and women and spitting on every precept of humanitarian and international law — on behalf of an atavistic settler-colonial project. It is more than ever despised and less than ever feared in a world escaping its control.
And in this catastrophic conjuncture, the U.S. political and media culture throws up two of the most incompetent figures imaginable to vie for the role of leading us into the abyss.”
This is by no means a view held by a few foreign and domestic analysts. Patrick Lawrence, an overseas journalist, and foreign affairs commentator for over 25 years had this to say,
Biden’s record on the foreign side speaks for itself. He leaves the U.S. stuck in a proxy war with Russia from which there is by design no exit, even as Ukraine is condemned to self-destruction and its people to a criminal, Nazi–infested dictatorship in Kiev. Cold War II now lies before us, by the look of it stretching out for decades.
Across the other ocean there is the new Cold War’s second front. Relations with China lie in ruins, having been run into the ground by patently incompetent amateurs whose sole qualification for office is their yes-man loyalty to a leader even stupider than they are.
Worst of all, of course, is the spectacle of America’s direct participation, well beyond mere support, in the final stage of a terrorist state’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This will leave a scar on the United States of America that no future leader will ever be able to erase.
Similar views on our current state of affairs are held by other notable experts in the field. This includes many retired intelligence analysts and high ranking military veterans who have been involved in US policy for over two generations. A partial list is below. You can click on their names to review their bio’s:
Robichaud’s first sentence in his closing paragraph again indicates he is not up to speed on many aspects of US history and US foreign policy. The sentence reads,
“The first quarter of the 21st century will therefore in hindsight be viewed as the seed-planting stage for the absolute shit show that’s about to unfold globally over the next two and a half decades.”
“The seed planting stage for the absolute shit show,” that took place in the first century after our country’s founding would have been, possibly the early 1600’s when predatory English colonists migrated to the Americas and forthwith began massacring the indigenous population.
“The seed planting stage for the [current] absolute shit show” that will continue under Trump’s guidance, if you can call what Trump does “guidance,” received a big push in 1997 with the founding of the Project for the New American Century, by Republican super hawks and colonial capitalists William Kristol and Robert Kagan. This think tank produced a template to expand US economic and political domination across the globe in the 21st century. Kagan left the Republican party in 2016 to support another super hawk colonial capitalist Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee. Kristol joined the Dems this year in support of Harris. As I have written in the past, among the two parties that dominate the US election cycles, there is one that wins every time, and that’s the War Party.
The attached image at the end of Robichaud’s commentary with the prefix, “or this:” is pasted below. This indicates to me that Robichaud is aware of the possibility that the US could become a fascist state under Trump’s rule. This possibility was deeply explored during his first term as president, and was indeed an anxiety provoking concern for a large portion of the US voting population.
However, Robichaud’s raising of the alarm, like many other noted commentators throughout the last year, is significantly late. The US is already deeply embedded in what one might call ‘fascism-light’ and has been for some time. The political propagandist just rebranded it under the disguise of US exceptionalism so the public can feel good about being controlled. Fascism-dark will be on its way shortly.
“I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
The US economic elites who control our government have been in the process of bringing our democracy to a screeching halt for decades, and bettering the lot of the citizenry is the furthest thing from their minds. Currently the transnational capitalist elites are engineering a society that comfortably sustains only 20% of the US population. The rest are being slowly processed into debt enslavement.
The social philosopher and cultural critic Umberto Eco warned us in 1995,
“We must keep alert… Ur Fascism [eternal fascism] is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances.”
And this brings me to the central point of this writing. Today, to the shock of many, we can state that Umberto Eco was wrong on one point. Sometimes life is “that simple.” We don’t have people talking about reopening Auschwitz, or Black Shirts parading in Italy, we have something even more apparent. We have what the Jewish Humanist Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz called “Judeo-Nazi” behavior being displayed right now in Gaza, as a bona fide genocide in real time is being main streamed through the worlds cell phones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is an ‘in your face’ horror that medical experts claim has caused the deaths of over 185,000 people in less than 9 months. With over 62,400 of those deaths being attributed to starvation. These are the textbook definition of war crimes.
If you listen to the people in the streets, in absolute clarity they draw a direct connection between these events and Harris losing the election. Here is a caption of a recent AP news report coming from a pro-Palestinian rally in Washington DC,
“Protesters carried signs criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the issue. One read: “Abandon Harris ’24.”
