Ron Unz
THE UNZ REVIEW

Should Vladimir Putin Call His Shot on a NATO Brushback Pitch? • 24m 

Whether or not it actually happened, the story of Babe Ruth’s famous “called shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series has become one of the great legends of baseball’s Golden Age.

The Chicago Cubs fans in Wrigley Field had been relentlessly hectoring the renowned Yankee slugger and the cat-calls and insults intensified as he came to bat in the fifth inning with the score tied 4-4, especially after he took a first strike. At that point, the Bambino raised his hand, pointed to the bleachers, then hit the next pitch as a towering home run to deep center field, the same spot he had just indicated. Or at least so goes the legend. Details aside, that homer helped the Yankees win the game, eventually leading to their 4-0 sweep of the entire series, and Ruth later included the tale as a centerpiece of his 1948 autobiography.

Calling your shot before you take it seems a very effective means of intimidating your opponents by demonstrating your effortless superiority. So perhaps Russian President Vladimir Putin should consider doing something similar in his current confrontation with NATO over the Ukraine war.

As everyone knows, the Western mainstream media has spent more than two years demonizing Russia and its president following the February 2022 outbreak of the Ukraine war, with Putin having become the most reviled world leader since Adolf Hitler more than three generations ago. And although Russia’s military attack only came after many years of the most extreme military and political provocations by America and its NATO allies, our astonishingly dishonest media outlets have uniformly plastered the word “unprovoked” on all their accounts of the conflict.

Prof. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago ranks as one of our most distinguished political scientists and his 2016 lecture on those Western provocations and the major risks of a future war has now been viewed some 29 million times on YouTube, quite possibly more than any other academic lecture in the history of the Internet.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University spent decades as an important economic advisor to Russia, Ukraine, and other countries in the region, making him a direct eyewitness to many of the important developments responsible for the conflict. He recently provided his first-hand account in a two-and-a-half hour interview with Tucker Carlson. The Tweet containing that interview has already been viewed more than 6 million times and I would highly recommend watching the entire segment, either on that platform or on YouTube:

Despite their enormous scholarly credentials and their deep knowledge of the issues, both these leading academics have been almost completely banned from our rabidly anti-Russian mainstream media outlets. In past generations they would have quickly disappeared from the public discussion, preventing any concerned citizens here or elsewhere from getting both sides of the story. But fortunately, the growth of the Internet and its video platforms have now begun to partially level the skewed playing field, reducing the power of the media gatekeepers to prevent the dissemination of important information.

As an example, over the last year or two both these individuals have become regular weekly interview guests on the popular podcast channel of Judge Andrew Napolitano, reaching an audience easily comparable to that of various cable news shows on network television. They have been joined by numerous other experts and analysts, equally blacklisted by mainstream outlets. These latter individuals include Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years as a leading CIA analyst, rising to become head of the Soviet policy group and serving as the morning intelligence briefer for a half-dozen American presidents.  Col. Douglas Macgregor has been an influential military analyst and an advisor to our Secretary of Defense, while Col. Larry Wilkinson was the long-time chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Dr. Philip Giraldi, Larry Johnson, and Scott Ritter are experienced former CIA officers and military experts, Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat and senior MI6 officer, while Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté are young Jewish progressives who have published award-winning journalism on the Middle East conflict. Despite having such a wide variety of different backgrounds and ideological orientations, all these individuals generally find themselves in strong agreement on the extremely dangerous nature of the current NATO confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

During the last week or two, their concerns reached new heights as Ukrainian drones attacked and damaged several of Russia’s early warning radar installations intended to detect incoming nuclear missiles. These attacks may have seriously degraded Moscow’s ability to spot an American first-strike, possibly lowering that country’s own threshold for triggering a nuclear response, an exceptionally dangerous and destabilizing situation. A recent Mike Whitney column discussed these important developments:

• Washington Attacks Key Element of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Nuclear Security Architecture
  
  Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • May 26, 2024 • 1,100 Words

Prof. Sachs is an extremely level-headed academic, who has spent his long career working closely with top political figures in America and across the rest of the world. But in his Thursday interview, he sounded the alarm, declaring the unprecedented danger from this attempt to blind Russia to a potential nuclear first strike. He felt these were acts of madness by Western governments that had raised the threat of nuclear war to the highest level since the end of World War II, but our ignorant and oblivious leaders seemed entirely unaware of the perilous nature of this situation.

Then late last week, Politico reported that President Joseph Biden had secretly agreed to allow the missiles we were providing Ukraine to be used in deep strikes against Russian territory, multiplying these dangers. It also appears likely that any actual Ukrainian involvement in use of these advanced missile systems is relatively minimal, with their control and targeting remaining in the hands of American or other NATO personnel. Another Mike Whitney column a couple of days ago usefully summarized these crucial facts:

1. The long-range precision weapons (missiles) are provided by NATO countries

2. The long-range precision weapons are manned by experts or contractors from the country of origin

3. The long-range precision weapons must be linked to space reconnaissance data provide by the US or NATO

4. The targets in Russia are also provided by space reconnaissance data provide by the US or NATO

The point that Putin is trying to make is that the long-range missiles are made by NATO, furnished by NATO, operated and launched by NATO contractors, whose targets are selected by NATO experts using space reconnaissance data provided by NATO. In every respect, the prospective firing of long-range precision weapons at targets in Russia, is a NATO-US operation. Thus, there should be no confusion about who is responsible. NATO is responsible which means that NATO is effectively declaring war on Russia. Putin’s lengthy comments merely underscore this critical point.

Thus, NATO is on the verge of firing a barrage of advanced missiles deep into Russian territory, an obvious act of war against a country possessing an arsenal of some six thousand strategic nuclear warheads, a decision of extraordinary recklessness. The leaders of some NATO members have even explicitly declared that they believe that Russia must be destroyed, exceptionally provocative public statements.

Unlike his Western counterparts, President Putin certainly recognizes the extreme gravity of this situation and Whitney quoted the threatening remarks he made at a press conference in Tashkent:

So, these officials from NATO countries, especially the ones based in Europe, particularly in small European countries, should be fully aware of what is at stake. They should keep in mind that theirs are small and densely populated countries, which is a factor to reckon with before they start talking about striking deep into the Russian territory. It is a serious matter and, without a doubt, we are watching this very carefully.

The Russians have also expressed considerable alarm that Ukrainian forces may soon be bolstered by the addition of Western F-16s. Those aircraft are nuclear-weapons capable, and the Russians have indicated that they may be forced to assume that they are so armed.

Version 1.0.0

Thus, both America and its NATO vassals seem to be sleepwalking into a potential Third World War fought with strategic nuclear weapons. This recalls the extreme hubris of their European political predecessors more than a century ago who led their continent into the First World War.

The main focus of Whitney’s most recent column was to argue that President Putin needed to take some sufficiently strong public steps to awaken the Western leaders from their slumber and force them to recognize the terrible dangers that they and the rest of the world faced, perhaps causing them to abandon their extremely dangerous and reckless behavior. Put in baseball terms, he believed that Russia needed to throw t he sort of “brushback pitch” intended to intimidate a batter.

•  (see below) To Avoid Nuclear War, Putin Needs to be a Little Crazier
  
  Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • May 31, 2024 • 1,900 Words

This suggestion seems a very reasonable one. So the issue now becomes what sort of Russian action would be most advisable.

NATO troops may soon be firing NATO missiles guided by NATO reconnaissance data against military targets deep within Russia so there remains only the thinnest of Ukrainian fig-leafs to camouflage what is actually taking place. Hence the Russians should take forceful steps to convince NATO that such actions are totally unacceptable and must be stopped. However, any such Russian military response should be carefully calibrated to thread the needle, neither being so mild that it fails to bring American and NATO leaders to their senses nor so severe that it risks triggering a direct, full-scale war with NATO, with such a war probably being the intended goal of those provocations.

