It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Death by Fungi: Cashing in on Erin Patterson
by Binoy Kampmark / July 9th, 2025
She has become a notorious figure of international interest, shamelessly exploited for news cycles, commercial worth, and career advancement. After a trial lasting nine weeks, conducted at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, Victoria, Erin Patterson, a stocky, thick-set mother of two, was found guilty of three murders and an attempted murder. Date: July 29, 2023, in the town of Leongatha. Her weapon in executing her plot of Sophoclean extravagance: death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) served in a beef Wellington. Her targets: in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson. Of the four, only Ian survived the culinary killings – barely. Prudently, estranged husband Simon chose not to attend.
News outlets thought it useful to produce graphics about this Australian’s terminating exploits. CNN produced one with voyeuristic relish, making it appear much like a Midsomer Murders episode. Details aplenty are provided, including the gruesome end for the victims. “Gail and Heather died on August 4 [2023] from multiorgan failure, followed by Don on August 5 after he failed to respond to a liver transplant.” Fortunately, Ian Wilkinson survived, but the rumour-mongering hack journalist can barely take it, almost regretful of that fact: “after almost two months of intensive treatment”, he was discharged.
Having an opinion on this case has become standard fare, amassing on a turd heap of supposition, second guessing and wonder. The range is positively Chaucerian in its village variety. The former court official interviewed about the killer’s guilty mind and poisoning stratagems, stating the obvious and dulling. The criminologist, keen on career advancement and pseudo-psychology, attempted to gain insight into Patterson’s mind, commenting on her apparent ordinariness.
One example of the latter is to be found in The Conversation, where we are told by Xanthe Mallett with platitudinous and forced certainty how Patterson, speaking days after the incident, “presented as your typical, average woman of 50.” If attempting to kill four people using fungi is a symptom of average, female ordinariness of a certain age, we all best start making our own meals. But Mallett thinks it is precisely that sense of the ordinary that led to a public obsession, a mania with crime and motivation. “The juxtaposition between the normality of a family lunch (and the sheer vanilla-ness of the accused) and the seriousness of the situation sent the media into overdrive.”
This is certainly not the view of Dr. Chris Webster, who answered the Leongatha Hospital doorbell when Patterson first presented. Realising her link to the other four victims suffering symptoms of fungal poisoning, Webster explained that death cap mushrooms were suspected. Asking Patterson where she got them, she replied with one word: “Woolworths.” This was enough for the doctor to presume guilt, an attitude which certainly gave one of Australia’s most ruthless supermarket chains a graceful pardon. “She was evil and very smart to have planned it all and carried out but didn’t quite dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.”
The marketer, thrilled with branding and promotion, suggests how Patterson Inc. can become an ongoing concern of merchandise, plays, and scripts. (Think of a shirt sporting the following: “I ate beef Wellington and survived”.) The ABC did not waste much time commissioning Toxic, a show created by Elise McCredie and Tony Ayres, aided by ABC podcaster Rachel Brown. Ayres hams it up by saying that, “True stories ask storytellers to probe the complexities of human behaviour. What really lies beneath the headlines? It’s both a challenge and a responsibility to go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just to sensationalise.” Given that this project is a child of frothy publicity born from sensationalism and hysteria, the comment is almost touching.
The media prompts and updates, mischaracterising Patterson as “The Mushroom Murderer”, leave the impression that she really did like killing fungi. But an absolute monster must be found, and the press hounds duly found it. Papers like the Herald Sun preferred the old Rupert Murdoch tactic: till the soil to surface level to find requisite dirt. According to a grimy bit of reporting from that most distinguished of Melbourne rags, “the callous murderer, whose maiden name was Scutter before marrying Simon Patterson in 2007, was secretly dubbed ‘Scutter the Nutter’ among her training group.” The Australianwas in a didactic mood, unhappy that the judge did not make it even more obvious that a crime, committed by a woman involving poison and “not a gun or a knife”, was equally grave.
To complete the matter was an aggrieved home cook, Nagi Maehashi, who also rode the wave of publicity by expressing sadness that her recipe had become a lethal weapon. (Presumably, Maehashi did not have lethal mushrooms in her original recipe, but precision slides in publicity.) Overcome with false modesty in this glare of publicity, Maehashi did not wish to take interviews, but felt her misused work deserved a statement. “It is, of course, upsetting to learn that one of my recipes – possibly the one I’ve spent more hours perfecting than any other – something I created to bring joy and happiness, is entangled in a tragic situation,” she moaned on Instagram. Those familiar with Maehashi will note her tendency to megalomania in the kitchen, especially given recipes that have been created long before she turned to knife and spatula.
The ones forgotten will be those victims who died excruciatingly before their loved ones in a richly sadistic exercise. At the end of it all, the entire ensemble of babblers, hucksters, and chancers so utterly obsessed with what took place in Leongatha should thank Patterson. Her murders have excited, enthralled, and given people purpose. She will start conversations, fill pockets, extend careers, and, if we are to believe some recent reporting, make meals for her fellow inmates in prison.
Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military
by Visualizing Palestine / July 9th, 2025
Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza has been fueled by a surge in deliveries of military-grade jet fuel from U.S. providers. In this visual, we expose the companies and governments complicit in this supply chain, while highlighting grassroots efforts to track and disrupt this deadly cargo through direct action, boycott campaigns, and community resistance.
Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.
Gunfire Communication with “Zombie Hordes”: The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the IDF
by Binoy Kampmark / July 8th, 2025
It’s made to order. First, eliminate the aid system after creating circumstances of enormous suffering. Then, kill, starve, vanquish, and displace those in need of that aid. Finally, give the pretence of humanity by ensuring some aid to those whose suffering you created in the first place.
