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.
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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.
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