The Flotillas to Gaza Are the World’s Conscience
January 16, 2026 By Chris Hedges , ScheerPost
OME, Italy — There will be a new flotilla in April 2026 that will attempt to break the 18-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza. The mission is expected to be the largest maritime action for Palestine to date, involving more than 3,000 activists from 100 countries on 100 boats, including a medical fleet of 1,000 health care workers to deliver 500 tons of life-saving aid, equipment and medical supplies that Israel has blocked from entering Gaza.
Once again, activists from all over the world will sail toward Gaza in an attempt to end one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. Once again, their journey will be minutely tracked on social media. Once again, Israeli drones will be sent out in international waters to intercept and attack the boats. Once again, the boats will be boarded by masked, heavily armed Israeli soldiers. Once again, activists will be arrested. Once again, they will be sent to high-security prisons. Once again, they will be physically abused, placed in solitary confinement, insulted, berated, forced to watch Israeli propaganda videos about Oct. 7, or raped by Israeli prison guards. Once again, Palestinians, many of whom wait on the beach in the hope that the latest flotilla will get through, will see they are not alone. And once again, the world will look away, ignoring its legal mandate to intervene to end the genocide, as per Article I of the Genocide Convention.
And yet, despite the almost certain outcome, the flotillas are imperceptibly chipping away at the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza. They are reminding the world of its moral and legal duty to intervene. They are shaming not only Israel, but the Western governments whose complicity sustains the genocide. They are illustrating that we are not powerless. We can act.
“How did you feel when you watched the flotilla?” I asked the Palestine ambassador to Italy, Mona Abuamara, when I joined the Italian dock workers strike in Genoa and national demonstration for Palestine in Rome at the end of November 2025.
“Like a child,” she answered. “You know how when you know the end of a movie but you still want it to be different. I kept thinking, ‘Let it pass. Let it pass.’ As if it could. We knew it wouldn’t. That’s part of the beauty of those people on those boats. They knew they’re not going to be allowed to pass, but they refused to accept the status quo.”
I met Thiago Ávila, a Brazilian activist, and Swedish activist Greta Thunberg early in the morning at the MAAM Museum in Rome, its labyrinth of halls, corridors and rooms filled with street art, including a sign that reads, “Spoiler YOU WILL DIE.” Some 200 migrants from various countries live as squatters in the abandoned slaughterhouse and museum. Artworks, including huge, elaborate murals by some of Italy’s best artists, cover the cement walls of the former meat factory. At the entrance, satirizing the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, in huge letters, is the word “FART.”
“For all the years I’ve been an activist, I have, every day, lost more and more hope — if I even had any — in the institutions and our so-called leaders, corporations, elected officials, banks, whatever it is, to come to our rescue,” Thunberg said. “They are the ones who have put us in this situation. The system is not flawed. It is designed to be destructive. It is designed, in my view, to have unequal power structures. It is designed to keep some people oppressed. It is designed to keep nature as a distant, separate entity that is not a part of us in order to exploit it. In order to oppress people, we have to dehumanize them. The only way out is to reclaim power, which is one of the main reasons why I’m here supporting the striking workers in Italy. This is such a clear, textbook example of what it looks like when people take back power and show where the real power is.”
Ávila organized the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and the newly formed Global Sumud Flotilla. He was part of the crew of the Madleen, a boat that departed in June 2025 with, among others, Thunberg and Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian Member of the European Parliament who was beaten in custody by Israeli prison guards.
The Madleen was intercepted by the Israeli navy in international waters and towed to the Israeli port of Ashdod. Ávila was held in solitary confinement in Ayalon Prison, where he took part in a dry hunger strike until he was deported.
“I’ve been on so many failed attempts I can’t count,” Ávila told me. “I’ve been in boats that were unfortunately bombed. I’ve been in boats that were sabotaged. Boats that were defeated bureaucratically by countries pressured by Israel. We’ve been trying for years to break that horrific siege. Eighteen years. The last two attempts I was with Greta. I made it close to Gaza twice.
While in prison, he said, Israeli guards kicked him and slammed his head onto the asphalt. They interrogated him for hours in an attempt to extract details about the flotillas while a guard pointed a shotgun at him. They sent snarling guard dogs into his cell. They constantly moved him from one cell to another. They woke him up repeatedly during the night.
“How many countries have you managed to mobilize?” Israeli interrogators asked Ávila.
“Who are the representatives in the countries?” they demanded to know.
“I’m not going to give you any information that would put anybody into a dangerous position,” Ávila answered. “But anything that is public, you can check on our website. We are very transparent.”
“Look, what you make your people go through,” the interrogators sneered. “Look at all the money that you spent, that you wasted. Think of what you could have done with this money?”
“Why are you doing this?” the army interrogators, intelligence agents and Israeli judges invariably asked.
“Because for eight decades you have been committing genocide and ethnic cleansing,” Ávila always answered. “You have structured an apartheid and colonial state. You are ruling this land, not by a religion, but by a racist and supremacist ideology, which is Zionism.”
“What’s their reaction?” I asked Ávila.
“They hate it,” he said.
“Most of the Israeli government wanted us out of there as soon as they could the last time we were held,” Ávila said. “It was a horrible PR situation. But Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security — who manages the Israeli prison system — didn’t want to let us out. He wanted to punish us. He wanted to make a political statement. There was this internal struggle. Eventually they tried to get rid of people.”
“International solidarity has the responsibility to be more useful to the Palestinian cause,” Ávila said. “We need to have a bigger impact. This time, we managed. When we went with the Madleen, we had been trying for the previous five months. We tried three other missions that failed. And to be honest, the world barely knew about them.”
On one of the failed missions, shortly after midnight on May 1, 2025, 20 miles off the coast of Malta, one of the flotilla’s boats — the Conscience, registered under the flag of Palau — was struck by missiles launched from two drones. The missiles appeared to target the ship’s generators. The strikes caused a fire and a breach in the hull. Communication with the ship was lost. It was loaded with humanitarian supplies.
“The European Union didn’t condemn the attack,” Ávila said of the strike. “It was a hard defeat for us. But we knew we had to keep trying. We didn’t have any more big boats. All we had was a small boat for 12 people. It could only carry a symbolic shipment of aid. But that is when the world paid attention. There was a huge mobilization to support us.”
There is always the possibility the Israeli assaults will turn deadly.
In May 2010, the Mavi Marmara, carrying activists and humanitarian aid, was raided by Israeli naval commandos in international waters as it sailed toward Gaza. Nine people — eight Turkish citizens and one with dual Turkish American citizenship — were killed by the Israelis who claimed they were attacked by activists armed with clubs and knives. Another 24 were seriously injured by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“The most heartbreaking thing was to be so close to Palestinians and at the same time not able to stop, for a second, the violence,” Lio said.
No nation, with the exception of Yemen, has made any effort to physically halt the genocide. The United States and European nations have supplied Israel with billions in weapons – the U.S. alone has provided $ 21.7 billion to Israel since Oct. 7 – to sustain the mass slaughter. These nations have criminalized those, such as members of Palestine Action, several of whom are in perilous physical conditions from a prolonged hunger strike in prison, who protest the genocide. They have shut down free speech in the media and on college campuses. They will support Israel until the final phase of the genocide – the mass deportation of the Palestinians from Gaza – is complete. It is up to us to act. If we fail, there will be no rule of law. Genocide will become another tool in the arsenal of industrial nations and the Palestinians, once again, will be betrayed.
The flotillas not only keep alive resistance, they keep alive hope. https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/16/chris-hedges-the-flotillas-to-gaza-are-the-worlds-conscience/
Pope Leo again condemns “zeal for war,” deepening rift with Trump
Axios Jason Lalljee, 10 Jan 26
Pope Leo XIV is continuing to issue indirect critiques about President Trump‘s policies as the U.S. ramps up its intervention in Venezuela.
The big picture: Since becoming pope last May, Leo has made a number of critiques — both subtle and explicit — regarding Trump’s treatment of immigrants as well as his……………………..(Subscribers only) https://www.axios.com/2026/01/09/trump-venezuela-pope-leo
Ushering In the Age of 1A Impunity: Venezuela, Palestine, and the End of International Law.
The UN’s human rights rapporteurs are under a sustained campaign of slander and sanction. And even the UN Security Council has surrendered to the U.S. empire, as evidenced by its resolution 2803 in November of 2025, endorsing the wholly unlawful and baldly colonial plans of the Trump administration for Gaza.
the hand of the Israeli regime in supporting right-wing forces and destabilizing progressive governments in the region is by now well known. Israeli weapons, surveillance technology, intelligence, training, and influence via Israel proxies in the region have been a constant feature of Latin America for decades.
The recent sound of explosions over Venezuela, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria are not merely the spasms by a declining U.S. empire. They are something much more terrifying — the dawning of the age of impunity.
Mondoweiss, By Craig Mokhiber January 7, 2026
On January 3, 2026, without provocation, cause, or legal justification, the U.S. bombed Venezuela, invaded its capital, killed dozens of people, and violently abducted the President and First Lady of the country, binding, blindfolding, and spiriting them off to the United States.
Surely, such a blatant violation of a whole raft of international laws, indeed, challenging the very centerpiece of the post-World War II legal framework that prohibits acts of aggression, would be met with universal condemnation.
Instead, it has been followed by equivocal whimpers by several Western leaders, a hyper-cautious response from the UN Secretary-General, rhetorical condemnation by members of the Security Council, but no action whatsoever, and enthusiastic cheerleading by U.S. and Western corporate media.
How could this be?
Simply put, we are witnessing the dawning of the age of impunity.
Slouching towards Bethlehem
The recent sound of explosions over Venezuela, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Nigeria, and over the Red Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Caribbean Sea, is not merely the sound of a momentary imperial spasm by a declining U.S. empire.
It heralds something much more terrifying.