As things stand, the system of aid distribution in the Gaza Strip is intended to cause suffering and destruction to recipients. Since May 26, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaque entity with Israeli and US backing, has run the distribution of parcels from a mere four points, a grim joke given the four hundred or so outlets previously operated by the United Nations Palestinian relief agency. The entire process of seeking aid has been heavily rationed and militarized, with Israeli troops and private contractors exercising murderous force with impunity. Opening times are not set, rendering the journey to the distribution points even more precarious. When they do open, they do so for short spells.
Haaretz has run reports quoting soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces claiming to have orders to deliberately fire upon unarmed crowds on their perilous journey to the food sites. In a June 27 piece, the paper quotes a soldier describing the distribution sites as “a killing field.” Where he was stationed, “between one and five people were killed every day.” Those seeking aid were “treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
The interviewed soldier could recall no instance of return fire. “There’s no enemy, no weapons.” IDF officers also told the paper that the GHF’s operations had provided a convenient distraction for continuing operations in Gaza, which had been turned into a “backyard”, notably during Israel’s war with Iran. In the words of a reservist, the Strip had “become a place with its own set of rules. The loss of human life means nothing. It’s not even an ‘unfortunate incident’ like they used to say.”
An IDF officer involved in overseeing security at one of the distribution centers was full of understatement. “Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire – that’s highly problematic, to say the least.” It was “neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach, or fail to reach, a [humanitarian zone] under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.”
Much the same story can be found with the security contractors, those enthusiastic killers following in the footsteps of predecessors who treat international humanitarian law as inconvenient if not altogether irrelevant. Countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq can attest to the blood-soiled record of private military contractors, with the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad city’s Nisour Square by Blackwater USA employees in September 2007 being but one spectacular example. While those employees faced trial and conviction in a US federal court in 2014 on an assortment of charges – among them murder, manslaughter, and attempted manslaughter – such a fate is unlikely for any of those working for the GHF.
On July 4, the BBC published the observations of a former contractor on the trigger-happy conduct of his colleagues around the food centers. In one instance, a guard opened fire on women, children, and elderly people “moving too slowly away from the site.” Another contractor, also on location, stood on the berm overlooking the exit to one of the GHF sites, firing 15 to 20 bursts of repetitive fire at the crowd. “A Palestinian man dropped to the ground motionless. And then, the other contractor who was standing there was like, ‘damn, I think you got one’. And then they laughed about it.”
The company had also failed to issue contractors any operating procedures or rules of engagement, except one: “If you feel threatened, shoot – shoot to kill and ask questions later.” No reference is made to the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers. To journey to Gaza was to go to a land unencumbered by laws and rules. “Do what you want” is the cultural norm of GHF operatives. And this stands to reason, given the reference of “team leaders” to Gazans seeking aid as “zombie hordes”.
The GHF, in time-honored fashion, has denied these allegations. Ditto the IDF, that great self-proclaimed stalwart of international law. It is, therefore, left to such contributors as Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, to enlighten those who care to read and listen. As one of the few Palestinian journalists working for a US news outlet in the strip, his observations carry singular weight. In a recent report, Baba neatly summarised the manufactured brutality behind the seeking of aid in an enclave strangled and suffering gradual extinction. “I faced Israeli military fire, private US contractors pointing laser beams at my forehead, crowds with knives fighting for rations, and masked thieves – to get food from a group supported by the US and Israel called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.
If nothing else, it is high time that the GHF scraps any pretense of being humanitarian in its title and admits to its true role: an adjutant to Israel’s program of extirpating Gaza’s Palestinian population.
“Thou Shalt Not Kill”: The World’s Silence Is Complicity
by Sammy Attoh / July 7th, 2025
I do not write from comfort. I write from the salt of grief. From the agony of watching the world orchestrate its distractions while an entire people are burned, buried, and erased.
The world has failed the Palestinian people. Utterly and entirely.
This is not a political crisis—it is a moral apocalypse.
Since October 2023, more than 64,000 Palestinians—the vast majority women and children—have been killed in Gaza. That figure, cited by the Watson Institute, only scratches the surface. A 2024 Lancet study estimated that up to 186,000 deaths may be attributable to the ongoing conflict—caused not only by direct violence but by famine, trauma, disease, and a shattered healthcare system. At that time, Ralph Nader placed the number closer to 200,000.
These are not numbers. These are obliterated lineages. Neighborhoods razed. Babies recovered from beneath rubble in what were meant to be shelters—not graves. Hospitals bombed. Schools incinerated. Families starved. Children turned to ash inside classrooms. Elders murdered in wards they once trusted as safe.
And how has the world responded? With silence. With vague “regrets.” With weapons shipments.
Where is the United Nations and its so-called peacekeeping mandate? Where is the Arab League? Where are the global faith leaders who quote “Thou shalt not kill” from the pulpit—but seem deaf to the cries from Gaza?
“Thou shalt not kill.” Inscribed in the Bible, Qur’an, Torah, Gita—yes. But also enshrined in international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the charters of the United Nations. It is sacred. It is legal. It is universal. And it has been violated. Repeatedly. Brazenly. Unforgivably.
Those who sponsor this genocide sleep beside holy texts while investing in weapons and war stocks. They pray with one hand and push missile buttons with the other.
Yet those sponsoring this genocide sleep beside these holy texts while investing in war stocks and boasting defense profits. They pray with one hand and press missile buttons with the other.
This is not just genocide—it is infanticide, ecocide, scholacide, culturecide, and medicide.
Let us name it fully:
Infanticide: Babies buried under bombed maternity wards.
