SOUTH AFRICA PRESENTS THE CASE AGAINST ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE IN GAZA

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ICJ photo

January 11, 2024

Above photo: Members of the International Court of Justice on December 2, 2019, at the Peace Palace in The Hague, the seat of the court. UN Photo/ICJ_CIJ/Frank Van Beek. Courtesy of the ICJ.

Day 1 Of South Africa V. Israel.

In an exhaustive presentation, lawyers for South Africa presented its case to the International Court of Justice that Israel has failed to prevent and is continuing to commit acts of genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

The opening salvo of South Africa’s legal bid to hold Israel accountable for genocide in Gaza rang out this morning in a crowded courtroom in The Hague.

The State of Israel has failed to prevent and is continuing to commit acts of genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza, lawyers for the Republic of South Africa told the International Court of Justice, gathered in the ornate chambers of The Hague’s Peace Palace.

Standing at a podium in front of the Court’s fifteen judges, supplemented by judges ad hoc Aharon Barak (Israel) and Dikgang Ernest Moseneke (South Africa), and in front of a battery of lawyers and scores of diplomatic observers, South African attorney Adila Hassim spelled out the acts Israel has committed against the Palestinian people of Gaza – acts defined as genocidal under Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Over the past three months, Israel has waged the heaviest conventional bombing campaign in the history of warfare, Hassim told the court, dropping 6000 bombs per week, including 2000-lb bombs on hundreds of occasions.

Over 23,000 Palestinians have perished, 70% of them women and children, Hassim told the court. At least seven thousand are unaccounted for, dead or dying beneath the rubble. “No one has been spared. Not even babies.”

Physically, Gaza is in ruins, Hassim continued. Homes, shelters, hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches have all been destroyed.

Irish attorney Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh was particularly graphic. Quoting UN officials, Ní Ghrálaigh described Gaza as “a crisis of humanity,” a “living hell,” a “bloodbath,” and a “situation of utter, deepening, and unmatched horror where an entire population is besieged and under attack, denied access to the essentials of survival on a massive scale.”

Pending the court’s determination of the merits of South Africa’s genocide charges (something that will take years), South Africa is asking the ICJ, as a matter of “extraordinary urgency,” to issue a “provisional measures” order – an injunction — instructing Israel to “immediately suspend” its military operations in Gaza, to “take all reasonable measures” to prevent genocide, to “desist” from genocidal acts set forth in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, to halt genocide incitement, conspiracy and complicity, and to ensure that evidence of this “crime of crimes” is preserved.

Eighty-four pages in length and exceptionally detailed, South Africa’s application exceeds what would ordinarily be required in a request for provisional measures, legal authorities told Mondoweiss, prior to today’s hearing.

“It is substantive, it is evidence rich,” says Michael Lynk, Canadian legal scholar and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “If anybody wanted a single reference to be able to understand what’s going on for the last twelve weeks with respect to the war on Gaza, this is the document with respect to that.”

“Normally, this kind of detail, you would wait for the underlying merits,” says Susan Akram, Professor of Law at Boston University, and director of BU’s International Human Rights Clinic.

“What’s required [in a preliminary measures application] is a prima facie [case], showing sufficient plausibility of evidence, and enough available evidence without the particulars being proven up by documentary and testimonial evidence,” Akram says. “But they’ve done their homework.”

No greater homework for South Africa’s lawyers than proving specific Israeli intent to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part — dolus specialis, in legal jargon.

Unlike run-of-the-mill war crimes like indiscriminate targeting of non-combatants and civilian infrastructure, enforced starvation, torture, and forcible displacement, genocide is defined as a crime of “specific intent” – demonstrated or inferred from public statements and “patterns of conduct.”

In today’s court hearing, South African lawyers argued that Israel has indeed waged its war “with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”

“The evidence for genocidal intent is not only chilling, it is also overwhelming and incontrovertible,” South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the court, itemizing flagrantly genocidal statements by top Israeli leaders, cabinet ministers, and military officers, including conversations with Israeli soldiers heading off to Gaza.

A video of Benjamin Netanyahu conjuring up the annihilation of the Amalekites was projected on a court screen behind the justices. So was a video of Israeli soldiers dancing and crying out ecstatically, “there are no uninvolved civilians,” and “may their village burn; may Gaza be erased.”

Ngcukaitobi told the court about “snuff videos” posted by IDF recruits on social media; about a soldier boasting about the village he’d helped destroyed, and about an Israeli pop singer saying, “Gaza must be wiped out and destroyed with every Amalek seed. We simply must destroy all of Gaza and exterminate everyone who is there.”

Genocidal intent is “not out on the fringes,” Ngcukaitobi told the judges. It’s “embodied in state policy.”

Outside observers agree.

“These are not rhetorical statements,” Katie Gallagher, senior staff attorney with the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights, told Mondoweiss. “Israeli officials at this level say what they mean and then do what they say.”

“Intent is normally the most difficult element to prove, but I think in this case, the Israeli government and the individuals who are prosecuting this war have made it very clear,” Susan Akram told Mondoweiss. “They meant to kill as many as possible. And the intent to transfer as many as possible outside of their territory; and then also to place and enforce a punitive siege that makes life difficult or impossible, so that their survival is clearly at risk. And that is the stated intention. So, I think in this case, the intent is not nearly as difficult to prove as in so many other genocide cases that have been decided.”

“This is not simply a war on Hamas,” Michael Lynk told Mondoweiss. “It also has the appearance of wanting to thin out Gaza; of encouraging the remaining Palestinians that there’s nothing to return to; that you may as well go to the Sinai; you may as well file your applications to Italy or to Canada, or to Australia to go live … [Bezalel Smotrich], who talked about wanting to reduce Gaza’s population from 2.3 million to roughly one or 200,000 Palestinians.”

Among the most relevant South African claims the ICJ will weigh in assessing Israeli genocidal intent: the high number of child casualties and alleged measures to prevent births.

The direct connection between child deaths, injury, trauma, and the genocidal destruction of a people has already been brought to the ICJ’s attention.

In mid-November, in a joint “Declaration of Intervention” to the ICJ regarding The Gambia v. Myanmar – the first genocide case brought by one country against another at the top UN court, in 2019 – Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK called on the court to broaden its interpretation of the Genocide Convention. Among other expanded interpretations of the Convention, Canada and its five allies declared that the ICJ should consider that acts of genocide “need to be assessed differently when the acts are committed against children.”

“[The] targeting of children provides an indication of the intention to destroy a group as such,” they argued, and “evidence of harm to children may contribute to an inference that the perpetrators intended to destroy a substantial part of the protected group.”

Israeli leaders have responded to these charges in a predictable fashion. Following South Africa’s submission of the application to the court, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the case a “blood libel.” More prosaically, Israeli President Isaac Herzog described South Africa’s application as “atrocious and preposterous.”

Still, Israel is worried. “A ruling by the court could have significant potential implications that are not only in the legal world but have practical bilateral, multilateral, economic, security ramifications,” says an Israeli Foreign Ministry cable, obtained by Axios.

Israeli worries are well founded. The prohibition against genocide is both a jus cogens norm (binding on all, without exceptions) and erga omnes partes (all 153 state parties to the Genocide Convention are obliged to enforce it), South African jurist and former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard told the ICJ’s fifteen justices this morning.

Fending off a procedural argument Israel is likely to make tomorrow that there is no “dispute” between South Africa and Israel and that there’s certainly not been any attempt at negotiations, Dugard described various communications South Africa had with Israel regarding its concerns over genocide. Among these, propositions that Israel had opposed. South Africa’s propositions were not only factually wrong, Israel argued, but “obscene,” Dugard recounted to the court.

Israeli lawyers will have a chance to rebut South African claims of procedure and fact tomorrow.

A provisional measure ruling from the court is anticipated by the end of January.

“I do expect that if there was a provisional measures order calling on Israel to stop its actions, it would increase the political and diplomatic pressure on Israel, on the United States, and on the Security Council to bring an end to what’s been going on,” Michael Lynk told Mondoweiss.

“If there were a provisional measures decision that comes out from the ICJ, it [would make] crystal clear to the United States, to Western powers, to all states that they are under an obligation, a binding obligation, to take measures to prevent genocide and to cease any assistance to genocide,” says Katie Gallagher, with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

As it happens, the CCR is in the midst of a lawsuit against Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin at a California District Court on behalf of a half dozen Palestinian NGOs and individual plaintiffs. They are seeking an injunction halting U.S. military support for Israel and anticipate that a provisional measures order from the ICJ, in South Africa’s case, would strengthen theirs.

If Washington doesn’t help enforce a provisional measures order against Israel by the IJC, in South Africa’s lawsuit, other state parties would.

“Under Article 41 of the ICJ statute, the ICJ should refer immediately provisional measures to the Security Council,” Susan Akram told Mondoweiss. “Now, of course, we know that the U.S. is going to [veto] any measures against Israel at the Security Council, but that does nothing to prevent all states, individually and regionally, for example Africa, to comply in a range of ways: suspend relations with Israel … and take whatever measures they wish to take or should take, under Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, to make the provisional measures binding.”


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BLOWBACK: Propaganda and Loss of a Legend

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Billy Bob's Dispatches

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Blowback w. Regis Tremblay, Ian Kummer

 


BONUS FEATURE
Regis Tremblay on Crimea
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. You can reach him on his Facebook page HERE.


Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.


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Who Is The Axis Of Resistance?

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indi.ca
Views from the third world. Earth.


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First posted by indi.ca on December 17th, 2023. Tagged HamasPalestineWhite EmpireResistanceWarHistory

A Hamas billboard in Iraq, showing the pan-Arab nature of the Resistance


The Resistance is being Telegram’d, and you can follow them directly, but it’s honestly a lot. As Pintada commented “I am too lazy and stupid to get access to all those sites that you mentioned.” For people like them, I’ll do some updates, but first, you need a bit of context. Who are all these groups the Western media lumps as ‘terrorists’, and why have they got the worst people on Earth so terrified?

In this brief and inadequate introduction, I’ll try to outline the main ‘Axis Of Resistance’, from Hamas in Palestine to Hezbollah in Lebanon to Ansar Allah in Yemen and so on. There’s a lot going on, and I hope this provides some context. Once we know the actors, we can get to the action.

Is Resistance Terrorism?

Another poster from Iraq. You tell me what’s the terror, the tank or the lone man in tracky bottoms resisting it


Firstly, as an obligatory throat-clearing for Western audiences, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, etc are not ‘terrorist’ organizations in any objective sense of that term. Certainly not anymore. Terrorism is as terrorism does, and right now, the ‘terrorists’ are hitting tanks while the imperial military is attacking premature babies. If you can imagine that colored people are also capable of feeling terror, this makes things clear enough.

While these organizations have attacked civilians, they have largely abandoned such tactics and operate more like conventional militaries than conventional militaries. In cases like Hamas, they are only designated as terrorist organizations by Europe/America so, you know, consider the source. Honestly, if the White Empire isn’t calling you terrorists, you’re doing something wrong.

When the worst people in the world tell me to hate something, I take it as a reading recommendation and I’ve tried to read about/from Hamas and Hezbollah directly, which I’ll quote from here. The Western media method is to repeat some names over and over while teaching you nothing about them, but this propaganda is falling flat in the face of observable reality. You can observe and read for yourself, I hope.

Who Are The Resistance?

The great Telegram channel Fotros Resistance frequently posts this flag, and I’ll move around it clockwise to help orient us.


Iran

We’ll start from the top, where the big flag missing for some reason is Iran. Think what you want about Iran, it’s frankly none of your fucking business, especially if you’re a Westerner. Iran has had to fight for its life against constant re-colonization attempts from the West, and they have somehow survived, mashallah. As Sayyed Nasrallah (of Hezbollah) has said:

We in Lebanon sought to benefit from the experience of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, because it is a pioneering movement, on a global scale, that succeeded in defying the old world order. It also succeeded in building a state, a regime, and an entity outside the framework of compulsory loyalty to either East or West. It gave us many examples from which the Arab and Muslim world could learn.

Out of the crucible of decolonization and through the gauntlet of sanctions, Iran developed a highly sophisticated military capable of both protecting itself and fighting for the liberation of the region. Whereas Saudis and Emiratis bought US weapons and became spare-part vassals, Iran has an indigenous weapons program, which alone is capable of fighting for indigenous liberation. The master's tools will not dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde said.  Sanctions are, in many ways, the best thing that can happen to a country because they force you to stand on your own.

Iran has developed drone and supersonic missile technology that technically and practically (affordability) exceeds America’s. They fund and arm most of the Resistance and are a most vital piece.

Syria

Going clockwise, the next flag is Syria, which is nominally part of the Resistance, but they’re also still trying to get their pants on after being relentlessly attacked by the White Empire. Many of its oil fields are still occupied by America (note that I use America, White Empire, Israel/America interchangeably because they are). Syrian paramilitaries are attacking American bases, but the Syrian state is just trying to survive and is not of supermuch assistance.

Liwa Fatemiyoun

The next flag is Liwa Fatemiyoun, which I have had to reverse image search because I have never heard of them. They seem to be an Afghan Shia group fighting in Syria (notably against ISIS) and now against the American occupation there (I assume). I don’t know anything else about them so I won’t go on.

Hezbollah

I’m going assume that all of the flags with a hand holding an AK-47 aloft are some variety of Hezbollah. For our purposes, I’ll address Hezbollah as one thing, based out of Lebanon and led by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, though this is obviously a simplification.

It’s important to understand that in Nasrallah’s philosophy, state borders in the Middle East are not real at all. Even less real is Israel, a colonial garrison state plonked there to keep the region divided (and conquered). This is an important philosophical point and Nasrallah is an important strategist, so I’ll quote from him directly here (from 1986):

We would like to allay the fears of those who think that Hezbollah intends to impose Islamic rule by force, and to tell them that we shall not impose Islam; for us, this is a matter of general principle. We are now intent on removing colonialism from this region, doing away with colonial means of information and culture, and making the people understand Islam as it should be understood; a lot of Muslim political terminology has been distorted by colonial interpretations.

We do not believe in multiple Islamic republics; we do believe, however, in a single Islamic world governed by a central government, because we consider all borders throughout the Muslim world as fake and colonialist, and therefore doomed to disappear.

We do not believe in a nation whose borders are 10,452 square kilometers in Lebanon; our project foresees Lebanon as part of the political map of an Islamic world in which specificities would cease to exist, but in which the rights, freedom, and dignity of minorities within it are guaranteed.

Therefore, in order for this project to be realized, priority should be given to removing Israel from the scene, because it was established for the express purpose of dividing and partitioning the Muslim world. We are not only against the partition of Lebanon, but also against the partition of the Muslim world; this explains why we see no alternative to fighting Israel, with all means at our disposal, until it ceases to exist.

I suppose Western people find much of this scary, but it’s again none of their business. Decolonization in an Islamic region could and would look Islamic, and that’s their business. There’s this weird liberal idea that everyone should liberate themselves the same way, and deserve to get couped or bombed if they don’t. That’s just liberal colonialism.

Islam is a perfectly valid governing philosophy (much more than that really) and it contains huge amounts of wisdom, jurisprudence, and centuries of cultural experience. Muslim states have historically been tolerant, open, and diverse, in their own way. Trying to impose Western liberal democracy (Democracy™) is just another form of colonialism, which Hezbollah rightly opposes. The colonizers want a European Union and White Empire for themselves, but attack any form of unity among Muslim peoples. It’s not even hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy, and that’s what must be overthrown.

Most borders in the Muslim world are divide-and-conquer lines drawn by the British, and they serve the same purpose under American rule. Hezbollah operates above and beyond such lines, and with a very singular focus. Hezbollah is not a governing party in Lebanon or anything like that. As Nasrallah says, “The long-term strategy of the Islamic Resistance is clear and does not require additional explanation. It involves fighting against Israel and liberating Jerusalem, as well as Imam Khomeini’s proposal — namely, ending Israel as a state.”  Hezbollah is just a Resistance organization and their priority for decades has just been attacking Israel.

The Western perspective on organizations like Hezbollah is that they are destabilizing the region, which is precisely the opposite of what’s happening. They are the region! The destabilizing presence is the carbon crusaders invading and colonizing the place. The real question is WTF the West is doing in the Middle East at all, with Israel as its ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’. As Nasrallah has said, “the resistance is linked to the occupation. As long as there is occupation, there is resistance.” And so the Resistance from Hezbollah goes on.

After beating Israel in 2006 (at great sacrifice), Hezbollah is now a highly sophisticated paramilitary. In 2021, Nasrallah claimed that Hezbollah had 100,000 fighters. They also have precision rockets that can hit all parts of Israel. Since the start of the Al Aqsa Flood on October 7th, they have been systematically dismantling Israeli intelligence points along the Lebanese border and have effectively decolonized much of the north of occupied Palestine already.

Given that Hezbollah has a large standing army and missiles, the question has been why don’t they attack Israel in full now? There is a story from the 1980s that illustrates their strategic thinking. As the story goes (via Fotros):

Sayyed Hassan reports that in the 80’s Hezbollah had launched a self-sacrificing attack on an “Israeli” convoy killing and wounding its soldiers. As a result, they besieged the village where it took place, arrested all males aged 14–60, imposed a curfew and cut off water and electricity from the village. People weren’t allowed to buy medicine nor food and were besieged in their houses for a certain period. At the time people (among which were big scholars) complained to the leadership of Hezbollah that the operations weren’t guided by wise decisions. They said that the resistance suffered more than the “Israelis” as a result of the retaliations. All while on the “Israeli” side there were only a couple of deaths and injuries. The leadership went to Imam Khomeini [of Iran] for guidance. He replied that they should continue with resisting. He said the people misidentified the benefit of the attack. The benefit wasn’t that they killed a couple of soldiers. The benefit was that the buildup of the operations would lead to liberation. Imam Khomeini’s response was clear, continue resisting whatever the price may be.

The Israeli war crimes in Lebanon were similar to those in Gaza today. Lebanon, indeed, is where the Dahiya Doctrine of attacking civilians came from. Hezbollah follows a different doctrine, which is steadily building up operations until the occupation collapses. This seems to be the methodical strategy they’re following today, tying up at least a third of the Israeli Occupation Force in the north, and steadily degrading them, day by day. Whether this works only time will say, but Hezbollah is the most intellectually deep organization I’ve read about, and Nasrallah is a thinker for the ages.

Palestine

Palestine is at the bottom center of the flag infographic above and at the epicenter of the graphic violence we’re witnessing today. They are the fulcrum of both oppression and resistance in the Middle East, and so this section will be a big one.