If such deep strikes into Russia take place, the Russians could target the firing locations in Ukraine with retaliatory missile attacks, perhaps killing some of the NATO servicemen responsible, professionals who had been “sheep dipped” and deployed there under the guise of being independent contractors or trainers. However, Russia has already done this in the past, and there are credible claims that substantial numbers of such NATO personnel have already died in Ukraine with no evidence that such losses had deterred escalating NATO provocations. The same problem applies if Russia merely intensified its bombardment of Ukrainian command and control facilities or critical infrastructure. Both America and NATO political leaders seem to have ignored such Russian responses in the past and would probably continue to do so.

Recognizing this problem, the Russians have begun raising the temperature. A couple of weeks ago, Russia publicized an important training drill for their potential use of tactical nuclear weapons and this produced a great deal of coverage in the global media. But it seemed to have had little impact upon Western leaders, who are probably very skeptical that the Russians would actually break the seven-decade-long nuclear taboo by resorting to first use of such destructive weapons. So any Russian use seems unlikely and if it did occur, there might be a serious risk of nuclear escalation. Therefore, I think that any Russian threats or actual use of battlefield nuclear weapons would be very ill-advised.

But I think that an even stronger reason for the Russians to avoid focusing on their nuclear arsenal is that their superiority is actually considerably greater on the conventional level. Over the last few years, the Russians have deployed a full suite of powerful hypersonic missiles, an important weapons system that the Americans have so far been unable to match. From everything I’ve read, these hypersonic delivery systems are almost unstoppable by any existing American or NATO defenses, which currently gives the Russians escalation-dominance on the conventional level. So the question is how the Russians can best exploit this existing advantage and force NATO to back down without risking a wider war.

During the last two years, anti-shipping missiles fired from Ukraine but presumably supplied and guided by NATO forces have inflicted very serious losses upon Russia’s Black Sea fleet, sinking or severely damaging a number of its major vessels. But turnabout is fair play and America’s geopolitical and military power is far more heavily dependent upon its own naval forces. Most analysts believe that our carrier fleet would be sitting ducks for Russian missiles, especially hypersonic ones. The loss of one or more of our carriers would have devastating impact upon American military credibility, and if taken seriously, Russian threats along such lines might force American leaders to change their Ukraine policy. But the arrogant Americans may stubbornly believe that their anti-missile defenses are capable of handling such a threat, while any successful attack against an American carrier battle-group might easily kill many thousands of Americans, leading to all-out war. So this should remain a last option.

The Russians have given strong hints that if their own bases deep inside Russia are attacked by NATO missiles, they might very well retaliate against NATO military installations in countries such as Poland. But any such attacks, especially if they involved heavy casualties, might once again trigger a full-scale NATO war with Russia under Article Five of the NATO Charter. Indeed, this is probably the exact goal of many Ukrainian and NATO leaders who have realized that the current war is lost but believe they can still achieve success by broadening it into a much wider conflict. So by taking such action, Russia might be falling into a NATO trap.

Since most of these other options seem so unsatisfactory, I think the best solution to this dilemma is for the Russians to take a page from the playbook of their Iranian allies.

A few weeks ago, the Israelis violated international law by launching an unprecedented bombing attack against an Iranian embassy building in Damascus, killing several top Iranian generals. This was merely the latest in a long series of such Israeli assassinations obviously intended to provoke the sort of heavy Iranian military response that could be used to draw in America, leading to a wider regional war and perhaps resulting in Iran’s destruction.

However, the Iranians shrewdly refused to take the bait and instead retaliated by bombarding very heavily-defended Israeli military bases with a huge salvo of some 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, but first providing several days of advance warning. Although the resulting full mobilization of American, British, and Israeli air defenses destroyed the overwhelming majority of the attacking units, quite a number still got through and inflicted serious damage on the installations, but without killing a single Israeli serviceman.

This Iranian attack had been skewed towards their older systems and only represented one or two percent of the country’s enormous arsenal. Therefore, it proved that even under the best of circumstances, Israel was entirely vulnerable to Iranian military retaliation. This demonstrated that Iran had achieved conventional escalation-dominance and military superiority over Israel, so the latter responded with only the most feeble and face-saving pinprick retaliation. Alastair Crooke described the enormous impact these developments had upon the Middle East strategic landscape:

Now suppose that NATO missiles based in Ukraine struck deep within Russia against important military targets, perhaps inflicting considerable casualties or loss of important equipment. The Russian government could publicly declare that since those missiles had been supplied, aimed, and controlled by NATO personnel, NATO had obviously become a co-belligerent and they would directly retaliate against that organization.

They could then announce that such retaliation would take the form of a hypersonic missile strike destroying the NATO headquarters building in Brussels, Belgium, with the attack scheduled for 12 Noon in two days’ time. That sort of advance warning would attract enormous international media coverage while allowing NATO plenty of time to fully evacuate that building and those nearby and also deploy a large number of its best anti-missile systems to defend the facility. Therefore, assuming that the multi-missile strike still succeeded in totally leveling the NATO HQ, the result would be few if any human casualties and a simultaneous demonstration that Russian hypersonics were unstoppable by any NATO defenses.

NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium

The Russians could then announce that their next retaliatory strikes would sink several of our aircraft carriers, a warning that American military leaders would now be forced to take very seriously.

Under such circumstances, both the political leaders and electorates of the West might draw some important conclusions from that very high-profile military demonstration. If despite such considerable advance warning, NATO still proved completely unable to defend its own headquarters from total destruction in a Russian attack, the perceived value of that military alliance would crumble, perhaps causing it to dissolve, as should have happened after the end of the Cold War more than thirty years ago.

It would also be difficult for Western media outlets to continue demonizing a Russian government that had gone to such great lengths to minimize any human casualties, while the extreme effectiveness of Russian hypersonics would have been proven by the wreckage and craters suddenly appearing in the heart of Brussels. Taken together, this would constitute a velvet glove on an iron fist.

Many Americans might ask themselves why they were annually spending a trillion dollars on their military if our defense contractors were unable to produce hypersonic weapons or to successfully defend against those produced by the Russians.

And American political and military leaders would probably recognize that if despite such advance warning they were unable to defend their own NATO headquarters from destruction, our aircraft carriers would have little hope of surviving a Russian attack. Our country’s global power-projection relies very heavily upon these carriers, whose military credibility supports our inflated US dollar. If several of those carriers were easily sunk, that credibility would be lost, probably causing a collapse in the dollar. Our ruling political regime might collapse along with it, much like the Japanese victory in 1905 had triggered a revolution in Czarist Russia.

More than three decades ago, the mighty Soviet Union crumbled and dissolved with almost no bloodshed. Under the right circumstances, I think that the Russian destruction of the NATO headquarters building might lead to an equally bloodless and long overdue dissolution of that military alliance.

Finally, on a somewhat different matter, tomorrow marks the 35th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which hundreds or even thousands of peaceful pro-democracy student protests were supposedly slaughtered by Chinese troops, a watershed event in China’s relations with the West. Last month I published an article pointing that the alleged massacre had almost certainly never happened and was merely a hoax long maintained by the Western media:

• American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
  
  Ron Unz •  The Unz Review • May 13, 2024 • 8,700 Words

Given our sharp current conflict with China, it will be interesting to see how the media covers that story. Several days ago, the Wall Street Journal already began running articles in commemoration, with their content and tone indicated by this lead sentence in one of them:

On its 35th anniversary, the 1989 massacre of unarmed protestors in Tiananmen Square remains such a source of embarrassment to the Chinese government that public acknowledgement of the event still faces automatic censorship.