Scholacide: Teachers and students turned to ash inside classrooms.
Ecocide: Farmland poisoned, aquifers drained, trees reduced to cinders.
Medicide: The annihilation of healthcare, as ambulances are shelled and doctors are slaughtered in their scrubs.
These are not metaphors. They are facts. And the so-called international community is not watching helplessly—it is watching profitably.
Let us not be deceived: silence is not neutrality. Silence is a moral alignment with power.
A carpenter does not build chairs to store under the bed. A tailor does not sew garments just to hide them away. And the arms industry does not make weapons for decoration. These machines of death must be sold. And sold they are—through wars.
The children of Gaza were not accidental casualties. They were sacrificed at the altar of empire, profit, and political cowardice.
So I ask:
To the architects of this violence: What crime did the Palestinian children commit? What sin warranted this obliteration?
To the silent majority: When does neutrality become complicity? What will you tell your children when they read of this— —or will even that history be erased?
This is not only about Gaza. It is about all of us. About what we become when we no longer act. About the future we construct through our indifference.
I offer this piece not just as protest, but as lament. Not just as lament, but as sacred indictment.
In the name of every holy book used to bless bombs, In memory of every mother whose child was stolen by missiles, In the name of all prophets who warned us against such evil: Let it be known—The world has failed the Palestinians.
We are called not only to pray but to protest. Not only to mourn but to move. Not only to witness, but to refuse— Refuse to accept that this is the world we inherit or pass down.
But we, the people of conscience, will not be silent.
And to my fellow activists, faith leaders, citizens of truth and resistance, I say this:
The silence of the world is not passive.It is participation.And it will be remembered that the entire world stood by while Palestinians were genocided—generation after generation.
Sammy Attoh is a Human Rights Coordinator, poet, and public writer. A member of The Riverside Church in New York City and The New York State Chaplains Group, he advocates for spiritual renewal and systemic justice. Originally from Ghana, his work draws from ancestral wisdom to explore the sacred ties between people, planet, and posterity. Read other articles by Sammy.
Blood and Ashes: Genocidal
Deathscapes from Treblinka to Gaza
by Phil Rockstroh / July 7th, 2025
“He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?” Isaiah 44:20”
My maternal family, being Jews in 1930s Germany, were forced to affix yellow stars upon their clothing and were subject to daily public harassment. Finally, my mother and her sister, a few small family valuables sown by their mother into the lining of their clothes, escaped the madness on a Kindertransport, their father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
At present, and since the inception of the Zionist state, in the name of those who survived Nazi inflicted brutality and blood lust, Palestinians suffer the Zionist’s version of crimes against humanity — that includes a type of Final Solution being enacted upon the inhabitants of Gaza.
War, in general, should be as outmoded among people possessed of heart, mind, and soul as is cannibalism, incest, and public lynching. Yet the political elite of the West not only permit Israel to perpetrate genocide but supply the weaponry that enable mass slaughter.
While, in the US, ICE thugs, with jackboots for minds, come for blameless human beings, as the Gestapo did my grandfather, as the worst among us cheer them on. The concept of Alligator Alcatraz (and the fact MAGA miscreants find it all so amusing) seems like a comic book version of Nazi evil. Himmel might have averred, “Das ist ein bisschen stark! Ist das eine Art Witz”! (“That’s a bit much! Is this some kind of a joke?”). The joke would have gone over like a flaming zeppelin at a Berghof dinner party.
Treblinka, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee and the US government-planned mass starvation of people of the American Great Plains, and Gaza are regarded as aberrations in human events. Yet, on closer examination, the demarcation point between civilization and human barbarity is nebulous at best.
Which side, one should ask oneself, again and again, of the tattered and torn divide are you on?
(Pictured: My son and I, in Berlin, in 2019, standing in front of the house stolen from our family by the Nazis. Palestinians, throughout Israel, could stage their version of the scene.)
Every action nations commit in war would be a crime in times of peace in a just society. Israeli actions, committed, by the IDF and the Zionist settler class, even before the Gaza genocide campaign, transgressed the boundaries of human decency. It is known, abused people, long after their horrible experiences, can become abusers. But whole societies? A cultural mythos of perpetual victimhood, it seems, can lead a people, once wronged, to become convinced they can do no wrong. Hence, the tragedy of a culture of grievance creates a compassion-bereft position towards outsiders.
A late uncle of mine, when a Jewish boy growing up in The Bronx in the 1920s, he and his brothers had to cross through treacherous-to-outsiders Irish, Black, and Italian city blocks when returning from school and other daily rounds. Often, they had to dodge barrages of thrown rocks and other threats to bodily safety. In adulthood, the European Holocaust re-enforced his animus toward the other and he conflated the survival of global Jewry with the existence of Israel.
Uncle Sol would pace the house and he was given to fulminate, even sans context, “an Arab is a Jew with his brains knocked out. Bomb them, that is all they understand.”
As a middle aged and elderly man, he was still dodging stones. His younger brother’s, an orthodox Jew by conviction, children became Israeli citizens and joined the ethnocentric ranks of the Zionist settler class. From the Bronx to Ramallah, through the generations, the madness perpetuates.
Uncle Sol, in his last years, as he descended into Alzheimer’s related dementia, hallucinated Palestinians marauders moved in stealth through his house; a stone-throwing Intifada of the mind shook the old man to his very core. There were peaceful days when he minded an imaginary nursery (he had attended to the care of his younger brother). He was prone to shouting, “Leave the children alone! Let them play!” How is it possible, by his bunker mentality worldview, that Palestinian children could not be viewed as human and that they were deserving of a homeland and a childhood?
