We live in a post truth era. A time of gargantuan gaslighting. Immediately following the murder of an unarmed woman in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis as she drove away, Kristi Noem began the process of sanitization. Despite clear evidence that this was an unprovoked murder, she reframed it as domestic terrorism.
Donald Trump chimed in not long after with his usual lies and swift scapegoating of the “radical left.”
And since then, a swarm of online trolls, who are mostly white men, have flooded their newsfeeds and the comment sections of anyone who will still keep them on their friend list with comments like “FAFO” or “this is what happens when you try to run over law enforcement.”
The last one is the most striking. Renee Nicole Good was killed in cold blood in front of cameras. We all saw it. So, how can anyone not connected to power still defend ICE?
It demonstrates two things. One, they did not watch the video. Two, they did, but they simply don’t care about facts. Either way, protecting the fragile edifice of American power and domination is more important than evidence, even when that evidence is incontrovertible. The only options available to them are to ignore it or redefine it to fit the only acceptable narrative.
For over two years, we have witnessed a literal genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza. The evidence is overwhelming in this regard. Thousands of photos, videos, testimonies, eyewitness accounts, doctors, nurses, journalists, scholars all attest to this. Yet, as with the murder of Renee Nicole Good, we are being gaslit to deny our own critical thinking and accept the version of the powerful, no matter how absurd or ridiculous it may be.
When truth becomes an option rather than the primary foundation of a society, the result is brutality. It always ends in atrocity. Genocide is the very worst crime against humanity. The US was and continues to be the primary engine of that crime. It has used every power it possesses to crush the truth about it. And this is the result.
Those defending the treacherous and murderous actions of ICE today are no different than those who defended Israel or the United States as they carried out a genocide. Both require a monumental suspension of critical thinking skills and the complete bankruptcy of moral integrity. And, in this regard, America excels at both.
Trump: “Colombia’s very sick too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you…He’s got cocaine mills and cocaine factories.”
Reporter: “So there will be an operation by the U.S. in Colombia?”
Trump: “It sounds good to me.”
The Trump regime is not finished. Not by a long shot. Its imperialistic rampage is targeting Columbia, Cuba, Mexico and Greenland. And if you think he will stop there, you haven’t been paying attention to his Hitlerian rants and the support he has received from his sniveling sycophants and even Democrat dolts like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Fetterman. Canada, I am looking at you.
Of course, what Trump is doing isn’t very different than any other project of the American Empire. Republican or Democratic, both arms of the empire do their part at the behest of its ruling class and their capital investments.
But Trump has ripped the veil off of the “Pax Americana” brand and showed it for what it really is. He has legitimized its gangsterism. And he is ramping it up to grab whatever is left for him and his wealthy friends on a planet that is on the brink of ecological devastation and climate chaos.
The American corporate media doesn’t know what to do with any of this, other than wring their hands about “legality” or worry about how it sounds rather than what it is. They are more concerned with preserving the old narrative of a benevolent and ethical, if not flawed, America, even though it is a complete lie.
And political leaders in Europe have demonstrated their complete subservience to American hegemony by couching their language in cautious “observatory” terminology. Except for Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who warned Trump to stop threatening the takeover of Greenland, which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
The latter is significant for several reasons, since Denmark is a member of NATO. Any attack on Greenland would be an attack on it, on NATO, and on Europe itself.
Trump’s actions are in keeping with American imperialistic aggression. The difference now is that under Trump its scope has expanded beyond the Global South to include white, Western nations as well. It is a clear signal that the old order of relations and allies is over.
But the Trump regime isn’t saving American Empire. On the contrary, he is stealing as much of the resources he can on behalf of its ruling class who know all too well that the party is almost over.
Even if Fox News flunkies believe that climate change is a hoax, they do not. Why else would they spend billions of dollars to suppress the science and silence the scientists? They know. They just care more about their wealth than they do about a livable biosphere. Because in some daft way, they think their wealth will insulate them.
And if the genocide in Gaza has taught us anything, it is that this class is thoroughly capable, without reservation, to annihilate anyone who might hamper their investments. Israel is, after all, one of the most important colonial assets of the American Empire. It has invested billions into what amounts to the biggest US military base in the world. They have shown us what they are more than willing to do or to justify. Only the willfully blind and toxically naive would not see that now.