A new world is being birthed (or perhaps, reborn, reminiscent as it is of the horrors of the first half of the 20th Century).
A world wholly unconstrained by international law, or even by the most basic and universal moral principles.
A birth that could have been foretold by anyone paying attention to the machinations of the empire and its allies and vassals in recent decades.
From the mass incarceration and police excesses of the “war on drugs,” to the renditions, executions, and torture of the “war on terrorism,” to the systematic immiseration of the many in order to consolidate the wealth and power of the few, the U.S. empire has been on a decades-long warpath culminating with the extermination of the Palestinian people and this week’s assault on Venezuela.
These ever-expanding ripples of oppression, unchecked, threaten us all.
Because, in a world where even genocide is not a red line, there are no red lines.
A child of impunity
This new world is the child of impunity.
For over two years, the world has watched passively as the U.S.-Israel Axis stampeded across Western Asia, Africa, and Latin America in a blood-soaked rampage of conquest and destruction.
The UN Charter, the Rome Statute, the laws of war, human rights law, the law of the sea, laws on the use of force, all have been trampled underfoot and left in ruin by the actions and pronouncements of the Axis, the complicity of its allies and vassals, and the complacency of other states.
For their part, the international institutions put in place in the wake of the Second World War to prevent and respond to such horrors have been systematically corrupted, cowed, or crushed by the Axis. The International Criminal Court is largely frozen in the face of illegal U.S. sanctions. The International Court of Justice faces unprecedented harassment and political pressure.
The UN’s human rights rapporteurs are under a sustained campaign of slander and sanction. And even the UN Security Council has surrendered to the U.S. empire, as evidenced by its resolution 2803 in November of 2025, endorsing the wholly unlawful and baldly colonial plans of the Trump administration for Gaza.
States of the Western world, which have long postured as the defenders of human rights and international law, rather than standing up to the excesses of the Axis, have tripped over each other to obsequiously kiss the ring of the emperor and to bow to the blood-soaked stewards of its colonial project in Palestine.
And any presumed checks within the institutions of the empire itself have shown themselves to be wholly complicit, including the courts, which are both politically driven and generally disdainful of international law, the Congress, itself entirely corrupted by the lobbies, corporations, and billionaires driving U.S. and Israeli crimes in the first place, and the corporate media, which have thoroughly dedicated themselves to running cover for the imperial, extractive, corporate, and Zionist causes at the root of the violence engulfing the world today.
Yes, the people themselves have risen up, and in record numbers, to oppose the crimes of the Axis. But they have been met with systematic and brutal repression inside the empire and across the West, and even within the captured front line states of Western Asia.
As a result, the Axis has enjoyed absolute impunity, encouraging successively more atrocious acts, in a building crescendo of violence that has included aggression against countries across Western Asia and Africa, a chain of assassinations, the targeting of humanitarian boats in the Mediterranean, transnational terror attacks with booby trapped pagers, unlawful occupation of several nations, and a continuing genocide in Palestine.
In this context, no one should be surprised by the blatant criminality of the U.S. in imposing brutal unilateral coercive measures designed to starve the population of Venezuela into submission, several coup attempts, a series of extrajudicial executions of boaters in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the pirating of the country’s oil tankers and the seizing of their cargo, the bombing and invasion of the country, and the violent abduction of the President and First Lady.
This is how impunity functions. The more you feed it, the hungrier it becomes. And the world has fed this impunity for decades.
The beastly child born of this impunity brings with it the worst genetic traits of its 20th-century progenitors: racism, imperialism, colonialism, fascism, Zionism, aggression, and genocide. But it is now armed with the terrible 21st-century technologies of surveillance, silencing, and murder. The impacts of this deadly combination are now being felt across three continents in the global South, while the rest of the world teeters on the brink.
Imperial crimes in Venezuela………………………………………………………………
The Israeli connection
In her first public address since the U.S. attacks, Venezuelan Vice-President (and now Interim President) Delcy Rodriguez declared that the attack on the country had “Zionist undertones.” While she did not elaborate, the hand of the Israeli regime in supporting right-wing forces and destabilizing progressive governments in the region is by now well known. Israeli weapons, surveillance technology, intelligence, training, and influence via Israel proxies in the region have been a constant feature of Latin America for decades.
For their part, Israeli regime leaders have been giddy in their celebration of the attacks and of the abduction of the Venezuelan President (and have expressed their hope that the next attacks will be in Iran).
And this is no surprise. Since the election of Hugo Chávez and the launch of the Bolivarian Revolution more than a quarter century ago, Venezuela has asserted its independence, resisted U.S. hegemony, directed its oil and mineral wealth toward improving living conditions within the country, and stood in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for human rights.
Like Iran, Iraq, and Libya before them, that combination of factors has secured Venezuela’s place in the gunsights of the U.S.-Israel axis.
What’s more, the Israeli regime has a long history of attacking progressive forces, supporting right-wing regimes, death squads, and dictators, and seeding conflict across Latin America. Over the decades, its blood-stained fingerprints have been revealed in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.
This, together with the anti-colonial instincts of the region, explains the disgust with which Latin American governments of the left view the Israeli regime. And it also explains why far-right movements and leaders in the region routinely declare their fanatical support for the regime and for the Zionist project, even in the midst of the genocide in Palestine.
While the progressive governments of the region have condemned the genocide, joined the ICJ genocide case against Israel, and cut off diplomatic relations with the regime, right-wing governments, as well as leaders of Venezuela’s right-wing opposition, have praised the Israeli regime and subserviently pledged even closer cooperation. The regime is, as it has always been, deeply invested in tearing down left-wing governments in Latin America and propping up the right.
At the same time, Venezuela’s opposition to the Israeli regime, while also holding the world’s largest oil reserves, is seen by the U.S.-Israel Axis as a potential obstacle to their nefarious plans for war on Iran. Iran’s own oil capacities, and especially its effective control over the Straits of Hormuz (and therefore world energy markets), make control of Venezuelan oil especially attractive to the Axis as it prepares to renew its attacks on Iran.
Thus, the principal drivers of U.S. aggression against countries of the global South are the possession of mineral wealth coveted by U.S. corporations, a refusal to submit to U.S. hegemony, and opposition to the crimes of the Israeli regime. Venezuela has been guilty of all three. And these are the real “crimes” for which it is being prosecuted.
Life after law
The nascent project of international law has always been both weak and inchoate. But the guardrails established since 1945 offered some hope of a world governed, at least in part, by the rule of law, rather than by force alone.
. And a global consensus had been established whereby the worst crimes- aggression and genocide- were agreed to be beyond the pale. The U.S.-Israel Axis, so often indicted for violating international law, has lost patience with the entire project, and, with genocide in Palestine, the raining down of Axis bombs in countries across the globe, and now aggression in Venezuela, it has declared to the world that a new order is born. One in which all must bow to the empire or perish.
It is not too late for the world to stand up to stop the emergence of this beastly new order. Movements of people within and beyond the empire can challenge it with the urgency and unity of purpose it requires. The global majority, led by the free nations of the South, could unite as it did in the 1960s and 70s to challenge the empire and draw a line of principle, centered on collective action for peace, security, self-determination, and the human rights of peoples everywhere. Sadly, to date, there is little evidence to suggest that this is happening.
In the meantime, the unmistakable, unequivocal message that the U.S. imperial regime, its Israeli attack dog, and its legions of subservient Western vassals are sending to the world, to the nation states in its gunsights, and to all peoples resisting foreign occupation, colonial domination, and racist regimes is this: Diplomacy will not save you. International law will not save you. The United Nations will not save you. And we are coming for you. https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/ushering-in-the-age-of-impunity-venezuela-palestine-and-the-end-of-international-law/
Israel And Its Supporters Deliberately Foment Hate And Division In Our Society
Caitlin Johnstone, Jan 03, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-and-its-supporters-deliberately?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=183299564&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I’ve noticed a lot of angry comments underneath my posts these past few days which bizarrely mention the words “Islam” and “Muslims” completely out of the blue.
“Why don’t you turn your attention sometimes to the genocidal intent of the radical Muslims, or does that suit your racist narrative?” reads one tweet.
“What can you say about Islamic Jihadists Muslims murdering thousands of Christians in Sudan and other parts of Africa?” reads another.
“The muslims must be irradicated,” reads another.
There are too many examples to quote here, but here’s what’s so funny about all this: I haven’t been saying anything about Islam or Muslims on Twitter — I’ve been tweeting about Israel. Hasbarists just babble about Islam when they can’t defend Israel’s actions.
It is not a coincidence that they’ve been doing this. In September of last year Drop Site News published a leaked polling report that had been commissioned by the Israeli government which found that while Israel’s reputation is crumbling throughout the western world, one way to salvage it would be to foment panic about Muslims.
Drop Site reports the following:
“Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds. By highlighting Israeli support for women’s rights and gay rights while elevating concerns that Hamas wants to ‘destroy all Jews and spread Jihadism,’ Israeli support rebounded by an average of over 20 points in each country. ‘Especially once the situation in Gaza is resolved, the room for growth in all countries is very significant,’ the report concludes.”
So if you speak critically about Israel online and suddenly find your replies inundated with Zionists shrieking about Islam and Muslims, that’s why. Their research has concluded that convincing westerners to hate Muslims is easier than convincing them to love Israel.
In addition to committing genocide and starting wars and working to stomp out free speech throughout the western world, Israel is also doing everything it can to make our society more racist and hateful. A foreign state is actively fomenting division and discord in western countries, in exactly the way western empire apologists claimed Putin was doing at the height of Russia hysteria. But because it’s a western “ally”, nothing is being done to stop it.