“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…” — Exodus 20:5.
Problematic passage, to say the least. How does one transform the rage and concomitant tragedy that seems to be passed forward by consanguinity. Furies rule the blood. Is there anything under heaven that will end the blood-drenched madness inherent to generational trauma turned by-reflex into animus?
My DNA reveals, my ancestors were European e.g., Spanish, French, Germanic, with four percent coming from Northern Iraq and Iran. This is crucial: nada from ancient Israel. How is it I have a “right to return” to a land where my ancestors never dwelled but Palestinians, whose blood states that they are descendants of the original Jews of the Old Testament are forbidden to return to the land stolen from them?
Whenever the concept of a One State Solution is suggested to Zionists, they are stricken by the thought that Palestinians, now a majority of the population, would inflict the same brutal, dehumanizing treatment on Jewish citizens that they suffered during Zionist rule. In the childhood city of my birth, Birmingham, Alabama, the White overclass, during the civil rights era, expressed similar trepidation thus resisted granting African-Americans equal rights and protection under the law. The same mindset ruled Apartheid South Africa. The psychological projection is a de facto admission of guilt.
Israel is bleeding population. A new Exodus is extant. Jews, in large numbers, are leaving the Zionist state. Perpetrating Genocide and other acts of perpetual aggression have bankrupted Israeli society, both economically and morally. As the Ashkenazi elite exit the country, the zealots remain, and like my Uncle Sol, in his decline, they are dwelling in an hallucinated, and, in steep decline, version of the world.
Regarding a related false and death-besotted cultural mythos:
It is all over but Trump’s et al. palaver in public declaration and SHOUTING in pixel
Independence Day in the US… the lie of the mind of it all. More than two and a half centuries of the lie. Independence from the crown; then subservience to the moneyed class. Life (taking the lives of the original people of the land). Liberty (being at liberty to be exploited by those whose idea of liberty is enslavement and land theft). The pursuit of happiness (perhaps the most profound delusion promulgated there is manic pursuit – but scant happiness is on display. Only the micro frauds that maintain the macro fraud).
An imposter culture instructs – coerces the individual – to manufacture an imposter self – a social mask so that the culture itself does not destroy you.
Result: The grifter, the predator capitalist, the hollow to the core politician, and the anxious and depressed. Do you want to drive yourself even crazier and make the world even worse in its madness. Refuse to admit your own madness and the madness of simply being human unlooses upon the world.
When you face the abyss – that is, the realization we, all of us, are alone. When you are devoured by it – that is where and when you gain the company of others who feel and grieve for the sadness of the earth; of those who transform mortification witnessing human folly into humor and poetry. Then welcome home, lost and weary traveler. You have gained independence. You have shaken off dependence on the American lie.
In the macro sense; The lies promote nationalism in general; of Zionism; of militarism; of earth decimating, soul-defying cultures of greed and exploitation.
Once, the rancid lies have gone to compost, the green of the novel can rise and bloom. A dreams, yes. But so are the nightmares that are self-resonate feedback loops of past and ongoing tragedy. The legacy of violence begetting violent reprisal is as human and tragic as human and tragic can be. Moving forward, we have a choice: implement a just peace or else be plagued, in perpetuity, by endless torment inflicted by grievance-maddened furies.
“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10
Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador DalÃ
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist, and essayist. His poems, short fiction, poetry and essays have been published in numerous print publications and anthologies; his political essays have been widely posted on the progressive/left side of the internet. Read other articles by Phil, or visit Phil's website
The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 9th, 2025
America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.
Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.
At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.
With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.
Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.
Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer.
Tellingly, the vast majority of those being detained have no criminal record. And like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.
Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.
The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.
At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.
What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.
As the enforcement dragnet expands, so does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state—including legal U.S. residents arrested for their political views.
In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.
Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.
That moment has arrived.
Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.
Our founders understood that unchecked government power, particularly in the name of public safety, poses the most significant threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.
Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.
Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.
The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.
This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.
A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.
This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.
We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.
The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.
Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.
The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.
Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.
We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.
If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.
One beetle's penis banned on YouTube, but Gazan babies imploded, that's a-okay
by Paul Haeder / July 10th, 2025
LONG READ
Well, I wrote this below a while back, and I am updating it here:
If anything you do brave liberators of Gaza, just find these people and immolate them many on my Substack tell me: “Court said to approve mom’s request to use fallen soldier son’s sperm to have grandchild.
Sharon Eisenkot permitted to use sperm of 19-year-old son Maor, Golani fighter killed in Gaza who was also nephew of ex-IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot.
This is what domination looks like. This is what schizophrenia looks like. This is what white supremacy looks like. While what, 100 a day murdered and imploded by Israel, those non-humans they call rats and roaches and snakes — Gazans.
[War cabinet minister and former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, with family and friends, at the funeral of his son Gal, in Herzliya on December 8, 2023.]
So, there are many levels of leeching and leeches: This is not an in-your-face CRIME?
THOUSANDS OF FAMILIES CUT OFF FROM WATER:A municipality spokesman has told Al Jazeera that thousands of families in eastern Gaza City have been without water for about a week. Asem al-Nabi said the water blockade means Palestinians there are now suffering from a state of dehydration that cannot be addressed without external intervention.
Several times, the question arose of whether Menachem Begin saw any comparison between the struggle of the Palestinians and the Jews’ War of Independence.
Once, Mike Wallace, the well-known American interviewer asked him directly,
“Mr. Prime Minister, you were the commander of a terrorist organization. Do you see any comparison between this and the PLO?”