PLO/PNA/Fatah/Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade

To start from the start, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was a Resistance group once, but now they’re basically the kapos of the concentration camp. They have been neutered by negotiations and corrupted into becoming colonial administrators more than a decolonial movement. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which they control, has neither a nation nor authority to speak of. The PLO is approved by the West and Israel, which is a bad thing for a resistance organization.

The PLO gave up everything for nothing, and are not worth talking about in this conversation, except as an irritant. I will use PLO interchangeably with its largest faction, Fatah, and the PNA, which they largely control. They are all, at this point, compradors. As Nasrallah said, “Any party, movement or faction that abandons resistance under any pretext, and for any reason, is giving up on a sacred duty,” and I concur. They are increasingly unpopular, in both Gaza and the West Bank, the latter of which they nominally control.

It’s important to note, however, that Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is still part of the active Resistance. Due to assassinations and spies, most Palestinian resistance organizations have political and military wings that are completely independent. Hence the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade features prominently in Resistance actions, though their political wing mostly sucks.

Hamas

Hamas is the big one, the bogeyman that Empire is using to justify massive war crimes. Hamas is actually an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement (Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah), and that’s what they are and do. There is nothing inherently evil about such a movement, just racism about them following Islam. In Western media, the very word Hamas is to conjure up the idea of ‘scary Muslims’, a well-rehearsed trope used by both Western media and Hollywood. If you look into the organization at all, however, it’s just a resistance movement that happens to be Islamic. The Islamic Resistance Movement, as it says on the tin. 

This 'Islamization' of resistance is not even particularly unique to Hamas. As Caridi says, “In Palestine, however, the problem is that this so-called Islamization can be found throughout all political forces, even those that are defined simply—and simplistically—as secular, nationalist, or leftist.” The general repugnance towards Hamas as an Islamic movement is really just racism. As Caridi says about the evolution of Hamas, “by the methodological standards of the history of Western-style political parties, there would be nothing remarkable in such a watershed: from movement to institution, from opposition to governments, from armed struggle to reentry into mainstream politics.” Indeed, the governments of both Israel and America both started with ‘terrorism’, which is really only a bad thing if you lose.

All of the western hand-wringing about violence is really about anyone threatening imperial monopoly of violence, not any problem with violence per se. They just want to be the ones doing it. Western conservatives want Muslims to just shut up and die, and liberals want them to peacefully protest and die, but to the colonized, it’s the same damn result. As Kwame Ture said,“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

Hamas as a resistance movement has figured this out and they use ‘any means necessary’ to liberate their people, including violence. They are not, however, inherently or blindly violent. This ain’t Hollywood and that’s just racist. As Caridi continues, “The first answer — the hardest, the most controversial, but also the most clearly backed by both facts and experts — is that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but rather a political movement that has used terrorism, particularly during a certain phase of its history spanning over two decades.” That phase is notably over and Hamas has returned to its earlier form of targeting the military occupation directly (though not exclusively). I’ll cover Hamas more in detail (in a review of Caridi’s book), but for our purposes here their military wing — the Martyr Izz al-Din Al Qassam Brigades — is more relevant. I’ll refer to them as Al Qassam.

Al Qassam

The thing about Hamas which pisses the West off so much is that they are creating a Palestinian state with an army. And that army is led by Al-Qassam. The PLO had an army but turned it into an internal police state, capos for an ever-shrinking concentration camp. Hamas rebuilt a resistance army and, for that, they are called terrorists, but, again, let’s get realpolitik. If Empire isn’t calling you terrorists, you’re doing it wrong.

The vanguard of the Palestinian Army is the Al Qassam Martyrs Brigade. Al Qassam has some tens of thousands of militants (20–25,000 by some estimates, over 40,000 by others, who knows). They are headed by Mohammed Deif—after the previous commander was killed—and their spokesman is Abu Obeida, who has become something of a folk here. Al Qassam uses homemade Yasin anti-tank weapons (based on Iranian tech) and their own modified rockets, including the M-90, which can reach 90 km. They operate out of some unknown kilometers of tunnels underneath Gaza. Despite being literally underground, they are a formidable fighting force and highly disciplined.


From the M-90 ‘launch’ video, via Fotros Resistance


Ideologically, Al Qassam is named after a preacher/militant killed in 1935 by the British, Izz al-Din al-Qassam. The OG al-Qassam was killed by the British for fighting them and the Zionist colonizer, and now his vision goes on, through his indirect descendants, the Al-Qassam Brigade. The Brigade today is an army of (largely) orphans fighting the Zionists and the latest incarnation of the White Empire, nearly a hundred years later.

Izz al-Din al-Qassam did “his daily work with the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society” and his ‘nightly’ work focused on the root cause of their suffering, the occupation and colonization of their land. As Caridi continues, “al-Qassam moved from straightforward political activity during the early 1930s to the establishment of full-fledged armed groups who carried out attacks against the kibbutzim, which had become the symbols of Zionism… According to the Sheikh, it was necessary to choose an armed jihad.” That is to say, he reached the same insight Kwame Ture did, which is that you have to just fight these people, rather than appeal to a conscience where there is none.

While there is no straight line from Izz al-Din al-Qassam to the martyrs brigade that bears his name, there is an ideological connection. The brigade is also committed to armed jihad and signs off most statements saying ‘it is indeed a jihad of victory or martyrdom.’ And so the struggle (one translation of jihad) goes on, with Al Qassam at the vanguard.

That vanguard shattered enemy lines on October 7th, which is why we’re having this conversation at all. After years of planning, Al Qassam executed a disciplined hit on Israeli military targets—the very bases occupying the concentration camp of Gaza. They also took hostages to exchange for the thousands of Palestinians Israel regularly kidnaps. The humiliated Israelis lied about beheaded babies and rapes— the same lies imperialists use for every slave rebellion and resistance movementbut it wasn’t true at all. The Al Aqsa Flood was a legitimate, military hit by an occupied people that have every right to self-defense, while Israel, as an occupying power, legally has none.

Israel responded with an orgy of war crimes that just made the contrast more clear. The ‘terrorists’ are a disciplined army and the ‘army’ are wild-eyed terrorists. Al Qassam are heroes of the Resistance, bravely blowing up tanks at point-blank range, while the Empire blows up hospitals. Allah knows Palestine needs an army to defend against these monsters, and in Al-Qassam, they have one.

Everyone Else

I’m honestly getting tired here—as you must be of reading all this—and this is also where my own reading stops. For the rest of the resistance groups I will defer to this infographic from the Resistance News Network. This is not because they’re less important—Allah knows they’re putting their lives on the line and everyone counts—but simply because I’m ignorant. You can, however, get a sense from these ‘Pokémon’ cards:


Al Qassam (Hamas) and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah/PLO)


Sarya Al-Quds (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (PFLP, commies/nominally PLO)


Mujahideen Brigades and Al-Nasser Salah Al-Deen Brigades (Popular Resistance Committees)


Omar Al-Qasim Forces (Marxist) and Lions’ Den


Joint Operations Room and Night Confusion


As you can see, there are a lot of Resistance groups in Palestine, because they have a lot of resisting to do. Luckily they’re not alone. Israel is not an isolated thing, it is just part of the greater White Empire, and that Empire is being attacked, in solidarity, across the whole region. Slowly but surely, the carbon crusaders are being kicked out.

Iraq

Most notably they’re being kicked out of Iraq, a nation they still occupy despite being voted out by the very democracy they bombed into the place. The white flag at left is the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units. These are Iraqi state-sponsored militants numbering over 200,000, but as will all these numbers, who knows.  It’s a lot, and they’re quite pissed off at America now, as you’ll see. They’re attacking American bases now, constantly.

Occupation bases in Iraq/Syria have been attacked nearly a hundred times now, with damage as follows:

America has been effectively covering this up, but the attacks are happening and the Americans have likely taken casualties. In response, America hasn’t done much, because they’re simply much weaker than they were in 2001. They can’t muster their own troops if they try, they have to rely on proxy armies willing to kill themselves. America did missile strike a few places in Iraq, leading to massive funerals like below:

The body of the martyr, Commander Montazer Alaa Al-Mamouri — Abu Mahdi, via Sabereen


Whereas the killing in Palestine was a salient but distant issue, now it hits home. The White Empire is under real pressure in Iraq/Syria, and following the general doctrine of Resistance, that pressure is systematically ramping up. Until liberation.

Yemen


Yemen, are the real heroes in the actual 'international community'. Despite suffering from a recent genocidal campaign themselves (from America/Saudi), they assembled a world-class military. That military stepped up to support Palestine by completely taking control of the Red Sea, while American warships float around impotently.

Yemen —the poorest country in the Arab world— has done more for Palestine than any nation-state besides Iran. Despite being divided themselves (a proxy Saudi government claims power), they are united around the Palestine issue, as Muslim countries are supposed to be.

After executing a daring raid on the Israeli-owned Galaxy Leader ship (above), Yemen has —as Israel escalates—escalated the embargo on their eastern shipping route. Do you see the pattern here? While the Empire lashes out like a wounded animal and exhausts itself, the Resistance steadily ramps up operations until liberation.

Yemen first shut down Israeli-owned shipping and now blocks ships going to/from Israel at all (unless they carry relief for the besieged people of Gaza). In response, Israeli Red Sea ports are almost empty, insurance rates have skyrocketed, and Maersk (big shipping company) has stopped all transit through the Red Sea entirely.