We are entering a new phase of the resource wars. The old imperial houses and gangster capitalists are preparing to scrape up the last bits of fortune at our expense, even if that means burning it all to ash. Trump is merely accelerating that inferno.
It is hard not to notice the civil war unfolding within MAGA world. Some say it began with the murder of the notorious far-right bigot, Charlie Kirk. Others say it began long before this. But one thing is undeniable. The war is reaching epic proportions now.
On one side are the establishment hacks. The ones who have used their access to power in order to promote an ideology of authoritarianism. On the other are the monsters largely created by the establishment hacks. Those who use their skills with social media manipulation and grift to stoke old stereotypes and social hatreds. Neither are traditionally conservative. But both have captured the conservative mind.
This has reached its most visible example in the battle between social media grifters, Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. Shapiro, who is Jewish, is known for his vile dehumanization of transgender people, Muslims and immigrants. Owens, who is Black, also participated in these bigotries. But since the murder of Kirk, she has taken it a step further in peddling odious antisemitic conspiracy theories and demonization.
Ben Shapiro has always supported the ethnostate of Israel. He has rationalized its apartheid, championed its most brutal policies and whitewashed its genocide of the Palestinians. Anyone who opposes Israel or Zionism is cast as antisemitic by the far right ideologue. But Owens, who was fired by Shapiro from the far right outlet The Daily Wire, has not only come out against Israel, she has used her platform with millions of followers to attack Jews as a whole, regurgitating ahistorical and debunked myths.
Whether it is the supposed notion that Jews were responsible for the Atlantic Slave Trade or that they believe all non-Jews are inferior to them, the story is an old one which has its roots in the antisemitic Protocols of Zion. This was a collection of fabricated conversations supposedly between Jewish elders in Russia. One which characterizes Jews as the cunning creators of a secret cabal whose aim was global domination.
The Protocols of Zion is not just an innocuous fiction. It was used by the Nazis and contributed to the persecution of Jewish communities in Germany and throughout Europe and to the Holocaust which claimed millions of Jewish lives and millions of other marginalized groups, including Roma, communists and queer people.
It may be mildly entertaining to watch this mostly online war between two grifters on the far right. But there is far more at stake. Both figures have captured a huge following in their own right. Shapiro’s camp is not only okay with US support for Israel as it commits genocide, it is cheering it on. They revel in the demonization of Palestinians and their supporters, including anti-Zionist Jews, tarring all as antisemitic for opposing the political ideology of Zionism and the apartheid and genocide it has fostered.
Owen’s may speak about genocide being wrong in any instance, but she has no real solidarity with the Palestinian people. Her new found hatred of Israel is not rooted in a principled approach to equality or collective liberation either. It comes from a deep hatred of Jews as a people and a pernicious delusion about them being some menacing, all powerful monolith.
Both Shapiro and Owens represent the darkest underbelly of far right politics in the United States. A toxic brew of white grievance and paranoid social hatred. That Owens is Black does not take away from this reality. In fact, she is the perfect token for peddling it to a population that has been conditioned to feel like they are under attack. They easily jettison facts for fantasy. Her irrational and incongruent conspiracy theories, whether it be that the moon landing was fake or that Brigitte Macron is actually a man, play to an audience which has been largely denuded of critical thinking skills.
Shapiro, who now has the devotion of professional widow Erika Kirk, is using his platform to whip Christian Zionists into a frenzy. Their support of Israel and his do not come from the same place. Evangelicals are not so concerned about Jews as they are in the fulfillment of an unhinged, eschatological opera. But both go hand in hand with American Empire and its goals.
And Shapiro helped create the culture of moral decay we see amongst US conservatives. One that easily dehumanizes and scapegoats minorities and champions the most sadistic policies of the Trump regime. They may all have different motivations, but the result is the same fascist dystopia.
Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens are visual aid to where MAGA was always destined. The deceitful and hateful rhetoric routinely employed by Donald Trump has fed into a miasma of confusion and paranoia. His disdain for intellectual discourse, informed dissent and moral curiosity created a cesspit of vicious hatefulness that has fostered racism, misogyny, transphobia, antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is a poisonous brew that led to the rise of some of the most odious figures of this century, which include Shapiro and Owens.