In addition to being evil and disgusting, this tactic is also just sloppy argumentation. Deflection is the lowest form of argument. Even if Islam really was as dangerous as they pretend it is and even if Muslims really did present a threat to our society, pointing this out would not address a single criticism of Israel. Yelling “Muslims bad!” does not magically erase Israel’s abuses or address the grievances of its critics; it just diverts attention to another target and says “Stop looking at Israel’s actions and hate THOSE people instead!”
Mention Israel and you’ll get hasbarists babbling about Islam, but Islam and Israel are not opposites, and the mention of one has no bearing on the other. One is a worldwide religion with nearly two billion adherents, while the other is a genocidal apartheid state. Framing the issue as a conflict between two diametrically opposed parties is a false dichotomy created by propagandists and manipulators.
And that’s exactly the false dichotomy Netanyahu is trying to feed into when he tells Americans that Israel is in an alliance with Christianity against “radical Shiite Islam” and “radical Sunni Islam,” calling it “our common Judeo-Christian civilization’s battle.” He’s working to foment fear of Islam among Americans to boost support for Israel.
All this to manufacture consent for human butchery and apartheid. Israel could improve its support among westerners by simply ending its genocidal atrocities in Gaza and ceasing to try to start a war between the US and Iran, but instead it’s working around the clock to foment racism and division while demanding increased censorship and authoritarianism to stomp out pro-Palestine sentiment throughout western society.
Israel is doing this because it cannot exist in its present iteration as a state without nonstop violence and abuse. Under the political ideology known as Zionism, peace, justice, truth and freedom are simply not an option.
Chris Hedges: Decline and Fall
We live in an eerily similar historical moment. Britain, within 12 years of Kipling’s lament, was plunged into the collective suicide of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of over a million British and Commonwealth troops and doomed the British Empire.
Donald Trump boasts that he will be the “fertilization president.” American couples — meaning white couples — will be given incentives by his administration to have more children to counter declining birth rates.
December 29, 2025 , By Chris Hedges , ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/12/29/chris-hedges-decline-and-fall/
At the start of the 20th century, the British Empire was, like our own, in terminal decline. Sixty percent of Englishmen were physically unfit for military service, as are 77 percent of American youth. The Liberal Party, like the Democratic Party, while it acknowledged the need for reform, did little to address the economic and social inequalities that saw the working class condemned to live in substandard housing, breathe polluted air, be denied basic sanitation and health care and forced to work in punishing and poorly paid jobs.
The Tory government, in response, formed an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration to examine the “deterioration of certain classes of the population,” meaning, of course, the urban poor. It became known as the report on “the degeneracy of our race.” Analogies were swiftly drawn, with much accuracy, with the decadence and degeneracy of the late Roman Empire.
Rudyard Kipling, who romanticized and mythologized the British Empire and its military, in his 1902 poem “The Islanders,” warned the British that they had grown complacent and flaccid from hubris, indolence and privilege. They were unprepared to sustain the Empire. He despaired of the loss of martial spirit by the “sons of the sheltered city — unmade, unhandled, unmeet,” and called for mandatory conscription. He excoriated the British military for its increasing reliance on mercenaries and colonial troops, “the men who could shoot and ride,” just as mercenaries and militias increasingly augment American forces overseas.
Kipling damned the British public for its preoccupation with “trinkets” and spectator sports, including “the flannel fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals,” athletes whom he believed should have been fighting in the war in South Africa. He foresaw in the succession of British military disasters during the South African Boer War, which had recently ended, the impending loss of British global dominance, much as the two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East have eroded U.S. hegemony.
The preoccupation with physical decline, also interpreted as moral decline, is what led Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to decry “fat generals,” and order women in the military to meet the “highest male standards” for physical fitness. It is what is behind his “Warrior Ethos Tasking,” plans to enhance physical fitness, grooming standards and military readiness.
We live in an eerily similar historical moment. Britain, within 12 years of Kipling’s lament, was plunged into the collective suicide of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of over a million British and Commonwealth troops and doomed the British Empire.
H.G. Wells, who anticipated trench warfare, tanks and machine guns, was one of the very few to see where Britain was headed. In 1908, he wrote “The War in the Air.” He warned that future wars would not be limited to antagonistic nation-states but would become global. These wars, as was true in the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, would carry out the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians. He also foresaw in “The World Set Free,” the dropping of atomic bombs.
Nearly one third of the population in Edwardian England endured abject poverty. The cause, as Seebohm Rowntree noted in his study of the slums, was not, as conservatives claimed, alcoholism, laziness, a lack of initiative or responsibility by the poor, but because “the wages paid for unskilled labour in York are insufficient to provide food, shelter, and clothing adequate to maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency.”
The U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty among Western industrialized nations, estimated by many economists at far above the official figure of 10.6 percent. In real terms, some 41 percent of Americans are poor or low-income, with 67 percent living paycheck to paycheck.
British eugenicists from the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics — which was funded by Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” — advocated “positive eugenics,” the “improvement” of the race by encouraging those deemed superior — always white members of the middle and upper classes — to have large families. “Negative eugenics” was advocated to limit the number of children born to those deemed “unfit.” This would be achieved through sterilization and the separation of genders.
Winston Churchill, who was home secretary in the liberal government of H.H. Asquith in 1910-11, backed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded,” calling them a “national and race danger” and “the source from which the stream of madness is fed.”
The Trump White House, led by Stephen Miller, is intent on carrying out a similar culling of American society. Those endowed with “negative” hereditary traits — based usually on race — are condemned as human contaminants that an army of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are terrorizing, incarcerating and purging from society.
Miller, in emails leaked in 2019, lauds the 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints,” written by Jean Raspail. It chronicles a flotilla of South Asian people who invade France and destroy Western civilization. The immigrants, who the Trump administration are now hunting down, are described as “kinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms” and “teeming ants toiling for the white man’s comfort.” The South Asian mobs are “grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta,” led by a feces-eating “gigantic Hindu” known as “the turd eater.”
This, in its most scurrilous form, is the thesis of the “Great Replacement” theory, the belief that the white races in Europe and North America are being “replaced” by “lesser breeds of the earth.”
Donald Trump boasts that he will be the “fertilization president.” American couples — meaning white couples — will be given incentives by his administration to have more children to counter declining birth rates. In the vernacular of the right wing, those who promote this updated version of “positive eugenics” are known as “pronatalists.” The Trump administration will also reduce refugees admitted to the United States next year to the token level of 7,500, with most of these spots filled by white South Africans.
Trump’s allies in Big Tech are busy creating the fertility infrastructure to conceive children with “positive” hereditary traits. Sam Altman, who has been awarded a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce “designer babies.”
Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, which is facilitating the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, has backed an embryo screening company called Orchid Health. Orchid promises to help parents design “healthy” children through embryo testing and selection technology. Elon Musk, a fervent pronatalist and believer in the Great Replacement theory, is reportedly a client of the startup. The goal is to empower parents to screen embryos for IQ and select “their children’s intelligence before birth,” as the Wall Street Journal notes.
We are making the same self-defeating mistakes made by the British political class that oversaw the decline of the British Empire and orchestrated the suicidal folly of World War I. We blame the poor for their own impoverishment. We believe in the superiority of the white race over other races, crushing the plethora of voices, cultures and experiences that create a dynamic society. We seek to counter injustices, along with economic and social inequality, with hypermasculinity, militarism and force, which accelerates the internal decay and propels us toward a disastrous global war, perhaps, in our case, with China.
Wells scoffed at the idiocy of an entitled ruling class that was unable to analyze or address the social problems it had created. He excoriated the British political elite for its ignorance and ineptitude. They had vulgarized democracy, he wrote, with their racism, hypernationalism and simplistic cliché-ridden public discourse, stoked by a sensationalist tabloid press.
When a crisis came, Wells warned, these mandarins, like our own, would set the funeral pyre of empire alight.
The Pro-Israel Propaganda Complex
The Zionist PR machine is an enterprise to behold. It is probably historically unprecedented in the breadth and density of its lobbying and propaganda entities.
If Israel is so innately good, why does it need so many resources to proselytise it, to defend it and to dissimulate about its character?
3 January 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Dr Evan Jones. https://theaimn.net/the-pro-israel-propaganda-complex/
Caitlin Johnstone’s customary finger on the Zionist pulse is how I was first exposed to the telling presentation by Sarah Hurwitz to the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on 16 November 2025. Hurwitz was a senior adviser in the Obama administration (from which she was appointed as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council).
Says Hurwitz, young people no longer read but are hooked on social media. There, with respect to Gaza, they confront a ‘wall of carnage’. Hurwitz laments that: “So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.” (Grown up) rationality has seemingly succumbed to (teenage) unprocessed sense impressions.
More, Holocaust education has been turned against us because our own young kin are applying the role of the evil oppressor, (Jewish) god forbid, to Israel itself.
British philosophy academic Lorna Finlayson (New Left Review’s Side Car) chimes in with respect to the Hurwitz performance:
“The true meaning of the Holocaust, we might infer, is not that it was bad because the strong were hurting the weak, but because Jews were the victims. When the victims are Black or Palestinian, it’s different.”
Peculiar that Hurwitz imagines that ‘the data and information and facts and arguments’ at her command contradict the youngster’s visualising the ‘wall of carnage’. The ‘data and information and facts and arguments’ that I am familiar with are consistent with the visuals.Finlayson concurs:
“The trouble for Hurwitz, however, is that if the pictures aren’t on her side, the ‘facts’ and ‘data’ are even less so. The more we see of them, the worse Israel looks.”
Dead children, medicos, journalists, aid workers – an impressive and mounting tally. Ah, and the infrastructure! The landscape obliterated. Bradford University’s Paul Rogers, interviewed in April 2025, estimated that 70,000 tonnes of explosives had been dropped on Gaza to that date.
Hurwitz waxes mystical:
“The problem is, we’re not just a religion … We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. … The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings.”