This is a serious economic drag on Israel and also a big black eye for America, which is supposed to be a naval power. If the American Empire can’t secure shipping lanes against one of the poorest countries in the world, what sort of power are they? Yemen has shown in yet another way that the Empire has no clothes.



Yemenis honestly seem like great people. The crew on the ships are treated as honored guests, chewing mouthfuls of qat and jamming out to local musicians. Meanwhile, the Galaxy Leader has been turned into a tourist attraction and photo spot for locals. Yemen is punching well above their weight in the Resistance. Much ‘greater’ powers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are frankly humiliated in comparison.

The Resistance Will Be Telegram’d

When I said the Resistance will be Telegram’d at the beginning of this post, I meant that literally. You can follow all of these groups directly, with a little working-around. As I wrote before:

With Telegram and a little working-around Apple/Google censorship, you can follow Hamas’s Al-Qassam BrigadesHezbollah, and Abu Obeida himself. You can follow Ansar Allah Media Center from Yemen, Sabereen for the Iraqi resistance, or great analysts like Fotros Resistance and the Resistance News Network, who aggregate all of the above. You have to take all of this information with plenty of salt and I, in fact, cannot vouch for the provenance of any of them, but you should be doing that with media anyways.

However, to repeat what Pintada told me “I am too lazy and stupid to get access to all those sites that you mentioned,” which is completely understandable. It’s a veritable firehose of information, much of it traumatizing. The value of this direct source of information (most of it auto-translated from Arabic for me) is, however, that it shows a very different picture than the constant Israeli war crimes we have all seen. While that shows the Palestinians being relentlessly beaten, which is true, the Resistance sources show them actively resisting, and winning. At great human cost, but that is the cost. As the Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashal said:

Nations are not easily liberated. The Russians sacrificed 30 million people in World War II in order to liberate it from Hitler’s attack. The Vietnamese sacrificed 3.5 million people until they defeated the Americans. Afghanistan sacrificed millions of martyrs to defeat the USSR and then the US. The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs over 130 years. The Palestinian people are just like any other nation. No nation is liberated without sacrifices.

Today we live at a time of both liberation and devastation. They seem to go together. Devastation is what we want to be liberated from, and when we fight back, it comes all at once.  We live at a time of both imperial collapse and global rebellion, and its epicenter is in occupied Palestine. That fount of so many tears is also the cynosure of all eyes. I am no authority but I am angry and I read these direct sources every day. Now that we’re at least on the same page in terms of who the actors are, I can begin to update you on their actions which, believe you me, are many. As the wheel of oppression breaks under the force of jihad, I hope you have a better sense of who the Axis of Resistance is. Next time, we’ll see how they roll.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
My name is Indrajit Samarajiva and I'm a writer. People call me Indrajit, Indi, Jit, or sometimes even Indica. Most people call me Indi. If you're younger than me you'd call me Ayya or Anna, if you're much younger you'd call me Maama, and if you're older you can call me whatever you want. My parents call me putha,which means human child or more often patiya, which means baby animal. I've wanted to be a writer since Mrs. Stewart gave me scratch-and-sniff stickers in first grade. I was born in 1982 in Vancouver, Canada where my parents were doing their PhDs. I lived in Sri Lanka briefly before moving to Upper Arlington, Ohio, where I grew up (K-12). I studied Cognitive Science at McGill University in Montreal. I started blogging there and have been doing so for over 20 years now. As an adult I moved back to Sri Lanka where I've lived since.


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Al Jazeera cameraman made me coffee just before Israel killed him

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Khalil Abu Shammala
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Al Jazeera cameraman made me coffee just before Israel killed him

Colleagues and friends say a final farewell to Samer Abu Daqqa before he was laid to rest on 16 December. Mustafa Thraya DPA

Last Friday, as usual, I was at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, covering Israel’s genocidal war.

I called Samer Abu Daqqa, a cameraman with Al Jazeera, and a friend. He came quickly, smiling as usual.

“I have coffee on my mind, Samer,” I said.

“Straight away,” he said and went off to make the coffee himself.

It was the last cup of coffee he would make.

Samer left with Al Jazeera correspondent Wael al-Dahdouh to cover the rescue by civil defense workers of a family trapped in their home in the middle of the city of Khan Younis.

The Al Jazeera crew was informed that coordination had been made with the occupation army to let the civil defense vehicles enter. Upon their arrival to the scene, however, an Israeli plane bombed the area, killing Samer, along with three civil defense workers, and wounding Wael.

Wael told me later that he fell to the ground and became dizzy after the first bombing. Then he pulled himself up and ran hundreds of meters away from the target site.

His right arm was bleeding as a result of being hit by shrapnel. An ambulance eventually arrived and took him to Nasser Medical Complex for treatment.

Despite much effort, no one, not even ambulances, could reach Samer, who was left bleeding for about five hours. While trying to crawl to safety, Samer apparently took off the protective armor that journalists wear while working in the field.

Then another airstrike hit, ending his life.

His body was later returned to Nasser Medical Complex, the place where he himself had covered the many martyrs and wounded in the weeks prior to his murder.

All evidence indicates the targeting of the Al Jazeera crew was intentional.

The Israeli military knew in advance through coordination that journalists would be accompanying the civil defense crew to the area.

It should have been clear to the occupation aircraft that those in the area were civil defense crews. They were wearing official uniforms, while the journalists wore armored vests and helmets upon which is clearly written “Press.”

Samer is no longer with us, but he left us with memories of his joyful spirit.

He left us without the chance to say goodbye to his children and his wife in Belgium.

He left our world as a martyr and a witness to mass murder in Gaza.

His murder brings the number of journalists killed to over 90. It is yet another crime committed openly in front of the eyes and ears of the entire world.

That cup of coffee on the morning of his murder turned out to be the final one Samer ever made. It leaves a bitter taste for me that will last forever.

Peace to Samer’s soul.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Khalil Abu Shammala is a human rights activist in Gaza.


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UNZ’ SALVO—Gaza and the Antisemitism Hoax

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Ron Unz
UNZ REVIEW

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Over 14,000 Gazans [ More than 20,000 as per latest conservative estimate on 12.17.23, as many victims—thousands—may still lie under the rubble.—Ed) have died from the relentless Israeli bombardment of the last few weeks, two-thirds of them women and children and almost none of them members of Hamas. That total represents the official figures of identified bodies, and with most of the local medical system destroyed and so many thousands more missing, buried under the rubble of the tens of thousands of demolished buildings, the true death toll probably already exceeds 20,000.

We are certainly witnessing the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world, with nothing even remotely comparable coming to mind. Over the last two years of the bitter war in Ukraine, a Russian missile fired at a military target occasionally caused twenty or forty civilian deaths as accidental collateral damage, and the resulting story spent days dominating the global headlines, then sometimes suddenly vanished once evidence appeared that an errant Ukrainian missile had actually been responsible.

By contrast, what we are now seeing is the deliberate massacre of civilians, aimed at driving out the Palestinians living in Gaza and rendering their enclave uninhabitable. Most of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities have been eliminated, and when the Jordanians established field hospitals in South Gaza, those too were bombarded. Schools, bakeries, and other facilities necessary for continued human existence have also been deliberately destroyed, along with the bulk of the housing stock, while the Israelis have blocked the inhabitants from any access to food, water, and fuel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified his Palestinian adversaries as the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and many of his country’s other political leaders have used equally genocidal language, with one Cabinet minister suggestingthat Israel utilize its illegal nuclear arsenal to eradicate Gaza and its population. Polls show that more than 80% of Israeli Jews support their government’s extremely harsh military measures, hoping to see all the Palestinians killed or expelled.

More and more evidence has steadily accumulated that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of the Israeli civilians killed in the Hamas attack died at the hands of their own country’s trigger-happy military, the victims of tank shells and Hellfire missiles. So the actual number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas fighters might have been as low as just 100 to 200, suggesting that the body-count of Palestinian civilians is at least 100 times larger. Yet despite this 100-to-1 casualty ratio, a recent front-page article in the New York Times by longtime correspondent Roger Cohen treated the tragedy in less than even terms, with a decided tilt towards the Israelis.

In recent years, public life in America and the rest of the West has become inordinately sensitive to the nuances of political correctness, with many regarding the misuse of pronouns as morally unconscionable. Therefore, the widespread graphic images on social media of the public slaughter of so many thousands of helpless babies and children has produced considerable unease, with well over half of Democrats being critical of these developments along with a substantial minority of Republicans.

Drowned Syrian toddler (2015)Back in 2015, the widely broadcast image of a single, accidentally-drowned Syrian toddler led European governments to open their borders to millions of migrants, both from Syria and from everywhere else in the world, mostly young men in the prime of health. Greater Syria had traditionally encompassed Palestinian Gaza, so if a single accidental victim from the former had such enormous, nation-transforming political impact throughout Europe, surely the images of the many thousands deliberately killed in the latter must at least be raising a few personal concerns, though since some of these countries have prohibited expressions of pro-Palestinian sentiment, it’s difficult to be sure.

Many European Jews have wholeheartedly backed the Jewish State even as it commits this gigantic public massacre, and this has naturally provoked a certain amount of popular criticism. Deeply concerned by this latter situation, the New York Times last week ran yet another major article on the desperate need to combat such “anti-Semitic” sentiments in Europe, obviously one of the world’s most dreadful problems.