Perhaps this civil war signals the end of MAGA as a movement. But it is best understood as a death cult. And cults rarely, if ever, dissipate peacefully. It remains to be seen whether this one will fade quickly, or cast a long, dark shadow on the American psyche for generations to come.
Hillary Clinton just can’t stop herself. After the backlash against her condescending comments on young Americans, particularly young Jews, being horrified and opposed to the US-backed genocide being carried out by Israel in Gaza, she doubled down on her position at a “security forum” in Doha, Qatar this week.
Clinton was widely criticized for saying young people get all their news from TikTok and “don’t know the history” of the Middle East at a conference held by billionaire Trump donor, Miriam Adelson. In the interview in Doha, she appeared visibly defensive with the questioning. But instead of displaying even a modicum of self-introspection, she used the same tired tactics used by other liberal genocide apologists: deflection.
Clinton bemoaned the “suffering in Gaza,” but never named the cause of that suffering, essentially reducing this human made atrocity as some kind of natural disaster. She also played the game of whataboutism by saying she was angry about the suffering all around the world, sidelining the role the US played as the engine of this particular genocide.
Instead, Clinton celebrated the so-called “ceasefire” which Israel has violated nearly every day, killing well over 300 hundred Palestinian civilians, including scores of children. And she praised Trump’s horrendous “peace plan” which sees Gaza as a real estate bonanza. And where Palestinians are essentially pushed out or into an even smaller concentration camp governed primarily by Israel with US oversight and funding.
Clinton even said the US must play a “larger role.” It is hard to see how she would expand the role of a nation which has supported and funded this genocide in the first place. And she resurrected the complete farce of a “two state solution,” ignoring the fact that her friend Netanyahu declared that there will never be a Palestinian state.
Most honest analysts of this situation have understood for a long time that the two state idea is long dead. If implemented today, it would merely be a clone of the current conditions Israel has constructed: a cluster of Bantustans surrounded by violent settlers and controlled by Israel, where Palestinians have absolutely no agency over their lives in their ancestral homeland.
Why is focusing on what Hillary Clinton has said so important? Because her stance is typical of liberal Zionism, with the common refrain that it is “too complicated” for ordinary people to understand. It is a belittling and cynical attitude that has the ultimate goal of derailment of dissent and distraction from the pernicious role the US has played in defending Israeli apartheid and providing the weapons and diplomatic cover for its genocidal project.
Clinton is essentially calling young Americans, including young Jews, antisemitic and stupid for opposing the mass murder of over 100,000 people and the complete destruction of Gazan society. She has shown zero interest in discussing the conclusions of genocide scholars, many of whom are Jewish and Israeli, who have condemned Israel’s actions as genocidal. She has zero interest in addressing the points made by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. She has no curiosity about the dozens of human rights organizations, including within Israel, who have called what Israel is doing a genocide.
Clinton has only one script on this issue. And it is one that she will never alter. But after 2+ years of witnessing Israel carry out the worst crime against humanity with the full support of the United States and other Western nations, it is one that no longer holds any weight.
Last week over a 1000 American pastors, mostly white, mostly men, and mostly evangelical, flew to Israel for a summit. It wasn’t to address the suffering of Palestinian children or to assist Palestinian families. It wasn’t to demand an end to the genocide. It wasn’t even to pray for a just peace for all peoples. It was a training program for Israeli propaganda.
Mike Huckabee, the Trump regime’s ambassador to the genocidal state and rabid Christian Zionist, joined the group. He said: “It’s an extraordinary time for pastors to go to their pulpits and push back on the bigotry being pushed toward Israel.”
Notice that Huckabee didn’t say bigotry against Jews. He said bigotry against Israel. Against a state. A state which is actively committing genocide with the full support of the United States.
This is significant because Christian Zionists are notoriously antisemitic. They do not support Israel because they love Jews, whom they believe are destined for hell if they continue to refuse their evangelical message of salvation. They do it because it fits neatly into their narrow, misinformed and heavily biased interpretation of the ramblings of a man who lived in a cave on a Greek island years after Christ walked the earth.
