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It has been another exciting week in a world at war where the word “diplomacy” has no meaning and would probably be defined by America’s head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as a doctrine in which you shoot someone first before he or she can shoot you. In my article last week I discussed the reports that there has been a serious rift between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, exemplified by Trump’s unwillingness to talk to the Israeli leader followed by his failure to visit Israel on his recent Middle East trip. Sources attributed the break to Trump’s perception that he was being “manipulated” by the Israeli, which was completely plausible though something that should have been recognized and warned against by Trump’s foreign policy advisers when he first ascended to the presidency in 2017. Israel always manipulates opinion on the United States through its lobby’s control of the media and corruption of the politicians.

I opined that the reports of the disenchantment with “America’s best friend” were credible possibly linked to spying involving National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, though I also observed that many of my contacts were skeptical, warning that the whole thing might be a set-up possibly engineered by Trump’s Zionist roving negotiator Steve Witkoff and specifically designed to benefit Israel. That means that the US was feigning a “breakup” with Netanyahu to enable it to reach an agreement with all the leading Arab countries of the Middle East in order to confirm Israel’s security while Netanyahu is completely wiping the Palestinians off the face of the earth. Trump has in fact said that his policies and the Mideast trip were “very good for Israel.”

In a follow up to my article I advised during an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano that it pays to be skeptical as Trump has done absolutely nothing to change Israel’s behavior, quite the contrary, even though he had an opportunity to support Palestinian statehood in the context of UN membership and also to demand an end to the genocide taking place in Gaza. The truth behind whether there was in fact a serious rupture in the personal relationship of the two leaders should be measured in light of the presence or absence of consequences when Israel pursues policies damaging to US interests.

Indeed, Netanyahu has personally confirmed that all is well with the United States. He said at a press conference last Wednesday that President Trump had assured him that the US and his administration were completely committed to Israel despite the series of media reports that have said there’s a problem between the two leaders. “Let me give you some details that perhaps haven’t been made public. A few days ago — I think around 10 days ago, maybe a little more — I spoke on the phone with President Trump. And he said to me, literally: ‘Bibi, I want you to know — I have absolute commitment to you. I have absolute commitment to the State of Israel.’”

Netanyahu also spoke with Vice President JD Vance, who, along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, had also avoided a visit to Israel. “[Vance] said to me… ‘Listen, don’t pay attention to all these fake news spins about this rupture between us… He said: It’s all spin. This isn’t the truth, you know it’s not true, and I’m telling you, from our side, it’s not true.” Netanyahu also said that Israel wants to carry out “Trump’s plan” for Gaza to include the permanent removal of the Palestinian population to create a US managed seafront resort over the ruins of the strip. Per Netanyahu, the Israelis have now included the creation of “Trump Gaza” as one of the redline conditions to permit an end of the war against Hamas.

The Israeli and Middle Eastern media have been reporting extensively and critically on the genocide and the various players involved in dealing with the Netanyahu agenda. A recent piece discussed the 29 mostly European Union (EU) countries led by the UK, France and Canada that have now called on Israel to moderate its behavior or face both sanctions and a suspension of the EU Israel trade arrangements, which greatly benefit the Jewish state. The EU declared that Israel’s announcement of letting some aid in was “wholly inadequate. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response” the leaders’ statement said. Netanyahu responded to the threat by declaring absurdly that “You’re on the wrong side of humanity and you’re on the wrong side of history.” But as the saying goes, unfortunately, talk is cheap, either from Netanyahu or from Israel’s newly minted critics. Diplomatic announcements and threatened sanctions mean always dancing around the awful truth. Israel is committing some of the worst war crimes humanity has ever witnessed and the Europeans and the Americans give every impression that they will certainly back off, deferring to Israel and persisting in doing absolutely nothing that will bring the suffering to an end.

The European gesture in particular is an attempt to make up somewhat for its support for 19 months of genocide. The completely contemptible Prime Minister of the UK Keir Starmer, confronted by a British public that has swung strongly anti-Israeli, has made a big show about taking action against Israel and the Israelis cooperated with him by playing their part, expressing outrage over the temerity of anyone telling them how to deal with their neighbors. Indeed, there was some corroboration from informed Israeli sources that the threats and responses from the two sides were little more than a bit of Kabuki. A senior Israeli official even explained to the media why European leaders have bothered to shift positions after 19 months of silence about the murderous Gaza genocide, to instead feign instant outrage. It was all coordinated with Israel in advance. He said that “The past 24 hours were all part of a planned ambush we knew about. This was a coordinated sequence of moves ahead of the EU meeting in Brussels – and thanks to joint efforts by our ambassadors and the foreign minister, we managed to moderate the outcome.”

The current outrage is as orchestrated as was the earlier silence. Israel’s extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained why Israel would be maintaining a balancing act between outright killing all the Palestinian and keeping western support by allowing absolutely minimum food to enter Gaza: “We need our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.” He also has said that his plan for the West Bank and Gaza includes giving the Palestinians the choice between subjugation, emigration, and death. Smotrich has repeatedly advocated for lethal force to be used against Palestinian children lest they grow up to be terrorists. On Wednesday the Israeli army doubled down on that message and to show how little it cares to coddle meddling foreigners when it fired on 31 European diplomats representing 29 countries who were visiting the Palestinian settlement Jenin on the West Bank in what was presumed to be in 100% Palestinian administered territory.

The fact is that no one in the European and American governments really cares about the Palestinians or their extermination. The only concern by the rulers is how their posturing looks to the rest of the world and to the voters in their own countries. Israel lies so enthusiastically in making its case and providing false evidence to back up its behavior that there is a tendency to be suspicious of anything it does. Last week’s assassination of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington DC by a man who just happened to yell “Free Palestine!” was good news for the Jewish state in that it creates sympathy for a country that has featured as bad news for well over a year. It is already being whispered in intelligence circles that it was a “false flag” attack contrived by Mossad to create a favorable news cycle as Israel secretly cranks up for an imminent attack on Iran. Iran phobia features regularly in the Israeli media to include a recent Israeli claim that Iran is hiding its nuclear enrichment facilities, which is true but designed the keep the Israelis from blowing them up. The “favorable news cycle” has included Jewish Congressman Randy Fine of Florida calling for the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Gaza and kill its remaining inhabitants just like “Japan at the end of World War 2.”

And to make sure Iran gets to feel the sharp point of the sword, presidential emissary Witkoff has now declared that the nuclear monitoring arrangement being negotiated with Iran must include zero enrichment of uranium, something that was not on the table when the talks started, so they will go nowhere guaranteed. Per Witkoff “We cannot allow even one percent of an enrichment capability. Enrichment enables weaponization.” Where did that demand come from? From a secretly nuclear armed Israel by way of treasonous Israel Firster Senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, no doubt. And if one follows that line of thinking, one can assume that Donald Trump is also on board, standing in line to pull out Netanyahu’s chair and bowing to him and then raising his mighty clenched fist before sending in the Yanks to finish the destruction of Persia. And if Iran responds effectively with force, Israel also has around 200 nukes that it will no doubt not hesitate to use as part of its “Samson Option” war plan. And Trump will undoubtedly say something like “Hey, what a big beautiful explosion! Nothing wrong with that! We used similar weapons to end the First World War!”

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

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Never interrupt your enemy when he is committing serial suicide.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is committing serial suicide (in reverse American gore-style, when the serial killer always resurrects). In the case of the EU kakistocracy, serial self-destruction is always a given, and always skyrocketing.

So the EUrocrats in Brussels have just adopted their 17th round of sanctions against Russia – the sky is the limit – targeting nearly 200 tankers of the so-called Russian shadow fleet. The package, endorsed by EU member states, includes proverbial scores of asset freezes and visa bans.

The EU + UK combo is also scheming how to tighten the oil price cap on Russia to $50 a barrel, aiming to “hurt” Russia’s energy revenue.

Cue to a monster pipeline of laughter from the whole Global South, especially India and China. As if they would impeach any vessels of the shadow fleet, or if OPEC+ would care about a puny unilateral EUrocrat oil price cap.

To qualify EU actions as self-destructive anti-intellectualism is actually benign. The IQ of people at the top in Brussels is at dismembered worm level, exemplified by the Estonian batshit crazy chick in theory representing the foreign policy of 450 million EU citizens. Brussels has been reduced to a pathetic Estonian propaganda snake pit with a whiff of British accent.

The SVR has noted how there is a groundswell of despair in Brussels for the “mistake” of appointing the imbecile Estonian, universally known for “absolute incompetence” and a cringing “inability to build bridges” with EU leaders. She has already been removed from EU strategic defense policy planning.

Still, the sanctions package dementia will keep rollin’ on – redacted by careerists with fat salaries who only care about their own retirement gold package.

The next, the 18th, is supposed to be the largest sanctions package in History, according to the Brussels rumor mill, not only accusing Russia of multiples stances of Hybrid War and alleged use of chemical weapons (when it’s actually the neo-nazis of country 404 who resort to it) but targeting several Russian defense sector companies plus companies and intermediaries from third countries supplying sanctioned products to Russia.

Add to it the German BlackRock chancellor actively lobbying for an EU ban on the Nord Stream pipeline – blocking any possibility of a U.S.-Russia business cooperation, already signaled by Trump. This ban will be part of the 18th package.

Cue to Grandmaster Sergey Lavrov, who recently felt the need to emphasize that political EUro-trash banning the return of NordStream are “either sick or suicidal.”

Stealing Russia blind: good luck with that

On the Baltic front, there’s more, of course – in a “Pirates of the Baltics” register: that’s the SIGINT-heavy Baltic Sentry mission, which aims to block Russian maritime activity. France is on it – which implies a non-regional NATO member directly involved, unlike, for instance, Norway.

The Russians are unfazed. A strong possibility is that they will escort Russian ships with multi-functional naval and aerial drones fully equipped with reconnaissance and combat gear.

Yet on the Orwellian front, nothing beats the anti-Russian “tribunal” announced on May 9 by EU foreign ministers in Lviv, together with Kiev, to “hold top representatives of the Russian leadership accountable.” That involves 30 partner countries, incuding UK and Australia. The U.S. is out.

The scam was minutely deconstructed by Thomas Roper, who is now viciously demonized and censored by the EU, even though he is a journalist and EU citizen of German nationality. Yes, Brussels now sanctions its own citizens capable of critical thinking, to the point of freezing their assets and forbidding them to visit their home country. And this is just the beginning.

The new EU kangaroo “court” will be set up by the Council of Europe – and will issue judgments even in absentia, via 15 judges elected for 9 years each, the whole thing costing the EUrocracy around 1 billion euros.

Needless to add that this kangaroo “court” has absolutely no basis in international law, as it’s not approved by the UN; instead, it’s a private club of the fragmented West. Follow the money to understand the rationale.

Few people today remember that last year the European Commission (EU) gave a $50 billion loan to Kiev; actually $35 billion by the EU and $15 billion by the G7. The problem is only Brussels is responsible for repaying this joint EU-G7 loan. And the loan is supposed to be paid from the annual revenues generated by Russian assets frozen – i.e. stolen – in the EU, which Brussels refuses to release before the next 45 years.

These are all official EU decisions, enshrined in Regulation 2024/277. Translation: no, I repeat, no European mainstream media has informed taxpaying citizens across the union that the EU has formally decided to be at war with Russia for at least the next 45 years.

Brussels has done everything trying to steal for good the “confiscated” Russian assets. The problem is the EC EUrocrats have not found a mechanism to bypass international law.

Enter the “court”. The EUrocracy will force the kangaroo “tribunal” to blame Russia for everything related to the war and the SMO; sentence Russian government members to long-term prison sentences – in absentia; and then decide that Russia has to pay reparations. Endgame: the kangaroo “court” decides to steal for good the frozen Russian assets.

Once again: under international law, this is a robbery. Key inevitable consequence: no one across the Global South will trust the euro and European financial centers anymore.

This Russian demonization EUro-dementia scenario is in play just as Trump 2.0 still bets on some sort of normalization with Russia via a solution for Ukraine. Yet the key factor here is the cowardly collective fear of the EU kakistocracy: if they don’t rob Russia blind, they have no means to repay that fateful $50 billion loan to the Kiev goons.

That should be the main factor explaining why this collection of political mutts needs, badly, to non-stop escalate what is a de facto Forever War against Russia.

So expect only dementia coming from Brussels in the foreseeable future. Like the brilliant idea of setting up a single military bank to alocate loans for weapons production, a replica of the World Bank with a HQ in London. Since they could not find 120 billion euros to come up with a single European military fund – the German economy, for instance, continues to collapse – their plan B is this bank.

For all that cornucopia of sound and fury, Russia remains, once again, unfazed. Putin top aide and former National Security Adviser Nikolai “Yoda” Patrushev has noted how NATO has been “conducting exercises at our borders at a scale unseen in decades. … They are training for conducting a broad offensive from Vilnius to Odessa, seizing Kaliningrad region, imposing a naval blockade in the Baltic and the Black Seas and executing preventive strikes on the staging locations of Russian nuclear deterrence forces.”

Good luck with that. Good luck with the military bank. And good luck with stealing Russia blind with no blowback.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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When we last checked in on our dashing hero Donald Trump, he was enthusiastically salivating over the chance to sign the “Take it Down” internet censorship bill. A few days ago, he did indeed sign this very Orwellian legislation. Most of us don’t deal in “revenge porn,” whatever that is, but we have good reason to fear this odious act.

So that’s at least one thing Trump has accomplished thus far in his second go round; making it even more difficult for truly dissenting views to be accessed online. And this is also the only thing the Republican majority in the House and Senate- you know, the alternative to the hopelessly evil “Woke” Democrats- has managed to do. Well, I think they snuck yet another pay raise for themselves in there. It’s hard to tell, because they do that so regularly. Why no Republican-led legislation to deport millions of illegals? Or end birth right citizenship? Or approve of the DOGE efforts to expose (and presumably at some point eliminate) all that governmental waste, fraud, and abuse? It’s almost like the MAGA forces have no power in Congress. It’s almost like the RINOs still rule the Stupid Party. It’s almost like the entire MAGA movement is all smoke and no fire. Or as I call it, the Trumpenstein Project.

Other than the dangerous “Take it Down” act, try to find out exactly what Trump has and hasn’t actually accomplished. He wrote a lot of executive orders, many of them which sounded really good, but have any actually been implemented? Other than the pardoning of the January 6 political prisoners? I’ll give him credit for that, so Trumpenstein has done two things, one good and one bad. If official reports are to be believed, his “mass deportation” has resulted in fewer illegals leaving the country than there were under Joe Biden. Both sides have reason to lie about these numbers, as the Left wants to hysterically suggest Trump is deporting everyone named Jose, and the Right is trying to portray it as a genuine “mass deportation,” where Trump is keeping up with those “promises made, promises delivered.” I haven’t driven by my Home Depot at 7 in the morning lately, but my guess is the parking lot is as full as ever.

In true Trumpenstein fashion, he has resumed troll tweeting (well now it would be categorized as Truth Socializing) ridiculous celebrities, usually in the middle of the night. Well, I guess he has to do something when he’s not on the golf course. Bruce Springsteen, whose music helped comprise the soundtrack of my youth, has admittedly become a really pathetic caricature of “The Boss.” He fell recently walking towards the stage, and sometimes manages to look like he’s in the beginning stages of transitioning to perhaps become the “ Bossette.” Or to be Woody Allen’s stunt double. Anyway, he said some predictable nasty things about Trump, what you’d expect from your typical celebrity with TDS. And Trumpenstein lashed back, at 2:00 in the morning no less, with a flurry of name calling that would make any “Woke” partisan proud. He really utilized every grammar school epithet he could think of, calling Springsteen everything except “poo-poo head.”

Trump, in fact, demanded an investigation into this “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and others. In his patented all caps fashion, the leader of the free world charged, “HOW MUCH DID KAMALA HARRIS PAY BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN FOR HIS POOR PERFORMANCE DURING HER CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT? WHY DID HE ACCEPT THAT MONEY IF HE IS SUCH A FAN OF HERS? ISN’T THAT A MAJOR AND ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION? WHAT ABOUT BEYONCÉ? …AND HOW MUCH WENT TO OPRAH, AND BONO???” As he did throughout Trump 1.0, the president is acting as if he’s an immature old man in a trailer park, not the head of the executive branch of the government. Such unhinged ranting will be the extent of all this. If there were to be any “investigation,” wouldn’t he start the process? Or at least push the Republicans in Congress to hold meaningless hearings?

Trumpenstein always finds time to respond to those who “disrespect” him. There aren’t many other billionaires who adopt this kind of ghetto mentality. He isn’t quite as proactive on carrying out his most hopeful campaign promises, however. Like actually doing a “mass deportation.” What happened to Tom “Mad Dog” Homan? He seemed like such a hard ass, didn’t he? Boris Karloff was pretty good at portraying demented mad scientists, too. That’s the entertainment biz for you. Trying to determine what is actually in Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax budget is as difficult as figuring out any other Trump policy. It’s a typically huge bill, so I haven’t read it, but there doesn’t seem to be anything in there about eliminating Social Security taxes. The most recent claim is that it eliminates taxes on overtime and tips. But is that only for government employees, who largely don’t work overtime? As for tips, that’s a good thing, but how many servers were reporting that anyhow?

Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill looks very much like previous budgets from other Republicans. Non-MAGA types. RINOs. He wants to retain his old tax rates, and that assures that, as always, the more income you have, the greater the tax cut. I’ve tried to explain that to blue collar supporters of Trump. “Tax cuts” are for the rich, because they have the most income. You can’t really cut income taxes on laborers, because they’re barely making any income. I wasn’t any more successful in trying to enlighten the Reagan supporters I worked with back in the 1980s. You’re not getting a tax cut. The CEO we all hate is. And what happened to Trump’s great suggestion of no taxes for anyone making less than $150,000? So in other words, meet the new Trumpenstein, same as the old Trumpenstein. No one’s impeaching him this time. There isn’t any phony “Russiagate” to contend with. Just Bruce Springsteen, I guess.

Trumpenstein 2.0 appears to be unraveling fast. His FBI director, Kash Patel, who we at least thought would be better than Hall of Fame Swamp Creature William Barr, just recently chimed in on the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein. Shockingly, unlike 100% of the MAGA faithful who hailed his appointment, Patel insists that Epstein killed himself. And sitting next to him was his assistant, former talk show host Dan Bongino, who expressed his strong agreement. In this regard, Bongino was going against 100% of his former radio audience. Bongino declared “I’ve seen the file.” Oh, you mean the one that the government says is missing all the stuff from Epstein’s safe? You know, that contained loads of video tapes and photos of compromised individuals, many of them undoubtedly famous? It’s astonishing that these figures can make these statements with straight faces. As the old expression goes, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, and still they lie.

So I suppose this assures us that there won’t be any “mass arrests” under Kash Patel. Remember “trust AG Barr?” So four more years of “two more weeks.” Really, how can they not have prosecuted the acting head of USAID, who wrote an email telling everyone to destroy evidence before DOGE could see it? That seems a lot more serious than a rape allegation from a mentally disturbed woman who couldn’t remember the year it happened, but what do I know? I didn’t even finish community college. Speaking of DOGE, what’s going on with that now? Did they ever begin auditing any other departments? Certainly not the promised audit of the Pentagon, as Trumpenstein pushed through a trillion dollar defense budget, the largest in history. You might even call it “big and beautiful.” Lots of bombs for the Hootie-Tooties in Yemen, and perhaps those “state sponsors of terrorism” in Iran.

I have to think that Trump is going to lose his MAGA base. He’s already lost Marjorie Taylor Greene. “I represent the base and when I’m frustrated and upset over the direction of things, you better be clear, the base is not happy,” Greene tweeted out earlier this month. “I campaigned for no more foreign wars. And now we are supposedly on the verge of going to war with Iran. “I don’t think we should be bombing foreign countries on behalf of other foreign countries especially when they have their own nuclear weapons and massive military strength….When you are losing MTG, you are losing the base. And Trump isn’t on the ballot in the future, so do the math on that.” Thomas Massie, the best the House has to offer, is despised by Trump. It’s a Trumpenstein thing, you wouldn’t understand. If the Republicans are no longer the Stupid Party, why isn’t Massie, or Greene, or Andy Biggs, Speaker of the House?

And Trump is now fired up over the belated admission by the establishment that Joe Biden was cognitively impaired during his presidency. He wants Congress to look into that. Sure, Kash Patel is working on indictments of key figures in the Biden administration as we speak. I don’t know if this is more important to Trumpenstein than Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono and other pretentious celebrities getting paid big money to support Kamala Harris. But it’s clearly a more pressing issue than our crumbling infrastructure. Or those new factories that have yet to be built, to go along with his tariffs. Or the corruption that is entrenched at all levels of the system, with no one ever held accountable for it. Trump once called it “draining the swamp.” Now in his second term, Trump has yet to touch a single Swamp creature. Bruce Springsteen will be indicted before James Comey or any other denizen of the Swamp.

On the treatment of Whites in South Africa, however, Trump is suddenly becoming bold. He admitted fifty four White South Africans into the country as political refugees. The same societal leaders that have been orgasmic over the immigration explosion during the last few decades suddenly found some migrants they didn’t like. It brought back memories of the handful of illegal immigrants that Ron DeSantis dropped off in Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago. Demonstrating that government can indeed respond on this issue, the Republican governor had those pathetic migrants escorted out of the One Percenter playground in hours. But the South African farmers were different; startlingly White, and bereft of any of the qualities that have made other African-Americans the toast of America 2.0. So it’s not all migrants they sympathize with, it’s only the nonwhite ones. Whites cannot be victims, cannot be persecuted. Period. Some migrants are more equal than others.

And then, topping that, Trump met with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House. Going beyond the scripted scolding he gave Ukrainian comedian turned dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump hit all the right talking points. He even had the lights dimmed and played the videos of South African leaders urging that Whites be murdered, and their land stolen. It took some courage to make even this small, symbolic gesture. And it marked the first time that I know of, that Trump has ever mentioned the White race as president. He also pointed out the endless crosses adorning the highways, each commemorating a White farmer killed by Blacks. Trump is at least raising an issue which has never been raised in polite society before. And incurring even more wrath from the crowd that prefers their migrants to be exclusively nonwhite males of prime fighting age. So, give Trump his due here. Ramaphosa and his crew’s smiles betrayed a very wicked sense of humor.

So this was at least some kind of “winning.” But Trump’s “wins” are all like this; WWE style verbal salvos, fired at targets who are undeniably terrible people. As Trump himself said, “I don’t know what to do” about the plight of the White Afrikaners. We all enjoyed him throwing Zelenskyy out of the White House. But it appears that the little penis piano playing leader hasn’t missed a single payment from the U.S. taxpayers. Is Trump going to intervene militarily in South Africa? Well, the Left would finally mention the word peace again in such a case. Bringing thousands of White migrants into this country certainly doesn’t solve the immigration problem. It may counter the Great Replacement in a small way, as young White Americans simply won’t have babies. Ultimately, Trump chewing out some horrific state controlled journalist, or a tyrannical foreign leader, is the only sign that he is fighting the elite.

Read the Whole Article

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Anyone who says Gaza will be at peace if Hamas just surrenders and releases the hostages is either knowingly sowing disinformation or ignorantly sowing misinformation. We need to make sure everyone’s clear on this so nobody can say they didn’t know after history unpacks this one.

Netanyahu has made it completely and unambiguously clear that even if Hamas surrendered today and released every single hostage, Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan will still need to be implemented as a precondition for ending the mass slaughter. To be absolutely 100 percent clear, Trump’s plan for Gaza is that “all” Palestinians be removed on a “permanent” basis, never allowed to return.

There is no way to permanently remove all Palestinians from a Palestinian territory without material coercion — meaning more mass scale violence and siege warfare. There is also no way to argue that this mass displacement would be voluntary even without further violence, since Israel has been deliberately and systematically making the Gaza Strip uninhabitable by destroying civilian infrastructure. Forcing them to choose between starvation in an uninhabitable wasteland or submit to ethnic cleansing is exactly the same as forcing them out at gunpoint.

It was obvious that this was Israel’s plan for Gaza in October 2023; plans to move the civilian population out of the enclave were already being circulated within days of the onslaught. But that wasn’t Israel’s official and openly stated policy until the Trump administration; now that Israel is clearly and explicitly stating this agenda in public, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to continue circulating the lie that the suffering of the people of Gaza ends if Hamas surrenders. What happens is that their homeland will be permanently taken away from them as they are shipped off to a foreign land, and Gaza will cease to exist as a Palestinian territory.

That’s not peace. Or if it is it’s the peace of an empty room; the peace of a room full of corpses. Saying you made peace by removing the Palestinians from Palestine is like saying you settled an argument by decapitating one of the arguers.

That’s the only “peace” the people of Palestine will experience if Hamas lays down its arms. Losing everything they’ve ever known forever, on pain of death.

That is the inconvenient truth people are trying to hide when they say “This all ends when Hamas surrenders and releases the hostages.” That is the deception they are sowing.

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Israel bombed the home of two married doctors in Gaza on Friday, killing nine of their children and critically injuring their sole surviving son. The father of the children was also severely injured in the attack, while their mother, while still working at the nearby hospital, received the charred bodies of her children. They were too badly burned to be recognized.

This one incident, just by itself, is vastly more newsworthy and deserving of attention than two Israeli embassy staff members being killed in Washington. But news coverage hasn’t reflected this, because Palestinians aren’t regarded as human beings in the mainstream western press.

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She heard a Muslim listening to a Muslim sermon on the radio and it made her feel scared because she’s a racist, and now she wants all American Jews to have firearms. That’s her whole entire story. I just saved you two minutes and eight seconds. https://t.co/PJIIsydgbG

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 24, 2025

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The Guardian has published an opinion piece by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett titled “As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch — powerless. What is it doing to us as a society?”, which is noteworthy because it somehow never mentions the word “Israel” or “Israeli” one single time throughout the entire article. It doesn’t even mention Netanyahu.

This is a particularly glaring example of the way the western press have been discussing the Gaza holocaust as some kind of unfortunate tragedy that is just passively happening to the Palestinian people, as though it’s a natural disaster or something. It’s like bombs and siege warfare are just the weather over there. Like “Oh it’s a bit bomby and faminy in Gaza today, and it makes me feel sad!”

This genocide is exposing the mass media like nothing else in my lifetime.

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Israel supporters have different packages of apologia for each ideological group, with different narratives explaining why Israel’s abuses are justified to all the different groups in language designed to appeal to each faction.

Are you a progressive humanitarian? Israel apologists have a narrative package custom designed to appeal to your support for the Jewish people and the revulsion you feel toward their historic persecution.

Are you a conservative who’s fearful of Muslims and terrorism? Israel apologists have a completely different package of narratives designed to appeal to your fears and explain why Islamic extremism must be defeated to protect western civilization.

Are you a fundamentalist Christian? There’s a whole other package of narratives designed to explain why support for Israel is actually commanded by God in the Holy Bible.

Are you a fascist who thinks Arabs should be wiped off the face of the earth? Boy howdy do the Israel apologists ever have some narratives for you.

Israel apologists understand that different political factions are responsive to different types of messaging, so each political faction gets its own messaging package.

The only ones they can’t effectively target with carefully constructed narratives are the groups who are already forcefully pro-Palestine, predominantly on the leftmost end of the political spectrum. So they just work on silencing, stigmatizing and marginalizing those groups instead.

It’s all about controlling the narrative. Israel apologists understand the power of narrative control better than perhaps any other major ideological faction on earth, and you see it at play throughout every facet of our society. That’s one of the many reasons they were so successful at manufacturing support for Israel in the west up until history’s first live-streamed genocide caused them to finally start losing control of the story.

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Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just declassified a 13 December 2021 National Counterterrorism Center memo warning that Domestic Violent Extremists “will threaten to mobilize to violence in opposition to new or expanding COVID-19 related mandates.”

The memo is a classic tactic used by incipient totalitarian regimes to associate rationale criticism of state policy with domestic terrorism. In the initial stage of erecting a totalitarian state, such associations are qualified with statements that pay lip service to constitutional protections, as does this particular memo (see page one below).

However, if state agencies that promulgate this ideology are not rigorously opposed, they will almost certainly advance to the next stage of removing the distinction between peaceful regime critics and violent extremists. The totality of circumstances indicates that the Biden administration was rapidly heading down this path in the autumn of 2021.

The extreme persecution of Dr. Peter McCullough in 2021—with multiple accusations of “spreading dangerous information” used to justify firing him from his ranking position at a major medical center, harassing him with lawsuits, and forcing him to undergo “struggle sessions” before a kangaroo court erected by the American Board of Internal Medicine—were animated with this totalitarian spirit.

The December 13, 2021 NCIS memo is a perfect expression of why we decided to start the McCullough Foundation to oppose tyranny masquerading as public health policy.

The world is now awakening to the fact that we at the McCullough Foundation were fully justified when we raised the alarm in 2021 that COVID-19 vaccines presented an unacceptably high risk of inducing myocarditis, especially in young males.

Thanks to the tireless clinical observations, investigative scholarship, and testimony of Dr. McCullough and his staff at the McCullough Foundation, the truth of this vitally important matter has prevailed.

On May 21, 2025—the same day that Dr. McCullough testified before the Senate about COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis—the FDA issued a directive requiring COVID vaccine makers Pfizer and Moderna to update their warnings about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis.

This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.

The post Biden Adm.:’Criticism of Covid Mandates Is Doctrine of Violent Domestic Extremists’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

On the eve of Iran’s meeting in Rome on Friday, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, summarized the situation quite succinctly… accept Iran’s offer to not build nuclear weapons or there is no deal. I do not think this is hyperbole or posturing. I believe it is the firm position of Iran. The decision is now in the hands of Donald Trump.

The Friday meeting in Rome marks the fifth time that Iran and the US have met for indirect talks. Oman has the unenviable task of running back-and-forth between the two delegations, who have declined to meet in person and talk directly to each other. Over the course of the last month, Iran has heard conflicting positions from Steve Witkoff, Trump’s lead negotiator. After the first round of talks in April, Witkoff said the US was willing to accept Iran’s peaceful enrichment of uranium, which is 3.6%. But, upon returning to Washington, the Zionist crowd clobbered Witkoff, which led him subsequently to make repeated public remarks that Iran would not be allowed to have any enrichment capability.

Iran, with the backing of Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, is willing to accept a 3.6% limit and to allow unfettered inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities in order to ensure compliance. The fly in the ointment is Israel. Bibi Netanyahu and the Zionist zealots are pulling out all stops to pressure Trump and toprevent him from making such a deal. An Iranian agreement to never build a nuke would remove one of Israel’s major excuses for its genocidal activites against the Palestinians and Hezbollah.

Netanyahu and company continue making threats to attack and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but realize it is an impossible goal without the full support of Washington. Domestic politics in the US is another factor that will constrain, if not prevent, Trump from making a sensible deal with Iran. A large number of the political whores that comprise the Republican and Democrat members of Congress, are insisting that Iran must also destroy its ballistic missile force and end all contacts with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Because Trump needs the votes of people like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz to pass his Big Beautiful Bill to fund the government and deliver tax cuts, he is unlikely to make any compromise with Iran.

The murder of two Israeli diplomats on Wednesday in DC adds even more emotional rocket fuel to the heat Trump is facing for even entertaining a deal with Iran. I want to be proven wrong, but I don’t think Trump has the courage or the backbone to do the right thing with respect to Iran.

For those of you who live outside the United States, I must emphasize that a majority of Americans hold an irrational, rabid hatred of Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas… at least those Americans holding political office. We have reached the point that anyone who tries to argue on behalf of the Palestinians is immediately denounced as an antisemite. The same emotional derangement that infects many in Israel is prevalent in the US with respect to Iran and the Palestinian people. Facts no longer matter.

While the prospect of a US-supported attack by Israel on Iran looms on the horizon, there is a chance that diplomatic intervention by the Gulf Arabs might dissuade Trump from embracing the suicidal proposal of Israel to destroy Iran’s nuclear processing facilities. Trump is also keen on making the Abraham Accords a reality — an impossible goal if the US attacks Iran in tandem with Israel. I agree with Doug MacGregor’s view that an attack on Iran will likely lead to Iran launching military strikes that will shutter the Persian Gulf. Maybe I am grasping at straws, but I am trying to identify some alternatives to a devastating, horrific war that the US will not be able to control or win.

I discussed this issue, as well as the war in Ukraine, with my friend, Garland Nixon. I am also posting the video of a recent chat with Pakistani lawyer, Waqas Ali.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post Decision Day in Rome appeared first on LewRockwell.

When Donald Trump was re-elected president in November 2024, expectations were widespread that Israel’s assault on Gaza would intensify, and that the incoming administration would take a much more active role in neutralizing Tel Aviv’s regional adversaries. The affinity between Benjamin Netanyahu, many Israelis, and Trump is well-established. As Foreign Policy noted in October 2024, “Israel is Trump country, and Trump’s No. 1 supporter is its prime minister,” the magazine wrote. Trump’s victory was widely celebrated in Israel, both publicly and at the state level.

Just days later, former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta predicted the president would give Netanyahu a “blank check” to cause havoc across the Middle East, up to all-out war with Iran. After taking office in January, the president did little to dispel such forecasts—quite the opposite. In February, Trump outlined plans for “Gaza Lago”—a total displacement and forced resettlement of Gaza’s Palestinian population and the creation of a so-called “Riviera of the Middle East” in its place.

In March, Trump renewed hostilities against Yemen’s Ansar Allah, after the group reinstated its Red Sea blockade in response to Israel’s flagrant breaches of its cease-fire agreement with Hamas. Battering Yemen far harder than Biden ever had, U.S. officials boasted that the air and naval effort against Ansar Allah would continue “indefinitely.” Trump also claimed that Washington’s “relentless strikes” would leave the resistance decimated.