Law student Annette Tunstall said she considered voting Democratic after Biden stepped down and Harris became the candidate. But she lost faith after pro-Palestinian voices were muzzled at the Democratic National Convention, she said. “
Joshua Rising
In the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a former member of the Israeli Knesset, wrote an essay called Territories thatwarned the political Zionist of Israel about their slow descent into fascism , and predicted that if they continued, Israel would eventually dissolve,
“If Israel does not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate, that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult… Our situation [in Israel] will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation… A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners [Palestinians] would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies… the Israeli Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations… [Eventually] Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it. (emphasis added)”
Many other Israeli intellectuals including, Mike Peled, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, continued to sound the alarm over the years, but to no avail. People of this ilk are defined as humanist and humanist hold a small minority voice in the Israeli Knesset. Perhaps it’s the deafening sound of 85,000 tons of US bombs that have been dropped on Gaza over the last year that has drowned out their cries for justice.
The current fascist coalition that has taken control of the Israeli Knesset has its roots in the teachings of one Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Ultra- Zionist Jewish supremacist terrorist that founded the Jewish Defense league in 1968. This organization plotted assassinations of Russian diplomats and carried out a wide spread bombing campaigns in the US over the two decades of the 1970’s and 80’s. Kahane recruited among the Jewish youth in the US and Israel, spreading a lethal form of Judeo fascism which taught that god ordained the purging of all non-Jewish people from Palestine/Israel by whatever means necessary, including mass executions. These expulsions and/ or executions included Jews who did not adhere to the Kahanist ideology. This was required to usher in the messianic redemption of mankind at the end of days.
Rabbi Meir Kahane (front right) at a rally. Image from the Southern Poverty Law Center
Giving a speech in Haifa, Israel on June 28th, 1985, Kahane incited the crowd with his expulsion rhetoric, “No one can understand the soul of those [Arab] beasts, those roaches. We shall either cut their throats or throw them out.” Then Kahane promised the crowd that, once he became the defense minister in Israel’s Knesset,
“they [the Arabs] will turn on the radio and hear that Kahane has been named Minister of Defense. Then they will come to me, bow to me, lick my feet, and I will be merciful and will allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered. “
By the time Kahane was assassinated in the US in 1990, he had recruited tens of thousands of followers in the US and Israel. On such follower, a young American-Israeli physician named Baruch Goldstein, walked in to the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on February 25th, 1994 and opened fire on the 800 Palestinian Muslim worshippers praying there during the month of Ramadan. He killed 29 and wounded another 125, until he was beaten to death by survivors.
Israel’s Judeo-Nazi Regime
On May 20th, 2022 Anthony Blinken’s US State Department removed the Kahanist terror group Kahanist Chai from its list of designated terrorist organizations. Five months later, with no obstacles left to stop him, Benjamin Netanyahu, joined hands with professed Kahanist Jewish supremacists Itamar Ben Gavir, Bezadel Smotrich, and others to form a predatory, ultra-right, anti-palestinian coalition and they won the election in the Knesset.
Ben Gavir had a picture of Baruch Goldstein hanging in his living room and praised him as a hero. In the year previous to the forming of this new coalition, Gavir had organized and led multiple anti-Palestinian race riots in the cities across Israel. Bezadel Smotrich, who advocated for a shoot-to-kill policy concerning Palestinian children throwing stones in resistance to Israeli occupation, has claimed Israeli ownership of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza, and is actively expelling their inhabitants now.
It is this coalition that is currently carrying out the murderous genocidal Kahanist policies in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and now Lebanon. All with the unwavering support of the Biden/Harris/Blinken administration and the US congress. All bought and paid for through the Israeli lobbying arm AIPAC and its functionaries.
The professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Francis Boyle spoke unequivocally in a recent interview with Aljazeera news, that the current US administration is guilty of “aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide against the Palestinians.” Boyle has consistently provided a counter narrative to the story the Bill Clinton tried to push onto the Palestinians in Michigan,
“God had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Jews to begin with. A fortiori the United Nations had no right to steal Palestine from the Palestinians and give Palestine to the Zionists in 1947.”
All this brings us back to the image at the end of Robichaud’s commentary. In a representative and/or participatory democracy don’t we hold some liability for the actions of those we elect? Especially now? The fact that most of the Harris and Trump voters stood, and continue to stand by, while all this is happening, doesn’t that qualify us as being complicit in the fascist policies of the Biden administration? And complicit in any further support of the Israeli genocide that may be forth coming in the Trump administration?