‘The seven million people in Israel’ – what? Hurwitz is referring to Jewish people in Israeland, presumably, Jewish settlers who don’t live in Israel (add Russian ersatz Jews assimilated to up the numbers). Hurwitz conflates the local Jewish population and the state of Israel. The others don’t exist.
Civilisation I don’t think so. ‘Tribe’ is correct – this is tribalism writ large. Yet the bad eggs, the founders and successive leaders of apartheid Israel, are dictating to the tribe the terms in their entirety on which tribalism will prevail. For Hurwitz – Israel is us, period. Being Jewish, you’re in the tribe on Israel’s terms – period. What do you think, at some expense, we send you to Jewish day school and Hebrew school for?
Finlayson again:
“The problem [for Hurwitz] with Palestinian children is not that they are evil [as perthe claims of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant] but that they are a PR challenge.”
How in the world could the bloodthirsty Zionist enterprise, acting with impunity, face a PR challenge?
The Zionist PR machine is an enterprise to behold. It is probably historically unprecedented in the breadth and density of its lobbying and propaganda entities. The character of the matrix is well captured in a review of American academic Harriet Malinowitz’s recent book Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara, from whence this Malinowitz summary is extracted:
“[The hasbara, which can be] bluntly described as propaganda, but in fact comprises a huge network of government ministries, nongovernmental organizations, nonprofit agencies and charities, campus organizations, volunteer groups, watchdog bodies, professional associations, media networks, fundraising operations, and educational programs that aim to fortify a Zionist-defined notion of Jewishness in persons within Israel, the United States, and other countries.”
Quite. And that’s just for Jewry itself, to keep it on the straight and narrow. The network addressed to the non-compliance and ignorance of non-Jews is something else.
Attached below is a list, inevitably incomplete, of organisations that one has been able to compile from public sources. It is a scrappy matrix, even anarchic but layered, influenced by national Jewish communities’ size and history, and by individual initiatives. It is complemented by Israeli state authority initiatives.
In total, the resources devoted to selling Israel and warding off and attacking its detractors have been and are formidable. Do Zionists have time in their life for anything else?
There’s an anomaly here. If Israel is so innately good, why does it need so many resources to proselytise it, to defend it and to dissimulate about its character?
The juggernaut has evidently had impressive results, of which the following samples.
The US Congress is a Zionist-occupied entity. The mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu is invited into the hallowed premises (Joint: 10 July 1996, 24 May 2011, 3 March 2015, 25 July 2024; House: 12 September 2002), debauches it with his mendacity and is met with standing ovations.
The EU-Israel Association Agreement ‘entered into force’ in June 2000. The Agreement accords Israel considerable privileges. The background is here. The 154 page document is here. Of integral relevance is Article 2:
“Relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement.”
Israel is an apartheid state by construction, so how could this trade Agreement ever get on the drawing board, leave alone come to fruition?
Israel remains ensconced in global sporting entities, as exemplified with soccer. There is currently pressure on UEFA and FIFA to exclude Israel but the governing bodies have resisted to date. Russia has been sanctioned. Israel remains in the bosom of global sport.
Ditto culture. Eurovision’s sponsor, the European Broadcasting Union, is also under pressure to exclude Israel but has ignored it (this is ‘a non-political event’). Russia is immediately expelled in 2022. Israel remains in Eurovision. Israel has won Eurovision four times, with more recent questions arising of dubious voting integrity and the transparent ‘soft power’ leverage by Israel of the platform to detract from the ongoing genocide.
Perusing the list, one can observe select categories.
1. Some early organisations began as charities to support Jewish communities in need. Amongst these, there has been a general trend to turn towards support for the state of Israel – sometimes auxiliary, sometimes central. Some latter–day organisations are formally Jewish community support-oriented but add Israel to their charter.
2. Some organisations stand out with respect to the influence of their operations. Uniquely there is the Jewish Agency for Israel, in Mandatory Palestine, which, with the Jewish National Council, were the nuclei for the state of Israel after 1948.
Singularly important are the dominant organisations in particular countries, not least AIPAC in the US, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and CRIF in France.
The power of AIPAC puts it in a league of its own. AIPAC exerts an enormous influence on the US Congress, not least through funding for and against sitting members and candidates, and fostering Israel junkets. AIPAC funding contributed to the defeat of long-serving Illinois Representative Paul Findley in 1982. Findley’s contemporary and fellow activist Pete McCloskey, California Representative (1967-83) was perennially under attack from the Zionist lobby. AIPAC and other Jewish organisations’ funding facilitated the defeat of long-time Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney and Alabama Representative Earl Hilliard, both in 2002 primaries. AIPAC funding defeated Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards, seeking re-election to a seat she previously held, in 2022. AIPAC funding defeated Missouri Representative Cori Bush and New York Representative Jaamal Bowman, both in primaries in 2024. Apparently AIPAC ‘invested’ $45 million in the November 2024 elections, half of which went to defeating Bush and Bowman. AIPAC conferences present a ghoulish spectacle in which Congress and government members bow down before AIPAC’s commitment to the imperatives of a foreign rogue state. (More details regarding the US Israel lobby are outlinedin Serge Halimi’s ‘Is the United States’ patience with Israel running out?’, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2025.)
3. A discernible category covers Christian Zionist organisations and Jewish organisations seeking amity with and support from Christian groups, not least Evangelicals. Christians United for Israel (US) is clearly the most significant of this grouping, with CUFI claiming over 10 million members. Israel and Zionism evidently value this alliance in terms of the numerical ‘heft’ that it brings.
Israeli academic Tom Ziv performed a quantitative analysis of the size of evangelical Christian Zionist populations in 18 Latin American countries (‘Evangelicalism and Support for Israel in Latin America’, Politics & Religion, 2022). He found a link between the size of such groups and the country’s support for Israel as reflected in UN votes, with such groups evidently having a direct impact on their country’s foreign policy. Being a ‘true’ value-free academic, he declines to articulate the ‘policy implications’, although the Israeli authorities would be thoroughly aware of the implications for hasbara PR funding.
As mainstream protestant churches were reducing their support for Israel (tangibly in divesting denomination-related investments from Israel-related corporations and activities), so also there had been some small shift against whole-hearted support for Israel amongst young evangelicals. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://theaimn.net/the-pro-israel-propaganda-complex/
Catholic diocese urges prayer, public witness against proposed nuclear plant in northern Philippines.
A northern Philippine diocese has urged Catholics to gather for prayer and public witness as it reiterates its opposition to a proposed nuclear power plant in Labrador town, Pangasinan province.
Jan 02, 2026, By Mark Saludes, Herald Malaysia Online,
In a video message circulated ahead of the gathering, Fr. Ed Inacay of the Diocese of Alaminos called on residents to take part in a Holy Mass on Sunday, Jan. 4, 2026, at 8 a.m. at St. Isidore Parish, to be presided over by Bishop Napoleon Sipalay Jr.
The priest said the Mass is linked to the Church’s discernment on the proposed nuclear facility and reflects the diocese’s opposition to the project.
“It is good that we reflect on this and pray over this plan, and I encourage you to join our bishops, especially here in our diocese, our beloved bishop, where the Diocese of Alaminos does not agree with the construction of a nuclear power plant here in our town of Labrador,” he said.
Caritas Philippines expressed support for the Diocese of Alaminos and urged the public to “demand an energy policy that prioritizes human safety, ecological integrity, and the constitutional right to a balanced and healthy environment.”
In a video message released on Jan. 2, Caritas Philippines president Bishop Gerardo Alminaza of San Carlos, warned that nuclear energy “remains a perilous energy source that poses long-term risks to our communities and our ‘common home.’”…………………..
In December 2025, Catholic dioceses across the country expressed collective opposition to the proposed construction of a nuclear power plant in Western Pangasinan, citing moral responsibility, environmental risk, and the protection of life as central concerns.
In a pastoral letter, the bishops, particularly those of the Metropolitan See of Lingayen-Dagupan, said the proposal came as communities were still recovering from Typhoon Uwan, which left the province under a state of calamity and affected more than 233,000 people.
The bishops said the Philippines’ vulnerability to earthquakes and typhoons, its location along the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” and the lack of a secure, long-term solution for radioactive waste make nuclear facilities an “unacceptable risk,” especially in disaster-prone areas.
They warned that nuclear energy carries “irreversible, long-term risks” that outweigh projected benefits and said radioactive waste, which remains deadly for thousands of years, would impose a burden on future generations.
Drawing from the experiences of bishops in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the prelates said nuclear power generation is fundamentally incompatible with a vision of society that respects all life.
Echoing Pope Francis, the bishops stressed prudence, human safety, and environmental protection over immediate economic gains, urging government officials and the public to pursue renewable energy paths that safeguard communities, ecosystems, and the common good.—licas.news https://www.heraldmalaysia.com/news/catholic-diocese-urges-prayer-public-witness-against-proposed-nuclear-plant-in-northern-philippines/86844/2
#9 TOP STORY OF 2025: Why six Australian Jews accused leading local Zionist of antisemitism
By David Glanz | 27 December 2025
When a leading Zionist calls six other Australian Jews “antisemitic” – and worse – over criticisms of Israel, the issues are deep. Hence this February piece, by those six, was so vital, well-received and much read.
Six Melbourne Jews, labelled “antisemites” by prominent lawyer Mark Leibler, have made a formal complaint against him to the Australian Human Rights Commission. Dr David Glanz details their position.
IMAGINE calling a group of Jews ‘repulsive and revolting human beings’.
At a time when Nazi thugs are openly organising on our streets and swastikas are being daubed on Jewish buildings, it’s surely the stuff of Far-Right memes. Inspiration for more foul graffiti.
But the author of the words was certainly no Nazi. The phrase was written by Mark Leibler AC, one of Melbourne’s leading lawyers, a member of the University of Melbourne Council, a former president of the Zionist Federation of Australia and the current chair of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
Mr Leibler wrote the words as part of a post on Twitter/X that he paid to promote, reaching some 400,000 people.