In early May, however, Trump declared the mission over after agreeing to a cease-fire under which Ansar Allah would stop targeting U.S. ships in return for free rein in its war against Israel. Tel Aviv was reportedly kept out of the loop, learning of the deal via news reports. Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, responded to backlash over the deal by stating that the U.S. “isn’t required to get permission from Israel” to make deals.

Huckabee, an ultraconservative evangelical and outspoken Zionist who vowed upon his nomination to refer to Israel in biblical terms such as the “Promised Land,” and who has frequently claimed that Jews hold a “rightful deed” to Palestinian land, surprised observers with the statement. Yet it seemed to mark the beginning of a dramatic shift in direction by the Trump administration, which, as MintPress News has previously documented, is stacked with pro-Israel hawks.

Since then, Trump has embarked on a tour of the Middle East, with Israel conspicuously absent from his itinerary. Instead, he has traveled to states in the Gulf Cooperation Council. Meanwhile, the president negotiated the release of the last living U.S. hostage held by Hamas and convened direct peace talks with the resistance group—in both cases without Tel Aviv’s involvement. There are rumors that Hamas may end hostilities in return for U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state, an offer Trump is reportedly open to.

Negotiations with Iran over a new nuclear deal have been underway since Trump took office. On May 15, it was widely reported that the two sides were finally on the verge of reaching an agreement. Once again, Israel was apparently entirely excluded from these talks, and any accord that does result will likely not take into account Tel Aviv’s bellicose stance toward Iran. In a remarkable speech in Riyadh on May 13, Trump appeared to backtrack on decades of American policy in the Middle East.

Successive U.S. administrations have considered normalization of relations between all Arab and Muslim states—particularly Saudi Arabia—and Israel a paramount objective to the extent of making continued U.S. defense guarantees to Riyadh contingent upon its recognition of Tel Aviv. However, Trump explicitly deprioritized this goal, saying that while he hoped the Saudis would eventually sign the Abraham Accords, he understood the current context made it unfeasible and added, “You’ll do it in your own time.” He mentioned Israel only once.

Washington went on to sign a slew of deals with Riyadh across various sectors, including the largest-ever defense agreement between the two countries, valued at nearly $142 billion. In sum, a string of seismic developments strongly suggests that Trump’s administration is breaking with the previously unshakable U.S. policy of lockstep support for Israel and serving its interests in nearly every regard—an arrangement in place since the country’s founding in 1948. But is this previously unthinkable rupture real, or just for show?

Trump Snubs Israel in Middle East Pivot

Purported rifts in the U.S.-Israel relationship are nothing new. Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, multiple mainstream reports suggested the relationship was “strained,” especially due to sharp personal differences between the then-president and Netanyahu. Similarly, from the start of the Gaza genocide, major news outlets intermittently reported that Joe Biden was “privately” angry with Netanyahu’s behavior. Meanwhile, White House spokespeople and prominent Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, publicly insisted that the administration was committed to securing a cease-fire.

In both cases, though, the U.S. financial and military aid that is fundamental to Israel’s continued existence and erasure of the Palestinian people continued unabated, if not increased. In late April, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog, who served from 2021 to 2025, proudly declared that “the [Biden] administration never came to us and said, ‘Cease-fire now.’ It never did.” As such, skepticism about the sincerity and substance of the Trump administration’s abrupt break from its traditionally pro-Israel trajectory is well-founded.

Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, tells MintPress News that there may be a real shift underway in U.S. foreign policy, driven in large part by Trump’s determination to counter China’s rising global influence, particularly in the Middle East. It is this agenda that, for now, is pushing Washington to conduct “a foreign policy increasingly friendly to deep-pocketed states on the Arabian Peninsula, at the expense of the historic U.S.-Israel alignment.” As Cafiero put it:

Trump wants to pull Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE et al closer to U.S. geopolitical and geo-economic influence, while pulling them away from China to some extent. He likely won’t have much success in slowing down the momentum of Arab-Chinese relations in energy, investment, trade, logistics, commerce, AI, digitization, and so on. But in terms of defense and security, the U.S. will continue to dominate, and Trump will make clear these are uncrossable ‘red lines’ in terms of the Gulf’s relationship with China from Washington’s perspective.”

Trump’s large trade and investment deals with Gulf states play heavily into his “Make America Great Again” agenda and self-mythologizing as a dealmaker at home and abroad. The Gulf states are “ripe for lucrative deals” for U.S. companies, Cafiero says, adding that these agreements will create jobs and generate “good optics” for the administration at home.

Geopolitical risk analyst Firas Modad agrees that economic factors are central to Trump’s current course shift, and are alienating Tel Aviv. “Trump needs to sell F-35s. The U.S. defense industry needs the funds. The sale of F-35s to Turkey and perhaps to Saudi Arabia… a new deal with Iran, a Saudi civilian nuclear program — these will all be big bones of contention with Israel,” Modad said.

If nuclear negotiations succeed, Trump will likely seek to open Iranian markets to U.S. firms too. Israel doesn’t want this either. Trump is showing Netanyahu how much Israel needs the U.S., not the other way around.”

Gulf States Rise as Israel Loses Clout

Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a Tehran-based political analyst and professor at the University of Tehran, tells MintPress News that a “rift” between the U.S. and Israel does indeed exist, but that it is “difficult to say how significant or deep it truly is.”

Marandi believes the broader U.S. power structure recognizes that its support for what he calls the “Gaza Holocaust” since October 2023—“a 24/7 televised genocide”—has seriously damaged the West’s international image and soft power, telling MintPress News that “By default, this has greatly enhanced the soft power of China, Iran and Russia. The Global South looks to them, not the U.S. or its European vassals, for leadership, direction and partnership.”

Modad agrees, noting that in March 2023, Saudi Arabia unexpectedly reconciled with Iran “under Chinese auspices, without meaningful consultation with Washington.” Now that Arab and Muslim states view China and Russia as viable economic and military partners, the prospect of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s “Sino-Islamic alliance” becoming a reality is increasingly likely.

“The Americans will do whatever it takes to avoid resource-rich or militarily capable Muslim countries falling into Beijing’s orbit, even if that’s at Israel’s expense,” Modad tells MintPress News.

Marandi sees potential for shifts in U.S. relations with the region, saying “the space is there for progress”—though such progress remains “limited in scope and purely prospective for now.” He believes the current divide between Washington and Tel Aviv is largely tied to Netanyahu’s leadership.

“There’s a chance he’ll be sacrificed to preserve and rehabilitate Israel’s image internationally, with blame for everything since October 7 placed squarely on him,” Marandi says. “It would be like blaming Hitler alone for World War II and the Holocaust, instead of the system he led and everyone who enabled it.”

Marandi doubts a broader U.S.-Israel split will occur, saying the relationship is “so substantial, it’s not going to completely wither and die” over current events. “The Zionist lobby in the U.S. remains very powerful,” Marandi notes, adding that while Israel “has been discredited worldwide and is internationally despised, with people across the West condemning and abhorring the Zionist regime, the lobby still exerts enormous influence over Washington’s domestic and foreign policy.”

Modad is likewise under no illusions about the Israeli lobby’s clout in Washington. He expects its affiliated groups—and the many lawmakers they generously fund—to aggressively push back against Trump’s shift. He also suggests the administration could respond to the pressure by forcing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to register as a foreign agent. Given AIPAC’s political clout, such a move would be unprecedented.

U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer has described AIPAC as “a de facto agent for a foreign government” with “a stranglehold on Congress.” Indeed, the powerful lobbying organization has a disturbing success rate in helping to elect hardcore proponents of  Israel to Congress and the Senate, and aggressively works to unseat anyone on Capitol Hill who expresses solidarity with Palestinians. This effort has only intensified since October 7, and the organization is so confident in its impunity that it openly advertises its activities.

For example, AIPAC publishes an annual report highlighting its “policy and political achievements.” The committee’s 2022 report boasts, among other things, of securing $3.3 billion “for security assistance to Israel, with no added conditions” and funding “pro-Israel candidates” to the tune of $17.5 million—the most of any U.S. PAC. A staggering 98% of those candidates went on to win, defeating 13 pro-Palestinian challengers in the process.

AIPAC Faces White House Resistance

Trump is not unaware of the Israel lobby’s outsized influence over U.S. domestic and foreign affairs. As Marandi notes, on Jan. 15, Trump shared a video of Professor Jeffrey Sachs in which he blames Benjamin Netanyahu for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq—a war that Trump has long criticized. The crucial role that AIPAC and its allies played in laying the groundwork for that war has largely been forgotten.

That’s likely due in part to the organization’s large-scale online cleanup operations in which evidence of their early cheerleading for a full-scale U.S. invasion of Iraq was quietly erased. In December 2001, AIPAC published a briefing for U.S. lawmakers on the “major threat” it claimed that Saddam Hussein posed in the Middle East, to U.S. interests in the region and to “Israel’s security”—accusing him of producing weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorist organizations.

Both claims were false, forming the basis of Washington’s case for the invasion. AIPAC later removed the briefing from its website. In 2015, a committee spokesperson told The New York Times that “AIPAC took no position whatsoever on the Iraq War.” Later that year, AIPAC President Robert A. Cohen went even further, claiming that “Leading up to the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, AIPAC took no position whatsoever, nor did we lobby on the issue.”

Today, Israel and its lobbying network are pushing for another major conflict in the Middle East—this time with Iran. In April, The New York Times, citing anonymous briefings, revealed that Tel Aviv had drawn up detailed plans for an attack on the Islamic Republic that would have required U.S. support—plans that were reportedly waved off by Trump. Israeli officials were said to be furious over the leak, with one calling it “one of the most dangerous leaks in Israel’s history.”

While Tel Aviv is purportedly still planning a “limited attack” on Iran, The New York Times report sent an unambiguous message to Netanyahu and his government that the Trump administration would not support any such action under any circumstances. Opposition to belligerence towards Tehran is in itself quite an extraordinary reversal for Trump and his cabinet, given their past rhetoric and stances. Before even taking office, it was reported that the administration was concocting plans to “bankrupt Iran” with “maximum pressure.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had long called for tightening already devastating sanctions on Tehran, was at the forefront of this push. He was eagerly supported by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, a Pentagon veteran who previously sat on the House Armed Services Committee. At an event convened by NATO adjunct the Atlantic Council in October 2024, Waltz bragged about how Trump had previously almost destroyed the Islamic Republic’s currency, and looked ahead to doling out even worse punishment following the president’s inauguration.

However, the reportedly positive progress of nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran today suggests Trump and his team have not only jettisoned these ambitions but are determined to avoid war. Cafiero believes this objective is one of the key geopolitical considerations driving the President’s current course in the Middle East. He notes such a conflict would inevitably be “messy, bloody, and costly,” and believes Netanyahu’s determination “to pull the U.S. into war” means Trump now sees Israel as a real liability:

Trump views West Asia as a region the U.S. has historically been sucked into, and he believes Washington shouldn’t be excessively entangled there anymore – no more costly and humiliating quagmires, diverting resources and attention away from other parts of the world, where China is making major economic and geopolitical gains. The Gulf monarchies are sources of regional stability – they’re diplomatic bridges and interlocutors, facilitating dialogue and negotiation, and assisting in winding down local and international conflicts, or at least U.S. involvement in them.”

A costly and humiliating quagmire conflict between the U.S. and Iran would certainly be – and were Israel to dare strike Tehran alone, Washington would likely suffer adverse consequences in any event. A September 2024 report from the powerful and secretive lobby group the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) spelled out in forensic detail that it would take “five minutes or less” for Iran’s ballistic and hypersonic missiles to reach most U.S. military bases in the Middle East and obliterate them.

Is US Support for Israel Ending?

Fears of such an eventuality, and the Empire’s repeatedly proven inability to prevail in battling Yemen’s Ansar Allah, surely lie behind Trump’s determined push for peace with Iran. Even if the administration’s current sidelining of Tel Aviv in favor of the Gulf states is temporary and conducted purely for expediency, given current geopolitical contexts, never before in Israel’s history have its leaders’ wishes and wills been so flagrantly and concertedly overlooked or outright contravened in American corridors of power.

Should this rocky period represent a mere transitory blip in the U.S./Israel relationship, the episode at least amply demonstrates that Washington isn’t as beholden to Israel as its leaders and the international Israel lobby like to think. With China’s rising influence and the newly anointed multipolar world going nowhere, U.S. leaders may think twice about being so deferential to Tel Aviv’s demands, its designs of endless territorial expansion, and its perpetual wars against its neighbors in the name of “security.”

This article was originally published on MintPress News.

The post Trump’s Break with Israel: Genuine Shift or Political Theater? appeared first on LewRockwell.

As evidence mounts that major western economies are heading into a banking and monetary crisis due to contracting credit, we face the consequences of unsound money. The era of fiat is drawing to a close and its death will be painful for the highly indebted advanced economies in North America, Europe, and Japan. History and legal precedent tell us that fiat will die, and only gold can provide an anchor to credit values.

As always, there are lessons to be learned from monetary history, particularly in the context of credit-dependent post-feudal economies, when in a post-feudal world gold standards evolved to support mountains of credit in the forms of bank notes and commercial bank deposits.

In this article, I look at lessons from nineteenth century gold standards and the mistakes made. Mostly, they could have been easily avoided, but are lessons for designing tomorrow’s monetary systems

The debate over the return of gold backing for credit is becoming urgent, not just because the fiat currency system has run its course, but because it is increasingly in the developing world’s interests to embrace it. And unless Russia, China, and their spheres of influence moves urgently towards backing their currencies with gold, there economies wil suffer from increasing dollar-led fiat instability.

Introduction

We know that from the dawn of monetary history, money is gold, silver, or copper and everything else is credit. And the relationship between money and credit was codified in a series of Roman law pronouncements dating back to Rome’s Twelve Tables in 449 BC. It was the successor nations of the Roman Empire, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Urals which colonised the world, apart from China and Japan. But coincidentally with the Twelve Tables, it was the era of Confucius, who had died only thirty years before, and the flowering of Chinese philosophy which confirmed similar conclusions about money. But since the end of barter, there have been numerous attempts by rulers to fraudulently misrepresent or confiscate money, usually to finance wars or disguise their debts.

The transition from agricultural feudalism to industrialisation was facilitated by the expansion of credit, not money, though above-ground stocks of gold and silver available for coining did continue to accumulate. And with its expansion, banking systems evolved to deal in credit, creating it as demanded. Rudimentary banking dealing in credit had existed in Roman times, which is why jurors such as Ulpian, Paul, and Gaius in the early Christian era ruled on the differences between money and credit.

In his 1751 treatise Della Moneta [On Money], the Italian economist Ferdinando Galiani confirmed the origins of Italian banking which spread throughout Europe:

“Notably, the first banks were in the hands of private persons with whom people deposited money and from whom they received bills of credit and who were governed by the same rules as the public banks are now. And thus, the Italians have not only been the fathers, the masters, and the arbiters of commerce so that in all Europe they have been the depositories of money and are called bankers.”

Banking as we know it today was developed in England by London’s goldsmiths, who began to receive the gold and silver coin of the merchants in deposit. They not only agreed to repay it on demand, but to pay 6% interest per annum for the use of it. Consequently, in order to enable them to pay the interest promised it necessarily became their property to trade with as they wished. They were not the trustees of the money, but its proprietors. And it was not placed with them as a depositum to be restored in specie, but it became the goldsmiths’ property as a mutuum to be restored to the merchant on demand. This business flourished after the Restoration in 1660, and expanded significantly under William of Orange, following the Glorious Revolution when the Catholic James II was banished.

When the goldsmith bankers received this money in deposit, in exchange it was agreed that a credit or right of action be given in favour of the merchant for an equal amount of money to be restored to him on demand. It is this banker’s obligation to the depositor which in banking language today is termed a deposit.

As this business became mainstream, experience showed that if some of a banker’s customers demanded payment of their deposits or credits from day-to-day, others would probably pay in about an equal amount, so that at the end of the day they would not be much difference in his cash balance. In practice, it was found that ordinarily the bank’s balance in cash would seldom differ by more than 1/36th of total deposits from day-to-day. Therefore, if a banker retained 1/10th of his cash to meet any demands for payments that may be made, it would be ample cover for deposit outflows in ordinary conditions.

This allowed the banker to buy commercial and other bills in far larger quantities at a discount in return for a deposit credited in favour of the sellers. The sellers of these bills could draw upon their credits at the bank at will. By dealing in credit this way, the leverage the banker could apply to his own balance sheet was safely up to ten times on the assumptions above. And with the rate of discount on commercial bills typically 8% or more, the banker was able to pay 6% to depositors and retain a good profit.

Clearly, the value of a banker’s credit had to be expressed in money. That is to say, a deposit was expected to be encashable for specie. But with the evolution of the goldsmiths’ business and the mountains of credit created by their activities, the relationship between gold and silver on the one hand and legal obligations to pay on the other would also evolve.