A few days ago, I’d asked an American academic friend of mine how his colleagues were reacting to this astonishing situation and he replied:

People are too scared to broadcast their views, I think…But I think a good fraction of even normie academics realize there is something monstrous going on.

This sounds plausible to me, and another senior academic I know reported a roughly similar situation. Fear stalks the land.

Students at our most elite universities have been threatened with permanent employment blacklisting if they supported the Palestinian cause, and a long list of Jewish billionaires have mounted similar attacks against the academic institutions themselves, something I cannot recall ever happening in the past. As a result, a legal analysis article commissioned and approved for publication in the prestigious Harvard Law Review was scrapped at the last moment.

From its earliest roots in the terroristic Irgun, Israel’s ruling Likud party has always endorsed the creation of a Greater Israel—“From the River to the Sea”—proclaiming that territory must be placed under Jewish rule, with all non-Jews subjugated, expelled, or killed. But in recent decades, progressive anti-Zionists have co-opted that same ambiguous slogan, using it to symbolize their goal of a unified country of Palestine, a secular democratic state providing equal rights for both Jews and non-Jews, two populations of similar size. This would naturally involve the dissolution of the existing Jewish state, absolute anathema to committed Zionists.

Propelled by the horrific images of dead babies in Gaza, this controversial phrase soon began trending among anti-Zionists on Twitter along with talk of “decolonizing” the Israeli settler-state. Wilting under intense Zionist attacks, owner Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest man—declared that these rather vague and innocuous progressive slogans constituted incitement to “genocide,” with their use being grounds for an immediate ban from his platform. By contrast, I haven’t heard that Musk has banned any of the Israeli politicians or activists publicly calling for the total annihilation of all Palestinians.

Famed Hollywood actress Susan Sarandon had spent decades as a prominent progressive activist, involved in a very wide range of political causes, many of them denounced as “anti-American” by her conservative opponents, and she earned the enthusiastic praise of her peers for her commitment. Yet when she recently showed some public sympathy for the Palestinians, a helpless people now being butchered by the thousands and perhaps soon by the tens of thousands, she was summarily “cancelled” by her longtime talent agency, and others have suffered a similar fate. Around the same time, Maha Dahkil, one of Hollywood’s top talent agents, was demoted and nearly fired for similar reasons. Even before the current fighting began, 80-year-old leftist rockstar Roger Waters of Pink Floyd had been vilified in the international media for supporting Palestinian rights and even bizarrely threatened with a German arrest warrant for supposedly glorifying Nazism.

The lethal accusation of “anti-Semitism” is the charge leveled against all of these individuals, and fear of suffering a similar fate surely keeps a vast number of their like-minded peers silent. In our current Western world, that indictment carries the same weight as “congress with Lucifer” might have held in the Old Salem of the Witch-Trials era.

I discovered that such timidity even extends to many alternative websites and left-liberal bloggers. Although the horrific events in the Israel/Gaza conflict have totally dominated the global headlines during the last few weeks, I’d become rather disappointed that the coverage of such matters had seemed relatively subdued and circumspect.

The Moon of Alabama blogger had fearlessly reported so many controversial facts about the Ukraine war and other important matters, but a few days ago he ran a rather apologetic post entitled “There Are Certain Things I Can Not Write About,” opening with:

I have tried to write about Gaza. But I am too aghast, outraged and depressed to create a sensible piece. So instead of coming up with something by myself I will leave you with a few links…

Given that the blogger is a German living in Germany, he may have also reasonably feared a knock on the door and a prison cell if he were too candid in his views.

Although the Naked Capitalism blog site was originally launched with a heavy economics focus, other topics regularly constitute a substantial majority of the total content, and I’d therefore been disappointed at the lack of heavy Gaza coverage. However, its proprietor Yves Smith finally published a good post last Wednesday, arguing that the proposed truce and prisoner exchange might merely represent a bump in the road for Israel’s success in achieving its extreme objectives, with her closing sentences reading:

Perhaps enough international pressure could eventually be brought on the US to get us to finally pull Israel’s choke chain. But by then, it seems highly likely that Israel will have established facts on the ground in Gaza (deaths plus built environment destruction) for Israel to have decisively won in its aim of removing substantial numbers of Palestinians from Israel permanently.

I only very rarely glance at the resulting discussion-threads, but for some reason I did so this time, and I noticed this exchange between a commenter and Lambert Strether, one of the bloggers:

cnchal: The choke chain runs the other way. Since the “globalists” sit at the top of the economic heap they could induce an instantaneous world wide depression with a capital strike. Now, where would Biden be if that happened?

Fifteen to twenty thousand dead Palestinians so far and another million, nine hundred and eighty five thousand to go, then off to the West Bank for moar is the trajectory. Peace in the desert will be achieved eventually on the globalist’s terms.

Lambert Strether: The only way that your “choke chain” comment makes sense to me is if “‘globalist’” (your quotes) is a euphemism for (capitalist) Jews, since in general, global capital is doing very well for itself right now. Therefore, there’s no reason for capitalists qua capitalists to stage a strike. Since this euphemism is both analytically false and politically destructive, please clarify your usage of the term.

cnchal: Yes, my use of the word globalist in this context is a substitute for the word Jew…

Lambert Strether: Your statement is anti-semitic. We can’t have that here. We’re not entertaining it. (It’s also just analytically terrible and destructive, positing as it does that the first loyalty of capitalists is not to capital, absurd on its face.)

Go away.

And that goes for anyone else with the same view.

UPDATE And if anyone’s thinking of sneaking this false construct through using artful language, don’t even try it. Our moderators are good at doping out things like that, and we’ll whack you, too.

The Jews of Israel are currently committing one of the worst public massacres in the history of the world, with the actions of their government loudly cheered on by many or most of the Jewish elites and populations of Europe and America, but taking notice of that obvious fact even using euphemistic constructs is regarded as a mortal sin. In a 2018 article, I described this sort of bizarre reaction now so widespread across the West:

I believe one factor is that over the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.

This distressing media landscape also exemplifies a very shrewd aphorism widely misattributed to Voltaire:

To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

As these examples suggest, the accusation of “anti-Semitism” has become an enormously powerful political weapon in today’s West, wielded by Jewish and pro-Israel groups as a trump card that still seems to carry the day against all others. So the historical reality of that concept is an important and interesting topic, one that I had discussed at length in a pair of 2018 articles.

The first of these explained how my discovery twenty years ago of a crucial historical fact regarding the true history of the Bolshevik Revolution led to a complete upheaval in my understanding of the issue.

Obviously, this entire landscape was totally transformed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which swept the old order from power, massacring much of its leadership and forcing the remainder to flee, thereby ushering in the modern world era of ideological and revolutionary regimes. I grew up during the final decades of the long Cold War, when the Soviet Union stood as America’s great international adversary, so the history of that revolution and its aftermath always fascinated me. During college and graduate school I probably read at least one hundred books in that general topic, devouring the brilliant works of Solzhenistyn and Sholokhov, the thick historical volumes of mainstream academic scholars such as Adam Ulam and Richard Pipes (professional Neocon, a bad choice for sourcing.—Ed) , as well as the writings of leading Soviet dissidents such as Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov, and Andrei Amalrik. (Again, all professional dissidents playing the anti-communist card.—Ed) I was fascinated by the tragic story of how Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky and his other rivals, leading to the massive purges of the 1930s as Stalin’s growing paranoia produced such gigantic loss of life. (Unz is here drinking the old anti-Stalinist brew, which is just too bad.—Ed)

I was not so totally naive that I did not recognize some of the powerful taboos surrounding discussion of the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding their ethnic composition. Although most of the books hardly emphasized the point, anyone with a careful eye for the occasional sentence or paragraph would surely know that Jews were enormously over-represented among the top revolutionaries, with three of Lenin’s five potential successors— Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—all coming from that background, along with many, many others within the top Communist leadership. Obviously, this was wildly disproportionate in a country having a Jewish population of perhaps 4%, and surely helped explain the large spike in worldwide hostility towards Jews soon afterward, which sometimes took the most deranged and irrational forms, such as the popularity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s notorious publication of The International Jew. But with Russian Jews so much more likely to be educated and urbanized, and suffering from fierce anti-Semitic oppression under the Czars, everything seemed to make reasonable sense.


Then perhaps fourteen or fifteen years ago, I encountered a rip in my personal space-time continuum, among the first of many to come.


In this particular instance, an especially rightwing friend of evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran had been spending long days browsing the pages of Stormfront, a leading Internet forum for the Far Right, and having come across a remarkable factual claim, asked me for my opinion. Allegedly Jacob Schiff, America’s leading Jewish banker, had been the crucial financial supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, providing the Communist revolutionaries with $20 million in funding.

My first reaction was that such a notion was utterly ridiculous since a fact so enormously explosive could not have been ignored by the many dozens of books I had read on the origins of that revolution. But the source seemed extremely precise. The Knickerbocker columnist in the February 3, 1949 edition of The New York Journal-American, then one of the leading local newspapers, wrote that “Today it is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.”