Begin replied,
“There’s nothing at all to compare. We fought to liberate our land from a foreign regime, from the British. They want to wipe us off the face of the Earth and take our land from us, because this land is ours. We threw out the British because the land is ours. What do the Arabs want? To throw us out of our land! There’s no comparison between the PLO, or any group of murderers of theirs. Another issue is the method of battle. They kill every man, woman, and child, whereas we did everything to avoid harming civilians. True, sometimes disasters happened, and civilians were hurt, but this was not part of our battle tactics.”
So, is it Zionism or Jewish Zionism or Israeli Judaism that is the global pandemic, the virus, or the parasite? Asking the questions and proposing the answers are all part of that super duper thought experiment, nothing to do with antisemitism.
Read: Traumatic insemination, also known as hypodermic insemination, is the matingpractice in some species of invertebrates in which the male pierces the female’s abdomen with his aedeagus and injects his sperm through the wound into her abdominal cavity (hemocoel).[1] The sperm diffuses through the female’s hemolymph, reaching the ovaries and resulting in fertilization.
The process is detrimental to the female’s health. It creates an open wound which impairs the female until it heals, and is susceptible to infection. The injection of sperm and ejaculatory fluids into the hemocoel can also trigger an immune reaction in the female. Bed bugs, which reproduce solely by traumatic insemination, have evolved a pair of sperm-receptacles, known as the spermalege. It has been suggested that the spermalege reduces the direct damage to the female bed bug during traumatic insemination. However experiments found no conclusive evidence for that hypothesis; as of 2003, the preferred explanation for that organ is hygienic protection against bacteria.[2]
The evolutionary origins of traumatic insemination are disputed. Although it evolved independently in many invertebrate species, traumatic insemination is most highly adapted and thoroughly studied in bed bugs, particularly Cimex lectularius.[1][3] Traumatic insemination is not limited to male-female couplings, or even couplings of the same species. Both homosexual and inter-species traumatic inseminations have been observed.
*****
Capitalism: A Rape Story! Qatar?
Turns out that Israel isn’t the only foreign power that commands tremendous influence over the United States thanks to lobbying (via AIPAC).
Enter Qatar.
From 2017, Qatar spent over $220 million on lobbying in the US, if the recent media reports and publicly available data are to be believed.
Qatar has become a major, if not the largest, source of donations to US universities, providing them with over $6 billion over the last 15 years.
The cost of maintaining the United States’ massive Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar is covered by Doha.
Some of Trump’s inner circle members have ties to Qatar: his chief of staff Susie Wiles was the head of Mercury Public Affairs lobbying firm when it represented Qatar embassy in the US; FBI Director Kash Patel previously worked for Qatar as a consultant.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff had his Park Lane Hotel investment, which was not doing too good at the time, bought out in 2003 by Qatar for $623 million.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi previously worked as a lobbyist for the Qatari embassy.
Trump himself has received a lavish gift from Qatar in the form of a Boeing 747 jet worth $400 that will become property of his presidential library when his presidential term ends.
Devolution:
And now? That bed bug, or beetle:
Trump and Israel, or, the male beetle and the male bed bug … the female seed beetle (or bean weevil; Callosobruchus maculatus) has to contend with her partner’s nightmarish penis – an organ covered in hard, sharp spikes. Just see if you can look at the picture on the right without wincing.
It’s no surprise then that females sustain heavy injuries during sex. But why have male beetles evolved such hellish genitals? What benefits do they gain by physically harming their partners?
It’s possible that the injuries directly benefit the males, either because they stop the females from mating again or spend more efforts in raising their fertilised eggs to avoid the strain of future liaisons.
Below — a variation on the theme of traumatic copulation, beetle and bed bug, both blood suckers.
Che Guevara’s visit to Gaza in 1959 was the first sign of transforming the Zionist colonization of Palestine from a regional conflict to a global struggle against colonialism. The trigger was the Bandung conference in 1955 and the resulting Non-Aligned Movement, whose members has just recently shaken the yoke of foreign domination. The stature of Nasser, as a world leader in the struggle against Imperialism and colonialism, brought world leaders to see for themselves the devastating results of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, clearly demonstrated in Gaza refugee camps.
Gaza Strip became the symbol of Palestine. This tiny sliver of land (1.3% of Palestine) remained the only place raising the flag of Palestine. It carried a major part of al Nakba burden when it became the temporary shelter for the inhabitant of 247 villages, expelled from their homes in southern Palestine. Villages in the south were ethnically cleansed by the Israeli military operation “Yoav”, also termed “The Ten Plagues”, in October 1948. Not a single Palestinian village remained. This act of total ethnic cleansing was propelled by several massacres which took place in Al Dawayima, Bayt Daras, Isdud, Burayr, among others.
Refugees, now corralled into Gaza Strip, were not immune from Israeli attacks even after their expulsion. The Majdal hospital was bombed in November 1948, as was the nearby al Joura village, which stood on the site of ancient Ashkelon and from which many future Hamas leaders would emerge. In January 1949, Israelis bombed food distribution centers in Dayr Al Balah and Khan Younis at peak hours, leaving over 200 bodies decimated by air raids. These raids led the usually restrained Red Cross to describe it as a “scene of horror”.
The occupation of Palestinian land and the expulsion of its population gave rise to a resistance movement, known then as the fedayeen. These resistance fighters crossed the Armistice line to attack the occupiers of their land.
In order to stop the incursions of the fedayeen and eliminate the idea of resistance, Israel continuously attacked the Gaza Strip refugee camps. In August 1953, Unit 101, led by Ariel Sharon, attacked Bureij refugee camp and killed 43 people in their beds. In August 1955, Israel, again led by Ariel Sharon, blew up the Khan Younis police station killing 74 policemen. In the same year, the Israelis killed 37 Egyptian soldiers in Gaza railway station and 28 others who were on their way to defend the others. The last attack changed the course of history in the region.