American evangelicals see Jews as essential only insofar as their role in the fulfillment of an eschatological opera. But they don’t see Palestinian Christians at all. They are rendered invisible because to acknowledge them would mean admitting the deep racism at the heart of their theology.
Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with an arrest warrant on him for war crimes, also addressed the crowd saying: “I’m counting on you. I know you’ll do what has to be done.” He also told them he wanted them to recruit 10,000 more pastors.
There is something deeply perverse about a group of Christian men being flown into a nation which is committing the very worst crime against humanity, only to “learn” from the very criminals perpetrating it. And doing this all while ignoring the mass suffering occurring just a few kilometres away. Not one of those pastors visited a Palestinian church or even mentioned Israel’s bombing of churches in Gaza.
That this happened during Advent is also staggering. This is a time when Christians around the world meditate on the story of a refugee child hunted by a vicious genocidal king. But instead of attending to the suffering of children being slaughtered by a contemporary genocidal government, they basked in its comfort and vowed to defend it.
To be sure, this is the heart of American Christianity. And it is a cold, deadened one. A theology of death. A gospel of calculated cruelty. And nothing will awaken these dead bones from the white washed sepulchers they have chosen to repose in.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t care that young Jewish students were moved by videos and photos of the firebombing of families huddled in their tents after their homes were reduced to rubble, or the bloated bellies of children being starved to death by Israel’s deliberate policy of famine, or the murder or scores of doctors, nurses and paramedics, or the blatant killing of more journalists than any other conflict in the world, or the rape of a Palestinian prisoner, or the complete and utter decimation of nearly every structure in Gaza, or the coldblooded killing of 5 year old Hind Rajab who was shot 335 times by Israeli soldiers as she sat in a car surrounded by the bodies of her dead family.
What Hillary Clinton does care about is that some of these young Jewish students couldn’t tell her which river or which sea was being referred to in the popular chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.”
To her, this is all “TikTok propaganda.” Never mind about the scores of genocide scholars who have declared this to be a genocide. Never mind that Israeli human rights organizations like B’Tselem said their country is committing genocide. Never mind Doctors Without Borders, or Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch. Never mind UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. It is all just social media from the “Chinese communist party.” Apparently, those Israeli politicians who talked about their genocidal plans openly and the IDF soldiers who posted their crimes were all “propaganda” from TikTok and China. This is her metric.
And why is this so important? Why do we need to keep talking about what Hillary Clinton said? Because it is the same metric and coldblooded calculous that every Western, liberal Zionist apologist has used to justify Israel’s genocide. A metric that involves ignoring a “wall of carnage,” as former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz so aptly put it. Or the endless “Dead Gaza Babies” as liberal icon Van Jones bemoaned.
It is a metric of breathtaking arrogance, staggering apologetics and nauseating sycophancy. A metric that extracts the humanity of the Palestinians from the entire equation to rationalize and excuse their annihilation.
Western liberalism is even more dangerous than the far right because it has the effect of normalizing state violence in the name of “humanitarian intervention.” It lulls decent people into complacency by using pacified and watered down rhetoric about human rights, inclusivity and equality, so much so that these terms becomes utterly toothless and devoid of any power. And it provides a veneer of respectability and civility through platitudes and bromides, masking its true imperialistic nature. It has also played the role of handmaiden to Trumpian fascism.
And it doesn’t stop in the US. Liberal leaders like Justin Trudeau, Kier Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen and Frank-Walter Steinmeier have all used their positions to justify and support this crime against humanity.
The genocide in Gaza has done what no other atrocity in contemporary history has been able to do. It has revealed to us just how depraved and twisted most Western political leaders and media figures are at their core. It showed us that if they can allow, aid or even applaud what Israel is doing, then they can easily do the same to us.
Kenn: Phil, I see you have been under a deluge of hate and mockery from online Zionists after a few of your pieces on the genocide in Gaza. What do you think is behind such a reaction? I am suspecting that there is a real fear amongst these groups that they are losing control of the narrative and are getting desperate. What are your thoughts?
Phil: My recent Facebook post on the subject did provoke a thousand-plus invasion of highly agitated Zionist trolls. They made the desert bloom with seething hate.
