There is a pernicious belief among certain circles in the West which posits that Israel controls the governments of the US, UK, Canada and other nations. This idea has seen a resurgence amidst revelations in the Epstein files. While there is no doubt that Israel has enormous influence over politicians and political parties, it is not “calling the shots” as one influencer put it recently.
This idea comes from a false understanding of the arrangement of power in the current world order and the nature of imperialism itself. Israel is best understood as the most important colonial asset of the United States and other Western nations. In a sense, it is the last imperial outpost of the American Empire in the Middle-East. This explains why the US has and continues to invest so much money into it.
And this gets to the heart of the matter. The United States and other white, Western nations have created a false narrative of naive innocence to explain away their own crimes and atrocities. This can be summed up in the all too common refrain “this is not who we are” when Americans try grapple with the cruelty, mendacity and viciousness of the Trump regime or of ICE thugs. But even a cursory glance at American history demonstrates that this is indeed who they are.
Israel did not exist at the time of the genocide of Indigenous North Americans or during trans-Atlantic slave trade. It did not tell the US to occupy and annex the Kingdom of Hawaii and imprison its Queen. It did not ask the US to occupy the Philippines. It had no hand in Jim Crow segregation or lynching. It did not force the US to nuke Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It did not suggest it round up Japanese Americans and put them into concentration camps. It did not persuade the US to destroy the Bikini Islands for nuclear testing and displace the local inhabitants. It did not strongarm the US into carpet bombing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
None of this is to absolve Israel of its copious crimes. It is guilty of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, stealing land, bombing nations that never attacked it and now genocide. It has and continues to meddle in the affairs of other countries and its mass surveillance technology is being used to subvert democracy. It is the quintessential example of a contemporary colonial settler state.
But the United States has funded and supported this project willingly for decades. In short, there would be no Israel without its imperial benefactor. And if Israel were to suddenly become a real liability to the empire, all support would stop.
Israel should be condemned for its crimes. But to stop there would be idiotic. Few of its crimes, if any, would have been possible without arms and diplomatic cover provided by the United States, along with the UK, Germany, France and Canada. To deny this is to participate in a fantasy where Israelis are somehow endowed with supernatural powers. One which conveniently casts American and Western nations as hapless victims who are completely powerless and ignorant. It is an idea that stems from an old antisemitic trope that Jews control the planet.
Without a doubt, the political ideology of Zionism is the very definition of colonial settlerism. And racism is foundational to its existence. It should be opposed by people of conscience. And it needs to be reiterated that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. In fact, there are more non-Jewish Zionists than there are Jewish Zionists. And Jews have been at the forefront opposing this ideology.
But the persistence of the idea that Israel controls Western governments is not only erroneous, it makes it more difficult to stop its crimes. Imperialism counts on this obfuscation. It relies on the proliferation of theories or ideas that distract from its crimes.
In short, the greatest threat to the world or even to the Palestinians isn’t Israel, it is the power behind Israel. The one which continually arms, funds and defends it from all scrutiny. The one that has subverted democracy and installed puppet regimes throughout the Global South for decades. The one that has 800+ military bases around the world. The one which continues to fuel a machinery of dispossession and death for the profit of a few.
Kenn Maurice Orfanos, February 2026
*Title illustration is by Fourate Chahal El Rekaby.
Sometimes a lie is so apparent that it is obscured by its sheer audacity. A ruse so enormous that it defies our conceptualization of facts. In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, there are things about his life which seem to defy who he actually was.
Epstein moved amongst the most wealthy, influential and powerful men and women. Appearing like a rich, slick lothario. Yet, by all accounts, the man himself was dumpy, uncouth, outwardly vulgar and spectacularly stupid.
He had cunning. But his personality oozed qualities more commonly associated with a slumlord who runs a sleazy strip club and cheap brothel. Nothing about him comes across as authentic.
How was a working-class boy from Coney Island, son of a construction labourer and groundskeeper for the New York City Parks Department and a school aide and secretary, able to rise up so rapidly? Why was a man who never completed university hired to teach math and physics at the elite Dalton School on Manhattan’s monied Upper East Side?
Epstein was sacked from Dalton for inappropriate interactions with students and being abysmally bad at teaching. Yet despite this, he was hired by Wall Street executive, Alan “Ace” Greenberg, for the prestigious Bear Stearns. It is as if Epstein “failed up the ladder of success” from there. More on Greenberg later.