The gold standard as our nineteenth century forbears knew it was basically a child of the British government and its bank in London, the Bank of England. The Bank itself opened for business on 1 August 1694 with a staff of nineteen. For most of the period between 1717 to 1931, Britain operated either a formal or de facto gold standard. The gold standard commenced after Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the Mint, valued the gold guinea at 21 silver shillings, marking an important shift from sterling silver towards a gold standard. After a period of bimetallism, gold gradually became to be regarded as the measure of value in preference to silver. And in 1816, gold was declared to be the only legal measure of value in England and the pound became the equivalent in gold of 20 silver shillings.

By the 1816 Regulations of the Mint, forty pounds weight of standard gold bullion are cut into £1,869 in sovereigns, fixing the mint price of gold at £3/17/6d. In modern measures, a sovereign weighs 7.99 grammes with a gold content of 7.32 grammes.

In the United States, before the War of Independence English law prevailed and in the late 1700s Blackstone’s Commentaries was the standard legal treatise among Americans. Blackstone was clear on what constituted money:

“Money is the medium of commerce. It is the King’s prerogative as the arbiter of domestic commerce to give it all authority or make it current. Money is a universal medium or common standard by comparison with which the value of all merchandise may be ascertained: a sign which represents the respective values of all commodities…

“The coining of money is in all states the act of the sovereign power that its value may be known on inspection. And with respect to coinage in general there are three things to be considered therein: the materials, the impression, and the denomination. With respect to the materials Sir Edward Coke lays it down that the money of England must be either of gold or silver…”[i]

The framers of the Constitution adapted Blackstone to replace the King’s prerogative with the new Congress, giving the federal government the power to coin money. And that money could only be coined. To get around this restriction, which is every spendthrift politician’s desire, the government would have to have a tame commercial bank to produce gold substitutes in the form of bank notes. But even that course was controversial.

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton as the first secretary of the Treasury submitted a report to Congress in which he outlined his proposal to establish a government-owned bank, the Bank of the United States, using the charter of the Bank of England as the basis for his plan. It was passed and a 20-year charter was signed into law by President Washington the following February. As well as acting as the government’s fiscal agent and making loans to the government, it also operated as a commercial bank, issuing banknotes. In 1811, Hamilton was dead, the Republican Party had taken control from the Federalists, and the charter was not renewed.[ii]

Just five years after Hamilton’s proposal, the Bank of England began experiencing a significant drain on its bullion reserve, due to the government’s need for gold to finance the war with France and also to pay for imported grain after a succession of bad harvests. In 1797, the Bank suspended payments in cash (i.e. gold and silver coin). The suspension continued through the Napoleonic Wars, during which the Bank inflated its note issue causing the price of gold to rise against the Bank’s paper currency. In 1810, this led to the appointment of a Select Committee “to enquire into the high price of bullion”, which concluded that the depreciation of the currency was due to the excessive issue of bank notes. The following which is extracted from its report to Parliament is the most relevant passage:

“…there is at present an excess of paper in circulation in this Country, of which the most unequivocal symptom is the very high price of Bullion, and next to that, the low state of the Continental Exchanges; that this excess is to be ascribed to the want of a sufficient check and control in the issues of paper from the Bank of England; and originally, to the suspension of cash payments, which removed the natural and true control. For upon a general view of the subject, Your Committee are of opinion, that no safe, certain, and constantly adequate provision against an excess of paper currency, either occasional or permanent, can be found, except in the convertibility of all such paper into specie. Your Committee cannot, therefore, but see reason to regret, that the suspension of cash payments, which, in the most favourable light in which it can be viewed, was only a temporary measure, has been continued so long; and particularly, that by the manner in which the present continuing Act is framed, the character should have been given to it of a permanent war measure.

The Committee recommended to Parliament that placing numerical restrictions on the note issue would be impossible to judge and that in the absence of an exchange facility between notes and coin, the only sure criterion was to be found in monitoring the price of bullion and the state of the foreign exchanges. It was a conclusion which has stood the test of time because ever since all attempts to manage the note issue and other forms of central bank credit to achieve price stability have failed.

Perhaps the implication that Parliament was unable to control monetary matters was unacceptable, because the Select Committee’s report was rejected. Consequently, being unrestrained the Bank of England was free to increase its note issue without restriction, reducing the gold value of the Bank’s paper pound even further.

In an inflationary free-for-all, bank notes were also being issued in increasing numbers by country banks outside London, in what would turn out to be a classic cycle of bank credit expansion. The consequence of the note expansion was rising prices: between 1808 and 1813, the general level of consumer prices is estimated to have risen 25%. Inevitably, a credit squeeze followed and between 1814—1816 half of the country banks failed in the subsequent slump, reducing the total volume of paper currency circulating substantially. The shortage of bank notes led to the value of the Bank of England’s notes increasing accordingly, proving that the Bullion Report was correct in its analysis: that it was impossible to judge what restrictions to put on the note issue, and the best solution was to be found in a firm relationship with specie.

Though Parliament had rejected the Bullion Report, it became the subject of much debate with the result that businessmen and traders were won over by it. It also converted Robert Peel, who later became the first Prime Minister with a business background. Peel also became Chairman of the Bullion Committee in 1819, and he pushed through an Act initially introducing a gold bullion standard to be followed by a resumption in 1823 of the previous sovereign coin standard. But the Bank had accumulated enough gold to press for the Act to be amended so that it could resume coin payments in May 1821.

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The post A Brief History of the Gold Standard appeared first on LewRockwell.

Deepest gratitude to our beloved Lew Rockwell, and to my good friend, Dr. Tom DiLorenzo, for inviting me here. I’m thrilled to be with you.

My topic is The Real Israel Versus Hasbara History. Hopefully some of you know what Hasbara is. When America’s regime historians reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they always praise Pax Americana. That is the idea that American empire, hegemony, brought peace to the world. Conveniently, they leave out the horrors of it.

Naturally, regime historians, the ones we are here to counter, speak a lot about Hitler. They hardly ever mention Hiroshima. Likewise, has Israel shaped its past, mixing some history with myth to render a myth history. The propaganda sustaining Israel’s counterfeit history is called Hasbara, which means explanation in Hebrew. Hasbara constructs serve to coat Israel’s real crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give them some purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus artificial constructs to rape reality. Undeniably, compared to Hasbara, American foreign policy has a certain narrative talent. The injustices of imperial power notwithstanding, people are persuaded by the strut of it. Less obvious is the appeal of Israeli Hasbara and the Jewish supremacy that goes with it, and has seduced so many Christians into ignoring Christ’s teachings. Christ commands care, not for the oppressor and the predator, but for the poor and the oppressed.

Hasbara and official myth history aside, because of Gaza, you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel. Reality is truth. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. Because of Gazans, the living and the martyred, the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

Shortly after October 7, with the commencement in Gaza of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron, certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. By late October, Israel’s actions within and without Gaza had shown the world the absolute depravity of Israel, state and civil society.

One such emerged reality is that Palestinians, not Israeli Jews, as Hasbara teaches, are the most imperiled people in the world. Israelis, the most perilous. Another is that Israel, with overwhelming support from the Jewish Israeli public, has gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate, industrial-scale murder and ethnic cleansing ongoing.

The Israel Defense Forces, IDF, were allowed to obliterate the fundamentals of physical, national, and economic life in Gaza, turning it into an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland. The strip has been reduced to its subsoil particulate elements only badly soiled. Gaza is now a mass grave along a small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea where living ghosts wander. Gaza’s soil is soaked through with a mix of millions of tons of building debris, the decaying bodies of tens of thousands of human beings, their pets, livestock, fauna and flora, all gone. An inferno of garbage, open sewage, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance.

Said a scholar of the architecture of occupation: “Israel has stolen from Gaza’s Palestinians the very ability to produce food, or receive it, or use means of exchange to get it.” Banking was dismantled. Believe it or not, but under years of medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people.

Indeed, Israel has systemized the mass murder and displacement of innocent Palestinian civilians, targeting them and their habitat for total warfare. Since war against civilians is a war on civilization, Israel, by extension, is the enemy of civilization.

Our ally Israel is a country in which genocide, snuff films, extrajudicial assassinations, rape, robbery, torture, and starvation of Palestinians are de facto legal. Israel is thus a criminal entity and a threat to the comity of nations. The indictment against Israel ought to have been hermetically sealed.

Israel’s ethnocide and genocide in Gaza is in violation of most systems of ethics known to man over intellectual history. It is in violation of God’s law, the Ten Commandments. These command not to covet, steal, or murder. It is in violation of libertarian law, the axiom of non-aggression. It is in violation of natural justice, the laws of war, although genocide is not war, as well as humanitarian law. And it is in violation of the systems of law within which the above is subsumed, the natural and the positive law.

Right and wrong are universal, not relative. The Sixth Commandment is neither opinion nor optional. Thou shalt not murder or mass murder is called a commandment for a reason. There is no tribal privilege clause attached to it. Like gentiles, Jews are enjoined against wanton murder. Yet Israelis now flout the Sixth Commandment with ugly audacity.

Over the months, I have closely observed Israel as it pulverizes population centers across the Levant. I’ve listened in Hebrew to Israeli Jewish public and political discourse. In Hebrew, the Jewish Israeli public personalities and the public express an impatient, snarling contempt for accusations of genocide, offering an unbroken stream of genocide justification Hasbara. It’s like Israeli Jews are yawning, waiting on the world to wake up to the fact that their lives do matter more, and that any aberrant action taken to make them feel safe must be allowed.

And it is allowed. Israel has played its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house, to the world. Israeli Jews don’t lack for facts, but most appear without the analytical and ethical faculties to examine their actions. They lead the unexamined lives of self-anointed superior beings. Societally, majorities appear to project the sense that their sectarian supremacy transcends the universal moral order to which international law, the natural law, and the Decalogue give expression.

The natural law is a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation, and experience, whichever floats your boat. Because it’s anchored in the very existential nature of man and reality, the natural law is the highest law known to man and is therefore deductively true and just. An example is the libertarian non-aggression axiom. For reasons obvious, there should be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axiom, which is the organizing principle of libertarianism. Minarchist, anarchist, or statist, genocide is forbidden.

The positive law, on the other hand, is the creation of the state. Legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. In teasing out right from wrong, we discriminate between acts that are criminal because the state has criminalized them as opposed to acts which are universally criminal. Most civilizing systems of ethics stipulate that no one has a right to kill a single innocent human being, let alone hundreds of thousands of members of a group. There again, Israel’s sacking of Gaza is universally evil.

Lest I be accused of arguing in circles around the definition of genocide, I’ll briefly mention genocide in the context of international versus the natural law. Israel has aced the genocide bar, namely the prohibitions in Article II of the Genocide Convention on destroying a group in whole or in part and/or making life unbearable for that group. Mens rea, intent in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy is a component of genocide.

If Palestinians were accorded equality before the law, any law, national or international, then by 2023’s end, logically and perhaps legally Israelis would have been seen as having both spoken their guilty minds and acted out their genocidal intent on the ground. Mass murder is never unintentional when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your mission. If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocents, attached to your criminal actions is a guilty mind, mens rea.

America shares in Israel’s genocidal guilty mind. The U.S. regime has been a worshipful partner in Israel’s vice. It has supplied munitions for mass murder. It has provided diplomatic cover. It has issued seven vetoes and abstentions in the UN Security Council to enable Israel’s continued atrocities. America has menaced countries, legal organs, and American residents for wanting to expel, arrest, protest, or boycott Israelis.

America’s helped Israeli Hasbara in asserting self-defense to justify collective punishment, and America has helped Israel to frame state terrorism as self-defense, normalizing the structural violence that is the state of Israel. The genocide of Gazans was happily and willingly underwritten by the United States government, the American political class, and its Julius Streicher media, which even mid-murder, describe Israelis as victims.

On the matter of industrial-scale mass murder, international law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law. Such is the case of Article Two of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It articulates mostly a set of negative rights. Their enforcement imposes no burden on anybody but the sadistic, sociopathic serial killers under discussion.

Most libertarians would concede that the state now acts extrajudicially, and that any remnants of the natural law once embedded in the US Constitution have long since been buried beneath the rubble of legislation and statute. Let us say then that to the extent that law, local, international, tribal, upholds no more than natural rights, law is okay. To the extent that law violates the rights to life, liberty, and property, law is bad. To the extent state law agrees with the natural law, to that extent it’s inoffensive. By extension, it matters not who upholds the rights of Palestinians to life and land, just so long as someone does. It matters not which state, which federal official, or international organization, or which platoon, Hezbollah or the Houthis, just so long as someone does.

In America, federalism means divided sovereignty, which if we are to take James Madison seriously, should make it difficult for states to begin executing their residents. Why would it be a matter of respect for a country’s sovereignty to allow Israel to systematically occupy and subjugate a population on the off-chance that they eliminate some terrorists, whom by now most consider resistance fighters? Most should.

Make no mistake, in human rights law, there is a responsibility to protect a community that is being evicted and eradicated. There’s a right to resist, under the Hague regulations on belligerent occupation. Neither offends the natural law. Resistance fighters argue that they are heeding this calling, the responsibility to protect. Israel ought to have been forcibly stopped, its innocent victims protected. You don’t placate a John Wayne Gacy and a Jeffrey Dahmer. You stop them, but not as the axis of genocide sees it.

The Arab societies are non-woke societies. The fact that Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Yemen were and are largely traditional societies, not co-opted woke societies, has certainly helped the West justify their mistreatment. You see, the woke masters of the Western universe consider non-woke societies as without the natural right of resistance. Their resistance we call terrorism.

Given that nobody has effectively upheld the legal responsibility to protect Palestinians, all but the spirit of Gaza is gone.

Consider the great Palestinian return to Northern Gaza in January of 2025. The erasure of over 2,000 Gazan bloodlines, family trees gone. An epic event took place despite that erasure. Processions of Palestinians in their thousands returned to their ruined homes in Northern Gaza. You see, the land is central to Palestinian identity. What greater proof is there of the ancestral homesteader claims that Palestinians have to Palestine than this devotion, this resilience?

Contrast this Palestinian rootedness and resilience with Israel’s squirrelly northern and southern sett- settler populations. Israeli Jews have not returned to towns in Israel’s north or south. Rather, their love of the land is predicated on its ethnic cleansing. Only if their army obliterates even the slightest danger posed by their indigenous neighbors would Israeli settlers return.

For yet more of a contrast, look too at the repulsive levels of Israeli environmental destruction in Gaza. This speaks among many other things to Israel’s profound alienation from an ecosystem it shares and claims to care about. Israeli Jews have a greed for the land, not a love of it.

Back to our nemesis, the state.

What about the moral authority of a democratic state? Surely our ally Israel shares our democratic values, or so we are lectured. Well, murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by the decree of the one dictator or the will of the many, by actors within or without the state, by the designated good guys or by the bad guys, murder of innocents is always murder.

You would be correct to conclude, however, that this 21st century holocaust is popular.

Thumping majorities across Israel’s public and private sectors have throughout justified, finessed, and fibbed about their army’s AI high-tech-driven depopulation and extermination orgy in Gaza. Eager to write the Palestinian obituary as late in the genocide as February of 2025, 80% of Jewish Israelis signaled their support for Trump’s plan for Gaza. Only 3% thought it immoral.

Trump’s plan is an extension and completion of Joe Biden’s genocide, which included the internal displacement, depopulation, and large-scale extermination of the Strip and its people. First, Donald Trump has proposed to cover up Israel’s crime of genocide, removing the pitiful exhibits from the scene of the crime. Next, he planned to conclude Joe’s genocide by scattering the survivors across the Middle East. Israel will have been rescued. Gazans would have ceased to exist as a nation. The liquidation and extermination campaign in the Gaza ghetto would have been completed.

Debating and committing genocidal violence, forcibly displacing millions, starving a subjugated population, all this many of Trump backers called out-of-the-box thinking. Who said crime doesn’t pay? When the superpower inverts the moral order of the universe, the crime of all crime pays and then some.

In any case, genocide has won a plebiscite in Israel. No surprise. Remember, the IDF is Israel. It’s a citizen army in which every Israeli must serve. It’s the voice of the Jewish Israeli commonwealth. Israel’s sons and daughters are the stars in the country’s genocide constellation. We’ve watched them level Gaza, vaporize young men picking their way through rubble as though in a video game, mock the victims, snipe their kids, rape their men, rob their businesses, rummage through the intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed, invade and explode entire residential buildings. True, all Israeli Jews are conscripted and must enlist in this army. However, the military draft does not compel a conscript to commit, chronicle, and crow over what is institutionalized, legalized serial-killer-type crime. The pride and joy seen, recorded, and then transmitted to the world from thousands of IDF mobile phones over months has been voluntary, spontaneous, and organic to Israeli society’s tenor and project.

So please let us hear no Nuremberg defense. “I was only following orders” must not be tolerated in mitigation of the IDF. The evidence is conclusive, idea of shoot, loot, and bomb for fun. No doubt the Israeli state is genocidal, but by the numbers and by their statements, Israeli society is as sociopathic. From janitor to general, from soldiers to Supreme Court justices. As uncomfortable as this is for us, for the libertarian individualist, the facts are clear. On the matter of the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israeli Jews, Israeli Jewish society does not stand apart from the Jewish state.