By the evidence, your insight regarding Israeli propagandist’s fumbling of the narrative is dead-on accurate. To wit, after, for example, witnessing the uniformed thugs of the IDF live-streaming their war crimes it was inevitable that large segments of the people of the world were going to grow incredulous to Israeli hasbara.
AI generated definition of the term hasbara: Hasbara is a Hebrew word that means “explanation” and is used to describe the Israeli government’s public diplomacy and public relations efforts to shape international opinion about the state of Israel.
How is it possible for Zionist propagandists to believe that ever proliferating images of bombed out hospitals, murdered doctors, medical personnel, aid workers, journalists, as well as entire families blown to bits in their homes could be explained away as acts of self-defense in behalf of little David Israeli facing down the looming Palestinian Goliath threatening a new, impending Holocaust?
Zionist apologists were, per always, playing victim as, all the while, Israeli government leaders and rabbis were, in full-throated fury, summing up the Old Testament, blood-crazed spirit of Amalek.
“When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” — Deuteronomy 25: 19
Hence, Zionist true believers found themselves in the (impossible) position of attempting to term their massive war crimes (to the point of a genocidal rampage) as being acts of national preservation. When, as time passed, it became apparent that what was retailed as a war against terrorist aggression was, in fact, a new facet of Zionist land theft i.e., the Israeli version — cue cringe-inducing irony — of Third Reich era Germany’s concept of Lebensraum.
My night terrors include the thought: How are we Jews going to survive the self-destructive conflation of Judaism and Zionism as weaponized by the Zionist ethno-supremacist state and their confabulation-prone apologists? As noted, the Zionist state’s version of Lebenstraun.
Lebensraum (noun): The (coveted) territory a nation state believes is needed for its natural development and crucial to national notion of self-determination e.g., God, in the Zionist worldview, has ordained that the Biblical era lands of Judea and Samaria are the birthright of the Zionist settler-colonialists.
Yet archaeological evidence and medical science confirm the following: The Jews of the ancient Levant closest ancestors are the Palestinian people.
My DNA reports my ancestors were of German, French, Dutch and Spanish (the latter via the 1492 Jewish expulsion during the Spanish Inquisition) origin. I also harbor 4% lineage from Northern Iraq/Iran. Thus the claim is risible that the so-called Promised Land was promised to me.
Among the hasbara fairytales believed and parroted, we diaspora Jews returned to our ancestral homeland and “made the desert bloom.” In reality, we have drenched the soil with the blood of the rightful inhabitants of the land and rendered our collective mindscape into a wasteland ridden with a soul-defying architecture constructed of casuistry and false, noxious mythos.
The world has looked on and asked, isn’t the Zionist worldview somewhat on the Nazi-adjacent side of the political/societal spectrum?
Your thoughts on the matter, Kenn?
Kenn: I think that the parallels of Zionism to Nazism are so striking, that it is staggeringly difficult for most people to comprehend. For 80+ years, Zionist propaganda proliferated with the assistance of the West, primarily the American Empire. So many crimes and atrocities were whitewashed by the Western press and politicians, that the public at large simply did not know the scale and, up until recently, remained ignorant of Israeli barbarism.
Education around the Holocaust played a large part in this. It began the project of conflating Zionism, a political ideology, with Judaism. Thus, the only safe place for Jews following the Shoah was in historic Palestine. The Indigenous population had to be removed, demonized and erased, both literally and figuratively. Israel’s so-called founding father, David Ben-Gurion, said that “the old will die and the young will forget.” This was the hope of many early Zionists who deluded themselves into thinking that the Indigenous people would simply move on and accept their displacement. They ingested these lies based on their Western colonial counterparts, who viewed the Indigenous populations they ethnically cleansed or tried to exterminate as imbeciles who could be manipulated into forgetting their own history.
Portrayals of the so-called “Indian War” that are an analog of Zionist propaganda involving Islamic terrorists
Now, we see this kind of major disconnect from reality among Zionists, who are largely older, white Americans. These are the ones who were the most propagandized. They saw what the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe (as well as countless other groups), but they did not take away some universalist message of solidarity. The slogan “never again” was uniquely applied to Jews. The mere inference that others could suffer from similar atrocities was taken as offensive and absurd. And this is of course racism.