[In this, Unz also seems sadly mistaken if not incredibly naive about the workings of the fanatical rightwing mind. This notion that Western billionaires financed Lenin is indeed ludicrous, and it has been debunked. It is just one of those bizarre memes that gain traction among rightwingers with a lurid imagination and massive ignorance about history (not that reliable historical accounts can be had by just grabbing the nearest history book). Such people naturally reject the much simpler truth offered by class analysis. Such people also claim that Obama is a Communist, and that the Rockefellers are in reality part of a secret communist Jewish conspiracy bent on taking over the world. —Ed.)]


Once I checked around a little, I discovered that numerous mainstream accounts described the enormous hostility of Schiff towards the Czarist regime for its ill-treatment of Jews, and these days even so establishmentarian a source as Wikipedia’s entry on Jacob Schiff notes that he played a major role financing the Russian Revolution of 1905, as was revealed in the later memoirs of one of his key operatives. And if you run a search on “jacob schiff bolshevik revolution” numerous other references come up, representing a wide variety of different positions and degrees of credibility. One very interesting statement appears in the memoirs of Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The Times of London and one of the foremost international journalists of his era. He very matter-of-factly mentioned that Schiff, Warburg and the other top Jewish international bankers were among the leading backers of the Jewish Bolsheviks, through whom they hoped to gain an opportunity for the Jewish exploitation of Russia, and he described their lobbying efforts on behalf of their Bolshevik allies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following the end of the First World War.

Now admittedly, a few details might easily have gotten somewhat garbled over time. For example, although Trotsky quickly became second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik hierarchy, in early 1917 the two men were still bitterly hostile over various ideological disputes, so he certainly was not then considered a member of that party. And since everyone today acknowledges that Schiff had heavily financed the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, it seems perfectly possible that the $20 million figure mentioned by his grandson refers to the total invested over the years supporting all the different Russian revolutionary movements and leaders, which together finally culminated in the establishment of Bolshevik Russia. But with so many seemingly credible and independent sources all making such similar claims, the basic facts appear almost indisputable.

Consider the implications of this remarkable conclusion. I would assume that most of Schiff’s funding of revolutionary activities was spent on items such as stipends for activists and bribes, and adjusted for the average family incomes of that era, $20 million would be as much as $2 billion in present-day money. Surely without such enormous financial support, the likelihood of any Bolshevik victory would have been far lower, perhaps almost impossible.

When people casually used to joke about the total insanity of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” no better example was ever tossed around than the self-evidently absurd notion that the international Jewish bankers had created the worldwide Communist movement. And yet by any reasonable standard, this statement appears to be more or less true, and apparently was widely known at least in rough form for decades after the Russian Revolution, but had never been mentioned in any of the numerous more recent histories that shaped my own knowledge of those events. Indeed, none of these very comprehensive sources had ever even mentioned Schiff’s name, although it was universally acknowledged that he had funded the 1905 Revolution, which was often discussed in enormous detail in many of those very weighty books. What other astonishing facts might they similarly be concealing?

When someone encounters remarkable new revelations in an area of history in which his knowledge was rudimentary, being little more than introductory textbooks or History 101 courses, the result is a shock and an embarrassment. But when the same situation occurs in an area in which he had read tens of thousands of pages in the leading authoritative texts, which seemingly explored every minor detail, surely his sense of reality begins to crumble.

In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank.

When one discovers a tear in the fabric of reality, there is a natural tendency to nervously peer inside, wondering what mysterious objects might dwell within. The Ackerman book denounced the notion of Schiff having funded the Bolsheviks as “a favorite trope of Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda” and just prior to those words he issued a similar denunciation of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, a publication that once would have meant almost nothing to me. Although Ackerman’s particular book had not yet been published when I first began considering the Schiff story a dozen years ago, many other writers had similarly conjoined those two topics, so I decided to explore the matter. Ford himself was a very interesting individual, and his world-historical role certainly received very scanty coverage in my basic history textbooks. Although the exact reasons for his decision to raise his minimum wage to $5 per day in 1914—double the existing average pay for industrial workers in America—can be disputed, it certainly seems to have played a huge role in the creation of our middle class. He also adopted a highly paternalistic policy of providing good company housing and other amenities to his workers, a total departure from the “Robber Baron” capitalism so widely practiced at that time, thereby establishing himself as a world-wide hero to industrial workers and their advocates. Indeed, Lenin himself had regarded Ford as a towering figure in the world’s revolutionary firmament, glossing over his conservative views and commitment to capitalism and instead focusing on his remarkable achievements in worker productivity and economic well-being. It is a forgotten detail of history that even after Ford’s considerable hostility to the Russian Revolution became widely known, the Bolsheviks still described their own industrial development policy as “Fordism.” Indeed, it was not unusual to see portraits of Lenin and Ford hanging side-by-side in Soviet factories, representing the two greatest secular saints of the Bolshevik pantheon.

As for The Dearborn Independent, Ford had apparently launched his newspaper on a national basis not long after the end of the war, intending to focus on controversial topics, especially those related to Jewish misbehavior, whose discussion he believed was being ignored or suppressed by nearly all mainstream media outlets. I had been aware that he had long been one of the wealthiest and most highly-regarded individuals in America, but I was still astonished to discover that his weekly newspaper, previously almost unknown to me, had reached a total national circulation of 900,000 by 1925, ranking it as the second largest in the country and by far the biggest with a national distribution. I found no easy means of examining the contents of a typical issue, but apparently the anti-Jewish articles of the first couple of years had been collected and published as short books, together constituting the four volumes of The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a notoriously anti-Semitic work occasionally mentioned in my history textbooks. Eventually my curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked a few buttons on Amazon.com, bought the set, and wondered what I would discover.

Based on all my pre-suppositions, I expected to read some foaming-at-the-mouth screed, and doubted I would be able to get past the first dozen pages before losing interest and consigning the volumes to gather dust on my shelves. But what I actually encountered was something entirely different.

Over the last couple of decades, the enormous growth in the power of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in America has occasionally led writers to cautiously raise certain facts regarding the untoward influence of those organizations and activists, while always carefully emphasizing that the vast majority of ordinary Jews do not benefit from these policies and actually might be harmed by them, even leaving aside the possible risk of eventually provoking an anti-Jewish backlash. To my considerable surprise, I found that the material in Ford’s 300,000 word series seemed to follow this exact same pattern and tone.

The individual 80 chapter-columns of Ford’s volumes generally discuss particular issues and events, some of which were well-known to me, but with most totally obscured by the passage of almost a hundred years. However, as far as I could tell, almost all the discussions seemed quite plausible and factually-oriented, even sometimes overly cautious in their presentation, and with one possible exception I can’t recall anything that seemed fanciful or unreasonable. As an example, there was no claim that Schiff or his fellow Jewish bankers had funded the Bolshevik Revolution since those particular facts had not yet come out, only that he had seemed to be strongly supportive of the overthrow of Czarism, and had worked toward that end for many years, motivated by what he regarded as the hostility of the Russian Empire towards its Jewish subjects. This sort of discussion is not all that different from what one might find in a modern Schiff biography or in his Wikipedia entry, though many of the important details presented in the Ford books have disappeared from the historical record.

Although I somehow managed to plow through all four volumes of The International Jew, the unrelenting drum-beat of Jewish intrigue and misbehavior became somewhat soporific after a while, especially since so many of the examples provided may have loomed quite large in 1920 or 1921 but were almost totally forgotten today. Most of the content was a collection of rather monotonous complaints regarding Jewish malfeasance, scandals, or clannishness, the sort of mundane matters which might have normally appeared in the pages of an ordinary newspaper or magazine, let alone one of the muckraking type.

However, I cannot fault the publication for having such a narrow focus. A consistent theme was that because of the intimidating fear of Jewish activists and influence, virtually all of America’s regular media outlets avoided discussion of any of these important matters, and since this new publication was intended to fill that void, it necessarily provided coverage overwhelmingly skewed toward that particular subject. The articles were also aimed at gradually expanding the window of public debate and eventually shaming other periodicals into discussing Jewish misbehavior. When leading magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly and Century Magazine began running such articles, this result was hailed as a major success.

Another important goal was to make ordinary Jews more aware of the very problematical behavior of many of their community leaders. Occasionally, the publication received a letter of praise from a self-proclaimed “proud American Jew” commending the series and sometimes including a check to purchase subscriptions for other members of his community, and this achievement might become the subject of an extended discussion.



And although the details of these individual stories differed considerably from those of today, the pattern of behavior being criticized seemed remarkably similar. Change a few facts, adjust the society for a century of progress, and many of the stories might be exactly the same ones that well-meaning people concerned about the future of our country are quietly discussing today. Most remarkably, there were even a couple of columns about the troubled relationship between the earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine and the surrounding native Palestinians, and deep complaints that under Jewish pressure the media often totally misreported or hid some of the outrages suffered by the latter group.

I cannot vouch for the overall accuracy of the contents of these volumes, but at the very least they would constitute an extremely valuable source of “raw material” for further historical investigation. So many of the events and incidents they recount seem to have been entirely omitted from the major media publications of that day, and certainly were never included in later historical narratives, given that even such widely known stories as Schiff’s major financial backing for the Bolsheviks were completely tossed down George Orwell’s “memory hole.” The International Jew The World’s Foremost Problem Henry Ford • 1920 • 323,000 Words American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 6,900 Words

I found these revelations shocking, both with regard to the crucial role of Jacob Schiff in the Bolshevik Revolution and the rather mundane and plausible contents of Ford’s notorious work The International Jew. This forced me to completely reassess my framework of assumptions, and in my next article, I carefully investigated the historical reality of “anti-Semitism.”