His target was anti-Zionist Jews in general and – given that we were organising an anti-Zionist rally the day after the post – surely the five of us, some of whom are migrants from Israel.
Mr Leibler didn’t pull his punches. He went on to say that our relatives killed in the Holocaust would be rolling in their graves.
And – this stings, given our track record of anti-racism – that we are ‘vicious antisemites’.
Now Mr Leibler is entitled to his support for Zionism. The idea that Jews would be best served by the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine is, after all, a political position and one that has been contested within Jewish communities for some 140 years.
He is also entitled to defend the State of Israel and its actions in Gaza over the past 16 months.
We disagree with him on both counts. We organised our rally at Parliament House because we wanted to put on the public record that some Jews oppose the settler colonial conquest of Palestine and the consequences that have flowed from that, including apartheid laws within Israel and the West Bank and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
We know that we are a minority within the Jewish community. We don’t claim to speak for all Melbourne Jews — quite the opposite. Our argument is that no one, including Mr Leibler, gets to speak for all Jews.
But we know that the number of Jews standing against the genocide and in solidarity with Palestine is growing, not just in Melbourne but around the world.
Over the past 16 months there have been impressive and lively rallies by dissenting Jews in the U.S., a Jewish bloc of up to 1,000 on Palestine rallies in London and, here in Melbourne, Jews taking part in each of the 71 weekly rallies for Palestine, with Jews often invited to speak from the platform.
We include in our ranks the descendants of Holocaust survivors and those who lost family in the Nazi death camps.
So the one thing we are certain Mr Leibler is not entitled to do is to dismiss us as beyond the pale. We have a right to speak, to be heard (and disagreed with) as Jews.
We have submitted a complaint about Mr Leibler’s post on X to the Australian Human Rights Commission.
As we are all Jews, and as Mr Leibler attacked us as such, we would argue that his post is not just offensive but antisemitic.
And given that our rally was to highlight the issue of discrimination against Palestinians and all victims of racism, we would argue that Mr Leibler’s post was an attempt to victimise us by exposing us to ridicule and contempt as Jews in the public arena.
It is also insulting. We include in our ranks the descendants of Holocaust survivors and those who lost family in the Nazi death camps.
We don’t want money or revenge. A public apology would suffice.
We have been denigrated and impugned. But the suffering of the Palestinians makes any slight we have experienced pale to nothing in comparison.
And that is the tragedy. While Mr Leibler uses his position of power to attack us as the “wrong sort of Jews”, some 2 million Palestinians in Gaza squat in the rubble of their homes, their hospitals and schools, their mosques and churches, and mourn their tens of thousands of dead.
Our rally called for an end to the suffering and discrimination. It was joined by many Jews and our non-Jewish supporters.
Mr Leibler’s post was a calculated and pre-emptive smear to undermine our rejection of all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.
He was obviously concerned about our impact. We must be doing something right.
Dr David Glanz, Nachshon Amir, Shahar Amir, Dr Keren Tova Rubinstein and Dr Guy Gillor are anti-Zionist Jews in Melbourne, who organised a rally against genocide and racism at the Victorian Parliament.
Palantir’s Palestine: How AI Gods Are Building Our Extinction
“Zionism is evil,” she says with the quiet certainty of someone who has spent a lifetime studying its fruits. “It is purely evil. It has created disasters, misery, atrocities, wars, aggression, unhappiness, insecurity for millions of Palestinians and Arabs. This ideology has no place whatsoever in a just world. None
The machines are not coming for us. They are already here. And the men who control them have made their intentions terrifyingly clear.
BettBeat Medi, Dec 26, 2025
But Zionism, in its current iteration, is not merely an ideology. It is a business model. It is a technology demonstration. It is the beta test for systems that will eventually be deployed everywhere.
The Israeli military’s Project Lavender uses AI to identify targets for assassination. Soldiers describe processing “dozens of them a day” with “zero added value as a human.” The algorithm marks. The human clicks. The bomb falls.
This is not a war. It is a sick twisted video game.
Palantir’s technology identifies the targets. Musk’s Starlink provides the communications. American military contractors supply the weapons. And the entire apparatus is funded by governments whose citizens have marched in the millions demanding it stop.
There is a moment in every civilization’s collapse when the instruments of its destruction become visible to those paying attention. We are living in that moment now. But the warning signs are not carved in stone or written in prophecy—they are embedded in source code, amplified by algorithms, and funded by men who speak openly of human extinction while racing to cause it.
In a nondescript office in Palo Alto, a man who claims to fear fascism has become its most sophisticated architect. In a sprawling Texas compound, another man who styles himself a free speech absolutist uses his platform to amplify the voices calling for ethnic cleansing. And in the bombed-out hospitals of Gaza, their technologies converge in a laboratory of horrors that prefigures what awaits us all.
The four horsemen of this apocalypse do not ride horses. They deploy algorithms.
The Confession
Professor Stuart Russell has spent fifty years studying artificial intelligence. He wrote the textbook from which nearly every AI CEO in Silicon Valley learned their craft. And now, at eighty hours a week, he works not to advance the field he helped create, but to prevent it from annihilating the species.
“They are playing Russian roulette with every human being on Earth,” Russell said in a recent interview, his voice carrying the weight of someone who has seen the calculations and understood their implications. “Without our permission. They’re coming into our houses, putting a gun to the head of our children, pulling the trigger, and saying, ‘Well, you know, possibly everyone will die. Oops. But possibly we’ll get incredibly rich.’”
This is not hyperbole from an outsider. This is the assessment of a man whose students now run the companies building these systems. And here is what should terrify you: the CEOs themselves agree with him.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, estimates a 25% chance of human extinction from AI. Elon Musk puts it at 20-30%. Sam Altman, before becoming CEO of OpenAI, declared that creating superhuman intelligence is “the biggest risk to human existence that there is.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
“These bombs are cheaper and you don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..The [Palantir] company’s software now powers what Israeli soldiers describe with chilling bureaucratic efficiency: “I would invest 20 seconds for each target and do dozens of them a day. I had zero added value as a human. Apart from being a stamp of approval.”
Twenty seconds. That is the value of a Palestinian life in the algorithmic calculus of Alex Karp’s creation. The machine decides who dies. The human merely clicks.
When whistleblowers revealed that Israeli intelligence officers were using “dumb bombs”—unguided munitions with no precision capability—on targets identified by Palantir’s AI, their justification was purely economic: “These bombs are cheaper and you don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people.”
Unimportant people. Children. Doctors. Journalists. Poets.
Karp has admitted, in a moment of rare candor: “I have asked myself if I were younger, at college, would I be protesting me?”
He knows the answer. We all know the answer. He simply does not care.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Musk is the CEO of xAI, OpenAI’s largest competitor. He has declared himself a 30% believer in human extinction from AI. And he is using the world’s most influential social media platform to promote the political movements most likely to strip away the regulations that might prevent that extinction.
The fascists have captured the algorithm.
The Laboratory of the Future
Dr. Ghada Karmi was a child in 1948 when she lost her homeland. She remembers enough to know that she lost her world. For seventy-seven years, she has watched as the mechanisms of Palestinian erasure evolved from rifles and bulldozers to algorithms and autonomous weapons systems.
“Zionism is evil,” she says with the quiet certainty of someone who has spent a lifetime studying its fruits. “It is purely evil. It has created disasters, misery, atrocities, wars, aggression, unhappiness, insecurity for millions of Palestinians and Arabs. This ideology has no place whatsoever in a just world. None. It has to go. It has to end. And it has to be removed. Even its memory has to go.”
But Zionism, in its current iteration, is not merely an ideology. It is a business model. It is a technology demonstration. It is the beta test for systems that will eventually be deployed everywhere.
The Israeli military’s Project Lavender uses AI to identify targets for assassination. Soldiers describe processing “dozens of them a day” with “zero added value as a human.” The algorithm marks. The human clicks. The bomb falls.
This is not a war. It is a sick twisted video game.
Palantir’s technology identifies the targets. Musk’s Starlink provides the communications. American military contractors supply the weapons. And the entire apparatus is funded by governments whose citizens have marched in the millions demanding it stop.
“The genocide has not provoked a change in the official attitude,” Dr. Karmi observes. “I’m astonished by this and it needs an explanation.”
The explanation is simpler and more terrifying than any conspiracy. The explanation is that the people who control these technologies have decided that some lives are worth twenty seconds of consideration and others are worth none at all. And the governments that might regulate them have been captured by men waving fifty billion dollar checks.
“They dangle fifty billion dollar checks in front of the governments,” Professor Russell explains. “On the other side, you’ve got very well-meaning, brilliant scientists like Jeff Hinton saying, actually, no, this is the end of the human race. But Jeff doesn’t have a fifty billion dollar check.”
The King Midas Problem
Russell invokes the legend of King Midas to explain the trap we have built for ourselves. ………………………………………………………………………………..
The CEOs know this. They have signed statements acknowledging it. They estimate the odds of catastrophe at one in four, one in three, and they continue anyway.
Why?
Because the economic value of AGI—artificial general intelligence—has been estimated at fifteen quadrillion dollars. This sum acts, in Russell’s metaphor, as “a giant magnet in the future. ……………………………………………………………
“The people developing the AI systems,” Russell observes, “they don’t even understand how the AI systems work. So their 25% chance of extinction is just a seat of the pants guess. They actually have no idea.”
No idea. But they’re spending a trillion dollars anyway. Because the magnet is too strong. Because the incentives are too powerful. Because they have convinced themselves that someone else will figure out the safety problem. Eventually. Probably. Maybe.
What Now?
If everything goes right—if somehow we solve the control problem, if somehow we prevent extinction, if somehow we navigate the transition to artificial general intelligence without destroying ourselves—what then? ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The Enablers
Dr. Karmi returns again and again to a simple question: Why?