I wonder how long our media will continue to maintain this historical fraud.

Related Reading:

• Washington Attacks Key Element of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Nuclear Security Architecture by Mike Whitney
• To Avoid Nuclear War, Putin Needs to be a Little Crazier by Mike Whitney
• Presidents Who Gamble with Nuclear Armageddon by Jeffrey Sachs
• American Pravda: Putin as Hitler?
• NATO’s Losing Proxy War in Ukraine
• American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

← American Pravda: The True Origin of the...

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To Avoid Nuclear War, Putin Needs to be a Little Crazier

MIKE WHITNEY • MAY 31, 2024 /  THE UNZ REVIEW

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Lili News 029

• In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
• Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
• Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.

Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

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Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
UNZ REVIEW

The Jewish Roots of the Gaza Rampage • 

The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank

Question 1: Israel’s Motives

EPub Format

What is driving Israel’s war on Gaza? (Land, Hamas, ideology or something else?)

Ron Unz—I think that a complex mixture of all those different factors is responsible, each being uppermost for different individuals. But obviously the triggering event was the extremely successful Hamas raid on October 7th and the total shock and horror it inflicted upon a very complacent Israeli society. As I wrote in December:

For years, many thousands of Palestinians had been held without trial as prisoners in Israel, often under brutal conditions, and these captives included large numbers of women and children. So Hamas hoped to seize some Israelis who could be traded for their freedom, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, carrying around 240 prisoners back to Gaza. In later interviews with Israeli and foreign media outlets, the released or rescued Jewish hostages described how well and respectfully they had been treated by their Hamas captors.

This stunning military achievement was a direct consequence of the arrogance and over-confidence of the Israelis, who had assumed that the many hundreds of millions of dollars they had invested in their Gaza border defenses, featuring banks of high-tech electronic sensors and remotely-operated machine-guns, made them impervious to any attack from Hamas. But the latter used inexpensive small drones and other innovative tactics to disable those defenses, then breached the barrier at numerous points. This allowed 1,500 lightly-armed Hamas militants to cross over and overrun a number of army bases, military kibbutzim, and police stations, some of them deep inside Israeli territory. The IDF was literally caught napping, with many of their sentries asleep or away from their posts, and Hamas achieved an initial success far greater than their expectations.

The Israeli response to this devastating, totally unexpected military attack was panic-stricken, disorganized, and very trigger-happy, with Apache helicopter pilots unable to distinguish friend from foe on the road and merely blasting anything that moved. Video footage shows that hundreds of Israeli cars were incinerated by Hellfire missiles, with some of those vehicles driven by Hamas militants with or without Israeli hostages and others driven by fleeing Israeli civilians.

Since the mid-1980s, Israel has adopted a controversial military policy known as the Hannibal Directive, under which any Israelis captured by Palestinian militants who cannot be readily rescued must be killed to prevent them from becoming hostages, and an Israeli official described what happened on October 7th as “a mass Hannibal.” High explosive tank-shells and missiles were used to blast buildings occupied by Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives, killing everyone.

Based upon the existing evidence, I think that perhaps as few as 100-200 unarmed Israeli civilians may have been killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently, while all the rest died at the hands of Israel’s own trigger-happy military. But admitting such embarrassing facts would have dealt a tremendous blow to the Israeli government, so instead propaganda efforts were put into overdrive, promoting the most ridiculous lies and atrocity-hoaxes involving beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and widespread Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, none of which seem to have any basis in reality.

• Gaza and the Dangers of Jewish Paranoia
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 18, 2023 • 5,800 Words

Not only did this wave of dishonest propaganda help to conceal Israel’s military humiliation, but it also stoked enormous popular anger, producing almost universal support for the brutal retaliatory massacre of tens of thousands of Gaza’s helpless civilians that soon followed. According to Max Blumenthal, polls have shown that up to 98% of Israelis support the massive ongoing attacks on Gaza, with nearly half believing that Israel’s military response has actually been too restrained.

This strategy also dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding goals of the most extreme members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, who for religious reasons have always demanded the expulsion of all Palestinians and the creation of a Greater Israel stretching “from the River to the Sea,” populated solely by Jews. The survival of Netanyahu’s government depended entirely upon that small political faction, and he believed that their support would be solidified if his military operation succeeded in killing or driving out all the Palestinians.

Such an outcome would also establish him as a towering figure in Israel’s national history, the leader who finally achieved the permanent territorial expansion that many of his predecessors had long desired. Meanwhile, every week of continued fighting delayed any public investigation of his disastrous failure on October 7th, which he hoped might eventually be redeemed by a sweeping military victory and territorial conquest.

Question 2: Israeli Racism?

Does racism play a role in the way the Palestinians are being treated?

Ron Unz—As I discussed in a long 2018 article, the word “racism” is far too mild a term to describe the attitude of traditional Orthodox Judaism towards all non-Jews. Drawing upon the seminal work of Israeli Prof. Israel Shahak, I highlighted some important facts:

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

Shahak also emphasizes the utterly totalitarian nature of traditional Jewish society, in which rabbis held the power of life and death over their congregants, and often sought to punish ideological deviation or heresy using those means. They were outraged that this became difficult as states grew stronger and increasingly prohibited such private executions. Liberalizing rabbis were sometimes murdered and Baruch Spinoza, the famous Jewish philosopher of the Age of Reason, only survived because the Dutch authorities refused to allow his fellow Jews to kill him.

Given the complexity and exceptionally controversial nature of this subject matter, I would urge readers who find this topic of interest to spend three or four hours reading Shahak’s very short book, and then decide for themselves whether his claims seem plausible and whether I may have inadvertently misunderstood them. Aside from the copies on Amazon, the work may also be found at Archive.org and a very convenient HTML copy is also freely available on the Internet.

My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

There may actually be a deeper historical truth behind that irony. I think I’ve read here and there that some scholars believe that Hitler may have modeled certain aspects of his racially-focused National Socialist doctrine upon the Jewish example, which really makes perfect sense. After all, he saw that despite their small numbers Jews had gained enormous power in the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and numerous other countries throughout Europe, partly due to their extremely strong ethnic cohesion, and he probably reasoned that his own Germanic people, being far greater in numbers and historical achievements could do even better if they adopted similar practices.

It’s also interesting to note that quite a number of the leading racialist pioneers of 19th century Europe came from a particular ethnic background. For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor.

Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

• American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words

For two thousand years, Jews have mostly existed as small minorities within much larger non-Jewish host societies, ensuring that these traditional Jewish doctrines could only manifest themselves in the most secretive or attenuated fashion. But the situation is quite different in Gaza, so the horrors we are seeing there probably provide a much more accurate indication of the attitude of traditional Judaism toward the lives and well-being of non-Jews.

Question 3: The Flour Massacre

Do you see any strategic reason why Israeli tanks would fire on hungry Palestinians gathered at aid trucks to get food for their families or was this just an act of sadistic violence intended to intimidate the victims?

Ron Unz—Just as in the case of Israel’s overall Gaza military operation, there may be several different factors behind the Israeli massacre of those starving, desperate Palestinians during a food distribution effort.

First, these days the Israeli military and its command structure are increasingly filled with strongly religious Jews, and I’ve emphasized that the doctrines of traditional Judaism regard non-Jewish lives as having no value whatsoever, with non-Jews merely being animals in the shape of men. Indeed, a prominent Israeli rabbi once publicly declared that “A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.” Therefore, massacring Palestinians in large numbers is not really a matter of any significance.