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who assumed power in Egypt in July 1952, signed the first armaments deal with the Soviet Block for arms denied to him by the British. He also authorised the fedayeen resistance by officially organising them under Colonel Mustafa Hafez.
On 29 October 1956 Israel invaded Sinai in collusion with Britain and France. The attacking Israeli soldiers entered Khan Younis on 3 November 1956, and collected all males between the ages of 15 and 50 from their homes and shot them in cold blood at their doorstep or against a wall in the town’s main square. The names of the 520 people killed have been listed. The following week, another massacre of refugees took place in Rafah. There were a deafening silence in the West about these massacres until the gifted cartoonist Joe Sacco immortalised them in his book Footnotes in Gaza.
These tragic events came to the world’s attention when Nasser became one of the recognised leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement starting with Bandung conference in 1955. Gaza Strip and Palestine came globally to light as the latest case of colonialism and ethnic cleansing.
Fig-1
Fig-2
As a result of this political development, Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, came to visit Gaza Strip at Nasser’s invitation.
Guevara’s visit was momentous. It was the first time that a famous revolutionary comes to see the devastation created by Al Nakba first hand. He was met most enthusiastically by resistance leaders, such as Abdullah Abu Sitta, leader of the fedayeen (and leader of the southern front in the Arab Revolt of 1936, seen in [Fig-1], to the extreme right in Arab dress) and Qassem el Farra, third from right, Secretary of Khan Younis Municipality who kept records of fedayeen and their activities. Both were members of Palestine Legislative Council.
According to evidence I received from contemporaries about the visit, Guevara told Palestinian refugees they must continue the struggle to liberate their land. There was no way but resistance to occupation, he said. He admitted that their case was “complex” because the new Jewish settlers occupied their homes. “The right must eventually be restored”, he affirmed. He offered to supply arms and training but Castro wanted this aid to be coordinated through Nasser.
Fig-4
Mustafa Abu Middain, Al Bureij camp leader, took Guevara to visit the camp and showed him cases of poverty and hardship. “We have worse case of poverty”, Guevara shot back. “You should show me what you have done to liberate your country. Where are the training camps? Where are the factories to manufacture arms? Where are people’s mobilisation centres?”
Fig-3
Guevara was accompanied by General Caprera, an expert in Guerilla warfare. Caprera [Fig-2, with the beard] met with community leaders to advise on methods of resistance. Guevara became the icon of Palestinian resistance and struggle for freedom.[Fig-3]
Nasser took great interest in Guevara’s visit. He met him in his office, took him to public and official functions, introduced him to community leaders and presented him with medals [Fig-4, composite photo]. That was the start of very close relationship of revolutionary Latin America with Nasser and the Palestinians till this day.
After the visit, Cuba gave scholarships to Palestinian students, granted citizenships for stranded Palestinians and held many conferences in support of Palestine.
During the Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014 Cuba sent tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza and received the injured. The support spread to most Latin American countries. El Salvador, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil have all withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel in protest. Bolivia’s President Evo Morales labeled Israel a “terrorist state” and restricted the entry of Israelis into the country. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela “vigorously condemned the actions of the illegal state of Israel against the heroic Palestinian people”. Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign with Palestine was very vocal both in the official and popular fields. The presidents of Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela issued a joint statement calling for a cessation of violence and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza Strip.
Fig-5
In the 1950s, Guevara was not the only well known personality of the Non-Aligned Movement to endorse the rights of Palestinians in a free Palestine. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, also, came to visit Gaza in the same period [Fig-5]. That was the start of close Indian and other Asian support for Palestine.
Today Palestine is the symbol of the struggle of liberation from the last and longest colonial project. That is why over three quarters of the world countries support Palestine in the United Nations. Those few who did not are the remnants of the old colonial Western countries which created the colonial project in Palestine in the first place.
*****
Hero on the right, above, and alas, the golden shower (probably) young girls on the lap and in the bedroom (certainly) Epstein/Mossad/Bibi Honey Pot/Trap Tapes on the left, the Apprentice, Rapist in Chief.
Here’s Dennis Kucinich, back to recovering some of his senses after working for RFK Jr to head to the White Man’s House:
But, he still takes that dirty regime’s ploy, using a lion (hader) as their touchstone for murdering Iranians, when nothing about Israeli Jews is like a LION:
Dennis: Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”
This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.
Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.
America’s so-called defense of Israel’s freedom has been turned into a protection racket of such dimensions as to make the mafia blush. That racket has its own devises. Democratic and Republican Administrations, alike, have been contemplating an attack on Iran for decades. President Trump’s assurances of avoiding war while working closely with Netanyahu damages the President’s credibility, either he was not telling the truth or he was misled by people in his own foreign policy establishment.
Israel’s government now defines freedom thusly: Freedom to commit genocide, freedom to starve a defenseless population, freedom to wage aggressive war, and freedom to posture and to lie about all of their inhuman actions before the entire world and to demand everyone agree or be smeared as “anti-semites.”
*****
This guy sells dildos with his daughter. Look up those videos, man: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach today met with Democratic Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, Jr. and discussed Israel, the rise of antisemitism, and Kennedy’s recent tweet where he supported Roger Waters.
“It was courageous of Bobby to come and meet me and reassert his lifelong support of Israel and the Jewish people, continuing in the legacy of his great father who was murdered by Palestinian gunman Sirhan Sirhan because of his own support of Israel in 1968.”
Rabbi Shmuley and Kennedy discussed the volatile situation in the Middle East and the challenges facing America for more than two hours.