Epstein’s “success” has been easily explained away by media figures and influencers as being a classic “rags to riches” tale. But when one examines his life with any seriousness, a stunning mediocrity emerges which defies these fables. Some have noticed that Epstein’s riches mysteriously coincided with Robert Maxwell’s missing fortune. Robert Maxwell is the late father of the infamous Ghislaine.
Maxwell died in bankruptcy and disgrace, allegedly drowning after falling from his yacht. But he had established secret offshore trusts in places like Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Trusts which were beyond the reach of creditors and which reportedly provided his daughter Ghislaine with an inheritance of at least $10 million pounds. But there are other aspects that most likely contributed to the image of Jeffrey Epstein that deserve closer scrutiny.
Now, before I go further, I want to be clear about something. It is unfortunate that there are some who are peddling loathsome antisemitic tropes in reference to the Epstein files. Epstein’s worldview appeared to be far more informed by Zionism, which is a political ideology, than by Judaism, which is a religious and cultural identity. And that is an important distinction. Conflating the two is lazy and misinformed. There are many Jews who are not Zionists and many who are opposed to the ideology. And there are many Zionists who are not Jewish.
But Epstein’s ties to Israel have been well documented, although not widely reported on in mainstream media. He was very close to former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. And the two joked about Epstein being a Mossad asset.
And thus we return to the man who got Epstein going, the late Alan “Ace” Greenberg. It is well known that Greenberg was an ardent supporter of the Zionist apartheid state. He had donated large sums of money to medical centres and the Israel Museum, and funded the construction of a middle school and sports centre in Gilo, which is an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem, naming them after his mother and father, respectively.
Greenberg likely met Epstein through a connection with the latter’s failed position at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan. Epstein was known for schmoozing the wealthy parents of students. And Greenberg had a soft spot for working class men with aspirations to be rich. Even though Epstein was eventually compelled to resign from Bear Stearns due to involvement in insider trading, there is speculation that this opportunity connected him even more with Israel.
Epstein went on to fail upwards at businesses involved in “debt collection” and “hostile corporate takeovers.” He was named in the notorious Towers Financial scandal which bilked investors of nearly $500 million dollars. At the time, it was noted as being the “biggest Ponzi scheme in American history.”
Miraculously, Epstein avoided going to prison. His business partner, Steven Hoffenberg, wasn’t so lucky. Even though Hoffenberg maintained that Epstein was the architect of the scheme. Just two years after the case, Epstein would reinvent himself again and make a stunning comeback.
Here is where Epstein’s life became even more murky, with shadowy connections to figures like Adnan Khashoggi. The cousin of Dodi Fayed (who was killed with Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris) and the uncle of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, this Saudi businessman and arms dealer was known for being the richest man in the world in the 1980s, with a net worth of $4 billion.
Khashoggi lived an extravagant lifestyle, which included a owning 12 palatial estates worldwide, a fleet of private jets (including a DC-8) and a 282-foot superyacht, the Nabila, which he was later forced to sell to Donald Trump due to financial troubles. In 1986, Khashoggi sold his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine (originally named Princess Amar), to Robert Maxwell. He died in 2017.
The most important aspect of Khashoggi was that he was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. Epstein’s consulting firm, Intercontinental Assets Group, listed him as a client. Khashoggi was the primary middleman for the U.S. weapons transfers from Israel to Iran that defined the scandal.
British arms dealer, Douglas Leese, apparently mentored Epstein in the early 1980s and introduced him to both Khashoggi and Robert Maxwell. Maxwell was known for having a deep connection with Israeli intelligence, and it is alleged that Epstein was involved in his network, which sought to facilitate Israeli arms sales to Iran and funnel the proceeds through offshore accounts.
Recent revelations from late 2025 seem to indicate that Epstein helped billionaire Leslie Wexner repurpose planes for his retail business which were previously used by Southern Air Transport, a CIA-linked airline used for Iran-Contra arms smuggling.
Epstein’s reported expertise in moving money through offshore accounts was allegedly utilized to facilitate the complicated flow of funds for these arms deals. During the planning of Iran-Contra, Epstein’s close friend Ehud Barak who served as the head of Israeli military intelligence (AMAN) at the time oversaw the logistics for Khashoggi’s shipments to Iran.