Under such an ideological framework, if a sizable crowd of unarmed Palestinians approaches Israeli military forces too closely and makes the latter a little nervous, the most appropriate response is to drive them away with explosive tank shells and machine-gun fire, perhaps killing many of them in the process.

Obviously, the Israelis are also still outraged over the successful October 7th Hamas raid, an operation that had killed more Israeli soldiers than had died in the previous fifty years of warfare, so slaughtering a few additional Palestinians helps to further balance the books. In addition, the terror inflicted may make Palestinians much more cautious about seeking any food supplies in the future, thereby increasing the effectiveness of Israel’s starvation blockade directed against the population of Gaza.

I think a reasonable historical analogy might be found in the huge slave revolt that plagued Rome during the first century BC. Large forces of slaves led by a former gladiator named Spartacus proved surprisingly effective against the Roman military units sent against them, and they spent several years successfully burning senatorial villas and pillaging the Italian countryside until they were finally defeated and put down. The outraged Romans retaliated by crucifying some 6,000 of the captured slaves along the entire Appian Way, inflicting those excruciating deaths both as punishment and as an exemplary means of deterring any future slave uprisings.

In keeping with those sorts of harsh Roman retributions, a leading European human rights organization has now documented that Israeli forces have begun killing Palestinians by driving over their living bodies with tanks and other military vehicles. Before being pixelated, the original image on the Internet was quite gruesome.

The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank
SEE ALSO: War on Gaza: Images suggest Israel ran over Palestinian detainee with armoured vehicle

I’d assume that many agitated Israelis still believe in the reality of the atrocity-hoax that Hamas beheaded 40 Israeli babies. So perhaps we will soon see the Israelis publicly beheading 400 Palestinian babies in retaliation for that imaginary crime.

Question 4: The Creation of a Jewish State

Has Israel’s 5 month-long military operation in Gaza changed your thinking about the wisdom of creating a Jewish state?

As is the case for most of us, while I was growing up I drew my knowledge of the world from the mainstream media and therefore always had a very positive view of Israel, admiring the great success it had achieved despite the bitter hostility of its Arab neighbors. As a young teenager, I remember celebrating Israel’s bold 1976 Entebbe commando-raid, which successfully freed the hostages held by a group of German and Palestinian terrorists, an incident later depicted in several Hollywood productions.

But for me, the turning point came in 1982, when Israel launched its totally unwarranted invasion of Lebanon. That operation killed many thousands of Lebanese civilians and culminated in the huge massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, in which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian women and children were butchered, some of them in particularly grisly fashion. Israeli dissident academic Israel Shahak had correctly predicted those shocking events, but I’d dismissed him as a crackpot, so henceforth I took his views much more seriously.

Not long afterward, the New York Times and other leading media outlets revealed that as a young right-wing Zionist leader, Israel’s sitting prime minister had been a great admirer of Fascist Italy, and after World War II broke out, he’d repeatedly sought to enlist his Zionist faction in the Axis military alliance of Hitler and Mussolini. I also eventually discovered that during the 1930s, the mainstream Zionist movement led by David Ben-Gurion had formed a crucial economic partnership with Nazi Germany, which laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.

• American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,900 Words

Although those remarkable facts were important, even more important was that such explosive revelations had been successfully concealed for more than forty years by our entire pro-Israel Western media.  This convinced me that I couldn’t trust a single word the media said about Israel or the Middle East conflict.

Therefore, over the years and the decades that followed, I gradually sifted through this large mass of dishonest propaganda, seeking to extract a more accurate version of events. As I discussed in a long article late last year, the true circumstances of the creation of Israel in 1948 were really quite outrageous, as heavily armed Zionist settlers, most of them relatively recent arrivals, used a campaign of massacres and brutal atrocities to expel some 800,000 native Palestinians from the lands they’d inhabited for the previous couple of thousand years.

• American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words

Although these days, the IDF is vastly better armed and can rely upon advanced American-supplied missiles and bombs to inflict most of its destruction, otherwise there doesn’t seem a huge difference between the events of three generations ago and those of today, with Zionist forces in both cases relying upon terror to drive out the inhabitants of the lands they seek to acquire. Indeed, nearly all of today’s Gazans are the descendants of Palestinians who had been violently expelled from their original homes during that earlier round of ethnic cleansing.

Whereas the recent story of Hamas militants roasting an Israeli baby in an oven was merely an atrocity-hoax, we have eyewitness testimony that back in 1948, the Zionist militants did indeed throw a young Palestinian boy into an oven and burn him alive, with his father soon following along behind him.

This raises an interesting point. Psychological projection is an important aspect of human behavior, with individuals often assuming that others think along the same lines as they themselves do. Over the last century or more, agitated Jewish activists have become notorious for falsely accusing their adversaries of committing the most extreme and grotesque atrocities, and I wonder if some of this might not represent their own dreams of the punishments they would wish to inflict upon their enemies if the tables were turned.

A particularly problematic aspect of Israel’s creation comes with regard to a different aspect of Jewish behavior. In a 2018 article I noted the tendency of Jews to cluster together and often work themselves into a dangerous frenzy:

As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.

Israel’s Jews obviously constitute the fullest example of such clustering, so perhaps we should not be too surprised at their extremely frenzied ideological chain-reaction of the last five months. Unfortunately, this has resulted in their exceptionally bloody rampage in Gaza, which also seems to be fully endorsed by many or most American Jews, especially the most prominent and influential ones.

Question 5: America’s Food Air-Drops

A week ago, US President Joe Biden pledged to organize air-drops of aid into northern Gaza. But there is already enough food to feed the entire population stuck in trucks right outside the Rafah crossing. Why doesn’t Biden simply insist that Israel allow that food to be delivered ASAP? Is this just a publicity stunt or is Biden sincere in wanting to feed starving Palestinians?

Ron Unz—I think this strange situation represents the utter and total humiliation of America, despite its boastful claims of being the world’s sole superpower.

We have demonstrated to the entire world that our country has now become nothing more than a political colony of Israel, run by a puppet government under the complete control of the pro-Israel Lobby and its financial donors.

Many have pointed out that although Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is a very weak and besieged figure in his own country, he and his allies certainly exercise greater control over the U.S. Congress, including both Democrats and Republicans, than does President Joe Biden or any Republican leader.

In the British Empire of the late nineteenth century, India had a population many times larger than that of Britain itself, but the subcontinent was entirely under British control. India’s leaders had no say over their own foreign policy, which instead was determined by a few individuals on the other side of the world. I think that America’s relationship to Israel is rapidly approaching that same situation.

President Biden faces a very difficult reelection challenge, with a large portion of his own Democratic voter base outraged over the scenes of devastation and starvation among Gaza’s Palestinians that they are seeing every day on their social media. So he would obviously like to mitigate his political problems by ensuring that food is delivered to Gaza’s starving Palestinians.

However, the Israelis have refused to allow the entry of sufficient trucks carrying food, and since the Israeli government controls the American government rather than the other way round, there’s not much that our President can do against that Israeli refusal. Therefore, Biden has resorted to desperate publicity stunts, such as air-dropping a few pallets of food, hoping that such transparent ploys will deceive his angry voters.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have been gleefully distributing a video on Telegram showing a starving dog in Gaza eating the body of a dead Palestinian child.

Question 6: Israel’s “Genocide”

The “genocide” moniker has been affixed to Israel like a scarlet letter. Do you think Israel’s leaders really grasp the long-term implications of this designation?

Ron Unz—I think that the Israeli leaders have become so arrogant, so insular, and so confident in their complete political control over the enormous power of the U.S. and its media that they don’t have the slightest concern over what the people of the world think. This explains their very public massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians by bombs, bullets, and starvation.