What I found interesting about the reaction to your posts was this narrative of the “self-hating Jew.” And it reminded me of how early Zionism utterly loathed Jews who appeared weak or ill. Israel turned away thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe who did not fit the new Jew mythos. Ironically, this new mythos bore a striking resemblance to the Aryan archetype of the perfect man and woman. A fascistic portrayal of the human being.
Phil: Kenn, you apprehended a (tragic) truth regarding the misapprehension of the nature of strength. Wilhelm Reich, who fled Nazi Germany due to his grasp of the dangers of fascism, explored the nature of the pathology he termed “narcissistic armouring.” In short, a chronic rigidity of thought manifested in both psyche and body resultant from the psyche being overwhelmed by the trauma inherent to the excesses of authoritarianism.
A lack of empathy and a tendency towards excessive rage when threats, real or imagined, are extant are defining traits of the pathological condition. To wit, we can consider that the Zionist state suffers — and causes all within its reach to suffer — due to a collective form of narcissistic armouring. In the mindset of those thus armoured, on an emotional basis, signs of weakness are viewed with disdain yet any sign of strength, even in a defensive posture, of those considered adversarial in nature, is viewed as an existential threat that must be annihilated. I suspect this explains the odious mindset of pro-Zionist — and authoritarianism-rancid rightwing — social media trolls.
Then there is this regarding the phenomenon of collective forms of narcissistic armouring, on a nation building basis: Israel was founded by campaigns of ethnic cleansing and, as the world has witnessed because of its massive war crimes in Gaza, is prone to genocidal rampages. Therefore, as hideous as it sounds when spoken aloud, unnervingly large segments of the Israeli citizenry regard even Palestinian infants as future terrorists and act as apologists for their massive extermination. A mindset, once again, analogous to the actions of Third Reich era Germany where Jews were viewed as genetically inferior to their Aryan race betters but were seen as a dangerous presence, fatal to the common good, that must be first expelled, then isolated, then exterminated.
Below the surface of Israel’s self-justifying lies, the nation’s Ashkenazi elites sense the unsustainable nature of the Zionist project: they are heading for the exits in droves while hyper-authoritarian religious zealots go full-force Brownshirt in the West Bank. Israelis might embrace the mythos that they have trudged through the desert and arrived in the Promised Land. But by means of the narcissistic armouring they manifest — they have become Pharaoh’s army.
Kenn: The idea of narcissistic armouring explains so much regarding Zionism’s constant reframing and battle. One of the ways it manifests is this notion of Israeli food. Of course, this is ridiculous. There is no Israeli food. There is appropriated food from various nations and ethnic groups in the region, but it is all stolen and rebranded.
And it is fascinating to me to see this real time dissolution of the original Zionist project into a kind of a hyper-religious form. As you mentioned, thousands of Israelis of Ashkenazi descent are fleeing Israel. They have been buying up property in Cyprus, Thailand, Portugal and elsewhere. These are the descendants of the secular Zionists who manufactured a kind of quasi-socialist utopia for Jews in historic Palestine. Of course, the only way to realize this dream was to erase the original inhabitants and invent a story of origin for themselves, even though we know from a variety of historians that this is a complete farce. But where is this “connection” to the land that they insisted they possessed? Where is the promised safety for Jews in Israel if they are leaving en masse?
In “The Invention of the Jewish People,” Schlomo Sand dismantles the Zionist mythology of a common people. Many of the Jews we see in Europe have absolutely no origin in Palestine, but are the descendants of converts to the faith early on, well before Christian authorities outlawed such proselytization. Even David Ben-Gurion believed that the Palestinians were the direct descendants of ancient Jews who had remained in the land after the Roman expulsions and converted to Islam over the centuries. This was, of course, very problematic for the European Jews who had no real connection to the Levant outside of religious mythology.
But it is interesting to me that so many Zionists feel it is imperative to erase the Palestinians simply on the basis that they do not possess a “nation.” This was exactly what has been done to Jews for thousands of years. Nationalism itself is a relatively new idea, only seen in recent centuries of human history and emerging in Europe. Imposed on the world via colonialism. So, to think that nationhood is the pinnacle of a people’s existence is rather trite and silly. But the racism is thick in this too. Imagine saying that there was no such thing as the French or the Spanish or the Czechs, because they are all just Europeans. In this same way, they are saying there is no such thing as Syrians or Egyptians or Lebanese because they are all just Arabs.