“Why should a state that was invented, with an invented population, have become so important that we can’t live without it?” she asks of Israel. But the question applies equally to Silicon Valley, to the tech platforms, to the entire apparatus of algorithmic control that now shapes our politics, our perceptions, our possibilities.
The answer, she suggests, lies in understanding the enablers.
“I think it’s absolutely crucial now to focus on the enablers,” she argues. “Because we can go on and on giving examples of Israeli brutality, of the atrocities, of the cruelties. That’s not for me the point. The point is who is allowing this to happen?”
The same question must be asked of AI. Who is allowing this to happen? Who is funding the companies that acknowledge a 25% chance of human extinction and continue anyway? Who is providing the regulatory vacuum in which these technologies develop unchecked? Who is amplifying the voices calling for acceleration while silencing those calling for caution?
The answer is the same class of people who have enabled every catastrophe of the modern era: the comfortable, the compliant, the compromised. The politicians who take the fifty billion dollar checks. The journalists who amplify the preferred narratives. The citizens who scroll past the warnings because they are too busy, too distracted, too convinced that someone else will handle it.
“All the polls that have been done say most people, 80% maybe, don’t want there to be super intelligent machines,” Russell notes. “But they don’t know what to do.”
They don’t know what to do. So they do nothing. And the machines keep learning. And the algorithms keep shaping. And the billionaires keep abusing. And the bombs keep falling. And the future keeps narrowing.
The Resistance
Russell’s advice is almost quaint in its simplicity: “Talk to your representative, your MP, your congressperson. Because I think the policymakers need to hear from people. The only voices they’re hearing right now are the tech companies and their fifty billion dollar checks.
………………………………… the point is not that resistance will succeed. The point is that resistance is the only thing that might succeed.
…………………………….We still have a choice. The machines are not yet smarter than us. The algorithms are not yet in complete control. The billionaires are not yet omnipotent.
But the window is closing. The event horizon may already be behind us. And the men who control the most powerful technologies in human history have made their values abundantly clear.
They will pursue profit over safety. They will amplify hatred over tolerance. They will choose rape over romance. They will enable genocide if the margins are favorable. They will risk extinction if the upside is sufficient.
This is not speculation. This is the record. This is what they are doing, right now, in plain sight.
The question is not whether we understand the danger. The question is what we will do about it……………………………………………………….. https://bettbeat.substack.com/p/palantirs-palestine-how-ai-gods-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=437130&post_id=180304933&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=46by4&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Ethics matter more than ever – even in Israel
19 December 25, https://theaimn.net/ethics-matter-more-than-ever-even-in-israel/
Who’d have thought, in this time of crisis, lies and propaganda, that it might be the Jerusalem Post that showed us an ethical direction?
And, on another matter of ethics – the Jerusalem Post, again.
I’m pretty used to the pro-Zionist propaganda that spills out from the Israeli media, the American media, and the Australian media.
I don’t know if it’s Hannukah, Christmas, or what, but in the usual cacophony of news and opinion, – that normally unfashionable subject of ethics is now standing out.
The Jerusalem Post spelt out its horror at the new, and murderous symbolism, of the lapel image now worn by ultranationalist Israeli politicians. Closely resembling the previous symbol, which called for the return of the Israeli hostages, their new symbol calls for continued killing of Palestinians, as the lapel image morphs from a ribbon into a noose.
A golden noose around Israel’s soul – says the paper – “The golden noose goes far beyond poor taste. It represents a theology of death, a reverence for vengeance that distorts the face of Judaism and deals a severe blow to Israeli society.”
“Jews around the world would be hard-pressed to defend and embrace the Jewish state.“
And indeed, this noose-wearing thing might backfire – as Jews in Israel and beyond reflect on the ethics of the Netanyahu government’s war on Palestinians.
Almost simultaneously, came the news of the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach. The mainstream corporate news outlets have, predictably, latched on to this, to engender more vengefulness and hatred, and to blame Australia’s Prime Minister for his support of Palestinian state rights.
There is much coverage and genuine concern for the victims of this cruel outrage and their families. In amongst this, some sentimental coverage of the brave man who tackled an armed killer. As the ABC pointed out, media coverage treated this man as an oddity – as being a Muslim, one would not expect such decency. – a media attitude that is subtly Islamophobic.
” Ahmed al-Ahmed a 43-year-old Sydney fruit shop owner and father of two, moved toward the attacker, wrapped him from behind, wrestled away the long gun, and forced the shooter to retreat. He was shot and hospitalized, but his split-second decision is widely credited with preventing even greater carnage.”
And commented – “There is something profoundly Hanukkah about that moment.”
The Post goes on to reflect on those non-Jews of history, who risked everything to save Jews, – Raoul Wallenberg. Oskar Schindler. Chiune Sugihara and more
“These stories are not only about the Holocaust, but they are also about moral clarity under pressure, the choice to see a fellow human being and refuse to look away.”
This man’s courage and generosity of spirit has impressed people world-wide, and his actions have been praised in the media, cutting through the general tone of anger and hatred
The author, ZVIKA KLEIN, reminds that Hannukah means “a demand that human beings choose decency over cruelty“
Which is pretty much what Christmas is supposed to mean, too.
While the merchants of hate, revenge, and political opportunism hold sway in the corporate media, voices for compassion and decency are being heard too. These are hopes to cling to for the coming year, and bring some positive meaning to Hannukah and Christmas,
After the First 70,669 Deaths
By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News, December 19, 2025
I take the 15 victims at Bondi Beach and divide them by the 71,000 deaths in Gaza as of this writing. I get a fraction of 0.0002143.
I read in a BBC report that the victims of the Dec. 14 shooting at Bondi Beach, along the coast a few miles from central Sydney, were “generous, joyful and talented.”
These were Jews who had gathered, a sizable group, to celebrate Hanukkah under Australia’s summer sun. Immediately this is cast across the West as a case of out-of-control, come-from-nowhere anti–Semitism having nothing to do with the conduct of “the Jewish state.”
Two of the victims, Sofia and Boris Gurman, “were people of deep kindness, quiet strength and unwavering care for others,” the family said in a statement the Australian Broadcasting Corporation published Tuesday.
I read that Reuven Morrison, another of the 15 victims, was “the most beautiful, generous man who had a gorgeous smile that would light up the room.” I read that the friends of Dan Elkayam, a French Jew marking the holiday in Australia, “described him as a down-to-earth, happy-to-lucky individual who was warmly embraced by those he met.”
You can read about these victims of the Bondi Beach shooting, too. The ABC published commemorations of 12 of the 15. There are photographs, the intimate remembrances of those who knew the deceased, some boilerplate describing how Australia’s state broadcaster is reporting the story. The New York Times published similar items on 13 of the victims under the headline, “What to Know About the Victims of the Bondi Beach Shooting.”
The ABC report is here, and The New York Times’s is here. If you study them briefly you find the themes common to both. Individuation is the essential point. We must know the names and see the faces of all of those killed. Innocence and virtue are the other running themes.
The Times ran a similar feature after Sept. 11, 2001. Under the headline, “Profiles in Grief,” it published thumbnail biographies of the 2,977 victims of the World Trade Center attacks, a half-dozen or so a day all through that strange autumn. I studied those short pieces carefully, and it is the same now as then: Everyone is uniquely himself or herself, everyone innocent, everyone generous, everyone happy and caring. Every life precious, in a word.
I do not know how to continue writing this commentary other than bluntly and honestly. The Bondi Beach killings bring us to a transformative moment and warrant no less.
The 15 people who perished at Bondi last Sunday — and there may be more casualties to come among those hospitalized with wounds — did not deserve to die at the hands of a father-and-son act reportedly inspired by the remnants of the Islamic State. These were senseless murders by any conceivable judgment — so senseless I am stating the obvious by saying so.
The Dishonesty of Official Grief
But I cannot enter into the responses officials and the media serving them have urged incessantly since last weekend. Out of the question for any number of reasons, chief among them the dishonesty at the core of what I may as well call “official grief.”
Read in the larger context of these awful events, the obsessive humanization of the Bondi Beach victims is an upside-down exercise in dehumanization. This is first, straight off the top. Jewish lives count, white lives count, names, faces, generous smiles — all this counts.
But the names, faces and lives of those the Zionist regime has terrorized and brutalized for the past two years or eight decades, depending on how you reckon history: No, no need for any of this because they do not count.
This is an obscenity, in my view — obscene for what it is and because it has a 500-year history. Since the opening of the imperial era in the late 15th century, the West has aggrandized itself with its never-to-be-questioned claims to civilization, decency, law and moral superiority, while the rest of the world consists of unruly, racially inferior, not-quite-human barbarians. The horrors of the mission civilisatrice — inhumanity in the name of humanity — were the inevitable outcome and so they remain.
Indulge in official grief as it is now more or less forced upon us and you are a 21st century participant in this self-serving… as I say, this obscenity. I do not see that it is any more complicated.
The New York Times published an especially egregious case in point a day after the attacks. “I no longer want to hear, after a mass shooting, of the remarkable ways a community came together,” Sharon Brous, a rabbi in Los Angeles, wrote in the paper’s opinion section. “I don’t want platitudes and pieties. I want justice…. I don’t want to celebrate resiliency. I want reform” — reform, that is, to combat the anti–semitism she understands to be the beginning and the end of the Bondi Beach story.
Rabbi Brous went on to explain that, post–Bondi, she struggles against despair. But she found great humanity, on the other hand, in “the vibrancy of the worldwide Jewish community that immediately rallied in solidarity, reminding us that when one limb is struck the whole body is unwell.”