I recently published a couple of long essays, and although they primarily focused on other matters, the subject of anti-Semitism was a strong secondary theme. In that regard, I mentioned my shock at discovering a dozen or more years ago that several of the most self-evidently absurd elements of anti-Semitic lunacy, which I had always dismissed without consideration, were probably correct…

When one discovers that matters of such enormous moment not only apparently occurred but that they had been successfully excluded from nearly all of our histories and media coverage for most of the last one hundred years, the implications take some time to properly digest. If the most extreme “anti-Semitic canards” were probably true, then surely the whole notion of anti-Semitism warrants a careful reexamination.

All of us obtain our knowledge of the world by two different channels. Some things we discover from our own personal experiences and the direct evidence of our senses, but most information comes to us via external sources such as books and the media, and a crisis may develop when we discover that these two pathways are in sharp conflict. The official media of the old USSR used to endlessly trumpet the tremendous achievements of its collectivized agricultural system, but when citizens noticed that there was never any meat in their shops, “Pravda” became a watchword for “Lies” rather than “Truth.”

Now consider the notion of “anti-Semitism.” Google searches for that word and its close variants reveal over 24 million hits, and over the years I’ve surely seen that term tens of thousands of times in my books and newspapers, and heard it endlessly reported in my electronic media and entertainment. But thinking it over, I’m not sure I can ever recall a single real-life instance that I’ve personally encountered, nor have I heard of almost any such cases from my friends or acquaintances. Indeed, the only persons I’ve ever come across making such claims were individuals who bore unmistakable signs of serious psychological imbalance. When the daily newspapers are brimming with lurid tales of hideous demons walking among us and attacking people on every street corner, but you yourself have never actually seen one, you may gradually grow suspicious.

Over the years some of my own research has uncovered a sharp contrast between image and reality. As recently as the late 1990s, leading mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times were still denouncing a top Ivy League school such as Princeton for the supposed anti-Semitism of its college admissions policy, but a few years ago when I carefully investigated that issue in quantitative terms for my lengthy Meritocracy analysis I was very surprised to reach a polar-opposite conclusion. According to the best available evidence, white Gentiles were over 90% less likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the other Ivies than were Jews of similar academic performance, a truly remarkable finding. If the situation had been reversed and Jews were 90% less likely to be found at Harvard than seemed warranted by their test scores, surely that fact would be endlessly cited as the absolute smoking-gun proof of horrendous anti-Semitism in present-day America.

It has also become apparent that a considerable fraction of what passes for “anti-Semitism” these days seems to stretch that term beyond all recognition. A few weeks ago an unknown 28-year-old Democratic Socialist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez scored a stunning upset primary victory over a top House Democrat in New York City, and naturally received a blizzard of media coverage as a result. However, when it came out that she had denounced the Israeli government for its recent massacre of over 140 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, cries of “anti-Semite” soon appeared, and according to Google there are now over 180,000 such hits combining her name and that harsh accusatory term. Similarly, just a few days ago the New York Times ran a major story reporting that all of Britain’s Jewish newspapers had issued an “unprecedented” denunciation of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, describing it as an “existential threat” to the Jewish community for the anti-Semitism it was fostering; but this apparently amounted to nothing more than its willingness to sharply criticize the Israeli government for its long mistreatment of the Palestinians.

It was obvious that in today’s political world, “anti-Semitism” had become a wildly-exaggerated, even meaningless accusation. So I decided to carefully explore its historical reality in the past, especially in the years prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, given that the very heavy involvement of Jews in the event had subsequently produced a popular backlash in other countries. 

In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Jew Accused by Albert Lindemann, a noted scholar of European ideological movements, and his book focused on exactly that era and those sorts of incidents. Although the text is quite short, running less than 300 pages, Lindemann built his discussion upon a huge foundation of secondary literature, with his footnotes drawn from the 200 works included in his extensive bibliography. As far as I could tell, he seems a very scrupulous scholar, generally providing the multiple, often conflicting accounts of a given incident, and coming to his own conclusions with considerable hesitation.
 

A few years later, Lindemann expanded his examination of historical anti-Semitism into a much broader treatment, Esau’s Tears, which appeared in 1997 and was nearly twice as long, providing comparative studies of the social landscape in numerous additional countries, including Germany, Britain, and Italy. Taken together the two volumes ran nearly 900 pages and constituted a very thorough and meticulously objective discussion of a social phenomenon so heavily covered in our media.

Lindemann’s major focus and the centerpiece of his first book were three of the world’s most notorious examples of anti-Semitism prior to the First World War, all of which had had fateful, long-term consequences while receiving attention in my introductory textbooks.

This approach is certainly demonstrated in the first of his major cases, the notorious Dreyfus affair of late 19th century France, probably one of history’s most famous anti-Semitic incidents. Although he concludes that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was very likely innocent of the charge of espionage, he notes the seemingly strong evidence that initially led to his arrest and conviction and finds—contrary to myth-making by numerous later writers—absolutely no indications that his Jewish origins played any role whatsoever in his predicament. •


However, he does note some of the underlying social context to this fierce political battle. Although only one Frenchman in a thousand was Jewish, just a few years earlier a group of Jews had been the leading culprits behind several huge financial scandals that had impoverished large numbers of small investors, and the swindlers afterward escaped any punishment by means of political influence and bribery. Given this history, much of the outrage of the anti-Dreyfusards probably arose from their fears that a Jewish military spy from a very wealthy family might be able to walk free using similar tactics, and the public claims that Dreyfus’s brother was offering enormous bribes to win his release certainly strengthened this concern. •


Lindemann’s discussion of the 1913 Leo Frank Affair, in which a wealthy Northern Jew working in Atlanta was accused of sexually-assaulting and murdering a young girl, is even more interesting. Once again, he notes that contrary to the traditional narrative, there seems absolutely no hint that Frank’s Jewish background played any role in his arrest or conviction. Indeed, at his trial it was instead his very highly-paid defense attorneys who unsuccessfully sought to “play the race card” with the jurors by crudely attempting to deflect suspicion upon a local black worker by means of racially-charged invective. •


Although Lindemann regards Frank as probably innocent, my own reading of the evidence he presents suggests the overwhelming likelihood of his guilt. Meanwhile, it seems undeniable that the outpouring of popular anger against Frank was produced by the vast ocean of outside Jewish money—at least $15 million or more in present-day dollars—that was committed to the legal efforts to save the life of someone widely regarded as a brutal murderer. There are strong suggestions that far more improper means were also employed, including bribery and influence-peddling, so that after Frank was convicted by a jury of his peers and thirteen separate legal appeals were denied, a governor with strong personal ties to the defense lawyers and Jewish interests chose to spare Frank’s life a few months before leaving office. Under these circumstances, the lynch-mob that hung Frank was viewed by the community as merely enforcing his official death sentence by extra-judicial means. •


I also discovered that the leading figures in the anti-Frank movement had views far nuanced than I had expected. For example, populist writer Tom Watson had previously been a strong defender of Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, while ferociously denouncing the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Goulds as the “true destroyers” of Jeffersonian democracy, so his outrage that Frank might escape punishment for murder seemed motivated by the extreme wealth of Frank’s family and his supporters rather than any pre-existing anti-Semitic sentiments. •


After some additional research and reading, I eventually concluded that the evidence for Frank’s guilt was absolutely overwhelming and even discovered that the traditional understanding of the case was actually inverted. Frank and his Jewish allies had desperately played upon the notorious racist sentiments of the Old South, attempting to orchestrate the lynching of various totally innocent black men in order to hide Frank’s guilt. But the white Southern jury saw through their scheme and Frank was the one sentenced to hang, as I recapitulated in an article earlier this year:
American Pravda: The Leo Frank Case and the Origins of the ADL Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 27, 2023 • 5,300 Words

The unmistakable conclusion of Lindemann’s analysis is that if the defendants in both the Dreyfus and Frank cases had not been Jewish, they would have suffered identical arrests and convictions, but lacking any wealthy and politically mobilized Jewish community to rally around them, they would have received their punishments, just or unjust, and immediately been forgotten. Instead, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, later claimed that the massive anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Affair was the basis of his personal ideological awakening, while the Frank Affair led to the establishment of America’s Anti-Defamation League. And both these cases have entered our history books as among the most notorious examples of pre-World War I anti-Semitism.

Lindemann’s discussion of the often difficult relations between Russia’s restive Jewish minority and its huge Slavic majority is also quite interesting, and he provides numerous instances in which major incidents, supposedly demonstrating the enormously strong appeal of vicious anti-Semitism, were quite different than has been suggested by the legend. The famous Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 was obviously the result of severe ethnic tension in that city, but contrary to the regular accusations of later writers, there seems absolutely no evidence of high-level government involvement, and the widespread claims of 700 dead that so horrified the entire world were grossly exaggerated, with only 45 killed in the urban rioting. Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel, later promoted the story that he himself and some other brave Jewish souls had personally defended their people with revolvers in hand even as they saw the mutilated bodies of 80 Jewish victims. This account was totally fictional since Weizmann happened to have been hundreds of miles away when the riots occurred.