Kennedy explained that his tweet about Waters was in response to someone sharing with him a picture that Waters flashed of Kennedy at one of his concerts, saluting the candidate’s willingness to swim against societal currents. “Bobby told me he had no idea that Waters was a vicious antisemite and when he studied the issue and the facts, he immediately deleted the tweet. I believe Bobby and I thank him for his repudiation of Waters. How tragic it is for Waters to have his legacy as an antisemite now overtake his legacy as an accomplished artist.”
Kennedy said his dedication to Israel’s security is unshakable and unalterable. He also said that he reserves the right to challenge some of its policies, for example, as an environmentalist, with regard to water rights.
Rabbi Shmuley agreed that the beauty of Israel, as opposed to all of its neighbors, is that it is an open democracy with a free press and, just like America, welcomes criticism. Kennedy and Boteach discussed the holocaust and the existential and genocidal threats facing the Jewish nation and Kennedy once again affirmed his profound commitment to Israel’s security.
“I told Bobby that his father was one Israel’s greatest friends and we in the Jewish community mourn him till this day. I then asked him to please march with me this Sunday, June 4th, at the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, and he immediately agreed. The conversation was riveting. While we disagreed on many issues, he speaks with a refreshing and non-partisan candor. I look forward to jointly marching this Sunday to champion the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish State.”
Yikes: CIA asset, that monk: Birthday with the Dildo Salesman.
“Defining everything that commands a price as valuable led to the marginalists’ conclusion that what you get is what you are worth. Profits are not determined by exploitation [the process whereby employers appropriate the surplus value created by the working class] but by technology and the ‘marginal product of capital’.” Mazzucato
Mazzucato uses Marx’s writings on value to attempt to ride to the rescue of ailing capitalism. Her intention is not to enable the new generation of workers and youth to understand the law of value and prepare them for the series of crises which inevitably flow from this. Nor does she suggest programmatic measures to replace the rule of capital with socialism.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write that capitalism is characterized thus:
Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Note how, in this passage, capitalism’s relentless “revolutionizing” of technologies and social relations also revolutionizes our self-understanding. As capitalism shakes up the material basis of life, it also demystifies and disenchants; it destroys all of the old mythical explanations and legitimations that were previously used to justify our place in society, and in the cosmos. And this destruction has only gone further in the years since Marx and Engels wrote. What Max Weber, somewhat later, called the “disenchantment of the world” has proceeded by leaps and bounds in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While all those “ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” are still quite vehemently held, they have lost their grounding and their authority. Today we are left, as Ray Brassier puts it, with a world in which “intelligibility has become detached from meaning.” — Parasites on the Body of Capital
On Fuck You Book/FB, if you are on it: The entire movie, The.Young.Karl.MarxI
Israel is more than just an army-air force-spy ring posing as an occupied and apartheid country. This country (sic) is THE raping beetle on the world:
The Israel-Iran war is more dangerous than we imagine | David Hearst | The Big Picture
Destroy Tehran, oil, hospitals, media, the lot. Two beetles fornicating each other.
“Intelligent design,” these beetles, these Talmudists, these Israelites, these ALL Jews Are Taught that Jerusalem and Zion are God’s Intelligent Design for Chosen Beetles Jewish people?
What concerns did Jewish educators have about teaching about Israel?
One teacher said,
“My worst fear is that they might walk away from my classroom without feeling a commitment to the project of Israel in the way that I feel. And my other worst fear is that they will walk away and go into college and learn all sorts of things that I didn’t tell them and think my teacher lied to me.”
More: When I was in fourth grade, the night before Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, my classmates and I gathered in the cafeteria of my Jewish day school and were handed a laminated map of Israel, a carton of ice cream and sundae toppings. We were told to use the ingredients to decorate the map—chocolate ice cream for the Negev, vanilla for the center of the country and Hershey’s Kisses for major cities. Years later, I discovered this was actually an activity in many day school and after-school curricula. The idea, I assume, was rooted in the Talmudic recommendation of putting honey on Hebrew letters when teaching children to read, so their learning would always be associated with sweetness. Similarly, we would always associate Israel with store-brand chocolate and vanilla ice cream.
To a certain extent, it worked. My classmates and I at my 1990s Modern Orthodox day school felt a strong connection to Israel throughout our school years; some lived there for a time, and some even made aliyah. Of course, this wasn’t just the ice cream. It was the Israeli maps and posters decorating every hallway, the celebrating and commemorating of important Israeli events throughout the year and the requirement to take “Zionism” for one semester in ninth grade. The unspoken goal was that we would graduate with ahavat yisrael, or “love of Israel,” as we went on to the next stage of our lives.
My experience is not necessarily representative; day school students are a small sliver of American Jewish children. Other Jewish children and young adults learn about Israel in their Sunday schools, youth group chapters or summer camps. Wherever they are, Jewish educational programs, formal or informal, make love of Israel a priority and a key part of Jewish identity. (Sarah Breger | Nov 15, 2017)
They do teach children that Israel is for the Jews, the chosen people, the mothership for Judaism.
This is the creationist freakdom, like one of a million creationist creepy beliefs:
“The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.” [JBS Haldane “What is Life?” 1949; often paraphrased, including by Haldane himself, to the effect of “The Creator must have an inordinate fondness for beetles, He made so many of them.”]
Well, yes, our God does have “inordinate fondness” for many things, being the God of Love, Who makes this or that out of love, and to be loved. Once one makes the leap of conceiving Him able and willing to love something else besides His glorious and eternal Self, there’s no real reason for Him not to love animals like beetles, or (probably) inanimate objects like stars, just as some of His images do (as the astronomers and entomologists in this group may attest). Though not necessarily in the same way (I won’t say “to the same degree”, as if He can give less than infinite attention to one thing or the other), since some of His gifts beyond mere existence (though that would have been enough, as the Jews recite at Passover) cannot in principle be grasped or used by the insentient.