None of this is to say with absolute certainty that Jeffrey Epstein worked for Mossad. There is currently no definitive evidence to support that. But his relationship to Ehud Barak, who would go on to become prime minister of Israel, certainly raises legitimate suspicions.
It is worth noting that Barak and his wife visited Epstein’s Caribbean island, frequently stayed in one of Epstein’s Manhattan apartments and was seen visiting his townhouse on multiple occasions.
He was also was implicated in a violent sexual assault alleged by the late Virginia Guiffre who referred to him as “the prime minister.” He was the only prime minister Guiffre ever met. Former Epstein staff allege they saw Barak flying on Epstein’s private plane with young girls.
In a leaked three-hour recording from 2013, Ehud Barak was heard discussing a “selective” immigration strategy for Israel with Jeffrey Epstein. Barak suggested that the state should take in one million Russian immigrants to offset the Indigenous Palestinian population.
Epstein also served as a financial fixer for Barak, promising in a 2013 email to help him make “at least few hundred million” in the private sector. He reportedly facilitated Barak’s connections to tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and his cofounded, mass surveillance company, Palantir.
It is worth noting that Palantir has been heavily complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Through its extensive contracts with the Israeli military, it is largely responsible for providing the country with surveillance and drone technology, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Palantir technology was also used in the terrorist pager attacks Israel carried out in Lebanon in September of 2024, which killed scores of civilians, including children, and injured thousands, some of them with lifelong mutilations, eye loss and brain damage.
Palantir CEO, Alex Carp has been vociferous in his support of the genocidal apartheid state and the company held its first board meeting in Tel Aviv in 2024.
In addition to Epstein’s relationship with Ehud Barak, in 2006 he joined ultra-Zionist lawyer Alan Dershowitz to smear John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as being antisemitic for their article: “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.” Epstein happily promoted the rebuttal by Dershowitz to all of his wealthy and powerful friends.
Alan Dershowitz, himself, was a key architect of the 2008 federal plea deal in Florida which allowed Epstein to serve only 13 months in a county jail with work-release for soliciting a minor, while granting immunity to unnamed “potential co-conspirators.” He continued to maintain his relationship with Epstein, saying it was predominantly “academic.” Yet he admitted to flying on Epstein’s private plane, staying at his homes, and taking a Lexus for his wife in lieu of legal fees.
In addition to this, the late Virginia Giuffre alleged she was trafficked to Dershowitz for sex on multiple occasions when she was a minor. Dershowitz vehemently denied these claims and Guiffre eventually dropped the lawsuit saying she “may have made a mistake.”
But other unsubstantiated allegations from former Epstein staff have surfaced alleging misconduct by the high profile lawyer. Dershowitz would go on to accuse Guiffre of lying about Andrew Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew). And most of us see how that turned out.
The revelations are monumental. Jeffrey Epstein and the notorious files cannot be separated from the murderous Israeli regime or the political ideology of Zionism. But this is just what we are seeing now, with mainstream media deliberately obscuring the connections and choosing instead to amplify a bigger Russian role.
Without a doubt, Epstein dealt heavily with Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin does not have clean hands in any of this. According to recently released emails, he arranged meetings with between Israel and Russian officials during the war in Syria. He also associated and consorted with a wide array of American politicians and billionaires and European aristocracy and royalty.
The idea that Jeffrey Epstein made it to where he was just before he died all by himself is the lie that is being peddled by many politicians and some in the media. It is a lie that is easily exposed. Yet it is being told repeatedly to reduce the urgency of interrogating these questionable ties.
The common markers of these relationships are simple: wealth accumulation for the wealthiest, obtaining and maintaining political power, arms dealing, money laundering and criminal impunity. And Epstein trafficked in all of these things as much, if not more, than he trafficked young girls. There are many villains in this story and they are from many places with many interests.
But despite the silence among Western politicians and legacy media, Jeffrey Epstein’s link to a nation-state that has implemented a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, ultimately culminating in the genocide the world has witnessed over the last 2+ years, cannot simply be brushed away.
Pointing this out is not bigotry. It is fact. And like the children in the files, the millions of victims of this sinister project deserve far better than being ignored once again.
Despite what American politicians and some media talking heads claimed, the takeover of TikTok was never about China, or national security, or protecting data. And now that ownership has been transferred to pro-Trump and pro-Israel billionaires, it is not only being heavily censored, it is collecting far more data on its users than before.