Simply typing these brief passages leaves me incredulous. Justice, reform, rallies in solidarity with the 15, nothing for the 71,000 (the Gaza Health Ministry’s count at this writing), who evidently do not even enter Rabbi Brous’s head. And the Zionist terror machine’s daily strikes in Gaza and the West Bank as we speak? No, nothing, for they are not part of any “whole body,” however this is conceived.
Yes, I can grieve for those who died last Sunday, but it is a question of recognition, of keeping things in proportion. Here is my admittedly simplified formula: I take the 15 victims at Bondi Beach and divide them by the 71,000 deaths in Gaza as of this writing. I get a fraction of 0.0002143 and this is the extent of my grief for the 15.
I have called the Bondi Beach attack transformative. Two reasons.
One, these awful events mark a major step in the erasure not only of history and memory but of sheer cognition. I have heard or read no mention from any mainstream quarter of the campaign of terror and dehumanization the Zionist state now wages not just in Gaza and in the West Bank but against Muslim populations across much of West Asia.
This is hardly new. Apartheid Israel and its too-numerous, too-powerful enablers have sought to erase and otherwise obscure the truth of the Zionist project since there was a Zionist project to speak of. But Bondi Beach looks set not merely to normalize the human mind’s incapacity to see, think and judge but to enforce this damage to the collective consciousness by means of those “reforms” Rabbi Brous proposes.
Two, Zionists and their fellow travelers instantly began to use the events of last Sunday to condemn the Palestinian cause altogether. This is again nothing new.
Utter “From the river to the sea…” or “Globalize the intifada,” and you risk your job, your professorship, your visa; arrest in Britain; profess support for Palestine Action, the British protest group, and you will be arrested and tried under the U.K.’s draconian terrorism laws.
But Bondi Beach already serves to license Zionists to advance a blanket condemnation of the Palestinian cause. Predictably enough, the Zionist-supervised New York Times gives us another case in point. ………………………………………………………………………………..
Judaism Versus Zionism
Just as I was thinking through the events at Bondi Beach and wondering why my sympathies came to 0.0002143 percent of what they were officially supposed to be, I began reading the book Yakov Rabkin, the distinguished professor of history at the University of Montreal, just published.
Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Palestine (Aspect Editions), is a brief, superbly lucid essay on the difference between Judaism and Zionism — the former embodying an excellently humanist tradition and the latter its violent perversion into a limitlessly vicious ethno-nationalist ideology.
Some pages in I came to this sentence:
“Across Israel and worldwide, Jews grapple with contradictions between the Judaism they profess and the Zionist ideology that has in fact taken hold of them.”
This simply stated reality landed squarely. I immediately went back to those brief biographies the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and The New York Times just published. Yes, I thought. Generous, kind toward others, compassionate: They put the victims exactly in the Judaic tradition as Rabkin described it.
Rabkin gives an excellent précis of the long history of animosity most Jews felt toward Zionism during its emergent phase in the late 19th and early 20th century. They, especially Jews residing in Palestine prior to the arrival of the first Zionist settlers, who lived peaceably side-by side with indigenous Arabs, wanted nothing to do with it.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. the possibility of a Mossad provocation cannot be dismissed. The historical record suggests this. (Mossad is now assisting Australian investigators into the attack). And given the use Zionists make of the Bondi Beach events, the cui bono argument cannot be thrown out of court.
Already there are Zionists in Australia and elsewhere asserting that anyone who has until now stood for the Palestinian cause bears responsible for the gruesome events at an Australian beach last Sunday. Reflecting this sentiment—and the political influence of militant Zionism in Australia—federal and state governments are now considering legislation that would, among much else, allow authorities to ban demonstrations and even speech in support of a free Palestine.
I take the opposite view as to where responsibility lies: Mossad op or no Mossad op, it is fairer to say it is Zionists who are responsible, directly or by way of the war they wage against Palestinians — and against morality and ordinary decency, against our public discourse, our laws and civil liberties, our consciences, our faculties of reason — for the deaths at Bondi Beach.
Post–Bondi, it follows immediately, it is ever more imperative that Jews the world over declare themselves either as Jews in the Judaic tradition or as Zionists. The urgency of mass denunciations of Zionism could hardly be more evident. https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/19/patrick-lawrence-after-the-first-70669-deaths/
A golden noose around Israel’s soul: Ben-Gvir’s theology of death strangles society – opinion.
The golden noose represents a theology of death, a reverence for vengeance that distorts the face of Judaism and deals a severe blow to Israeli society.
By ELAD CAPLAN, Jerusalem Post, DECEMBER 15, 2025, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-880357
If you happened to wander into the meeting of the Knesset committee this week, you might have expected to see MKs engrossed in serious discussions on the myriad and often existential challenges Israel must address. But what would most likely have caught your eye is the golden pin on National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his party members’ jackets.
What was troubling about these pins was their shape – a hangman’s noose. Ben-Gvir and his fellow party members explained that the pins symbolize their commitment to executing terrorists. But symbols carry weight beyond their stated purpose, and this one speaks volumes – not about strength but about a dangerous path threatening Israel’s Jewish and democratic character.
Israel’s existential challenges
Two existential challenges confront the State of Israel at this hour: defeating our enemies and taking every possible precaution to ensure that we do not become like them – neither in their savagery, nor in their abandonment of morality. Those who believe meeting the first challenge can be achieved without the second have forgotten what it means to be Jewish.
Time and time again, the prophets and the sages declared a simple truth: Military might without moral purpose is self-defeating. A nation that abandons its ethical foundations does not become stronger. On the contrary, it erodes itself from within.
When voices in Israel call for us to “learn from our enemies,” to match their cruelty, to embrace their methods – they forget a crucial fact: Our enemies are losing. They have always lost. Not because we out-brutalized them but because we built something they could not: a free society, a democracy, a culture that believes in law and conscience. This is not weakness. This is the source of our strength and our resilience.
A distortion of Judaism
The golden noose goes far beyond poor taste. It represents a theology of death, a reverence for vengeance that distorts the face of Judaism and deals a severe blow to Israeli society.
But the golden noose does not represent most religious Israelis who abhor these politicians. This is a community committed to Torah along with democratic values, ethics, and social responsibility – so vastly different from the caricature of religious Zionism that Ben-Gvir and his followers present. They shame the public face of religious Judaism. They do not speak for it.
NATIONAL SECURITY Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is seen wearing a gold pin of a noose, on December 8, 2025.(photo credit: Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Office)
This distortion of Judaism has implications far beyond Israel’s borders. The bond between Israel and the Diaspora depends on Israel remaining a society worthy of that bond – a society committed not only to Jewish survival but to Jewish values. When Israeli politicians parade symbols of death as badges of honor, they threaten that bond, so dear to all of us. In such a reality, Jews around the world would be hard-pressed to defend and embrace the Jewish state.
We believe in a God who rewards those who pursue justice and righteousness. We believe that moral societies are stronger societies – more cohesive, more resilient, more capable of sustaining alliances with fellow democracies. This is not naive idealism. It is strategic and moral clarity.
Going forward, it is essential for us to succeed in meeting both challenges: victory over those who seek our annihilation, and victory over any impulse to go down the path of destruction, hate, and inhuman behavior. The first challenge cannot be met without the second. A nation that wins its wars but loses its soul has not truly won anything at all.
The writer is the CEO of Kolenu, a Jewish-Democratic voice for Torah, moral leadership, and social responsibility.
The first Zionist targeted assassination – 1924
Eli Ku, Aug 25, 2025, https://lenabloch.medium.com/the-first-zionist-targeted-assassination-was-of-the-orthodox-jewish-peace-negotiator-jaacob-israel-de5b0eb7844b
The first Zionist targeted assassination was of the Orthodox Jewish peace negotiator, Jaacob Israel De Haan, in 1924. Jewish terrorists unleashed a brutal terror campaign on Palestinians and the British, with bombings, assassinations, pogroms of Arab businesses and villages, destruction of civilian places of commonality, sabotaging railroads.
“By the time the Balfour Declaration was finalised, thirty-plus years of Zionist settlement had made clear that the Zionists intended to ethnically cleanse the land for a settler state based on racial superiority; and it was the behind-the-scenes demands of the principal Zionist leaders, notably Chaim Weizmann and Baron Rothschild.
First-hand accounts of Zionist settlement in Palestine had already painted a picture of violent racial displacement. I will cite one of the lesser known reports, by Dr. Paul Nathan, a prominent Jewish leader in Berlin, who went to Palestine on behalf of the German Jewish National Relief Association. He was so horrified by what he found that he published a pamphlet in January, 1914, in which he described the Zionist settlers as carrying on
“a campaign of terror modelled almost on Russian pogrom models [against settlers refusing to adopt Hebrew].”
A few years later, the Balfour Declaration’s deliberately ambiguous wording was being finalized. Sceptics—and the British Cabinet—were assured that it did not mean a Zionist state. Yet simultaneously, Weizmann was pushing to create that very state immediately. He demanded that his state extend all the way to the Jordan River within three or four years of the Declaration—that is, by 1921—and then expand beyond it.
In their behind-the-scenes meetings, Weizmann and Rothschild treated the ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians as indispensable to their plans, and they repeatedly complained to the British that the settlers were not being treated preferentially enough over the Palestinians. And they insisted that the British must lie about the scheme until it is too late for anyone to do anything about it.
In correspondence with Balfour, Weizmann justified his lies by slandering the Palestinians and Jews—that is, the Middle East’s indigenous Jews, who were overwhelmingly opposed to Zionism and whom Weizmann smeared with classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Palestinians he dismissed as, in so many words, a lower type of human, and this was among the reasons he and other Zionist leaders used for refusing democracy in Palestine—if the “Arabs” had the vote, he said, it would lower the Jew down to the level of a “native”.