After all, the Israelis and their Zionist predecessors have been freely committing the worst sort of crimes and atrocities for generations, without ever incurring any penalty. Instead, nearly all of those dark deeds were either successfully concealed by their media allies or have been almost entirely forgotten. As I wrote in early 2020:

Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.

As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.

One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state…

The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.

When countries develop a sense of total impunity, their actions may steadily escalate. Because Israel and its government were never called to account or punished for any of their crimes, their transgressions steadily became bolder and more daring as the decades went by.

For example, as part of his non-proliferation efforts, President John F. Kennedy was determined to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons, making that project one of his top foreign policy initiatives. He exerted enormous pressure towards that goal, threatening Israel with a cut-off of all American financial support and initiating the legal destruction of its political lobby, the predecessor of AIPAC. All those American policies were immediately reversed after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and in that same 2020 article I outlined the strong, perhaps even overwhelming evidence that Israel’s Mossad played a central role in the death of our President, one of the most famous events of the twentieth century, as well as in the subsequent assassination of his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when the latter ran for President a few years later.

• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
  
  “Final Judgment” on the JFK Assassination
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words

During 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty intended to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew. That incident was the deadliest assault on an American naval vessel since World War II and if any other nation had been responsible, our country would certainly have declared war. Instead, the American government and media have entirely concealed the history of that event for the last half-century so that even today few Americans are aware that it ever happened.

• American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 18, 2021 • 11,400 Words

Then in 2001, Israel faced a desperate crisis as the widespread suicide bombings of the Second Palestinian Intifada threatened its survival, with numerous hostile Arab nations supporting that campaign. But the sudden 9/11 Attacks on America totally changed the strategic situation, allowing the fiercely pro-Israel Neocons to immediately gain control of the stunned George W. Bush administration. Under their influence, the War on Terror became the centerpiece of American foreign policy, and over the next dozen years the world’s sole superpower destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional adversaries including Iraq, Libya, and Syria, while nearly attacking Iran on several occasions. Last year I recapitulated the strong, even overwhelming evidence that Israel’s Mossad had been responsible for the 9/11 Attacks that successfully reversed Israel’s very difficult predicament.

• American Pravda: Remembering the 9/11 Truth Movement
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 11, 2023 • 9,800 Words

Given three generations of such total Israeli impunity, it’s easy to understand why Israel’s leaders today seem so nonchalant about the charges of genocide their country faces. South Africa provided a 91 page legal brief documenting its accusations to the International Court of Justice, and those jurists affirmed those charges in a series of near-unanimous rulings. Most observers naturally expected that such formidable legal developments would force the Israelis to back away from their Gaza attacks, but the latter instead demonstrated their total contempt for that international body by redoubling their efforts, continuing their bombing while further reducing the food and water available to Gaza’s starving population of two million.

However, it is possible that the government of Israel might be making a serious miscalculation. Their past crimes had been successfully suppressed by the pro-Israel gatekeepers of the mainstream media, preventing nearly all people around the world from ever becoming aware of them. But in recent years our informational landscape has been drastically transformed by the rise of the Internet, social media, and numerous video platforms. These have allowed the horrific unfiltered images of Gaza’s devastation to be seen worldwide, including by a large portion of our electorate, especially the younger Americans who heavily rely upon those new channels of information. The result has been a wave of huge, spontaneous protests across many Western countries and at many American universities.

By breaking the media stranglehold long enjoyed by Israel’s partisans, these technological changes may have important political consequences. Surprisingly large numbers of Democratic voters in Michigan and Minnesota have refused to support President Joe Biden on their primary ballots, raising fears that his November reelection prospects against former President Donald Trump might be slipping away. And in a British by-election, George Galloway, a fierce supporter of Gaza and critic of Israel, won more votes than the combined total of all the candidates from Britain’s major parties, suggesting that concerns over Gaza were becoming an important political issue in that country as well.

Question 7: The Impact of Aaron Bushnell

Aaron Bushnell’s picture is now circulating on social media sites around the world. The majority of people appear to have been very moved by his extraordinary act of self-sacrifice. In your opinion, has Bushnell’s self-immolation helped to change the way people think about what’s going on in Gaza?

Ron Unz—I think that the consequences may be enormous. I’ve heard the American mainstream media quickly “disappeared” the story after a day or two, so that it had little influence upon the older Americans who rely upon those legacy outlets. But everywhere else—across social media and non-Western broadcasters—the impact must have been gigantic.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose a Russian military serviceman had burned himself alive outside the Kremlin as an act of personal protest against his country’s Ukraine war. Surely the Western media would have treated that event as the biggest story in the world for days, even weeks, declaring that it proved President Vladimir Putin had lost the support of his own people, and his crumbling regime was headed for collapse. The leadership and people of Russia, China, Iran, and all the other countries that are not totally under American media control must view this incident in much the same way.

As far as I know, nothing similar has ever previously occurred in American history, and only very rarely in other countries around the world. A South Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire in 1963 to protest his government’s policies and a few months later the ruling regime he opposed was overthrown. In 2010 a Tunisian food-vendor immolated himself and his death launched the Arab Spring, bringing down governments all across North Africa and the Middle East. Although America’s dominance over the global media provides a considerable measure of protection against such popular forces, I think our regime may have suffered a major body-blow.

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Media rules our world, being vastly more powerful than tank battalions or nuclear weapons since it acts as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of the individuals who deploy those physical weapons. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dollar-value of the global media coverage of Bushnell’s personal sacrifice totaled in the billions. That’s hardly an insignificant sacrificial accomplishment for an unknown 25-year-old lacking any special skills. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anything else he could have done that had as high a chance of success and greater positive impact.

Bushnell had been raised in an isolated Christian community, aware from his childhood that the founding figure of his own religion had died a horrible death on the Cross in order to redeem mankind. So self-sacrifice and martyrdom had always been a central element of his faith.

Furthermore, any individual who enlists in the military must recognize that he might someday be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice for his own country, and Bushnell was hardly alone in regarding our ruling regime as an illegitimate one, whose policies were completely antithetical to the values of the country he’d sworn to defend. So in some respects, his fate was not so very different from that of any patriotic American military serviceman who died in the flaming wreckage of his destroyed plane or tank.

[Here Ron Unz, as a libertarian, shows his own ignorance and effects of anti-communist brainwash. He doesn't really understand the history of the USSR. Too bad.—Ed.]

• American Pravda: The Rise of the BRICS and the Fall of the USSA?
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 4, 2023 • 3,300 Words

For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.

Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.

• Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words
• More Falsehoods of World War II
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 19, 2023 • 7,500 Words
• Hitler, Churchill, the Holocaust, and the War in Ukraine
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 17, 2023 • 9,700 Words

Related Reading:

• Gaza and the Dangers of Jewish Paranoia
• American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
• American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
• American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
• American Pravda: Remembering the Liberty
• American Pravda: The Rise of the BRICS and the Fall of the USSA?

← American Pravda: The Rwandan Genocide

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Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
THIS IS A REPOST

“Israel has Absolutely No Legitimate Case Whatsoever for Its Attacks on Gaza”

Question 1: The ICJ Genocide Ruling

EPub Format

In your opinion, is the ICJ’s ‘genocide’ ruling convincing or overstated?

Ron Unz—From the beginning I’ve been extremely reluctant to characterize the Israeli attack on Gaza as being a “genocide” because use of that term has become so wildly inflated and distorted in recent years, converted by dishonest Western governments and their mainstream media lackeys into a propaganda-weapon used to vilify countries whose governments they seek to undermine.