Throughout, polled opinion in Israel was not split between Jewish Israelis for mass murder versus Israelis against mass murder and ethnic cleansing. No. The division in Israeli society has been between Jewish Israelis for current levels of violence against Gazans versus those for greater or lesser industry in what were already industrial levels and methods of murder.

By the polls, nothing outside their self-righteous and self-obsessed selves mattered to a preponderance of Jewish Israelis. Israeli Jews, by and large, have become a sorority of Jewish supremacists, and Palestinians have paid a terrible price for Israel’s systemic societal sociopathy.

Ask Israelis about Palestinian babies shredded to bits, real beheadings, and they’ll dish Hasbara. “It’s all in self-defense, and it’s all the doing of a third party.” Guess who made them do the genocide? Hamas. “It’s not me,” says the criminal. “Hamas ate my homework.” “I mean my… I mean my conscience.” This is Israel’s third-party theory of culpability. Israel vomits it up, the West laps it up.

The Hamas made me mass murder non sequitur exposes Israel’s Hasbara for its irrationality. Since when do you blame a third party for your ongoing crimes in real time?

Put it this way, the state in which you live has no right to evict you from your home and bomb your neighborhood because its agents believe outlaws hide in your neighborhood. The crime of passion defense is bad enough. The third-party theory of culpability must never bolster it. The crime of passion defense we associate with a single event, not with sadistic serial killer… Serial killers loosed for months on end on millions of innocents across the Via Dolorosa that is Gaza.

Yes, Israel has an historic passion, all right, but for methodical mass murder. See, the idea of… It’s not a fighting force, it’s an air force. Judged from its actions over time, this air force’s objectives are not to defeat a regular army, but to pound population centers into submission in Gaza, across the Levant, and beyond. What other country has not only had killer practices codified in law, but also named… The Dahiya Doctrine is named after the southern suburbs of Beirut, upon whose Shia civilians the Israeli Air Force has perfected its predation. Mowing the lawn. That’s the term used across Israel to signal murder sprees periodical against Palestinian civilians to keep populations subdued.

Fans of true crime TV, me, will remember the Highway I-5 serial killer. Imagine his killer craft being dubbed the I-5 Doctrine, and Wikipedia describing this infamous serial killer murderer of women as an originator of the I-5 Doctrine.

Without a doubt, public protest too in Israel has followed a strictly “me, me” solipsistic self-interest. There was little transcendent humanity whatsoever in Israeli hostage protests. Remember this. By the numbers and by their own words, most Israeli Jews were simply demanding a return of their hostages. Said one Israeli pundit, “Israeli wants… want… Israelis want their hostages back. They don’t want Gaza back.”

If the Israeli state is a criminal entity, what then can be said about the US? Israel’s war on Gaza, the West Bank, and the Greater Levant is America’s war. Like it or not, Gaza is a genocide. We hear disinterested mumblings about the national interest, uh, “Don’t talk to me about Gaza. It’s of no national interest to the United States of America.” I’m afraid it’s too late for the national interest dodge. The US is an interventionist hegemon. It has aided, abetted, and partaken in via reconnaissance an extermination campaign in Gaza.

Besides often being immoral, the national interest argument is a form of statism. The premise of national interest political pragmatism leads to this perverse logic. If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and Iraqis happen to be in the American national interest, then those endeavors would have been justified in accordance with the national interest standards. In other words, if the US government considered genocide in the national interest, then genocide it is. America should act as the divine… on the… as… on its divine rights as global judge, jury, and executioner. No, genocide is not a foreign policy matter, it is a moral matter.

And the United States’ energetic support for the Gaza holocaust is a defining event in the annals of American foreign policy aberrations, and in the national life. While American foreign policy is a museum of horrors, Gaza is now the main exhibit.

Why is Gaza qualitatively different from foreign policy deformities that went before? Here’s why, in my opinion. So far, America’s foreign policy has been largely focused on regime change program where collateral damage is largely concealed but framed as incidental to a political program. Again and again, the American masters of the universe have gone to war to make the world woke. Namely, make it over in America’s image, as well as make the world safe for Israel, of course. Mass murder within the American foreign policy framework has generally been secondary to a program of warring to make the world work. Crudely put, “Be like us or we’ll kill you.”

In Gaza, however, America’s participated in mass murder for the sake of murder. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all universal values.

What the US has approved and assisted in Gaza is a primetime 21st-century holocaust. In a sense, Israel has affected a radical ethical inversion in America. Sects of Christianity can no longer distinguish Satan from God, mutually exclusive categories. They favor apex edicts over the commandment of the prince of peace. But you are what you do. The Israeli state is genocidal, not by virtue of its actions and the declared intent accompanying these actions, not because it has been denounced as genocidal by so-called anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers. Said Jesus, “Therefore, by their fruits, you will know them.”

Another of Hasbarah’s aims is to frame IDF’s ongoing extermination campaign against the population of cornered civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as byproducts of war, as incidental to a just war prosecuted by brave fighters.

If it’s portrayed as a war crime, genocide can be dismissed as no more than a case of, “Oops, bad things happen in the butcher shop of war.” In Gaza, however, Israel has waged genocide, not war. Dressing up a canned hunt as a war is pure Hasbarah. Genocide is not a war. The genocide-as-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends authority to criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime. You see, genocide is not a war crime to which a set of mitigating and explanatory legal defenses can attach. Genocide is a standalone, indefensible crime of all crimes for which there are no legal or moral defenses. There are no extenuating circumstances, historical, legal, or other, for genocide.

True, Israel’s genocide has been disrupted by asymmetric warfare from non-state Palestinian resistance fighters, but there is an enormous power differential between occupier and occupied.

That the serial killers encounter organized regional resistance does not make genocide a war.

So far, I’ve anatomized what Israel state and society has done to the Gaza Strip and its people since October 7, but what have Gazans, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal.

Outwardly captives, Palestinians are truly liberated from the liberal political propaganda that grips the West. They have made us see Israel as an irreparably corrupt force, morally and militarily. The genocide of Gaza has very plainly invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion. Here’s why. You’ve seen Israel for the contradiction it is. Israel astonishingly has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions, denying genocide while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to do genocide. Israel demands to exist as a privileged protected aberration, carrying out satanic deeds with universal blessings and absolution. Think about it. Caught in the protracted planful act of committing genocide, the guilty party, Israel, persist in claiming for itself the right to kill and deceive without being considered and treated as a killer and con artist. The chutzpah.

To no avail, human action, as Mises taught us, is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted. They’ve been exposed. Ethnocide, depopulation, and domicide are never justified and can never be exculpated. To assert that you are just and justified as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified, this is to embody the most grotesque contradiction and to be less than human, less than coherent. At minimum, Israel deserves the revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

The same ahistoric Hoppean argumentation, God bless Hoppe, applied to invalidate Israel will serve here to validate the Palestinians’ reality as they have been telling it over decades. Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians, their reason for rage, and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians have been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their reality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7. Now, if supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza deny this, they too would be fraudsters living a lie. The liar’s life of lies we expose by compelling the denier of the Palestinian holocaust to live his own lie.

Deniers of the Palestinian reality, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Biden, Bibi, Blinken, Douglas Murray, Dennis Prager, would be parachuted into occupied Gaza. Genocide would become their lived reality, not their rhetorical reality.

Running here and there as tanks advance on the denier, ducking and diving bombardments from above, as if you can escape the death radius of American-made 2,500-pound bombs. These Holocaust deniers would be recorded scratching for scraps, carrying jerricans of contaminated drinking water back to nylon dwellings, climbing over kilometers of decaying structures through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera will find these Holocaust deniers queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been destroyed by the Israelis. The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be filmed up close, suffering dysentery, sepsis, and starvation, intubated, amputated, or C-sectioned without narcotics. Twisting on a hospital floor smeared by blood and waste. Listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s quadcopter killer drones. The Holocaust denier will therefore live this absolute truth, the ontological truth of Israel’s final solution to its Palestinian problem.

The nature of Palestinian reality is, as they’ve been telling it, QED proposition proven.

In conclusion, books are now being written more about Israeli and Jewish anguish than about the victims. Being Jewish after Gaza is one.

Israel’s theocracy, Israel’s moral and military degeneration, Israel’s looming collapse. When did it begin? Right wing, left wing? Why? Why? Why? Everyone is beating on breast about Israel.

An apt response are the words of a character from Southern literature, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

And neither should you worry about the perpetrators of genocide only to the extent that punishment is exacted upon Israel for what it has done to the Palestinians, that reparations and restitution are extracted from Israel in perpetuity for the Palestinians. Thank you.

The post The Real Israel vs. Hasbara History appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Times of Israel reported this week that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that the ethnic cleansing of the population in Gaza is a condition for ending the United States and Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.  Netanyahu referred to Trump’s plan to expel the Palestinians from Gaza as “revolutionary” and “brilliant.”

Furthermore, The Times of Israel reported a few weeks ago that Netanyahu testified before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Israel is “destroying more and more houses [in Gaza and Palestinians accordingly] have nowhere to return.”  He also said, “The only obvious result will be Gazans choosing to emigrate outside of the Strip.  But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”

This week Israel finally allowed a minimum amount of aid into Gaza after subjecting Gaza to a total blockade of aid since March 2nd.  Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explained that allowing a small amount of aid was necessary to appease pro-Israel US lawmakers, who do not want the public to see pictures of starving Gazans, which would undermine their ability to enthusiastically support the ongoing Shoah or Holocaust in Gaza.

Drop Site News reported that Smotrich explained that allowing aid in would enable, “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.”

He also said, “The [aid] that will enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount. A handful of bakeries that will hand out pita bread to people in public kitchens.  People in Gaza will get a pita and a food plate, and that’s it.  Exactly what we are seeing in the videos: people standing in line and waiting to have someone serve them, with some soup plate.”

Smotrich further elaborated on Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza, “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.  There are pressures.  There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding.  You know why they aren’t succeeding?  Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that’s how we’ll continue to do [it].”

Yair Golan of the center-left The Democrats Party and former deputy IDF chief-of-staff explained that Israel is murdering Gazan babies as a “hobby.”  So far, 16,000 Palestinian children have been killed in the war according to the Gaza Health Ministry, but that number is likely a very conservative estimate of the real number of deaths.

The Associated Press reported, “The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises, has warned that there could be some 71,000 cases of malnourished children between now and March.  In addition, nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will need treatment for acute malnutrition in the coming months.”

Israel, with the full-backing of the US national-security state, wants to murder as many people in Gaza as possible and whoever survives the Shoah will be expelled to make way for their puppet Donald Trump to develop a resort in Gaza.

The post The Final Solution of Gaza is Imminent appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Chris Condon. 

Top Doctors Express Skepticism Over Timing of Biden’s Aggressive Cancer Diagnosis: ‘Inconceivable’.

See here.

The post Top Doctors Express Skepticism Over Timing of Biden’s Aggressive Cancer Diagnosis: ‘Inconceivable’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click Here:

The Post Millennial

The post Abortion clinics in Iowa, Minnesota set to close as Trump admin targets funding for Planned Parenthood appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Frahm.

Lifesite News

The post Bishop Strickland warns against Freemasonry: ‘Incompatible with our Catholic faith’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Deepest gratitude to our beloved Lew Rockwell, and to my good friend, Dr. Tom DiLorenzo, for inviting me here. I’m thrilled to be with you.

My topic is The Real Israel Versus Hasbara History. Hopefully some of you know what Hasbara is. When America’s regime historians reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they always praise Pax Americana. That is the idea that American empire, hegemony, brought peace to the world. Conveniently, they leave out the horrors of it.

Naturally, regime historians, the ones we are here to counter, speak a lot about Hitler. They hardly ever mention Hiroshima. Likewise, has Israel shaped its past, mixing some history with myth to render a myth history. The propaganda sustaining Israel’s counterfeit history is called Hasbara, which means explanation in Hebrew. Hasbara constructs serve to coat Israel’s real crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give them some purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus artificial constructs to rape reality. Undeniably, compared to Hasbara, American foreign policy has a certain narrative talent. The injustices of imperial power notwithstanding, people are persuaded by the strut of it. Less obvious is the appeal of Israeli Hasbara and the Jewish supremacy that goes with it, and has seduced so many Christians into ignoring Christ’s teachings. Christ commands care, not for the oppressor and the predator, but for the poor and the oppressed.

Hasbara and official myth history aside, because of Gaza, you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel. Reality is truth. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. Because of Gazans, the living and the martyred, the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

Shortly after October 7, with the commencement in Gaza of Israel’s Operation Swords of Iron, certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. By late October, Israel’s actions within and without Gaza had shown the world the absolute depravity of Israel, state and civil society.

One such emerged reality is that Palestinians, not Israeli Jews, as Hasbara teaches, are the most imperiled people in the world. Israelis, the most perilous. Another is that Israel, with overwhelming support from the Jewish Israeli public, has gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate, industrial-scale murder and ethnic cleansing ongoing.

The Israel Defense Forces, IDF, were allowed to obliterate the fundamentals of physical, national, and economic life in Gaza, turning it into an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic wasteland. The strip has been reduced to its subsoil particulate elements only badly soiled. Gaza is now a mass grave along a small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea where living ghosts wander. Gaza’s soil is soaked through with a mix of millions of tons of building debris, the decaying bodies of tens of thousands of human beings, their pets, livestock, fauna and flora, all gone. An inferno of garbage, open sewage, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance.

Said a scholar of the architecture of occupation: “Israel has stolen from Gaza’s Palestinians the very ability to produce food, or receive it, or use means of exchange to get it.” Banking was dismantled. Believe it or not, but under years of medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, before October 7, fed a third of their people.

Indeed, Israel has systemized the mass murder and displacement of innocent Palestinian civilians, targeting them and their habitat for total warfare. Since war against civilians is a war on civilization, Israel, by extension, is the enemy of civilization.

Our ally Israel is a country in which genocide, snuff films, extrajudicial assassinations, rape, robbery, torture, and starvation of Palestinians are de facto legal. Israel is thus a criminal entity and a threat to the comity of nations. The indictment against Israel ought to have been hermetically sealed.

Israel’s ethnocide and genocide in Gaza is in violation of most systems of ethics known to man over intellectual history. It is in violation of God’s law, the Ten Commandments. These command not to covet, steal, or murder. It is in violation of libertarian law, the axiom of non-aggression. It is in violation of natural justice, the laws of war, although genocide is not war, as well as humanitarian law. And it is in violation of the systems of law within which the above is subsumed, the natural and the positive law.

Right and wrong are universal, not relative. The Sixth Commandment is neither opinion nor optional. Thou shalt not murder or mass murder is called a commandment for a reason. There is no tribal privilege clause attached to it. Like gentiles, Jews are enjoined against wanton murder. Yet Israelis now flout the Sixth Commandment with ugly audacity.

Over the months, I have closely observed Israel as it pulverizes population centers across the Levant. I’ve listened in Hebrew to Israeli Jewish public and political discourse. In Hebrew, the Jewish Israeli public personalities and the public express an impatient, snarling contempt for accusations of genocide, offering an unbroken stream of genocide justification Hasbara. It’s like Israeli Jews are yawning, waiting on the world to wake up to the fact that their lives do matter more, and that any aberrant action taken to make them feel safe must be allowed.

And it is allowed. Israel has played its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house, to the world. Israeli Jews don’t lack for facts, but most appear without the analytical and ethical faculties to examine their actions. They lead the unexamined lives of self-anointed superior beings. Societally, majorities appear to project the sense that their sectarian supremacy transcends the universal moral order to which international law, the natural law, and the Decalogue give expression.

The natural law is a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation, and experience, whichever floats your boat. Because it’s anchored in the very existential nature of man and reality, the natural law is the highest law known to man and is therefore deductively true and just. An example is the libertarian non-aggression axiom. For reasons obvious, there should be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axiom, which is the organizing principle of libertarianism. Minarchist, anarchist, or statist, genocide is forbidden.

The positive law, on the other hand, is the creation of the state. Legal positivism equates justice with the law of the state. In teasing out right from wrong, we discriminate between acts that are criminal because the state has criminalized them as opposed to acts which are universally criminal. Most civilizing systems of ethics stipulate that no one has a right to kill a single innocent human being, let alone hundreds of thousands of members of a group. There again, Israel’s sacking of Gaza is universally evil.

Lest I be accused of arguing in circles around the definition of genocide, I’ll briefly mention genocide in the context of international versus the natural law. Israel has aced the genocide bar, namely the prohibitions in Article II of the Genocide Convention on destroying a group in whole or in part and/or making life unbearable for that group. Mens rea, intent in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy is a component of genocide.

If Palestinians were accorded equality before the law, any law, national or international, then by 2023’s end, logically and perhaps legally Israelis would have been seen as having both spoken their guilty minds and acted out their genocidal intent on the ground. Mass murder is never unintentional when you know it is inevitable and incidental to your mission. If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocents, attached to your criminal actions is a guilty mind, mens rea.