Over the last year, we watched as college student/faculty protests at 140 campuses across the country were violently suppressed by law enforcement for exercising the first amendment. We watched congress, under a false definition of anti-semitism, chastise university presidents who attempted to protect their students. We watched US Airman Aaron Bushnell spiritually immolate in moral outrage at the front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, because he refused to live in a world where humanity didn’t matter. We watched as our elected officials literally stomped on the dead bodies of over 17,000 Gazan children, while the overwhelming majority continued to send more bombs to Israel’s genocidal Regime. We watched hundreds of press briefings where government officials repeatedly slapped the US citizens in the face with lies about truths that were already publicly known. Lies about Israel, about Ukraine, lies about the state of the US economy, about the president’s mental competency, lies about our country’s security, about everything, and we were slapped again when the US mainstream media echo chambered the same filth.
On the week end of October 5th this year, in the lead up to the one year anniversary of the Palestinian’s escape from the 141 square mile Israeli torture prison known as the Gaza strip, protest and rallies again erupted across the globe, reminding the ‘powers that be’ that this is not going away any time soon. From LA to Rome, to Serbia, to India, to Manilla, to Hamburg, to Copenhagen, to Switzerland, to Turkey, to Paris, to Ecuador, to Chile, to Venezuela, and back to the brain trust in Washington DC that is responsible for this whole mess, they marched, fighting to sustain humanity.
As the emblem of the blue star of David rises above the stars and stripes on the flagpole of global opinion, and we question whether we have descended into oligarchical despotism, the rest of the world is telling us, without any doubt, that we are the Nazis.
(1) Professor Christopher Robichaud, Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government posted this on his X account on November 8th, 2024. That post has since been deleted and Robichaud has abandoned his twitter account. A complete copy of what I received is pasted in full below:
“I’ll say this, and then I likely won’t be saying much more on here for quite some time, to the relief of some, I’m sure. But my farewell warning is this.
Everyone in the days and weeks ahead will use this loss as an opportunity to seek validation for their own hobby horse complaint. Harris lost because she campaigned with Liz Cheney. Harris lost because she didn’t embrace Gaza. Harris lost because she didn’t choose Shapiro. Harris lost because she wasn’t progressive enough (possibly my favorite one).
Take a good hard look at the map, my friends. Trump has won the popular vote. Trump ran the table. Explaining that with your hobby horse issue isn’t going to cut it, tempting and consoling as it may be.
The problem isn’t the electoral college. The problem isn’t that we didn’t have a full primary. The problem isn’t Harris. The problem isn’t that Dems didn’t have the right message. The problem isn’t even inflation or the border.
The problem is so much worse than any of those things. Those are all technical problems, with straightforward expertise fixes. If only it were so! No, our problem is not technical. It’s very much adaptive. A party that embraced the Big Lie, supported an insurrection, and has been selling conspiracy-addled madness for years was widely and enthusiastically embraced. Voter turnout was profound! People didn’t sit this out.
Simply put, the problem–as some of you have rightly posted–is cultural. America, culturally, has completely abandoned a politics of decency and respect and has embraced instead a politics of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia, and bullying. And if you look at the demographics, you also won’t be able to comfort yourself that it’s just a white thing, or a working class thing, or an education thing. It’s multi-class, multi-gender, multi-educational and multi-racial. That’s what winning the popular vote means. That’s what running the table amounts to.
A culture that has descended to this level of debasement is not easily fixed. In fact it may not ever be fixed. The timeline for changing something like this is decades–at best–not two-to-four year election cycles. You can extend that in this case, because with the GOP likely controlling all branches of federal government and the courts, they will ensure that mechanisms are in place to keep them in power long after their popularity has waned. You can count on that.
The GOP evolved into a party of rage, lies, and revenge–and it correctly diagnosed that there was and is a large appetite for that. That’s what the country wants. At least, enough of the country wants it to ensure broad appeal and widespread electoral success. The old GOP will never return, and the Dems have nothing to say to American culture at the moment. Nothing. They’ve been speaking to a country that’s gone, like dust in the wind.
And that’s my final thought, which my posts last night alluded to. The America I knew and loved is gone. This new America–nah, I won’t even bother. I will say that cultural change is less likely to occur in politics, or in the academy. You’re not going to get people to see how vulgar they’ve become through a clever argument or a nice campaign speech, that’s for sure.