Most people understand “genocide” to mean killing a large fraction of a given population group as part of an effort aimed at total extermination.But in early 2021, the outgoing Trump Administration and incoming Biden officials both publicly declared that the Chinese government was committing a “genocide” against the Uighur people of Xinjiang Province despite failing to provide any evidence that any significant number of Uighurs had actually been killed, and the media heavily promoted those accusations. If the bipartisan political leaders of America and our complicit mainstream media can declare a “genocide” without any apparent killings, the word has become so totally corrupted that I’m loath to consider using it.

However, in a strictly technical sense this ridiculous situation is actually possible. The term “genocide” was originally invented around 1944 by a Jewish propagandist named Raphael Lemkin, who used it as a means of stigmatizing and vilifying Nazi Germany. The beginning of the lengthy Wikipedia article on Genocide explains how the definition soon officially adopted by the UN included situations involving few if any actual killings:

In 1948, the defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

Given the nebulous definition of causing “serious bodily or mental harm,” leftist academics over the decades have often denounced “cultural genocide,” in which a government uses its power to assimilate a minority group into the language and cultural practices of the majority. For example, a century ago Canada established a system of residential public schools to teach English and modern lifestyles to Amerindian children from deprived tribal backgrounds. At the time, the policy was considered a benign, enlightened effort to help integrate them into mainstream Canadian society, but in recent years, that educational project has been denounced as “cultural genocide.”

One obvious problem with this very expansive definition of “genocide” is that it includes far too many historical cases. Used in such a broad fashion, there may have been many dozens or even hundreds of different “genocides” around the world over the last decade or two, and if everything is a “genocide” then nothing is a “genocide,” with the powerful political term drained of any impact.

However, despite all those serious concerns, I do think that the Israeli military actions in Gaza have been so extreme, so indiscriminate, and so massive that they fall into an entirely different category. Nearly 70% of the Gazans killed have been women or children, a demographic profile very close to that of the general Gaza population. Since Hamas consists entirely of adult males, this indicates that nearly all the deaths have been those of unarmed civilians, which is almost unprecedented in military conflicts over the last few decades.

However, such carnage is hardly surprising given Israel’s enormously heavy bombardment of that very densely populated urban center with the largest unguided bombs in its arsenal. After less than one month, the Israelis had already dropped more explosives than the tonnage corresponding to the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they have accelerated their attacks since then, destroying 100,000 local buildings and rendering nearly two million Gazans homeless.

By early December, the Financial Times reported that the destruction inflicted upon defenseless northern Gaza after just seven weeks of Israeli attacks was similar to that suffered by the worst-hit German cities after years of Allied carpet-bombing during World War II, an astonishing comparison.

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The catastrophic destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war https://t.co/Hm0YiTNOjr pic.twitter.com/vC3Nx3BP5X

— Financial Times (@FT) December 7, 2023

The obvious Israeli intent has been to render Gaza totally uninhabitable and kill enough Gazans to drive them out into the Sinai desert, thereby allowing the Israelis to annex the land as many of their political leaders have proposed. The South African legal case filed before the ICJ included 90-odd pages quoting numerous top Israeli political and military leaders who publicly declared their explicitly genocidal plans towards the Palestinians of Gaza, and their attacks over the last four months have certainly amounted to the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world.

Under such a combination of facts, I think it was very reasonable for the near-unanimous ICJ ruling that there was strong evidence that the Gazans were at serious risk of suffering a potential genocide at the hands of the Israelis. The Israeli government itself appointed one of the ICJ judges hearing the case, selecting a former chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, but he voted along with the other justices that the Israeli government must take all measures to prevent and punish incitement to genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.

Question 2: Possible Israeli Justification

In your opinion, is there any defense for Israel’s behavior in Gaza? And, are you at all sympathetic to Israel’s stated position (that they need to defeat Hamas to defend their own national security.)

Ron Unz—Israel has absolutely no legitimate case whatsoever for its attacks on Gaza over the last four months, and as more and more facts have come out, the attempts at justification have become weaker and weaker.

Hamas came to power in 2007 following free elections organized and judged fair by the Americans, but after that surprising victory at the polls, Israel and the West orchestrated an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the vote by military force. As I explained in December, the failure of that coup led Israel to impose a very harsh blockade and siege on Gaza:

For over fifteen years, more than two million Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza have been rigidly confined to what Human Rights Watch and other leading international organizations have widely described as the world’s largest open air prison or concentration camp, with all their food, fuel, medicine, and outward movement tightly controlled by their Israeli captors. When the Gazans began staging months of large, unarmed peaceful marches in 2018 to protest their terrible situation, they were massacred by Israeli troops, with many thousands killed or wounded. In 1960 Apartheid South Africa, a single, somewhat violent protest march against aspects of white minority rule led to 69 deaths and horrified the entire world, which proclaimed it “the Sharpesville Massacre.” But given the tight control over the global media by Jews and other pro-Israel forces, the vastly larger number of deaths inflicted upon the totally unarmed Gaza protesters was almost entirely ignored. This remarkable story was told in a widely-praised 2019 documentary on the subject by filmmaker Abby Martin, an American sympathetic to the Gazans, as well as in her more recent interview on the same subject.

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Genocidal Onslaught on Gaza Shocks Conscience of the World, w/ Abby Martin
BreakThrough
Oct 27, 2023 Rania Khalek Dispatches

https://www.patreon.com/posts/extende... Israel’s genocide in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the entire world, with an endless flow of videos and images of Palestinian children cut into pieces by American bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population. Despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of Israeli officials, Western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” But this war on Gaza is different from past wars, not only in the level of Israeli aggression, but in the reaction on the street, from the Middle East to the United States. Israel is losing the narrative war. Most people want to see a ceasefire and tens of thousands have protested across the US to demonstrate their opposition to Biden’s unconditional support for this genocide. To discuss Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza ahead of a looming ground invasion and how it has the potential to snowball into a catastrophic regional war, Rania Khalek was joined by journalist Abby Martin, creator and host of The Empire Files. Watch the extended version of this interview on our Patreon. Become a member at https://www.Patreon.com/BreakthroughNews to access the full episode and other exclusive content. Watch Abby’s documentary “Gaza Fights For Freedom”: https://youtu.be/HnZSaKYmP2s?si=deHf3... #breakthroughnews

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The American government and American media endlessly glorify the 1950s Civil Rights protest marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others and have fiercely denounced the brutal beatings those illegal protesters sometimes received at the hands of Southern police. But imagine the reaction if thousands of those black marchers had been shot down by American military snipers.

The key difference is that the uniformly pro-Israel Western global media has for decades concealed these facts, allowing the Israelis to literally get away with murder. Meanwhile, the Israeli government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing massive fortified defenses around Gaza, which they believed had completely eliminated the possibility of any incursion by Hamas.

Therefore, when the very successful Hamas attack breached those defenses, the complacent and over-confident Israelis completely panicked, and their Apache helicopters were ordered to blast anything that moved with Hellfire missiles, killing very large numbers of Israeli civilians. The exact totals are uncertain, but based upon the evidence I think that a majority, probably a substantial majority of all the unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7th actually died at the hands of their own trigger-happy military forces, with perhaps as few as 100 to 200 killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently.

These likely facts are hardly surprising since the primary goal of the Hamas attack was to seize Israeli hostages who could then be exchanged for the thousands of Palestinian captives held without trial in Israeli prisons, sometimes for years and under brutal conditions. Meanwhile, it has been confirmed that the Israeli government implemented its notorious “Hannibal Directive,” ordering Israeli military forces to deliberately target and the kill Israelis who had been captured by Hamas in order to forestall any such later prisoner exchanges.

I discussed these issues in several articles, beginning in late October, also explaining that since the Hamas fighters had apparently killed so few civilians, Israel and its media allies had desperately resorted to promoting the most outrageous atrocity-hoaxes to buttress their moral case for the massive retaliatory bombardment of Gaza they were unleashing.