It is a feat of enormous delusion that so many Zionists think they will succeed in erasing the Palestinians. The first time we see the term Palestine is in The Histories by the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE. He mentions it as a district of Syria. And I was recently reading a book on Pompeii and found it fascinating to discover that the ancient city that was buried under molten ash had traded with Palestine. So, it is rather odd that these modern day Zionists try so hard to erase Palestine from the historical record. It is an impossible task for them, yet they persist in trying.
But this is what colonialism is in a nutshell. The Europeans did it in the Americas, Africa, Asia and beyond. Razing Indigenous temples and cities and erecting cathedrals on their foundations. Erasure of a people is nothing new. It is the lynchpin of all colonial projects. And much of this is psychological warfare. Constantly harping on about this obviously false notion that Palestine never existed or that there is no such thing as the Palestinians is meant to demoralize or mock people, especially ones that are being ethnically cleansed or genocided like the Palestinians.
The Nakba, then and now
Israel is falling apart. Mental health in the country is spiraling downward and thousands are weighing their options for getting out. And when they leave, what will become of the state when you only have rabid extremists and religious nutcases rampaging in the occupied territories? Do you see this as the beginning of the end for the Zionist project and if so, what is the future of Jews and Judaism in the wake of Zionism’s brutality and lies?
Religious zealot land thieves, under the protection of IDF uniformed thugs (i.e., de facto Brownshirts) perpetrating the Zionist form of Lebensraum
Phil: Years of participation and complicity in ethnic cleansing, perpetual aggression directed at their neighbors, and the Gaza genocide is inflicting a psychological toll on the citizenry of Israel.
“Israel is experiencing what experts describe as a severe “mental health tsunami,” with around two million people in need of psychological assistance as addiction rates climb and social cohesion weakens,” according to the news outlet Yedioth Ahronoth.
But don’t expect a reckoning of national conscience to take hold in the Zionist ethno-supremacist state. On an historical basis, in regard to modern nation states, a form of collective psychological affliction causes the populace to seek psychical remedy in the palliatives administered by authoritarian demagogues e.g., in the case of Israel, rightwing/religious death cult leaders such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Political and religious zealot demagogues are adept black magicians in the art of displaced resentment and the psychological projection of the collective dark side of a culture unto the alien other and treasonous underminers in their midst.
In short, events will careen towards calamity. The process of cultural/national truth-resonant reckoning does not unfold, if ever, until a collective bottom is hit.
Hence, Zionism is manifested as a psychotic episode, including evincing homicidal impulsiveness, in the form of a nation. Of course, the pathological proclivity has existed since Israel’s inception but now the affliction has lapsed into a state of exponential runaway.
The Zionist leadership has become, as is a general rule with leaders of authoritarian states, inmates in an asylum for the criminally insane — who now run the asylum.
As a result, the general population is suffering a collective nervous breakdown.
Carl Jung diagnosed the root cause of their pathology: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”
In short, the Zionist state’s path to recovery would be the recognition of the internal carnage they inflict on their own souls due to the suffering they perpetrate on all within range of their blood-drenched belligerence.
“None of us are free until Palestine is free.”
That is the declaration provoked a troll swarm to descend upon my comment section, raging, in essence, “genocide=freedom.”
A Third Reich-adjacent reaction, wouldn’t you say?
Hint: The 1000 Year Reich lasted 12 years.
My mother, her father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, escaped Nazi Germany by Kindertransport. She lived until 92 years of age. Her very life is a testament to the deathscape of ash and dust that is the fate of genocidal nations.
Israel is coming apart at the seams, both on a cultural and political basis. The Ashkenazi elite are headed for the exits as the religious zealot settler class are inflamed with the death-besotted mythos of Amalek.
History reveals, nations that beat their plowshares into weapons to wage genocide hasten their mortal return to inevitable dust.
Pictured my (Phil Rochstroh) mother, Erica Meyer and her older sister, Gisela, both Children of The Kindertransport that delivered Jewish children into the homes of strangers in the U.K.