The usual reasons for this are still true. Most data collection is for marketing. But why does TikTok need to know about your immigration status? Or your ethnic identity? Or your sexual orientation? We know that the Department of Homeland Security and other US agencies routinely harvest information from this kind of data collection.
Other questions have come up as well. Why is TikTok censoring the word “Epstein” and “ICE?” Why does the word “Israel” come up in virtually every search? The reasons for the latter become apparent when one listens to the new owners who have stated quite clearly that certain words, such as “Zionist,” will be considered “dirty” unless it is coming from someone who is a proud one. This isn’t about confronting and condemning antisemitism, especially since many Jews identify as anti-Zionist. It is about banning any interrogation of a political ideology which has resulted in the genocide in Gaza.
Some Democrats are saying that TikTok should be investigated, such as Gavin Newsom. But Newsom has always supported these kinds of draconian surveillance tactics. He signed the “Digital Age Assurance Act” which is wildly pro-censorship in the name of supposedly “protecting children.” So, his objections now are merely political theatre and it is only in reference to Trump. He wants to be able to keep up his completely useless meme war with him without providing any meaningful challenge to his fascism. And he doesn’t care one bit if Palestinian content is banned.
With all the bluster about China and their censorship of political speech, surveillance and data collection, a differentiating factor between it and the United States is that China does this largely to benefit its people. The US does not. This is not an excuse for authoritarianism, but it is a striking contrast between the two nations.
As TikTok becomes a free speech wasteland, other apps are rising. UpScrolled has seen a sharp rise in users. But it is based in Australia, which does not have the best record in online free speech either. Still, it is a far better alternative.
The hard truth is that the ruling, billionaire class feels like they are losing control of the narrative. Of “acceptable debate and dialogue.” They use terms like “civil discourse” as a cudgel against dissent and criticism. In this way, they never have to be interrogated for their role in atrocities, political repression and the global dismantling of democracy.
This is why they are busy buying up news outlets and social media platforms. And they do not care one bit if they drive these mediums into the ground, so long as they hold on to their wealth and every lever of power.
Since the US-Israeli takeover of TikTok, there have been endless complaints about censorship, banned content and banned content creators. Some are saying the platform isn’t even allowing viewers to type in the letters “ICE.” Others have said that the word “Israel” pops up in any search, regardless of the topic. And any search for the word “Epstein” apparently may get your profile flagged for violating “community guidelines.” It has been hemorrhaging members who are going to the new UpScrolled as an alternative.
This all began when billionaires and American politicians were wringing their hands over the influence it was having regarding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Unsurprisingly, all of them claimed it was because of Chinese censorship, date collection and surveillance. But everyone, except the feckless, understood the real reason.
After ardent Zionist and billionaire, Larry Ellison, bought the company via his corporation Oracle, everything changed. The new CEO of TikTok, Adam Presser, boasted about banning the word “Zionist” as a form of hate speech unless it was used in the context of being a “proud Zionist.” If the content criticized the political ideology, it would be considered a “dirty word” and be censored. Anti-Zionists, which include an enormous swath of Jews, are not welcome any more.
Larry Ellison, sixth richest person in the world and close friend of wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, has made significant donations to the IDF as it commits heinous crimes against Palestinian civilians, including children. His company Oracle is an enormous, AI-generated surveillance technology giant.
Ellison, himself, has said he would welcome a “1984-style” surveillance state where AI analyzes video feeds to track, record, and influence citizen behavior. The billionaire claimed “citizens will be on their best behavior” because they are constantly being recorded and reported. Larry Ellison and others claimed that they were afraid of “Chinese surveillance,” even as Oracle had ties to Chinese resellers who have provided surveillance technology to Chinese police.
What all of this means is rather simple and banal. Elites like Ellison understood that these social media platforms were sharing real content about the atrocities Israel was committing. For the first time in human history, a genocide became widely seen and livestreamed by the victims.
The new TikTok is shadowbanning and silencing critics of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism. But it is part of a larger project of social control in the United States. Larry Ellison financed his son David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount Global (the parent company of CBS).
They then appointed journalist flunky Bari Weiss as the Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. Weiss, known for her crusade against woke windmills of the mind, has also peddled in genocide apologetics and denial from her virtually inconsequential platform The Free Press.