• Pro-Israel Propaganda-Lies vs. Reality
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 30, 2023 • 4,300 Words
• American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 6, 2023 • 6,300 Words
• Zionism, Antisemitism, and Racialism
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 13, 2023 • 7,600 Words

In early January, I summarized some of these conclusions:

The surprisingly successful Hamas attack on October 7th was deeply embarrassing to the Israelis, and pro-Israel propagandists soon began heavily emphasizing ridiculous hoaxes such as the claims of forty beheaded babies or a baby roasted in an oven. All of these frauds were provided by extremely disreputable characters, but eagerly accepted and promoted by leading Western political elites and media outlets. The latest wave of very doubtful claims has focused upon second-hand stories of Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations. These accounts only came to light two months after the events in question and lacked any supportive forensic evidence, with many of the claims coming from the same individuals behind the beheaded babies hoax, suggesting that they are equally desperate propaganda ploys. Journalists Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and others have discussed the extreme credulity of the Times and other media outlets in promoting these blatantly fraudulent stories. Many of these points are summarized in a brief video discussion: Inspired by my reporting at @TheGrayzoneNews, this brilliant takedown by @propandco provides the strongest and most accessible refutation of the bogus atrocity propaganda Israel concocted to justify its genocidal rampage in Gaza Watch and share it widely pic.twitter.com/Q8XawKN07Y — Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 27, 2023 Meanwhile, consider the very strong evidence from silence. According to news reports, small GoPro cameras were worn by the attacking Hamas militants, which recorded all their activities, and the Israelis recovered many of these from their bodies and began carefully examining hundreds of hours of this extensive video footage. They surely would have soon released a video compilation providing any incriminating evidence that they found, yet I’m not aware of a single public clip that shows any such brutal atrocities or mass killings, strongly suggesting that very little of that occurred. Indeed, the GrayZone discovered that the main photograph provided of an allegedly raped and murdered Israeli woman actually turned out to be that of a female Kurdish fighter from years earlier that had been plucked off the Internet, demonstrating the apparent desperation and dishonesty of the pro-Israel propagandists promoting these stories.

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But given that total national humiliation, the Israeli military reaction aimed at punishing the helpless civilians of Gaza has been enormously brutal, probably already killing well over 30,000 victims, overwhelmingly women and children. Nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals have been destroyed, along with the local universities, schools, mosques and churches, and administrative buildings. A few days ago, the New York Times published an article highlighting the widespread Israeli use of controlled demolitions to deliberately destroy all of this civilian infrastructure. The obvious intent is to render the entire area uninhabitable and permanently drive out Gaza’s Palestinians.

It’s useful to contrast this Israeli retaliatory campaign of massive destruction with how other countries reacted in the wake of comparable events. For example, in 1946 Zionist militants dressed as Arabs bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people in one of the worst terrorist attacks in history to that date, with an overwhelming majority of the victims being civilians. It would have been unthinkable for the British to have responded by launching a massive bombing campaign against the Jewish population centers of Palestine, killing thousands or tens of thousands of Jews, and they would have been universally condemned by the world as the worst sort of war-criminals if they had done so.

Similarly, beginning in the early 1970s, the IRA launched a huge wave of terrorism against British military and civilian targets, including bombing attacks in central London, and many hundreds died as a consequence. In 1984, the IRA planted a massive bomb in the Brighton hotel being used for a Conservative Party conference, killing or severely injuring many important British officials, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her government narrowly escaping death. The IRA had considerable popular support among the Catholics of both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, yet the British would have been considered totally insane if they had responded with a massive strategic bombing campaign against those Irish civilian population centers.

When countries behave like mad dogs before the eyes of the entire world they have only themselves to blame for the ultimate consequences.

Question 3: Demographic Reasons

Are there demographic reasons why Israel would want to expel the Palestinians in Gaza or is this really all about Hamas?

Ron Unz—The Zionist goal had always been to establish Israel as an ethnically-pure Jewish state, driving out all the native Palestinians. In 1948, the Zionist militias came close to achieving that objective, seizing nearly 80% of the territory and violently expelling almost a million Palestinians from their ancient homeland, killing many of them in that brutal process of ethnic cleansing. The main regret was that some Palestinians still remained when a truce ending the fighting, but the result was still the creation of an overwhelmingly Jewish state. Although the UN required Israel to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to the homes they had fled days or weeks earlier, the Israeli government always ignored that requirement, often shooting and killing any Palestinian civilians who attempted to do so. I discussed that history of Israel’s origins in a long December article.

• American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust
  
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • December 11, 2023 • 14,600 Words

However, in 1967 the Israelis suddenly launched a surprise attack against Egypt and its other Arab neighbors, seizing Gaza and the West Bank with their millions of Palestinians, many of whom were refugees who had previously been expelled from their homes in Israel two decades earlier. Annexing those new territories would have required Israel to grant citizenship to their non-Jewish residents, severely shifting the overall demographic balance, so despite endless peace negotiations, they have effectively remained under Israeli occupation for more than a half-century, even as their Palestinian populations have steadily increased.

A further political constraint upon Israeli governments has been the growing political power of the right-wing religious voting block, which regards those occupied territories as the sacred, divinely-ordained lands of their Greater Israel and is therefore absolutely opposed to relinquishing any part of it, especially in order to establish a Palestinian state. Moreover, during those long decades of occupation, Israeli governments have planted many Jewish settlements, with most of those settlers being religious zealots, determined to retain the land and drive out the existing Palestinians.

Over the last three generations, Palestinian numbers have grown more rapidly than Jewish ones, and they now constitute almost exactly half of the population of the intended Greater Israel, now containing 7.2 million Jews and 7.2 million Palestinians. So if the Palestinians were granted civil rights, Israel would immediately cease to be a Jewish state. Therefore, prior to October 7th, the Israeli strategy had been to maintain an Apartheid state on the West Bank, while confining the Palestinians of Gaza to what amounted to an open-air prison.

But the surprisingly successful Hamas raid destroyed those political illusions, inflicting very heavy casualties on Israel’s military forces and also leading to many civilian deaths. With Apartheid no long considered a viable, long-term option, the Israeli government seems to have now decided to use the Hamas raid as an excuse for solving its demographic problems by killing or expelling all the Palestinians once and for all, with surveys showing that the bulk of the Israeli public apparently supports that plan.

I had discussed some of these issues in an October podcast interview:

Patrick Casey • The Israel-Hamas War • October 27, 2023 • 1hr 20m

CLICK HERE TO WATCH/LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST

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Question 4: UNRWA and Palestinian Starvation

Israeli leaders know that if they succeed in defunding UNRWA, tens of thousands of Palestinians will die from hunger. And, yet, among members of the Knesset, there is almost unanimous support for the policy. What are we to make of this? Does Israel really want to starve two million Palestinians or do they have some other goal in mind?

Ron Unz—For the last several months, the Israelis have been severely restricting the import of food, water, and medicine into Gaza so that there is already widespread hunger and thirst, with a high-ranking UN official describing the resulting famine as an “unprecedented” crisis. According to these reports, the Palestinians of Gaza now constitute roughly 80% of all the people in the world facing catastrophic hunger.

Moreover, numerous top Israeli leaders have been using explicitly genocidal language towards this Palestinian population. According to Max Blumenthal, Israeli public opinion surveys have shown that 98% of Israeli Jews support the massive destruction inflicted upon Gaza and indeed over 40% think that the Israeli government’s military attacks have been too restrained and should be stronger.