Although a tendency to lie and exaggerate was hardly unique to the political partisans of Russian Jewry, the existence of a powerful international network of Jewish journalists and Jewish-influenced media outlets ensured that such concocted propaganda stories might receive enormous worldwide distribution, while the truth followed far behind, if at all.

but the obvious explanation was extraordinary Jewish fecundity, which far outstripped that of their Slavic fellow countrymen, and quickly led them to outgrow the available spots in any of their traditional “middleman” occupations, a situation worsened by their total disinclination to engage in agriculture or other primary-producer activities. Jewish communities expressed horror at the risk of losing their sons to the Czarist military draft, but this was simply the flip-side of the full Russian citizenship they had been granted, and no different from what was faced by their non-Jewish neighbors.

Certainly the Jews of Russia suffered greatly from widespread riots and mob attacks in the generation prior to World War I, and these did sometimes have substantial government encouragement, especially in the aftermath of the very heavy Jewish role in the 1905 Revolution. But we should keep in mind that a Jewish plotter had been implicated in the killing of Czar Alexander II, and Jewish assassins had also struck down several top Russian ministers and numerous other government officials. If the last decade or two had seen American Muslims assassinate a sitting U.S. President, various leading Cabinet members, and a host of our other elected and appointed officials, surely the position of Muslims in this country would have become a very uncomfortable one.

As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia’s very rapidly growing Jewish population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms.

These cases are widely regarded as three of the most egregious examples of anti-Semitism in all of human history, and they separately gave birth to the Zionist movement, led to the founding of the ADL, and inspired the revolutionary, anti-Czarist fervor and funding that ultimately resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet when viewed in the cold light of reality, it was not clear to me whether any of them actually constituted “anti-Semitism” in any legitimate sense of the word, and the same was generally true for the long list of far lesser incidents that fill the remainder of Lindemann’s 900 pages of careful historical analysis. All of this suggested that “anti-Semitism” had always been more of an ideological phantasm deployed as a political weapon rather than any sort of meaningful concept in the real world, not merely today but also in the historical past.

Some Jewish scholars, loathe to accept that possibility, seemed to immediately recognize the potential political threat posed by Lindemann’s objective scholarship and they reacted accordingly, though their harsh attacks were rebutted by other, apparently less ideologically-driven academics:

But although I found his analysis quite useful and interesting, the extraordinarily harsh attacks his text provoked from some outraged Jewish academics seemed even more intriguing.

For example, Judith Laikin Elkin opened her discussion in The American Historical Review by describing the book as a “545-page polemic” a strange characterization of a work so remarkably even-handed and factually-based in its scholarship. Writing in Commentary, Robert Wistrich was even harsher, stating that merely reading the contents had been a painful experience for him, and his review seemed filled with spittle-flecked rage. Unless these individuals had somehow gotten copies of a different book, I found their attitudes simply astonishing.

I was not alone in such a reaction. Richard S. Levy of the University of Illinois, a noted scholar of anti-Semitism, expressed amazement at Wistrich’s seemingly irrational outburst, while Paul Gottfried, writing in Chronicles, mildly suggested that Lindemann had “touched raw nerves.” Indeed, Gottfried’s own evaluation quite reasonably criticized Lindemann for perhaps being a little too even-handed, sometimes presenting numerous conflicting analyses without choosing between them. For those interested, a good discussion of the book by Alan Steinweis, a younger scholar specializing in the same topic, is conveniently available online.

The remarkable ferocity with which some Jewish writers attacked Lindemann’s meticulous attempt to provide an accurate history of anti-Semitism may carry more significance than merely an exchange of angry words in low-circulation academic publications. If our mainstream media shapes our reality, scholarly books and the articles they influence tend to set the contours of that media coverage. And the ability of a relatively small number of agitated and energetic Jews to police the acceptable boundaries of historical narratives may have enormous consequences for our larger society, deterring scholars from objectively reporting historical facts and preventing students from discovering them.

Jews as a people have existed for thousands of years and their often bitter conflict against others around them certainly stretches back that far, with Wistrich having published a book entitled Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred. The Wikipedia entry on the History of Anti-Semitism runs 18,000 words, containing a multitude of references and well over 200 footnotes.

But while the term “Anti-Semitism” is so powerful in today’s political debate, it was only first coined in the late nineteenth century by journalist Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist writer and former radical. Although his first three wives were all of Jewish ancestry, Marr became alarmed by the growing control over finance and industry exercised by his country’s tiny Jewish minority, which he viewed in racial rather than religious terms, and he therefore founded the League of Anti-Semites to combat such encroachments. Thus, over the course of a century, Jewish media control has successfully transformed a term originally intended to challenge Jewish power and influence into one of the ideological weapons used to maintain it.

As we have seen above, the historical evidence for the existence of “anti-Semitism” in any meaningful sense really seems rather meager, and such apparent hostility was usually either fabricated by heavily distorted accounts or else appeared in direct response to very serious Jewish provocations. With perhaps 20,000 Gazan Palestinians having now been slaughtered by Jews, I don’t doubt that the miserable survivors currently feel a great deal of hostility towards the group responsible, but how could we possibly expect anything else? Do we gain any extra insight by labeling this animosity “anti-Semitism”?

Meanwhile, in sharp contrast, the fundamental tenets of traditional Judaism have always included an enormous amount of inherent hostility towards all non-Jews, something that has been widely remarked upon for thousands of years. As I discussed in 2018:

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.

Despite these facts, the reifying power of the term “anti-Semitism” has helped ensure that any hostility displayed by Gentiles towards Jews enjoys an enormously higher profile than any reciprocal hostility in the other direction, with the latter lacking any name to give the concept solid meaning. Indeed, over the years I’ve occasionally seen some anti-Jewish activists attempt to fill that gap by inventing new terms such as “anti-Goyism” or “loxism,” but given their lack of media power, none of these have caught on.

Yet named or not, the phenomenon is certainly real, with bits of evidence occasionally seeping out. Despite the current 100-to-1 civilian casualty ratio, tendentious pro-Israel propaganda has currently stoked enormous levels of Jewish hatred towards Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, which sometimes leads to striking real-world incidents. Just a few days ago, a Jewish former State Department official, a senior figure who had been responsible for Israel/Palestine relations in the Obama Administration, was caught on video berating a random Egyptian immigrant food cart vendor in New York City, promising to use his powerful political connections to have the poor man’s family brutally tortured and killed.

Meet Stuart Seldowitz, a former advisor to the White House who used to advise Obama on foreign policy.

He is a three-time winner of the State Department’s Superior Honour Award.
pic.twitter.com/DYDUKnhmEw

— Zara Magnusson (@zaramagnusson) November 21, 2023

That astonishing video clip together with its longer versions received well over 10 million impressions on Twitter, and provoked such a furor that it led to the man’s arrest on charges of “harassment.” Because the victim was Muslim, the outrageous behavior was described as “Islamophobic.” But under slightly different circumstances, I’m sure the target of his wrath could have just as easily been a German or an Anglo-Saxon or any other Gentile group, with the behavior then lacking any identifying name. Indeed, the same perpetrator had reportedly been similarly accosting and insulting ethnic Russians earlier this year.

Just a few weeks ago, a top Israeli political figure interviewed on KremlinTV had denounced Russia for being insufficiently pro-Israel in the current conflict and outrageously threatened the country possessing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal:


Finally, in the most astonishing example of all, Israel’s national broadcaster released a propaganda video showing sweet young Israeli children singing songs calling for the total annihilation of Gaza and all of its inhabitants. The video was eventually deleted after the Israelis realized that other peoples around the world may have other ways of thinking and might consider it inappropriate.

🚨WATCH: Israeli children sing, "We will annihilate everyone" in Gaza, against a background of destruction.

Disturbing video was posted, then deleted by Israeli national broadcaster @kann_news.

We captured it and added English subtitles

FULL STORY: https://t.co/fzS5bu2NBx pic.twitter.com/pKut1WYixi

— Electronic Intifada (@intifada) November 19, 2023

Copies of this striking song video remain in circulation and have been viewed many millions of times around the world, perhaps providing an important insight into the thinking of Israeli Jews, and this telling incident was discussed on the Grayzone.

In his sharp criticism, Max Blumenthal characterized this Israeli video as “Nazi-esque” but I think he is almost certainly mistaken. If any such official propaganda project had ever been undertaken in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, it surely would have subsequently become the centerpiece of every American documentary seeking to demonstrate the unspeakable evil of Nazi Germany. Indeed, I suspect that the notion of the German government coaching young German children into singing songs calling for the total annihilation of Jews or any other group would have been utterly unimaginable in that society. As I half-jokingly suggested in a 2018 article, Nazism might reasonably be characterized as “Judaism for wimps.”

I have explained that decades ago a small handful of shocking discoveries caused me to completely reassess my understanding of the world and begin considering ideas that I previously would have dismissed. I suspect that the graphic images coming out of destroyed Gaza and some of the surprising behavior of Israel’s governmental leaders and its committed advocates may now be having a similar effect upon hundreds of millions of individuals around the world, including some in our own country. And this may be the most important long-term consequence of the sanguinary events that were triggered by the Hamas attack last month.

We must carefully distinguish between the realities of the world and the extreme beliefs that agitated Jewish propagandists have often projected upon their various adversaries, both past and present. I touched upon this issue in several of my pieces from earlier this year, published prior to the outbreak of the current Israel/Gaza conflict.

Related Reading:

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Ron Unz, who is Jewish, is The Unz Review's publisher and founding editor.


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