This would be time for the arts, broadly understood, to step in. The arts can change hearts and minds. Too bad the arts have been systematically dismantled in education in this country, and on the other end, the tech industry’s assault on the arts through AI is sure to hollow out any good-faith efforts that might emerge.
And for the rest of the world, America’s rightward lurch is, I’m afraid, bad news for you too. I know you know this. Because it’s not isolated, is it? It’s just at the moment the most prominent example of a burgeoning trend. And this will embolden others in other countries, to be sure. We need not speculate what happens when countries become mired in lies, embrace resentment, and savor bullying. We know exactly what happens. Bloody conflict and global destabilization.
The first quarter of the 21st century will therefore in hindsight be viewed as the seed-planting stage for the absolute shit show that’s about to unfold globally over the next two and a half decades. Count on it.
Adopt whatever coping and endurance strategies you have available. You’re going to need it.
A look at Colonization Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
We are Americans!
How many times have we heard this as though we speak for the inhabitants of the whole Western Hemisphere. People in the US or Europe who still use this language are those who are clinging to a colonial era mentality, which has long been rejected by many people in the US and the world. It has been rejected domestically due to its self-destructive nature that robs US citizens of any pride in their country or any peace in their lives. It has been rejected internationally because it leaves no room for global cooperation, or any sense of the obvious interconnectedness with our global human family.
These types of references only demean the rest of the populations who inhabit the Western hemisphere, particularly the indigenous tribes whose ancestors suffered repeated genocides at the hands of the European colonial invaders.
The historian David Stannard recounts these events in his text The American Holocaust published in 1993, and sadly his words still ring true. “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.” Stannard and others estimated, “Almost 100 million indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere have been killed or died prematurely because of the Europeans and their descendants in five centuries.” Like Aaron Bushnell, the US Airman who spiritually immolated in front of the Israeli embassy on February 25th, 2024, to rock the worlds conscience into an awareness of the ongoing Palestinian genocide, Stannard also reminds us of the current reality,
“The murder and destruction continue, with the aid and assistance of the United States, even as these words are being written and read. And many of the detailed accounts from contemporary observers read much like those recorded by the conquistadors’ chroniclers nearly 500 years earlier.”
They Came with Biblical Warrants
A Replica of page 148 of the Text
“To put this in a contemporary context [1993], the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.”
Screen shot from the church of Kostnice v Sedlci, a Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints in the Czech Republic
Some political pundits claim that the USA was meant to be a refuge from the hatreds in the world. This would be laughable if he weren’t so deadly wrong. The predatory policies that the US political, economic, and religious (PER)* elites have in place use financial and military conquest to reach their goal of gathering wealth for the few. These are violent policies that divide communities and destroy human lives; prompting anger, hatred, and hostility domestically and internationally in order to position populations into their sphere of control. These policies which define the US are neither a refuge for the general populous or the elites. The former continually being pushed to the political, economic, and religious margins, the latter, being infected with the anxiety ridden disease of avarice, as they stand at the border of total mental and moral breakdown.
A Distraught Anthony Blinken 2023
This is why you have people currently protesting all over the globe in solidarity with the people of Palestinian. If the Palestinians are saved this could mark the beginning of a political transformation away from further colonial expansions. Not only in Palestine but in the last bastion of colonialism, the US. These brutal PER policies are by far the leading cause of misery and suffering that has stagnated the development of the human global family for the last five centuries.
Through their suffering, the Palestinian people have opened a rare opportunity in the history of humanity. The opportunity to heed the advice of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, and numerous other visionaries of the past, the opportunity to overcome what the American economist and sociologist, Thorstein Veblen called “‘the predatory phase’ of human development.” We have to get over the hump of conquest.
For the marginalized in the US, as the cost of living continues to rise and our quality of living continues to fall, resentments become inevitable. These resentments aren’t from some prehistoric civilization. They are the product of the PER elites slowly and methodically eroding the constitutional rights of a large portion of the domestic population in a big way for the last 75 years.
They are the result of PER elites who have been manipulating the information that the public receives, to conceal the fact that they, or their hired proxy thugs, have been committing rape, torture, and mass murder on a regular basis in many countries across the globe. Like they are doing it right now in Palestine. These are the same PER elites whose policies promote a culture of fear that glorifies violence, defines greed as a virtue, putrefies sexual intimacy, and rewards the exploitation of children. Violence and mayhem are literally the PER elites most plentiful commodity.