Bari Weiss made a career out of whining and complaining about so-called “wokeness.” And after leaving the New York Times for being out of her depth, she founded the “Free Press.”
Weiss then used her small platform “Free Press,” which was a colossal failure, to downplay Israel’s genocide in Gaza. She published pieces that claimed that children suffering and dying from Israel’s imposed famine in Gaza had “pre-existing conditions” as if this made it okay. As if their lives were less important. And she did this knowing full well that the sickest people in society succumb faster than others in such conditions. She did this knowing full well that this was the same excuse that the Nazis used to justify their barbarism.
Weiss also targeted Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was then murdered by the Israeli military in Gaza. Before he was killed, Alareer said that if he were to die, Weiss would be to blame. Sadly, he was correct.
Now, after succeeding in becoming Editor-in-Chief of CBS, Weiss is banking on the prospect of Paramount purchasing all or part of Warner Bros. Discovery. Because she wants to “run a combined CBS-CNN” operation. Weiss said she wants to “redraw the lines of acceptable debate.” In other words, she wants to control the Overton Window. Essentially, Weiss is a living example of manufactured consent.
Weiss has never garnered respect as a journalist. In fact, her “Free Press” platform had one of the smallest audiences among online platforms. The only reason she gained the position she has is because she was chosen by Zionist billionaire David Ellison to rebrand genocide apologetics for a wider audience.
I think it is safe to say that if this modern day Leni Riefenstahl gets what she wants, American mainstream media will become her and David Ellison’s personal loud speaker for the most biased propaganda the US has seen thus far.
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
So, is Israel committing genocide?
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), the world’s leading academic association of genocide experts, passed a resolution stating that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide.
Organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, the University Network for Human Rights say Israel is committing genocide.
Two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have also concluded that their country is committing genocide.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, said it is accurate to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza as a genocide.
The United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory say Israel is committing genocide.
Several Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, including 87 year old Stephen Kapos and 80 year old Agnes Kory say Israel is committing genocide.
Haim Bresheeth, an Israeli academic and filmmaker and the son of Polish survivors of Auschwitz and Belsen-Bergen says Israel is committing genocide.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, stated in a March 2024 report that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel is committing genocide.
An independent international commission of inquiry for the UN concluded in a September 2025 report that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and that senior officials are responsible for incitement.
Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, South Africa and Spain say Israel is committing genocide.
Israel is also on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
And who denies Israel is committing genocide?
Israel and its primary benefactor and supplier of weapons, the United States, Kier Starmer and the UK establishment, the German government, weapons manufacturers, far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, neoconservative politicians, celebrities like Debra Messing, evangelicals, and Zionists. So, who are you going to believe?
Whatever you might think of Marjorie Taylor Greene, her untimely exit from the cesspit of Washington is instructive. She didn’t go willingly. Anyone who thinks this misunderstands the dynamics of power in American Empire.
For all her flaws, and there are many, Greene ended up doing things no one is permitted to do. She demanded the release of the Epstein files and she demanded an end to US support for Israel as it commits genocide against the Palestinians. These two things sealed her fate.
She defied the order of powerful white men who rule the empire. And she dared to question the undying devotion it has to its primary colonial asset, Israel.
Greene had some genuinely insane and loathsome political positions. She peddled far right conspiracy theories, antisemitism, racism and transphobia. But in that sense, she wasn’t a grifter. She was truly deluded. She believed these loathsome things. And she was embraced for them by the cult of MAGA.
Her devotion to what she believed was the truth inevitably led her to some dark conclusions. And after that first press conference about the Epstein files, her life in politics was doomed. Since then, she has had to hire private security. And I think it was at this point she might have begun to realize what she had put some of her colleagues through.
Greene will likely make the rounds in the miasma of far right talking heads and insufferable blowhards for some time. She will likely go silent for a while to regroup. And maybe she will resurface down the road with a new brand and look.
But her time in the belly of the beast should serve as the clearest example of the banal evil of American Empire. Although it is in steep decline, it protects its interests. Those interests lie in the capital investments made by the most powerful and wealthy men on the planet. And they will do anything to preserve that status even if it means sinking the whole ship to the bottom of the sea.
Kenn Maurice Orfanos (Orphan) 