America shares in Israel’s genocidal guilty mind. The U.S. regime has been a worshipful partner in Israel’s vice. It has supplied munitions for mass murder. It has provided diplomatic cover. It has issued seven vetoes and abstentions in the UN Security Council to enable Israel’s continued atrocities. America has menaced countries, legal organs, and American residents for wanting to expel, arrest, protest, or boycott Israelis.

America’s helped Israeli Hasbara in asserting self-defense to justify collective punishment, and America has helped Israel to frame state terrorism as self-defense, normalizing the structural violence that is the state of Israel. The genocide of Gazans was happily and willingly underwritten by the United States government, the American political class, and its Julius Streicher media, which even mid-murder, describe Israelis as victims.

On the matter of industrial-scale mass murder, international law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law. Such is the case of Article Two of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It articulates mostly a set of negative rights. Their enforcement imposes no burden on anybody but the sadistic, sociopathic serial killers under discussion.

Most libertarians would concede that the state now acts extrajudicially, and that any remnants of the natural law once embedded in the US Constitution have long since been buried beneath the rubble of legislation and statute. Let us say then that to the extent that law, local, international, tribal, upholds no more than natural rights, law is okay. To the extent that law violates the rights to life, liberty, and property, law is bad. To the extent state law agrees with the natural law, to that extent it’s inoffensive. By extension, it matters not who upholds the rights of Palestinians to life and land, just so long as someone does. It matters not which state, which federal official, or international organization, or which platoon, Hezbollah or the Houthis, just so long as someone does.

In America, federalism means divided sovereignty, which if we are to take James Madison seriously, should make it difficult for states to begin executing their residents. Why would it be a matter of respect for a country’s sovereignty to allow Israel to systematically occupy and subjugate a population on the off-chance that they eliminate some terrorists, whom by now most consider resistance fighters? Most should.

Make no mistake, in human rights law, there is a responsibility to protect a community that is being evicted and eradicated. There’s a right to resist, under the Hague regulations on belligerent occupation. Neither offends the natural law. Resistance fighters argue that they are heeding this calling, the responsibility to protect. Israel ought to have been forcibly stopped, its innocent victims protected. You don’t placate a John Wayne Gacy and a Jeffrey Dahmer. You stop them, but not as the axis of genocide sees it.

The Arab societies are non-woke societies. The fact that Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Yemen were and are largely traditional societies, not co-opted woke societies, has certainly helped the West justify their mistreatment. You see, the woke masters of the Western universe consider non-woke societies as without the natural right of resistance. Their resistance we call terrorism.

Given that nobody has effectively upheld the legal responsibility to protect Palestinians, all but the spirit of Gaza is gone.

Consider the great Palestinian return to Northern Gaza in January of 2025. The erasure of over 2,000 Gazan bloodlines, family trees gone. An epic event took place despite that erasure. Processions of Palestinians in their thousands returned to their ruined homes in Northern Gaza. You see, the land is central to Palestinian identity. What greater proof is there of the ancestral homesteader claims that Palestinians have to Palestine than this devotion, this resilience?

Contrast this Palestinian rootedness and resilience with Israel’s squirrelly northern and southern sett- settler populations. Israeli Jews have not returned to towns in Israel’s north or south. Rather, their love of the land is predicated on its ethnic cleansing. Only if their army obliterates even the slightest danger posed by their indigenous neighbors would Israeli settlers return.

For yet more of a contrast, look too at the repulsive levels of Israeli environmental destruction in Gaza. This speaks among many other things to Israel’s profound alienation from an ecosystem it shares and claims to care about. Israeli Jews have a greed for the land, not a love of it.

Back to our nemesis, the state.

What about the moral authority of a democratic state? Surely our ally Israel shares our democratic values, or so we are lectured. Well, murder with majority approval is still murder, whomever the perpetrator. Whether it is committed by the decree of the one dictator or the will of the many, by actors within or without the state, by the designated good guys or by the bad guys, murder of innocents is always murder.

You would be correct to conclude, however, that this 21st century holocaust is popular.

Thumping majorities across Israel’s public and private sectors have throughout justified, finessed, and fibbed about their army’s AI high-tech-driven depopulation and extermination orgy in Gaza. Eager to write the Palestinian obituary as late in the genocide as February of 2025, 80% of Jewish Israelis signaled their support for Trump’s plan for Gaza. Only 3% thought it immoral.

Trump’s plan is an extension and completion of Joe Biden’s genocide, which included the internal displacement, depopulation, and large-scale extermination of the Strip and its people. First, Donald Trump has proposed to cover up Israel’s crime of genocide, removing the pitiful exhibits from the scene of the crime. Next, he planned to conclude Joe’s genocide by scattering the survivors across the Middle East. Israel will have been rescued. Gazans would have ceased to exist as a nation. The liquidation and extermination campaign in the Gaza ghetto would have been completed.

Debating and committing genocidal violence, forcibly displacing millions, starving a subjugated population, all this many of Trump backers called out-of-the-box thinking. Who said crime doesn’t pay? When the superpower inverts the moral order of the universe, the crime of all crime pays and then some.

In any case, genocide has won a plebiscite in Israel. No surprise. Remember, the IDF is Israel. It’s a citizen army in which every Israeli must serve. It’s the voice of the Jewish Israeli commonwealth. Israel’s sons and daughters are the stars in the country’s genocide constellation. We’ve watched them level Gaza, vaporize young men picking their way through rubble as though in a video game, mock the victims, snipe their kids, rape their men, rob their businesses, rummage through the intimate effects of people dead and dispossessed, invade and explode entire residential buildings. True, all Israeli Jews are conscripted and must enlist in this army. However, the military draft does not compel a conscript to commit, chronicle, and crow over what is institutionalized, legalized serial-killer-type crime. The pride and joy seen, recorded, and then transmitted to the world from thousands of IDF mobile phones over months has been voluntary, spontaneous, and organic to Israeli society’s tenor and project.

So please let us hear no Nuremberg defense. “I was only following orders” must not be tolerated in mitigation of the IDF. The evidence is conclusive, idea of shoot, loot, and bomb for fun. No doubt the Israeli state is genocidal, but by the numbers and by their statements, Israeli society is as sociopathic. From janitor to general, from soldiers to Supreme Court justices. As uncomfortable as this is for us, for the libertarian individualist, the facts are clear. On the matter of the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, Israeli Jews, Israeli Jewish society does not stand apart from the Jewish state.

Throughout, polled opinion in Israel was not split between Jewish Israelis for mass murder versus Israelis against mass murder and ethnic cleansing. No. The division in Israeli society has been between Jewish Israelis for current levels of violence against Gazans versus those for greater or lesser industry in what were already industrial levels and methods of murder.

By the polls, nothing outside their self-righteous and self-obsessed selves mattered to a preponderance of Jewish Israelis. Israeli Jews, by and large, have become a sorority of Jewish supremacists, and Palestinians have paid a terrible price for Israel’s systemic societal sociopathy.

Ask Israelis about Palestinian babies shredded to bits, real beheadings, and they’ll dish Hasbara. “It’s all in self-defense, and it’s all the doing of a third party.” Guess who made them do the genocide? Hamas. “It’s not me,” says the criminal. “Hamas ate my homework.” “I mean my… I mean my conscience.” This is Israel’s third-party theory of culpability. Israel vomits it up, the West laps it up.

The Hamas made me mass murder non sequitur exposes Israel’s Hasbara for its irrationality. Since when do you blame a third party for your ongoing crimes in real time?

Put it this way, the state in which you live has no right to evict you from your home and bomb your neighborhood because its agents believe outlaws hide in your neighborhood. The crime of passion defense is bad enough. The third-party theory of culpability must never bolster it. The crime of passion defense we associate with a single event, not with sadistic serial killer… Serial killers loosed for months on end on millions of innocents across the Via Dolorosa that is Gaza.

Yes, Israel has an historic passion, all right, but for methodical mass murder. See, the idea of… It’s not a fighting force, it’s an air force. Judged from its actions over time, this air force’s objectives are not to defeat a regular army, but to pound population centers into submission in Gaza, across the Levant, and beyond. What other country has not only had killer practices codified in law, but also named… The Dahiya Doctrine is named after the southern suburbs of Beirut, upon whose Shia civilians the Israeli Air Force has perfected its predation. Mowing the lawn. That’s the term used across Israel to signal murder sprees periodical against Palestinian civilians to keep populations subdued.

Fans of true crime TV, me, will remember the Highway I-5 serial killer. Imagine his killer craft being dubbed the I-5 Doctrine, and Wikipedia describing this infamous serial killer murderer of women as an originator of the I-5 Doctrine.

Without a doubt, public protest too in Israel has followed a strictly “me, me” solipsistic self-interest. There was little transcendent humanity whatsoever in Israeli hostage protests. Remember this. By the numbers and by their own words, most Israeli Jews were simply demanding a return of their hostages. Said one Israeli pundit, “Israeli wants… want… Israelis want their hostages back. They don’t want Gaza back.”

If the Israeli state is a criminal entity, what then can be said about the US? Israel’s war on Gaza, the West Bank, and the Greater Levant is America’s war. Like it or not, Gaza is a genocide. We hear disinterested mumblings about the national interest, uh, “Don’t talk to me about Gaza. It’s of no national interest to the United States of America.” I’m afraid it’s too late for the national interest dodge. The US is an interventionist hegemon. It has aided, abetted, and partaken in via reconnaissance an extermination campaign in Gaza.

Besides often being immoral, the national interest argument is a form of statism. The premise of national interest political pragmatism leads to this perverse logic. If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and Iraqis happen to be in the American national interest, then those endeavors would have been justified in accordance with the national interest standards. In other words, if the US government considered genocide in the national interest, then genocide it is. America should act as the divine… on the… as… on its divine rights as global judge, jury, and executioner. No, genocide is not a foreign policy matter, it is a moral matter.

And the United States’ energetic support for the Gaza holocaust is a defining event in the annals of American foreign policy aberrations, and in the national life. While American foreign policy is a museum of horrors, Gaza is now the main exhibit.

Why is Gaza qualitatively different from foreign policy deformities that went before? Here’s why, in my opinion. So far, America’s foreign policy has been largely focused on regime change program where collateral damage is largely concealed but framed as incidental to a political program. Again and again, the American masters of the universe have gone to war to make the world woke. Namely, make it over in America’s image, as well as make the world safe for Israel, of course. Mass murder within the American foreign policy framework has generally been secondary to a program of warring to make the world work. Crudely put, “Be like us or we’ll kill you.”

In Gaza, however, America’s participated in mass murder for the sake of murder. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all universal values.

What the US has approved and assisted in Gaza is a primetime 21st-century holocaust. In a sense, Israel has affected a radical ethical inversion in America. Sects of Christianity can no longer distinguish Satan from God, mutually exclusive categories. They favor apex edicts over the commandment of the prince of peace. But you are what you do. The Israeli state is genocidal, not by virtue of its actions and the declared intent accompanying these actions, not because it has been denounced as genocidal by so-called anti-Semites and terrorist sympathizers. Said Jesus, “Therefore, by their fruits, you will know them.”

Another of Hasbarah’s aims is to frame IDF’s ongoing extermination campaign against the population of cornered civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as byproducts of war, as incidental to a just war prosecuted by brave fighters.

If it’s portrayed as a war crime, genocide can be dismissed as no more than a case of, “Oops, bad things happen in the butcher shop of war.” In Gaza, however, Israel has waged genocide, not war. Dressing up a canned hunt as a war is pure Hasbarah. Genocide is not a war. The genocide-as-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends authority to criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime. You see, genocide is not a war crime to which a set of mitigating and explanatory legal defenses can attach. Genocide is a standalone, indefensible crime of all crimes for which there are no legal or moral defenses. There are no extenuating circumstances, historical, legal, or other, for genocide.

True, Israel’s genocide has been disrupted by asymmetric warfare from non-state Palestinian resistance fighters, but there is an enormous power differential between occupier and occupied.

That the serial killers encounter organized regional resistance does not make genocide a war.

So far, I’ve anatomized what Israel state and society has done to the Gaza Strip and its people since October 7, but what have Gazans, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal.

Outwardly captives, Palestinians are truly liberated from the liberal political propaganda that grips the West. They have made us see Israel as an irreparably corrupt force, morally and militarily. The genocide of Gaza has very plainly invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion. Here’s why. You’ve seen Israel for the contradiction it is. Israel astonishingly has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions, denying genocide while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to do genocide. Israel demands to exist as a privileged protected aberration, carrying out satanic deeds with universal blessings and absolution. Think about it. Caught in the protracted planful act of committing genocide, the guilty party, Israel, persist in claiming for itself the right to kill and deceive without being considered and treated as a killer and con artist. The chutzpah.

To no avail, human action, as Mises taught us, is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted. They’ve been exposed. Ethnocide, depopulation, and domicide are never justified and can never be exculpated. To assert that you are just and justified as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified, this is to embody the most grotesque contradiction and to be less than human, less than coherent. At minimum, Israel deserves the revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

The same ahistoric Hoppean argumentation, God bless Hoppe, applied to invalidate Israel will serve here to validate the Palestinians’ reality as they have been telling it over decades. Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the reality of the Palestinians, their reason for rage, and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians have been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their reality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7. Now, if supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza deny this, they too would be fraudsters living a lie. The liar’s life of lies we expose by compelling the denier of the Palestinian holocaust to live his own lie.

Deniers of the Palestinian reality, Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Biden, Bibi, Blinken, Douglas Murray, Dennis Prager, would be parachuted into occupied Gaza. Genocide would become their lived reality, not their rhetorical reality.

Running here and there as tanks advance on the denier, ducking and diving bombardments from above, as if you can escape the death radius of American-made 2,500-pound bombs. These Holocaust deniers would be recorded scratching for scraps, carrying jerricans of contaminated drinking water back to nylon dwellings, climbing over kilometers of decaying structures through ruins and twisted metal. Our camera will find these Holocaust deniers queuing with thousands to use a single functioning toilet, plumbing having been destroyed by the Israelis. The denier of the Palestinian holocaust would be filmed up close, suffering dysentery, sepsis, and starvation, intubated, amputated, or C-sectioned without narcotics. Twisting on a hospital floor smeared by blood and waste. Listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s quadcopter killer drones. The Holocaust denier will therefore live this absolute truth, the ontological truth of Israel’s final solution to its Palestinian problem.

The nature of Palestinian reality is, as they’ve been telling it, QED proposition proven.

In conclusion, books are now being written more about Israeli and Jewish anguish than about the victims. Being Jewish after Gaza is one.

Israel’s theocracy, Israel’s moral and military degeneration, Israel’s looming collapse. When did it begin? Right wing, left wing? Why? Why? Why? Everyone is beating on breast about Israel.

An apt response are the words of a character from Southern literature, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

And neither should you worry about the perpetrators of genocide only to the extent that punishment is exacted upon Israel for what it has done to the Palestinians, that reparations and restitution are extracted from Israel in perpetuity for the Palestinians. Thank you.

The post The Real Israel vs. Hasbara History appeared first on LewRockwell.

Libertarianism is a theory of justice. In fact, it is the only theory that can be rationally justified, and therefore the only valid one. This theory deals with the legitimate use of force in society, which can be summarized as the defense of property rights and the punishment of aggression against people and their property. Consequently, the issue of justice is the most important thing for libertarians. And that is why libertarians long to live in a society where justice reigns, where impunity is not allowed, and where every crime against property rights committed is punished. With the current technological stage of surveillance and such tools as facial recognition and artificial intelligence, this is arguably possible in many places. However, with the current statist social order, is this desirable?

Recently in New York, cameras captured the images of the murder of the CEO of the largest health insurance company in the United States, committed by a masked man. As New York is one of the most camera-monitored cities in the world, the police were able to follow the masked man’s footsteps, captured by several cameras. Finally, five days after the crime, it was possible to see his face on camera when he briefly lowered his mask to flirt with the hostel’s receptionist where he stayed. The killer, Luigi Mangione, was captured 280 miles away from the crime scene. If he had remained in New York after being identified, he would probably have been caught earlier, due to the Domain Awareness System of New York, a system that integrates the images of 18,000 cameras with the police database for real-time surveillance.

The city of São Paulo, where I live, has an even larger surveillance system, the Smart Sampa, with 25,000 cameras integrated with facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence to monitor suspicious activities and identify those wanted by the courts. Since it was implemented in July 2024, the system has allowed the capture of more than a thousand fugitives and 2,289 arrests in flagrante delicto. Though huge, the system covers only a small percentage of the city’s public space, and many crimes are committed outside the coverage area, so many criminals remain unidentified. If 100% of the city’s area was monitored by the system and everyone who entered the city was previously identified, no criminal would remain anonymous in public places. Such a scenario already exists in some places in the city.