Since God seems to want so many things to arise and develop through natural means and processes (possibly for the human will to be free, Nature must be free), including highly unlikely ones, then perhaps it was necessary for the visible universe to be the size and age it is for you and me to be here right now, or for any rational life to have arisen on this world, or perhaps any other, at all.”
There are more than 3,500 species of mosquitoes that are found everywhere but Antarctica. That sounds like a lot, but there are millions of species of insects, and only about a hundred feed on human blood. During the peak of their breeding, mosquitoes outnumber every other animal but ants and termites. Historically, they have killed more than those who have died in war. Even during times of relative peace, tens of thousands died from diseases inflicted by mosquito bites during the construction of the Panama Canal. Mosquitoes also affect human migration on a grand scale: in many tropical zones, the effects of malaria cause people to move inland from the coast, where more primitive lifestyle, economic development, and other factors make medical help more difficult to obtain.
Mosquitoes and the diseases they cause are notorious. Yet, we read in Genesis 1:31 that God made everything “very good.” If everything that God made was good, where did disease-causing mosquitoes come from? What is the origin of mosquito-borne diseases? Where do mosquitoes fit into the creation account? Were mosquitoes created along with the rest of life in the first week of Creation, or are they a result of the Curse? Are there good mosquitoes? These and other questions have been asked by creation biologists (Gillen 2007), and their answers may surprise you.
God’s and Yaweh’s creation: YHWH
Oh, Iran, those poor poor paper tigers with half-assed weapons and no air defense and the flagging Putin and Russia estrangement and abandonment syndrome, old Iran/Persia gobbled up by that Israel Swarm Mosquitoes.
Nonsense, believing Tucker Carlson or Glen Greenwald and Scott Ritter and the other usual suspects. Jimmy Dore. The Duran? Iran is dead.
Absurd endless live streams, man, with some bizarre belief Iran has a chance to succumb Jewish State of Murder: Iran is defeated.
I could list a million Podcasts on YouTube videos or Rumble or Odyesee programs. Whatever. Monetizing armchair prognostication. They ALL have an opinion. The death of the planet, man, and these people are just working hard to get $5 here and $10 there.
These creeps ask this NYC Mayoral candidate if he’d go to Israel if he’s elected. MAYOR of New York City. My oh my, Jew York City? Is that apropos? Watch it, man. Bad Faith — should Israel have the right to exist? They are an ethno racist warring spying terrorist nationalist state based on Judaism. Back to Abby Martin above.
++–++
[A British army officer and troops outside the King David Hotel, which had been bombed by the underground Zionist group the Irgun, Jerusalem, July 1946]
The terrorism practiced nowadays by Zionists gangs like Lahava (the flame), Paying the Price, Youths upon the Hills, and the Jewish Fighting Organization cannot be divorced from the terrorism practiced during the British Mandate over Palestine by Zionist gangs which began to form at the beginning of the Twenties of the last century, becoming very active especially in the Thirties and Forties. However, what distinguishes the current Zionist terrorist gangs is that their acts of murder, arson, expulsion, sacrilege and cutting of trees being carried out against the Palestinians on the West Bank take place with the full support, and sometimes the active participation, of the soldiers of the Israeli army of occupation.
Zionist terrorism before 1948
The terms “Jewish terrorism” and “Zionist terrorism” were both used prior to 1948 to refer to terrorist acts committed by armed Zionist gangs which targeted the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as well as the British Mandate authorities. Since the Great Palestine Revolt of 1936-39 and right until the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionist terrorism was used as a strategic military weapon to hasten the founding of an independent Jewish state. Numerous attacks were mounted against Palestinians to terrorize them and drive them out of their ancestral land, and against British army and police outposts. Many assassinations were carried out as well as bombs planted in markets, ships and hotels. Heading these Zionist gangs were men who, in later years, became prime ministers of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
[The Hebrew and Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, who cofounded the anti-British extremist group Brit Habiryonim and was later a member of the Irgun, Kraków, mid-1930s]
Like a rabbi Who carries his prayer-book in a velvet bag to the synagogue So carry I My sacred gun to the Temple.
In another poem Yair wrote:
“We shall pray by rifle, machine gun, landmine.” (Source)
The recent election of Benjamin Netanyahu—who after trailing in the polls made racist statements that were clearly intended to arouse fear—shows that the violent sentiments and views discussed by Hoffman and Bishop are still very much alive. Netanyahu’s father, a formidable scholar of the Inquisition who died in 2012, was a revisionist ideologue who belonged to the “maximalist” circle. He was an Islamophobe who supported pre-state terrorism and opposed any agreement with Arabs, even the peace accord with Egypt.
His son shares many of his views despite opportunistic rhetoric about a two-state solution, which he opposed during the election and then limply endorsed afterward. In early May he formed a new government including members of the Jewish Home party, which supports expansion of West Bank settlements and opposes a Palestinian state. The Likud, under Netanyahu’s leadership, has shed the last remnants of Jabotinsky’s liberal commitments and became a party willing to exploit racist contempt for Arabs. Understanding the ideological roots of Israel’s current leaders is indispensable if they are ever to be successfully challenged and replaced.
Leeches. Netanyahu’s original family name was Mileikowsky, which was later changed to Netanyahu. He was also known as Benjamin “Ben” Nitai for a period, a name he adopted to make it easier for Americans to pronounce.
Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.