With the establishment of the British Mandate, four decades of peaceful Palestinian resistance had proved futile, and armed Palestinian resistance—which included terrorism—began. Zionist terror became the domain of formal organizations that attacked anyone in the way of its messianic goals—Palestinian, Jew, or British. These terror organizations operated from within the Zionist settlements and were actively empowered and shielded by the settlements and the Jewish Agency, the recognized semi-autonomous government of the Zionist settlements, what would become the Israeli government.
There was no substantive difference between the acknowledged terror organizations—most famously, the Irgun, and Lehi, the so-called Stern Gang—and the Jewish Agency, and its terror gang, the Hagana. The Agency cooperated, collaborated, and even helped finance the Irgun.
The relationship between the Jewish Agency, and the Irgun and Lehi, was symbiotic. The Irgun in particular would act on behalf of the Hagana so that the Jewish Agency could feign innocence. The Agency would then tell the British that they condemn the terror, while steadfastly refusing any cooperation against it, indeed doing what they could to shield it.
The fascist nature of the Zionist enterprise was apparent both to US and British intelligence. The Jewish Agency tolerated no dissent and sought to dictate the fates of all Jews. Children were radicalised as part of the methodology of all three major organizations, and by extension, the Jewish Agency.”
Thomas Suarez, London House of Lords, December 2016.
Ahmed Al Ahmed’s actions showed what moral clarity looks like — the commentary around him showed media bias.
Eli Federman, 19 Dec 25, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/bondi-hero-ahmed-al-ahmed-moral-clarity-media-bias/106162284
My roommate in rabbinical school Rabbi Yaakov Levitan signed his last Facebook message to me with the words “peace and love brother”. He lived that way as a Jewish community leader in Sydney. Terrorists on Bondi Beach murdered him as he was spreading light at a Chanukah gathering. In the chaos, Australian civilian Ahmed Al Ahmed ran toward one of the gunmen, tackled him and wrestled away his weapon, saving lives. He took two bullets and is in critical but stable condition. He is a hero.
But the media’s fixation on his Syrian and Muslim identity reveals an implicit bias that this kind of heroism — especially the kind that saves Jewish lives — is not to be expected from a Muslim.
Major outlets led with Ahmed’s religion before describing his courage. Headlines repeatedly framed him as a “Muslim man” who stopped a shooter, as if his faith explained the story rather than his actions. Some reports highlighted his Syrian background in the opening lines, treating that identity as the headline and his bravery as a footnote.
Such framing matters. The Islamophobia implicit here does not lie in the praise. It lies in the assumption. The coverage assumes that a Muslim risking his life to save Jews defies expectation. It treats decency as anomalous when it comes from a Muslim man. When goodness from Muslims becomes newsworthy because of who they are, not what they do, the media confesses how low its baseline expectations have fallen.
The reaction went further. Commentators and viral posts tried to erase Ahmed’s identity altogether. Some insisted he could not be Muslim. Others claimed he must be Christian. Several outlets reported on this reaction, amplifying the idea that Muslim heroism required explanation or denial. Still others highlighted online attacks branding Ahmed a “traitor” for saving Jews, again focussing on his faith as a problem rather than his courage as the point.
These narratives do real damage. They reinforce the idea that Muslim morality and Jewish safety stand in tension. They are wrong.
Recent history proves it. On 7 October 2023, Hamas carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Amid the carnage, Arab and Bedouin Muslims risked their lives to save Jewish civilians under fire. Four Bedouin men from Rahat pulled 30 to 40 Jews out of danger near Kibbutz Be’eri while bullets flew. They asked no questions. They acted.
Surveys after the attack showed that large majorities of Arab Israelis, Muslim and Druze rejected the attacks and backed rescue and volunteer efforts. Much of the media coverage barely mentioned those findings because they disrupted the simple story line.
At the same time, honesty requires clarity. Antisemitism has surged worldwide, and Muslim leadership too often fails to condemn it clearly, publicly and consistently. Silence creates moral fog. When Jews hear hesitation instead of unequivocal rejection of Jew-hatred, trust is eroded and extremists gain ground. This is not a uniquely Muslim failure. Antisemitism infects many ideologies, religions, and political movements. Everyone must do more.
Ahmed did not issue a statement. He did not hedge. He acted. He showed what moral clarity looks like in real time. He affirmed, without words, that Jewish lives matter. He should not be the exception. He should be the rule.
Ahmed’s bravery does not erase antisemitism. It does not remove armed guards from synagogues. It does not bring my friend Yaakov back. But it does set a standard. If we want a world where such courage becomes ordinary, every community must raise its expectations. Muslim leaders must condemn antisemitism without caveat. Jewish communities must resist judging entire populations by their worst voices. And the media must stop treating Muslim decency as an anomaly and start treating it as normal.
Ahmed Al Ahmed did what any decent human being should hope to do. The tragedy is that his courage felt unexpected. It should not have. May Ahmed’s courage stand as the rule, not the exception.
Eli Federman has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Reuters and other media outlets on society, religion and media bias.
Australians Being Massacred Shouldn’t Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred
Caitlin Johnstone, 16 Dec 25, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/australians-being-massacred-shouldnt?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=181738154&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
On March 16 of this year, Reuters published an article titled “Israeli strikes kill 15 people in Gaza over past day, Palestinian medics say”.
Does anyone remember the 15 Palestinians who died on March 16, 2025?
Does that day stand out in anyone’s memory as particularly significant in terms of mass murder?
No?
Same here.
I honestly can’t remember it at all. This would have been during the tail end of the first fake “ceasefire”, a couple of days before Trump signed off on Israel resuming its large-scale bombing operations in Gaza, so this wasn’t one of those days with huge massacres and staggering death tolls. It doesn’t exactly stand out in the memory.
I have no idea who those people were. I don’t know their names. I never saw their pictures flashing across my news feed. I never saw any western officials denouncing their deaths, or media institutions giving wall-to-wall coverage to the news of their killing. So I don’t remember them.
I saw a tweet from Aaron Maté yesterday:
“15 civilians were killed in the massacre targeting Sydney’s Jewish community. A day in which Israel massacres 15 Palestinian civilians in Gaza would be at the low end of the average in 2+ years of genocide.
“Israel’s atrocities and the impunity they receive are undoubtedly the number one driver of anti-Semitism worldwide. And to show how little Israel and its apologists care about anti-Semitism, many are exploiting the Sydney massacre to justify Israel’s rejection of a Palestinian state; baselessly blame Iran; and demand more censorship of anti-genocide protests.”
Indeed, the worst people on earth are using the Bondi Beach shooting to argue for crackdowns on free speech and freedom of assembly to silence Israel’s critics online and on the streets, in Australia and throughout the western world. And when 15 Palestinians were killed by Israel on March 16, the west barely noticed.
I don’t remember the 15 Palestinians who died during that 24-hour period in mid-March, but I will always remember the Bondi Beach shooting. Someone could mention it to me thirty years from now and I’ll know exactly what they’re talking about. My society made an infinitely bigger deal about the deaths of 15 westerners in Sydney, Australia than the deaths of 15 Palestinians in Gaza, so it will always stick in my memory.
Hell, I can’t blame it all on society; if I’m honest I made a much bigger deal about it myself. I’ve felt sick thinking about the shooting ever since it happened, partly because I know it’s going to be used to roll out authoritarian measures and stomp out free speech in my country, but also partly because I’ve felt so bad for those who died and their loved ones. Even after spending two years denouncing the way western society normalizes the murder of Arabs and places more importance on western lives than Palestinian lives, I’m still basically doing the same thing myself. I’m a damn hypocrite.
I wasn’t born this way. This was learned behavior. If I had my slate cleaned and could see the world through fresh eyes it would never occur to me that I and my society would ever see 15 people being murdered in Australia as more significant than 15 people being murdered in Palestine. I would expect them to be viewed as exactly as terrible.
And they should be. Palestinians don’t love their families any less than Australians do. Australian lives aren’t any more significant or valuable than Palestinian lives. There is no valid reason for the world to have focused any less on the 15 people who were killed in Gaza on March 16 than on the 15 people who were murdered on Bondi Beach. But it did.
Sunday was an awful, dark day. Hundreds of lives have been directly devastated by this tragedy, thousands more indirectly, and in some ways the nation as a whole has been changed. The trauma will reverberate in the victim’s families for generations. The sorrow is palpable and ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; in the streets, at the supermarket. There is catastrophe in the air, and people around the world are feeling it.
And this is appropriate. This is what 15 deaths ought to feel like. This is what it feels like when you see mass murder inflicted upon a population whose murder hasn’t become normalized for you.
That’s all I’ve got to offer right now. Just the humble suggestion that every massacre of Palestinians should shake the earth just as much as the Bondi massacre has. Every death toll out of Gaza should hit us just as hard as the death toll out of Sydney did. Feel how hard this hits, and then translate it to the people of Gaza. This is happening there every single day.
In trying to get people to care about warmongering and imperialism what we’re really trying to do is get people to widen their circle of compassion to the furthest extent possible. To extend their care for the people around them to include caring about violence and abuse against people even on the other side of the world, who might not look and speak and live as they do. Maybe even extending it so far as caring about the non-human organisms who share our planet with us.
As Einstein wrote in a condolence letter toward the end of his life,
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
Humanity won’t survive into the distant future unless we grow into a conscious species, and part of that growth will necessarily include widening our circles of compassion to include our fellow beings around the world. If we can’t do that, we’re not going to make it. We’re too destructive. We hurt each other and our environment too much. We destroy everything around us trying to shore up wealth and resources for ourselves, and it simply is not sustainable. It’ll get us all killed eventually.
We’ve got to become better. We’ve got to become more caring. More emotionally intelligent. Less susceptible to the manipulations of propaganda. A society driven by truth and compassion rather than lies and the pursuit of profit.
That’s the only way we’re making it out of this awkward adolescent transition stage with these large, capable brains still wound up in vestigial evolutionary fear-based conditioning. That’s the only way we achieve our true potential and build a healthy world together.
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