I am a member of a sport club that has implemented a system like this, where the entire area, except for the locker rooms, is monitored by cameras. If you leave your mobile, your wallet or any object somewhere, and it disappears, you just go to the surveillance center, indicate the approximate place and time of the event and the case is closed. Since everyone who enters the club is identified in advance, anyone stealing something in the monitored areas will be recognized and suffer the consequences. As a result, practically no thefts occur in the club, because the wannabe thief knows that he would be caught. It’s nice to be able to leave my iPhone in any corner and know that no one will touch it. The only place in the club where thefts still occur is the only place that is not monitored by cameras: the locker rooms. Of course, for privacy reasons, there are no cameras in the locker rooms. But with AI that automatically clouds the private parts in the images of cameras, it is already possible to monitor bathrooms and locker rooms as well.

The same goes for other types of infractions committed on the premises of the club: aggressions, vandalism, etc. Everything is recorded, those involved are identified, duly judged, and the victims are repaired. Nothing could be better for those who value justice, right? Not always, as the system can also be used to commit injustices. This has already occurred during the Covid tyranny, when the club complied with the protocols of the health dictatorship, such as the ridiculous rules for gyms to “operate 6 hours a day, with 30% capacity, prior scheduling, individual training, cleaning of equipment three times a day and mandatory use of face mask”. The use of a face mask was also mandatory in all areas of the club, including outdoors. This complete stupidity of wearing masks to prevent the spread of a virus was strictly imposed at all times with the help of the surveillance system of the club. For example, a friend who on a rainy day, at 6 o’clock in the morning, was running on the completely empty athletics track, had the image of his face with the mask lowered to his chin captured by the cameras and received a warning for this infraction. As it is a private club, there is always the option of stopping attending (I stayed 3 years, from March 2020 to March 2023, without stepping a foot in the club) or leaving permanently. But there is a substantial difference between being forced to comply with private rules and being forced to comply with state legislation. As Schumpeter’s famous quote says:

The theory that construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.

The despot mayor Bruno Covas, along with the tyrant governor João Doria, also made the use of face masks mandatory on the streets of São Paulo for almost two years. Well, I never wore a face mask and walked the streets of the city every day during this period without any “authority” reprimanding me or punishing me for this “crime”. There was a ban in place, with the threat of a fine, but as I noted at the time, there was no enforcement. Without the easy option of simply stopping attendance or disassociating oneself from the city, I can only imagine the hell it would be if surveillance on the streets of the city was like the surveillance of my club. I would have received hundreds of fines and would have been arrested. This example makes it clear that it is not desirable for a state to have the capacity for total surveillance. On the other hand, we still ardently wish that thieves, murderers, rapists, kidnappers, etc., do not remain anonymous and unpunished. And on the streets of São Paulo there are many thousands of thefts, assaults, murders, rapes, kidnappings, etc. Are we facing an insoluble dilemma?

The obvious but distant solution is the privatization of all public space and its insertion into a libertarian social order, where only real crimes—with victims—are fought. But in the statist social order we live in, it seems that the issue boils down to the exchange of freedom for security, which brings us to Benjamin Franklin’s warning, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety“. Yes, we would be safer from private criminals, but at the same time we would be totally at the mercy of state banditry, and forcing people to wear a face mask is not the only crime committed by this gang. The list of state crimes is colossal, such as large-scale theft of taxes, censorship or invasion of one’s own body with mandatory vaccines. Imagine no one being able to escape any criminal imposition of the state against individuals—Orwell already did. The CIA, which created the myth of Chinese Social Credit, imagined and propagated this dystopic idea, fooling many people to believe that this already exists in China.

However, this crossroads between choosing a scenario of impunity and rampant private crime or an Orwellian dystopia is misleading. There are other ways to fight common criminals, without having to surrender our freedoms and privacy to state criminals. To begin with, high crime is a consequence of the state itself, which monopolizes policing and justice, being lenient with real criminals and even prevents people from defending themselves from them by disarming them. Repealing the ban on carrying guns would already considerably reduce crime. On the other hand, most of the fight against crime is already done by the market and not by the state. There are many more private security guards than police officers, and the billionaire market for security products supplies almost everything in the private sector, from padlocks and electric fences up to armored doors and cars. In addition, if the monitoring system of the city of São Paulo has 25,000 cameras, the private cameras in the city already exceed millions, and many crimes are caught and criminals are identified by these cameras, whose images the owners can release only to fight real crimes. I want every criminal to be identified and punished, but we don’t need the state for that. And yet, the very state is preventing this from fully happening—hindering surveillance, security and justice in private hands.

The post Is Total Surveillance a Good or a Bad Thing? appeared first on LewRockwell.

As a teacher of classical literature for over twelve years, I am excited to be offering a course on The Iliad for adults this summer. Here are ten reasons why you should put down your phone and pick up a book this summer!

1. The Iliad is the first book in Western culture and one of our oldest stories. It was written down around 850 B.C., just when the Greek alphabet was being invented. But it’s older than that. The story (or elements of the story) had been passed down via oral tradition for hundreds of years by the Mycenaeans, the ancient Greeks’ early ancestors. The story is set during the Trojan War, which probably happened in the late Bronze Age, around 1250 B.C.

2. About The Iliad, Simon Weil once wrote: “Nothing that the peoples of Europe have since produced has been worth the first poem to have appeared among them.” (We’ll be discussing the essay in which that quote appears as part of the class.) Here’s an idea: How about instead of binging on the latest, depressing piece of crap produced by Netflix, you spend those 10-20 hours reading the greatest thing to ever come out of Western civilization? (The Iliad is also kind of depressing, but it is also at times funny, always poignant, and incredibly beautiful.)

3. Poetry is a branch of knowledge. If you go to the Stanza della segnatura in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome, you can look up and see four frescos that Raphael painted representing philosophy, theology, poetry, and law. “The Parnassus” depicts Apollo, the god of music and poetry, along with the Muses; Homer is there, on the left in blue. Why is poetry a branch of knowledge? Perhaps William Carlos Williams said it best:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

4. The Iliad reminds us of the effects of sin, specifically the sin of wrath. If you have a short temper, lash out at people, and hold grudges; if you too frequently ruminate on the weaknesses of others; if you have ever done anything out of spite, just because you felt “dissed” (disrespected); if you have ever thought to yourself, “I’ll show them!”, then first of all, join the club! Wrath stems from pride, the mother of all vices. Sometimes one great poem is worth a million sermons. This poem might just save your life, by reminding you of the possibility of spiritual death. It might help you get over that thing, that thing you keep obsessing about, you know the one…

5. You need a dopamine detox. We’ve all spent the last 10-15 years developing a terrible addiction. Our lives are nothing but time—and oh, how we’ve piddled it away! Our powers of concentration are totally shot. It’s so hard to pick up a book and read anymore, isn’t it? But I am tired of blue light, aren’t you? I am sick of scrolling through “content,” hunched over some device, engaging in the passive and solitary consumption of information. I am sick of information, period. I crave what is timeless and universal! I am sick of listening to podcasts, to other people’s conversations. I want to have great conversations again, with other people! But reading, especially reading epics, is hard. That’s exactly why you should do it. And do it in a group. There will be some accountability built in. Force yourself to sit in silence, and pay attention, and turn another page. Wake up! Engage your brain! Reclaim your life! De-zombify!

6. Set an example for your children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, goddaughters and godsons. If you want the people who look up to you to read, you have to read. If you want them to grow up to become lifelong learners, you have to model lifelong learning. You could even invite them to take the class with you. Western culture is a Great Conversation. Join it. Dive in together! If nothing else, you can tell your children or grandchildren about what you are reading, and maybe one day they will want to read it too. This is how we preserve our culture, not through digitizing every library but by telling the great stories again and again—in joy and remembrance, in fear and trembling.

7. War has always been totally evil and totally dumb. The Trojan War supposedly started because one guy ran off with another guy’s wife. Thousands of men fought for twelve years and the war destroyed the entire Mycenaean world somehow. My students always say: “This war is so dumb!” They are right, for one reason because it is so grotesquely out of proportion. I recently recorded a podcast on which my guest was bemoaning Israel’s lack of proportion in fighting the war in Gaza. He seemed to see the “Just War” doctrine as some kind of solvent for war’s insanity. To me, Homer is a thousand times more realistic, showing us exactly how war becomes a perpetual motion machine of evil, and why it is so hard to stop once it starts.

8. Classical literature gives you perspective. We all need perspective. Perspective is good for mental health. Ecclesiastes 1:9: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

9. Classical literature can deepen your appreciation of Christianity and help you grow in faith. Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it?” Revelation 21:5: “And he who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new!”

10. Cultural literacy. Homer only wrote two books, so if you read The Iliad, you’ll be able to read The Odyssey with us in January, and then you’ll be able to go around bragging, saying, “I’ve read the complete works of Homer.” (It will sound impressive because most people don’t know he only wrote two books.) Once you’ve read the complete works of Homer, you’ll be able to watch Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, coming out in 2026, with a critical eye. You’ll be able to appreciate his film and compare it to Homer’s original work. You’ll be able to know what is new and what is not new and whether Nolan’s adaptation is true, and you’ll be able to discuss the film with other students of Homer. (What’s a great book, or a great film, without a great conversation?)

(Note: “Because Elon Musk recommended it” is not on the list.)

So, in summary, by reading The Iliad this summer, you can reclaim your cultural heritage and be empowered by the knowledge it provides. You can take back your brain from the tyrants of tech, those greedy little thieves of your precious time and attention. You can connect with others and join in the Great Conversation of Western civilization, while setting an example of lifelong learning for those around you. You can reflect on the role of violence in this world, and you might even discover new dimensions of your faith, as you think more deeply about the Way Jesus taught us on how to conquer evil and death. You might even escape some potential spiritual death, by finally surrendering what is dead, that which you may have been holding onto for far too long. Don’t be like Achilleus. Choose life — your one, unique, precious, eternal and non-repeatable life! This is one way to live it, more deeply, more intentionally, and more richly, this summer.

If you want to test the waters, join me for my (first ever) livestream on YouTube on May 26. We’ll read through the first lines of The Iliad together. The class starts June 3rd!

The post Read a Book. Save Yourself. Save the World. appeared first on LewRockwell.

In Tehran, bewildered diplomats told me they suspect the Trump administration is exploiting nuclear negotiations as a instrument for generating instability to weaken Iran’s economy and foment social strife.

With nuclear negotiations between the Trump administration and Iran’s Reformist government at a standstill, I held two separate, lengthy background conversations in Tehran this past week with a pair of seasoned Iranian diplomats with detailed knowledge of the talks in Muscat, Oman.

Like most Iranians, the diplomats were eager for a durable deal that would provide sanctions relief. But they said their side could not seem to break through to a Trump team they described as dithering, divided, distracted by other conflicts, and incapable of holding to a consistent position. Worse, as the negotiations drag on, the Trump administration is defaulting toward the hardline Israeli position which rejects all uranium enrichment, even for civilian purposes, violating a right Tehran considers sacrosanct.

The Iranian diplomats have now begun to suspect the Trump administration held an ulterior motive for engaging in talks, and is exploiting the meetings in Oman as a instrument for generating instability to weaken Iran’s economy and foment social strife.

Their comments to me echoed a warning issued by the Leader of Iran’s Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, as Tehran considered a request from Trump for nuclear talks last March. “Negotiating with this US administration won’t result in the sanctions being removed,” Khamenei declared. “It will cause the knot of sanctions to become tighter and pressure to increase.”

Following two months of political confusion and a significant escalation of US financial warfare, the Ayatollah’s words have proven prescient. Iran’s Reformist government now risks repeating the folly of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action, or JCPOA, which failed to deliver meaningful sanctions relief in the brief period before Trump shredded the deal, and ultimately led to a regime of “maximum pressure” culminating with the US assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani.

Iran’s government entered the latest round of talks under heavy pressure, with Trump dispatching a B-2 bomber strike force to the Diego Garcia Airbase to enforce his demands. The negotiations also took place in the shadow of the post-October 7 wars, in which Iran’s regional allies had suffered serious setbacks and with the last retaliation it vowed against Israel, True Promise III, still unfulfilled. Iranian public opinion researcher Ebrahim Moehseni told me his polling at the time showed that a majority of Iranians from all social sectors supported the talks.

According to the two diplomats I spoke to in Tehran, Iran’s negotiating team arrived in Oman with a sense of pessimism, but quickly grew more positive as they realized the Americans were not introducing demands for Iran to sever relations with its allies in Lebanon and Yemen, scrap its long range ballistic missiles, or destroy its reactors in Natanz and Fordow. But after each encouraging exchange, they watched key Trump negotiators issue bellicose statements to media immediately after returning to Washington, essentially reversing the positions they had taken in Muscat. The Iranians suspected Trump’s team, led by real estate lawyer Steve Witkoff, was kowtowing to Israeli assets like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and its top donor, Miriam Adelson.

During each round of talks, the Iranian team introduced concrete proposals to bridge disagreements and maintain momentum. But according to the diplomats I spoke to, they found themselves waiting for a week or more to receive a reply from the Americans. They described Witkoff as distracted by other diplomatic assignments and said he often put Iran on the back burner while he tended to Ukraine-Russia negotiations or the Gaza war.

The diplomats were especially concerned by the apparent power struggle between Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They suspected that Rubio was exploiting US media appearances to project control over the negotiations, and worried that his apparent rivalry with Witkoff would prevent Trump’s team from reaching a consensus on the nuclear issue.

One Iranian diplomat referenced historian Robert Dallek’s book, The American Style of Foreign Policy, to elucidate his view that the Trump administration’s counter-productive approach reflected a deeper crisis in the US establishment. The 1983 book argued that domestic pressures and social shifts at home have placed US foreign policy makers on a persistently irrational trajectory. The diplomat pointed to former Secretary of State Tony Blinken as a case study in Dallek’s thesis, recalling how Blinken routinely moved the goalposts on previous agreements with Iran in order to prevent negotiations from taking concrete form during the Biden years. His implication, as I read it, was the preponderance of pressure from the Israel lobby and military industry had been too overwhelming to allow either the Biden or Trump administration to execute a lasting deal.

Both diplomats I spoke to brought up recent reports revealing that Witkoff had promised Hamas he would force Israel to lift the starvation siege on the Gaza Strip if they released the US-Israeli captive Edan Alexander. They were dismayed that Witkoff had reneged on his promise and allowed Israel to slaughter hundreds of civilians in an apocalyptic frenzy throughout the week. Trump’s bad faith tactics with Hamas have cast a pall over the negotiations in Oman, fueling Iranian pessimism about a workable deal.

But perhaps no statement was more damaging to the prospect of a deal than Witkoff’s proclamation on ABC’s ‘This Week’: “We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment. We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.”

The comments fit the pattern of Trump negotiators sabotaging progress in Oman by issuing onerous demands and threats immediately after returning to Washington. And few issues are more central to the Islamic Republic’s sense of independence than its civilian nuclear program.

Read the Whole Article

The post Iranian Diplomats Suspect Trump Using Talks as Instrument of Sabotage appeared first on LewRockwell.

We’re always told that vaccines were a medical marvel that safely ended the dark age of infectious disease. However, when the actual records are examined, they often abjectly failed to prevent those diseases, and worse still, frequently caused outbreaks and severely injured many of the recipients.

This in part resulted from the inherent toxicity of vaccines and in part because manufacturing challenges regularly resulted in hot lots being released. Rather than address this, the vaccine industry chose to create a variety of strategies to conceal those issues, such as enshrining the dogma “all vaccines are safe” and giving blanket legal immunity to all the “safe” vaccines.

The Toxicity Bell Curve

When humans are exposed to toxins, the reactions to them are distributed such that severe injuries are much rarer. As a result, many of the more subtle, common reactions typically go unrecognized.

Because of this, if a product causes a significant number of deaths (e.g., the COVID mRNA vaccines), that’s often the tip of the iceberg and far larger number of injuries lie under the surface (e.g., polling showed that showed 34% of those vaccinated for COVID reported minor side effects and 7% reported significant side effects).

Sudden Infant Deaths

This sadly also holds true for infant deaths, and since its creation, the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus (DPT) vaccine has been associated with those deaths.

For example, in 2014, unmarked mass graves belonging to Irish orphans were discovered which belonged to a group of 2,051 children upon whom an early diphtheria vaccine was covertly tested in the 1930s.
Note: early vaccine experiments (including DPT) were conducted in the 1960s to 1970s at Irish care homes, and the test subjects included babies and handicapped children.

Likewise, as detailed by Sir Graham Wilson, in the early 1900s, there were over a dozen cases in the medical literature (and likely far more that weren’t documented) where groups of children received an incorrectly prepared diphtheria vaccine, and collectively, thousands became severely ill, with hundreds suffering an agonizing death.

A wave of deaths hence followed DPT’s adoption, which like those following the COVID vaccines, became a “mysterious syndrome,” initially being called “crib death” and then “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” (SIDS). In turn, a few doctors saw this and spoke out against it.