Zionist Movement Recruitment Poster 1915
Humanity In Its Darkest Hour
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas defense forces escaped from the Israeli open air torture prison that held them and began attacking their captors. The Zionist Israeli colonists determined that someone had to pay. The hell that followed was recorded live stream and fed to the world for the next 16 months. The shield that guarded the underbelly of the US Empire was shattered and evil became incarnate.
A Chronicle From Gaza:
Less than a month after Aaron Bushnell’s spiritual immolation, on Monday March 18th, 2024 at 2am, a US and Israeli coordinated terror operation began in Gaza City, Palestine. This came in the midst of a 6 month old bombing campaign, again coordinated by the US and Israel, whose primary targets were women and children who had no ability to defend themselves. The colonists call these victims “soft targets” who will be tagged as unnamed “collateral damage” when the history of the event is written. This program of sheer devastation caused the inhabitants of the Strip to flee in maniacal terror, as their loved ones were blown to pieces and their body parts littered the ground of the 64,000 acre enclave. The missing were somewhere under the rubble.
“Israel’s military forces have stormed al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City with tanks and heavy gunfire, resulting in deaths and injuries, Palestinian officials have said. The Israeli military said in a statement on Monday that it is conducting a “precise operation” at the medical facility. Gaza’s Ministry of Health said about 30,000 people, including displaced civilians, wounded patients and medical staff are trapped inside the complex.”
“In a message in English on Telegram, Gaza’s Ministry of Health said anyone “who tries to move is targeted by sniper bullets and quadcopter.” It added that the raid, which began at 2am, has resulted in a “number of martyrs and wounded”.
Journalist Wadea Abu Alsoud gave a live video report while inside the hospital:
“We are now besieged inside al-Shifa hospital. We are being heavily shot at. The occupation forces suddenly raided the hospital. As you can hear now, there are intense clashes going on. We are hearing sounds coming from the gate. There is shrapnel falling all over the hospital’s courtyard.”
This was the fourth attack on the hospital since October 7th. Calls came into the hospital reporting that there were many casualties outside, as Israel Occupation Forces could be heard over loudspeakers ordering the hospital’s inhabitants to immediately evacuate. The siege lasted two weeks. By April 1st reports from eye witnesses began seeping into independent media.
“The army then brought out a huge number of men from the group of suspected Hamas and PIJ members and employees, gathering them in the center of the courtyard. It then proceeded to execute them, one after the other. When the slaughter was done, army bulldozers piled up their corpses in the dozens, dragging them through the sand and burying them.
As this was ongoing, other soldiers stormed various buildings in the compound in search of people who had refused to evacuate when the initial order was given. They killed anyone they found, regarding them as suspects.”
Al Jazeera continued to follow the story:
“Gaza Civil Defense spokesman, Major Mahmoud Basal, said on Monday that, following the Israeli withdrawal, about 300 bodies were found in the Shifa complex and its surroundings. Basal added that the Israeli forces burned entire departments of the hospital, and destroyed all medical equipment and supplies.”
One Al-Quds Network head line read, “Shocking testimonies from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza: Rape, murder, and entire families burned alive.”
On April 5th, 2024 British Parliament member George Galloway reported:
“In the previous 24 hours, Israel withdrew from the al-Shifa Hospital…leaving 400 corpses behind. Corpses that were being eaten by dogs, corpses that had their hands tied behind their back, corpses that had rope around their legs indicating that they had been dragged by military vehicles over the ground until they were dead, corpses of doctors, corpses of nurses, corpses of technicians, corpses of patients, corpses of small children… There are 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip and not a single one has not been attacked.”
The dust settled by April 12th as the News outlet Mondoweiss reported “at least 1,500 people had been killed, injured, or reported missing.” Forced evacuations included another 25,000 people, while over a thousand dwellings near the complex were also destroyed.
Palestinians gather around the burned and destroyed al-Shifa Hospital [Osama Rabii/Anadolu] Photo from the Aljazeera Network.
On the same day of the IDF withdrawal, they announced that the military operation had concluded and claimed that it was conducted without causing “harm to civilians, patients, and medical teams,” hailing it as one of “the most successful operations” of the war.