Combining these different pieces of evidence, I doubt that many members of the Knesset would be dismayed if large numbers of Gazans began to die of starvation, especially if such horrifying conditions finally succeeded in driving them into Egypt and forcing the Egyptian government to accept them, thereby emptying the enclave and allowing Israel to permanently occupy and annex it. At the very least, Israeli leaders may believe that such mass starvation of Gazan civilians would coerce Hamas into accepting defeat and agreeing to release their remaining prisoners.

So the plan behind the Western suspension of financial support for UNRWA may be based upon Israeli goals, which include some mixture of punishment and further pressure for Palestinian expulsion or Hamas surrender. Meanwhile, the Western media has used the heavy coverage of those unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA to avoid reporting the dramatic vote against Israel by the IJC that had immediately proceeded it.

The actual reasons given by the United States and many of its allies for cutting off funding to UNRWA and beginning to starve the Palestinians seemed utterly unreasonable. According to media reports, UNRWA employs some 30,000 Gazan residents and the Israelis claimed that just 12 of these individuals had participated in the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel—12 out of 30,000 employees! This demonstrates the absurd subservience of Western political leaders to the wishes of the Israeli government.

With so much of Gaza destroyed and with so many Gazans now on the verge of starvation, there are videos showing groups of Israeli activists blocking the entry of trucks carrying food and water to that desperate population, and surely almost everyone around the world condemns that monstrous behavior. Yet the political leaders of America, Britain, Germany, and many other Western nations who endlessly boast of their humanitarian principles are now doing much the same thing, seeking to cut off food supplies to millions of starving civilians, utterly outrageous actions ignored by most of the American public, who have been successfully brainwashed by our mainstream media.

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Question 5: A War of Narratives

Israel’s operation in Gaza is, to large extent, a war of narratives. On the one hand, we have the highly-politicized term “genocide,” and on the other we have the equally-politicized term “antisemitism.” I cannot remember any conflict in which language played a more important role or summarized the views of the warring parties. Do you agree that—beyond the actual hostilities and violence—there is a battle of narratives taking place in which the two main enemies are brandishing their own particular terminology to overpower the other? Who do you think is winning that war?

Ron Unz—I do think that the political activists condemning the Israeli military attack on Gaza quickly began using the incendiary charge of “genocide” to dramatize their case and also to counter the weighty accusations of “antisemitism” they faced from their pro-Israel opponents. But that approach has resulted in some serious setbacks.

For example, when student protesters at Harvard and other elite colleges held up signs denouncing “genocide” or shouted it out at their public demonstrations, their opponents dishonestly claimed that they were publicly calling for the genocide of Jews. This allowed pro-Israel forces to deploy their overwhelming political and media power to promote that ridiculous argument and use it to force the resignation of the presidents of Harvard and UPenn, resulting in an unprecedented ideological purge of the top leadership of Ivy League schools.

I also think introduction of that term may have helped pressure Elon Musk into banning anyone on Twitter who used the popular progressive slogan “From the River to the Sea,” claiming that it represented a call for “Jewish genocide” rather than merely the replacement of Israel with a secular democratic state with equal rights for both Jews and Palestinians.

On the other hand, now that a near-unanimous majority of the International Court of Justice has ruled that the Palestinians of Gaza are indeed potentially at risk of suffering such a genocide at Israel’s hands, those accusations have become much more substantial and legitimate, although the Western mainstream media has done its utmost to avoid reporting that important story, probably preventing most of the public from becoming aware of it.

There is also a very strong divide based upon age and sources of information. For generations, America’s mainstream print publications and broadcast media have presented an extremely one-sided, pro-Israel account of the Middle East conflict, and individuals drenched for decades in such powerful propaganda are unlikely to suddenly change their opinions, so polling shows that they are still very supportive of Israel.

However, younger Americans are less set in their beliefs and they also often get their knowledge of events from social media and video platforms, which are much less under the total control of pro-Israel propagandists.Therefore, surveys reveal that they are far more evenly divided in their views, or even actually lean more towards the Palestinian side.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world outside the influence of the Western mainstream media, support for the Palestinian cause seems absolutely overwhelming, certainly among the two billion Arabs and Muslims, but elsewhere as well. For example, China and its media outlets have attempted to provide even-handed coverage of the current conflict, seeking to maintain good relations with both Israel and the Arab world. But when a leading influencer on Chinese social media polled his million Weibo followers soon after the October 7th Hamas attacks, 98% of them thought that the Palestinians were the ones with justice on their side.

I discussed some of these matters in several recent podcast interviews:

Pete Quinones Show • October 7th and Its Consequences • January 23, 2024 • 1hr

Episode 1004: October 7th and Its Consequences w/ Ron Unz

The Pete Quinones Show
Jan 23, 2024

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Red Ice TV • Israel/Gaza Conflict and Anti-Semitism • December 6, 2023 • 1hr

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Question 6: Inciting a War with Iran

In your opinion, is Netanyahu trying to incite a war between the United States and Iran? How would Israel benefit from such a war?

Ron Unz—It’s absolutely obvious that he is trying to do so. Indeed, Netanyahu and his political allies, including the American Neocons, have been doing their utmost to incite an American attack on Iran for decades, using military provocations, dishonest propaganda, and political pressure to achieve this objective. For more than thirty years, the Israeli leader has declared that Iran is on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon and must be stopped, famously holding up a colorful illustration of the dire Iranian threat at the 2012 UN General Assembly.

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The problem they face is that all competent military experts agree that such a war would be utterly disastrous for the United States and our Western allies, as well as the entire world. Iran is a large, populous nation and its reasonable concerns about a possible American attack have caused it to build up a very formidable military force, including an enormous arsenal of highly-accurate cruise missiles which could easily overwhelm our defenses in the region. If we attacked, Iran’s retaliatory strikes could probably destroy all of our local bases in the region, killing enormous numbers of Americans, while sinking many of our ships at sea, perhaps even including the aircraft carriers that provide our global projection of power.

Over the last few weeks, the Houthi militias of Yemen, merely equipped with second- and third-tier weapons, have demonstrated that they can successfully bar the Red Sea to any vessels they wish, and our vaunted naval and air power has proved powerless to stop them. So in a war, the Iranians—who possess a vastly larger arsenal of first-class weapons, supposedly even including the hypersonic missiles that we ourselves have yet been unable to produce—could easily block the Straits of Hormuz to oil tankers, thereby collapsing much of the world economy at a stroke, especially including our NATO allies and Japan.

Given the endless American threats of attack, the Iranians have worked very hard over the last couple of decades to greatly improve their military capabilities, while despite our enormous defense budget, our own conventional arsenal has largely remained stagnant due to our overwhelming focus upon counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. More than two decades ago, the Pentagon’s 2002 Millennium Challenge war games found that the Iranians could defeat America in a war, and Iran is vastly stronger today. Meanwhile, the Iranians have recently finalized a comprehensive 20-year deal with Russia that includes defense cooperation, and given our huge support for the Ukrainian forces over the last couple of years, Moscow would certainly be very willing to return the favor by backing and supplying Iran.

So I actually think the greatest danger we face is that a sufficiently ignorant or arrogant Biden Administration, under enormous internal and external pressure by pro-Israel political forces, might be drawn into a totally irrational war with Iran. And if the results were sufficiently disastrous, with enormous American human losses from Iranian missiles fired at our military bases and ships sunk at sea, perhaps including aircraft carriers, our government might find itself compelled to threaten or use nuclear weapons to salvage its position, thereby pushing the entire world to the brink of destruction.

Related Reading:

• Pro-Israel Propaganda-Lies vs. Reality 
• American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict
• Zionism, Antisemitism, and Racialism
• American Pravda: The Nakba and the Holocaust

 

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