• James Howenstine, MD in 2003 stated:

The incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has grown from .55 per 1000 live births in 1953 to 12.8 per 1000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota. The peak incidence for SIDS is at age 2 to 4 months, the exact time most vaccines are being given to children. 85 % of cases of SIDS occur in the first 6 months of infancy. The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1000 in 1992. This rise in SIDS deaths has occurred during a period when nearly every childhood disease was declining due to improved sanitation and medical progress except SIDS. These deaths from SIDS did increase during a period when the number of vaccines given to a child was steadily rising to 36 per child.

Note: it has always astounded me that the medical profession knows SIDS peaks at exactly 2, 4, and 6 months of age, but cannot connect that to childhood vaccines being given at the exact same time.

• Robert Mendelsohn M.D. in his 1987 book How to Raise a Healthy Child in Spite of Your Doctor wrote:

My suspicion, which is shared by others in my profession, is that the nearly 10,000 SIDS deaths that occur in the United States each year are related to one or more of the vaccines that are routinely given to children. The pertussis vaccine is the most likely villain, but it could also be one or more of the others.”

Note: Although I believe pertussis (DPT) is the vaccine most strongly linked to SIDS, other vaccines also have an association (e.g., a 2007 VAERS analysis and a 1999, legislative testimony by Philip Incao, MD made compelling cases also linking SIDS to the hepatitis B vaccine).

• In 1957, Archie Kalokerinos M.D., desiring to serve the people, requested to be stationed in the neglected rural Aboriginal communities, as their infant mortality rate was 10% (whereas it was 2% in the surrounding white communities). Many diseases were rampant there (pneumonia, severe ear infections, severe infant irritability, and a frequent inability to feed the afflicted children), but were ignored and blamed on the uncivilized habits of the mothers.

Note: the full (and quite profound) interview can be viewed here.

Archie eventually realized these deaths were due to severe nutritional deficiencies and quickly saved many lives (e.g., by injecting IV vitamin C or giving zinc).

After the infant death rate climbed to 50% following an infant vaccination campaign, he realized that in the same way infections depleted vitamin C, vaccines did too, and rapidly stopped the vaccination deaths with injected vitamin C. Additionally, he also discovered that vaccinating a child who was currently ill was frequently lethal (which, to varying degrees, has also been reported throughout the medical literature).
Note: Kalokerinos also found early breastfeeding was critical for infant health and preventing death, but unfortunately, colonial forces had shifted them towards formula—mirroring a pernicious trend seen globally. Many have since found breastfeeding counteracts many of the harms of vaccination (e.g., breastfeeding halves the rate of SIDS)—all of which is discussed here.

Later, he used vitamin C to treat many other conditions too (e.g., otherwise fatal measles cases)—something coincidentally also being done by another pioneering doctor in America.

Note: Kalokerinos also showed that mothers accused of shaking their babies to death had in fact died of scurvy. Similarly, as I show here, the diagnosis “shaken baby syndrome” (invented in the 1970s) was frequently used to wrongfully convict parents whose children died in their sleep after vaccination (and dovetails with the fact parents who’ve just lost their infants to vaccines at their most vulnerable moment are often then put through a subsequent nightmare by law enforcement).

Note: Obomsawin also highlighted that when Japan moved the DPT injections from 3-5 months to 24 months of age, there was an 85-90% reduction in DPT brain damage and SIDS cases, and a 60% decrease in the overall infant mortality rate.

A Shot in the Dark

In addition to causing death, the DPT vaccine frequently caused brain injuries. As the media had not yet been bought out by the pharmaceutical industry (due to a 1997 FTC decision legalizing pharmaceutical television advertisements), programs critical of vaccination would occasionally air such as a 1982 one highlighting the profound disability being caused by the DPT vaccine.

Many parents with DPT injured children saw this program, called NBC and then were connected by NBC, forming “Dissatisfied Parents Together” one of the original vaccine safety groups, and in 1985, DPT, A Shot in the Dark, was published.

DPT, A Shot in the Dark highlighted that:

• As early as 1933, there were published reports of infant deaths shortly after DPT shots, including some where autopsies attributed the deaths to vaccination.

• Simultaneous identical twin deaths are an extraordinarily rare event and are hence considered a gold standard for establishing causality, and in 1946, two twins died (on their backs) within 24 hours of their second DPT vaccine— something also shown in 1987, 2006, 2007, 2010, and 2013 case reports.

• Researchers like Dr. William Torch (who analyzed 72 sequential SIDS cases and then over 200) showed that these deaths clustered shortly after vaccination—something which could not be explained by chance.

• The FDA’s pertussis vaccine specialist, Charles Manclark had stated in 1976 that:

Pertussis vaccine is one of the more troublesome products to produce and assay. As an example, the pertussis vaccine has one of the highest failure rates of all products submitted to the Bureau of Biologics for testing and release. Approximately 15-20 percent of all lots that pass the manufacturer’s tests fail to pass the Bureau’s tests.

• In 1978–79, eleven infants in Tennessee died within eight days of receiving a DPT vaccine; nine had been vaccinated with the same lot—Wyeth #64201—and five (four from that lot) died within 24 hours. Statistical analysis showed that such a clustering of deaths would occur by chance only 3% of the time; later estimates put the probability even lower—between 0.2% and 0.5%.

In June, CDC Director Dr. William Foege told the Surgeon General that while a causal link to those deaths couldn’t be confirmed, it also couldn’t be ruled out. Three weeks later, FDA official Harry Meyer cited Foege’s memo to reject Wyeth’s request to list SIDS-related risk factors as contraindications for the DPT vaccine, stating there was no medical basis or evidence that such labeling would prevent SIDS.

• Following this, in 1979 Wyeth’s senior leadership published a memo which stated future DPT lots needed to be distributed across the country (rather than sent to one place) so a repeat of the 1978-1979 incident would not occur again.

Additionally, another cluster of SIDS deaths in Fresno California led to the local newspaper conducting an investigation that revealed widespread issues with hot DPT lots, had doctors in the area providence evidence DPT was indeed causing SIDS, and disclosed that a 1978 study on the safety of the DPT vaccine was buried after researchers discovered adverse reactions within 48 hours of immunization were 5000% higher than expected.

This damning indictment of the DPT vaccine led to national vaccine safety legislation being passed in 1986 (which sadly subsequently got co-opted and became nothing but a blanket liability shield for industry) and the whole cell DTwP vaccine eventually being replaced with the safer acellular DTaP vaccine.

Note: since the DTaP vaccine costs more to produce, industry long resisted it and still gives DTwP to poorer regions like Africa.

Read the Whole Article

The post The Century of Evidence Vaccines Cause Sudden Infant Death Syndrome appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bad as it was, “Joe Biden,” the figment president was merely one manifestation of a nation made mad by power-seeking demons, real-live, ill-intentioned human beings driving a runaway political machine, the party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred. The country is just now struggling to exit a convulsion of mass mental illness. The demons are still there, though, and still hard at work trying to drag you all back into mass formation.

A central mystery is how the news media made itself the enemy of the people, and this conundrum is not at all explained by Jake Tapper and Alex Marshall in their book Original Sin. It’s actually just another hustle with overtones of hoax, like everything else in the evil cavalcade of narratives spun out in the news media’s war on reality. Tapper and Marshall want you to believe that a faceless collective they call “the White House” managed to conceal “Joe Biden’s” well-advanced disintegration from the voting public, and that was. . . that. The media wuz fooled! Goll-lee!

Of course, that fails to explain a whole lot — such as: how come anybody watching daily video clips of “Joe Biden” in action, could not fail to see the broken old puppet he is. Alex Marshall, receiving his “award for excellence” from the White House Correspondents’ Association weeks ago said, “We just missed it.” Yeah, sure. . . . They also apparently missed the programmatic devastation to American society that was carried out in the old stumblebum’s name.

I will give you the key to that conundrum, and then you will understand why all this happened, and why the many lingering demons are still at it in their self-styled “resistance” to America-in-recovery. Mr. Marshall lied, you understand. The media connived with the demons. They were in on the gag the whole time.

If there is any “original sin” in the story, it revolves around Hillary Clinton. This monster emerged as the junior partner to her husband, political wonder-boy Bill Clinton. From the get-go, the narrative painted her as a wife sore-beset by her charismatic husband’s infidelities. (Forget that her only child, Chelsea, is a dead-ringer for her former law partner, Webb Hubbell.) However their connubial affairs worked, Hill and Bill had a deal: when he was done, she would eventually rise to become the first woman president, and they would go down in history as two era-defining, Boomer gen, political wonder-geniuses.

It was a flawed plan. For one thing, Hillary utterly lacked Bill’s political charisma, which was his ability to avidly engage with other people and their issues. Hillary didn’t care much for other people, and only pretended to be interested in their issues. Also, people could easily read that in her demeanor. Nobody was fooled. If anything, she had negative charm, anti-charisma. Her own interests were strictly limited to obtaining power and riches. With enough power, Hillary noticed, you didn’t need charm or charisma. You could simply order people around. But the power couple left the White House broke in 2001, and were caught trying to spirit away some of the presidential dinner-ware.

The next phase of Hillary’s career was fortune-building. The Clinton Foundation was set up in 1997, ostensibly to fund Bill’s presidential library. It would become a fantastic grift magnet in the years to come, taking them from broke-ass-broke to demi-billionaires. Her launching pad was a seat in the US Senate. (She ran and won in New York when she was still First Lady in the 2000 election.)

2008 was supposed to be Hillary’s apotheosis from senator to president. The setup was perfect. The country was tired of Double-ya Bush. The time was exactly right for a woman president. Hillary was the obvious choice by a country mile. Except that she was edged out in the primaries by the Democratic Party’s alternative play for something even more amazing, in a contest of historic firsts, than a woman president — a black president, proving to the world how morally upright the USA had become, America liked how it felt. We were good people, after all!

Barack Obama liked playing his role, and he seemed to have more charisma than Hillary (though he didn’t care much for other people either, really). His sketchy background included a lot of people tinged with Marxism, such as his mentor in Chicago, Bill Ayers, an infamous Sixties radical, rumored to have ghost-written Obama’s books. And he was ensorcelled by big bankers like Robert Rubin of CitiGroup, and by Globalist bigshots orbiting Davos and the WEF.

Yet, Senator Hillary Clinton was still aggregating power as leader of Democratic women voters, a massive base. It was clear that she would remain in the game, aiming for her eventual “turn” in the White House. So, Mr. Obama made a deal with her: he would elevate her to Secretary of State, further fortifying her credentials, and then stand behind her in a 2016 run.

Hillary used her years at State to also fortify the Clinton Foundation’s coffers in various pay-to-play schemes — such as the Skolkovo tech deal with Russia and the Uranium One deal that netted the Clinton Foundation combined pledges of over $275-million, according to Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer. The 2010 Haiti earthquake crisis was another bonanza for the foundation and its partners. One might also surmise, from the recent DOGE reports, that the fabulous armature for grift that USAID became, spawning countless NGOs, was engineered by Obama appointees like Samantha Powers and Hillary’s State Department machine.

In 2015, Hillary, off-and-running, came to the rescue of the Democratic National Committee. The party was foundering in debt. It entered a joint fund-raising agreement with a PAC called Hillary for America (HFA) and the Hillary Victory Fund. The agreement gave Hillary control over the DNC’s finances, strategy, and staffing decisions that enabled her to snake out Senator Bernie Sanders for the nomination. Hillary’s nomination, the drive toward her “turn,” was when the trouble really blossomed.

Pitted against the rising outsider, Donald Trump, in 2016, Hillary’s lack of charisma was sinking her campaign. So, with a little help from John Brennan at the CIA, Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political media company, the FBI under Director Jim Comey, and lawfare ninja Marc Elias at the Perkins Coie DC law firm, the Russia collusion hoax was dreamed up and put into action.

That was the “original sin” that set up the Party of hoaxes, hustles, and hatred to become greatest lie-spewing operation in US history, with reverberations for the decade-to-come. It also became the greatest ass-covering op in US history, with each successive raft of lies — the Mueller Investigation, impeachment #1, the stolen election of 2020 and installation of “Joe Biden,” the J-6 op, impeachment #2, the Trump prosecutions of 2024 — all requiring successive layers of cover-up and lies.

Since the news media despised Donald Trump, and was convinced by its own bullshit that Hillary would win the 2016 election, they all ran with the Russia collusion story and turned it into RussiaGate. They miscalculated, of course. Mr. Trump won, a stunning surprise, a shock really to everyone, including Mr. Trump himself, who utterly lacked experience running a government and was bamboozled, sand-bagged, and eventually hoaxed into defeat — Covid-19 being the coup-de-grace. The news media had to continue lying to the country throughout and beyond all of that to pretend that they were not equally culpable for all this mischief.

And so, they ran with every deception of “Joe Biden’s” ruinous term in office. Alas for them, the indefatigable Mr. Trump rallied, persevered through the concocted prosecutions cooked up by Norm Eisen, Mary McCord, Lisa Monaco, and the rest of lawfare ninjahood, and is now back in power with an assembled team of appointees who are the Left’s worst nightmare.

What kept it all going — all the lying, gaslighting, deception, prevarication, and sedition — was the lack of accountability. It was a fatal intoxicant. That’s over now, though turning in the direction of justice is necessarily difficult and delicate, considering the elevated level of derangement among the public, the fragility of the national psyche, and the danger signals emanating from the zeitgeist.

It looks like the accounting will begin in earnest now. We are going to find out who was acting behind the empty figure of “Joe Biden,” and who ran the auto-pen. And working backward from there, this will all unspool in one, long, appalling thread of treason.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The post Stumblebum’s Legacy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Over the weekend, the Biden family announced that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. The statement said that the cancer was characterized by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, indicating it is highly aggressive, and that it has already spread to the bone.

Well-wishes poured in from both the former president’s allies and political opponents as the Bidens reportedly reviewed treatment options. But it didn’t take long for people to note a few questionable details about the nature and timing of this announcement.

First, it happened to come a little over thirty hours before the release of a highly-anticipated book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that detailed Joe Biden’s mental decline while in office and the effort by people around him to cover it up and deny it was happening at all. While other books have already come out claiming to tell this story, none have come from journalists as highly respected by the political establishment as Tapper and Thompson.

Also, the day before the announcement, Axios released the full recording of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, where the president’s difficulty answering straightforward questions was on full display at the same time his allies in the media were trying to claim he was “as sharp as a tack.”

That convenient timing and speed at which some Biden allies, like David Axelrod, came out and said that talk of the former president’s decline should now be set aside because of this diagnosis led to some skepticism about the claim that the cancer was discovered only a few days ago.

That skepticism only grew as doctors began reacting with disbelief that cancer at this late a stage could have either just developed in the past few months or gone undetected for years while Biden was president. That’s especially true considering that prostate cancer is typically easier to discover early than most other cancers due to antigens it releases in the blood that can be detected with a simple blood test—a blood test we know both presidents Obama and Trump had taken while they were in office.

It is certainly possible that no physical health problems were covered up during Biden’s presidency, that his cancer was only detected for the first time a few weeks ago, as his office has said. But many of those most aggressively denying that anything shady is happening with the timing of this announcement will have a much harder time getting the public to believe them because of the blatant and unsuccessful attempt to censor, hide, and deny Biden’s deteriorating mental state in the lead up to the 2024 election.

The lengths to which establishment politicians and major media figures went to gaslight the American public into dismissing something that was obvious to anyone who was looking should never be forgotten because it exposed the true nature of the political class. They lied, shamelessly, to further their political ambitions.

While that’s far from unusual, rarely are their lies as blatantly and immediately obvious as saying Biden was sharp and highly engaged behind closed doors and that every video that purported to show otherwise was fabricated by far-right video editors.

It’s also rare for the establishment’s lies to blow up in their faces as quickly and extensively as this one did at the now famous June 2024 presidential debate. Once it became obvious that the lie would not hold, virtually the entire anti-Trump political scene flipped on a dime and began parroting concerns that they were mocking people for voicing mere hours before.

The political class is still struggling to run damage control. The most promising strategy—seemingly embodied by Tapper and Thompson’s new book—is to try to pin the blame on a handful of staffers, claiming they hid the truth from media figures like Tapper who then unintentionally spread the lie to the rest of the world. But that would be a much easier sell if millions of Americans had not spent years openly talking about the very thing that was apparently being hidden from them. Still, the establishment will throw as many staffers under the bus as they need to avoid admitting they lied. They do not want the takeaway from this episode to be that they need to lie less.

And beyond that, if the establishment admitted they knowingly supported an increasingly cognitively impaired man, not only to remain in office but to serve an entire second term, it would shatter the illusion that our government is truly run by a president who embodies the wishes of the voting public, like we learned in elementary school. It would reveal the fact that, as long as they don’t actively speak out against or draw attention to all the ways the political class is ripping the American public off, the person sitting in the Oval Office is essentially irrelevant.

Whether the timing of Biden’s cancer announcement is a particularly disgusting part of the scheme to cover all this up or truly a complete coincidence, the last few days have made it clear that the damage the political class did to its credibility with its attempted cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition has not gone away. And that is duly deserved.

The post What the Biden Health Coverup Reveals About the Political Class appeared first on LewRockwell.