This is the US Supremacist version of, “spreading democracy and freedom around the world.” Witnessing the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine has made it clear to attentive global citizens, in the US and elsewhere, that “Pax Americana” is really “Pox Americana” for everyone else. As the economist Michal Hudson stated in a recent interview, in the context of US hegemony, “Peace’ is when the United States controls everything and no other country has any ability to fight back. That’s ‘peace!”
Realities in Post-Colonialism
As long as US Centrism reigns, colonialism and slavery will be human realities. This is what empires do. In order for the PER elites to maintain control over the populations they administer, they have to overlook blatant realities that the rest of us live with every day.
One such reality is that the world has become a much smaller place in the minds of human beings than it was even 30 years ago. With the spread of instant communication and satellite imagery, the Russians, Chinese, and Palestinians are no longer foreign entities “over there” but come alive to us in real time on a screen that is right in our face. Only those who have been indoctrinated beyond hope can view the images of the suffering that is taking place in Gaza and the West Bank and not be moved.
Human beings are intrinsically connected to all other forms of life on the planet. The short version reads, one cannot do without the other for very long. With this being said, it causes one to think that it is with extreme myopia that the political Zionist Israelis are hell bent on eliminating the Palestinians, the very people that they need to survive in that land scape. When defining justice, the Unity Scholar Michael von Brück, points to this reality,
“Justice is the realization that living beings depend on each other for the very foundation of their lives. There never has been nor is an independent individuality or cultural self-sufficiency. Especially in a cross-cultural context we not only need to be aware but practice the mutual interdependency on all levels of life… Since all beings and events are primarily interrelated, there is no individual realization or individual good, but a common good that needs to be realized by overcoming individualism or any self-centered perspective.” (Emphasis mine)
With the newly inaugurated President of the US repeating endlessly that he plans to punish and isolate all other nations/societies who do not fall in line with his often obscurely defined foreign policy, is a show of absolute blindness to this reality.
Another reality comes from the understanding that authentic intelligence requires empathy and compassion for ourselves and others. Without these traits, planetary survival ceases to be an option. I find it bizarre that we are taught in our society to measure smartness by the number of digits that come after the $ sign of a person’s wealth index. Extreme wealth breeds, extreme anxiety, breeds extreme stress, and stress is a major contributor to deadly diseases.
Stress will cloud the mind, causing one to forget the lessons learned from the past, promoting tunnel vision that overlooks cooperative possibilities that are present. For a brief 3 minute analysis on how this happens you can Listen to the neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky here.
The reality of impermanence: There is wisdom to be gained from embracing the fact that nothing remains in a static state. Political, economic, and religious understandings are in a constant state of change. Empires and the institutions that support them come and they go. The US Empire is on its way out and the PER elites pretend that they can conduct domestic and geopolitical affairs as though it is the 1950s. They spent their lives creating a system that funnels most of the country’s revenue into their corner, so it pays for them to arrest any further development. People are naturally fluid, and are inclined to adapt to the changes in their inner and outer environments. Colonial empires have always moved in the opposite direction.
The two major political parties in the US have held sway in the electoral process for over 165 years. They are no longer providing credible answers to the questions that the majority presents to them. This leaves the people devoid of any sense that a better life awaits their future. From an economic perspective, people know that compound interest accrues more rapidly than national growth, which means that the majority will be marginalized into debt enslavement for the rest of their lives if our circumstances do not change.
Colonialism carries dire self destructive consequences. The longer the PER elites continue policies that deepen the wealth divide, the domestic population moves closer to mass revolt. This is the oligarch’s greatest fear. Without public cooperation their political power becomes sterile, non-functional, and unsustainable. To quote the physicist and social philosopher Albert Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.” (see page 3 of the link)
Author Ceation
Wisdom and Justice can be served when we foster an environment where people are able to interact on a level political and economic playing field. This allows for the spontaneous evolution of their creative potential. Therefore, we not only need to ensure access to the primary necessities that sustain life but, to envision the future potential of the population as whole. In the ongoing colonial genocide in Palestine, the supreme loss was the obliteration of entire blood lines. Families going back three and four generations were evaporated. This is one of the hallmarks of the colonial system. A complete erasure of the population that was invaded so a history can be written that favors the invaders and scandalizes the victims.
As I was writing this, the words issued in 1966 by Marine General David Shoup, one of the many Joint Chiefs that opposed sending more troops into Vietnam, kept coming to mind,
“I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for. [Not one] crammed down their throats by Americans.”
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