Since taking over CBS, Weiss has been busy making the once respected news organization into a facsimile of Fox News for old centrists. Her first big event was an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow and grifter extraordinaire, Erika Kirk. It had some of the lowest viewership in the networks history.
What we are witnessing in the United States is the complete decay of its communications and journalism institutions. From CBS to TikTok to MGM Studios, the aim is in controlling the dialogue and manufacturing opinions and consent within the accepted framework.
MGM, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is most notoriously known for its recent bankrolling of the documentary “Melania,” which follows the first lady around for a few weeks as she does practically nothing but exist and wear lampshade-sized hats.
Regardless of how much money billionaire elites spend, what they are managing is nothing more than the death spiral of American society. The rapid unraveling of an empire, now headed by a dying, narcissistic, rapist who is terrorizing Black, Brown, Indigenous, women, queer and immigrant communities and occupying American cities as he rattles his saber at allies and adversaries abroad. Meanwhile, Americans struggle to make ends meet, terrified of medical bankruptcy and choosing between rent and food.
This is Bread and Circuses, but without the bread.
It is utterly loathsome to see this kind of dehumanization and Holocaust denial from anyone. But from a rabbi?
Anne Frank and millions of Jews, Roma and other ethnic or religious groups were rendered stateless for the very purpose of deporting them to death camps. Anne violated the law by hiding from authorities in a secret annex concealed in their father’s office building. She was not in the Netherlands legally because the Nazis changed the laws.
Laws do not equate morality. They do not equate ethics. They represent control and power. Sometimes they are good. Often they are reprehensible.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by a regime that stripped millions of their citizenship, even in the nations that it invaded and occupied. This regime created laws that reinforced this otherizing and demonization in order to seize their property and annihilate them. And without passports or other documents, these people were trapped, unable to flee to other countries.
This is no different than what the Trump regime is doing (and other administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have done). They are dehumanizing people based on their colour, or accent, or immigration status. They are rendering them stateless for easy internment in their concentration camps. For easy disposal.
But this is the moral bankruptcy at the heart of Zionism. A political ideology which relies on ahistorical myths and supremacy, and which cannot recognize these simple facts because doing so unravels their narrative. And thus, it makes the only choice it has left, which is to support fascism.
If the Holocaust taught us anything, it is that papers and passports are all temporary and arbitrary based on who holds power. It taught us that no human being is illegal. And no excuse made by a ruthless and brutal regime will change those immutable facts.
One of the most striking features of the Trump-Kushner plan for Gaza is that it erases anything resembling Palestine. The ancient architecture, most of which has been reduced to rubble by Israel, is replaced by something more akin to Dubai. And this is no accident.
Like so many Americans, Kushner and Trump view the entire Middle-East region as a monolith. One people. One culture. No variations. No complexities. The clothing, language, food? All the same.
The only cities they are familiar with are from the Gulf monarchies. Gaza, whose history stretches back at least 5000 years, was filled with ancient souks, mosques, hammams, churches, Roman mosaics, alleyways and ports, is transformed into a glittering hyper-capitalist dystopia. One which could sit comfortably in any of the Gulf nations.
When one considers the notion that this city would be built over the mass graves of hundreds of thousands of people, it becomes obvious how odious it all is. But this is also the story of Israel.
The Zionists came into this region with the claim that it was a “land without a people, for a people without a land.” But this was always a lie. And they knew it.
This is why they destroyed so many villages and planted forests on top of the ruins with trees not indigenous to the Levant. The result has been wildfires every year, as these European pines ignite in the dry, hot climate.
The seaside Palestinian village of Tantura was referred by the ancient Greeks as Dor. During the Nakba, a Zionist death squad from the Haganah, which came under the command of one of Israel’s founding fathers David Ben-Gurion, murdered hundreds of the inhabitants and buried them in mass graves. A kibbutz was later erected on the site. Today, it is a popular beach for Israelis.
Kushner’s grotesque vision for Gaza is in keeping with the Zionist project, which never sat comfortably in the Levant. It attempted to import its European identity on to a land that already had a long and rich culture of its own.
Despite its glittering skyscrapers, casinos, hotels and 5-star restaurants, this “New Gaza” will forever be stained with the blood of thousands. Their bones will be in every foundational stone. Though they will try their hardest to whitewash its edifice, the genocide will never be forgotten, nor forgiven by the millions of people around the world who have witnessed its horror.
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.
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.
Kenn Maurice Orfanos (Orphan) 