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.
Catholic bishops remind political leaders that nuclear weapons are immoral.
our new Pope Leo XIV said, “Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.”
Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago. “We strongly urge both the world and the Japanese government to take this ‘sign of the times’ deeply to heart, and to take immediate steps toward the signing and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapon
Bulletin, By John Wester | December 14, 2025
In August, a group of American Catholic Church leaders—including Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, DC, Archbishop Paul Etienne of Seattle, and me, the Archbishop of Santa Fe—traveled to Japan to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There, we joined our Japanese counterparts—Bishop Mitsuru Shirahama of Hiroshima, Archbishop Emeritus Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, and Archbishop Michiaki Nakamura of Nagasaki—in commemorating the destruction of their cities. Takami is a hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor); he was in his mother’s womb on August 9, 1945, when his city of Nagasaki was bombed. His maternal aunt and grandmother were both killed in the blast.
Eighty years have passed. But the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons is still with us—and it is growing worse every day. In 2019, Pope Francis elevated the Catholic Church beyond conditional acceptance of so-called deterrence. He declared that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. Nevertheless, the nuclear powers are now spending enormous sums of money on “modernization” that will keep nuclear weapons virtually forever. Meanwhile, in the United States, taxes are being cut to benefit the rich, and economic inequality and homelessness are exploding. This situation is deeply immoral and counter to the Catholic Church’s teachings on social justice.
Today, the United States has entered a new arms race involving multiple nuclear powers, new cyber weapons, and artificial intelligence. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said the world survived the Cuban Missile Crisis only thanks to luck. This is not a sustainable survival strategy: Luck is not eternal. Even the remote possibility of “nuclear winter” makes nuclear disarmament a profound pro-life issue on an immense scale.
The word “deterrence” has been used by successive US presidents to justify nuclear weapons. But that one word is only a half-truth. The United States has always rejected minimal deterrence and, instead, preferred to include nuclear warfighting capabilities—capabilities that can end civilization overnight. Russia has followed the same course. That is why both sides still have thousands of nuclear weapons instead of only a few hundred, with China now racing to expand its own arsenal. That is why the United States plans to spend nearly $1 trillion “to operate, sustain, and modernize current nuclear forces and purchase new [nuclear weapons] forces” in the next 10 years alone.
This is contrary to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, in which the non-nuclear weapon states pledged never to acquire nuclear weapons. In return, the nuclear powers promised to enter into negotiations leading to disarmament—a promise that has never been honored. From that betrayal sprang the 2021 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which the Vatican was the first nation-state to sign and ratify. The nuclear-weapon states oppose the TPNW, arguing that it does not effectively advance disarmament and could instead fuel further proliferation. But the treaty does nothing more than ban nuclear weapons, just like previous treaties that enjoyed universal support banned biological and chemical weapons, which are also weapons of mass destruction.
A prime example of this nuclear immorality is right in my own backyard of New Mexico.
A whopping $1 billion is being added to the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s annual $4 billion nuclear weapons budget, largely for the expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores. However, no future pit production is to maintain the existing stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons that will fuel the new arms race. The development of new weapon systems could prompt the United States to return to explosive nuclear testing, which would have severe proliferation consequences. Meanwhile, the lab’s science, nonproliferation, and cleanup programs are being cut, and research on renewable energies is being zeroed out.
Jobs are often cited by the New Mexico congressional delegation as justification for expanding nuclear weapons programs in New Mexico. But jobs at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories would be far better directed toward peaceful purposes. Nuclear weapon “modernization” diverts money from helping the poor and feeding the hungry—two far more important moral objectives than feeding warheads and war plans. In FY 2026, the Energy Department plans to spend $10.8 billion in New Mexico alone—the same amount as the state government’s entire operating budget. Of that federal money, 84 percent is for nuclear weapons research and production programs. Still, New Mexico remains the third poorest state in the nation and is ranked dead last in the quality of public education and the lives of our children.
People of all faiths—as well as people of no faith at all—need to know that the American Catholic Church is deeply engaged in nuclear disarmament issues. In a message addressed to Bishop Shirahama of Hiroshima on the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing, our new Pope Leo XIV said, “Nuclear arms offend our shared humanity and also betray the dignity of creation, whose harmony we are called to safeguard.” The Vatican’s Holy See delegation to the United Nations recently called “on all nuclear-armed States to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons by engaging in good faith negotiations [and] to ratify the NPT, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, as well as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” In that same spirit, two years ago, the dioceses of Santa Fe, Seattle, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki joined together to form the Partnership for a World without Nuclear Weapons to work on nuclear disarmament. We invite other Catholic entities to join us.
On August 5, the two American Cardinals present in Japan delivered stirring words from the Hiroshima World Peace Memorial Cathedral, whose bricks contain ashes from the atomic bomb. “We pray that this award [the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to the hibakusha organization Nihon Hidankyo] may become a light of hope toward a world without nuclear weapons,” said Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago. “We strongly urge both the world and the Japanese government to take this ‘sign of the times’ deeply to heart, and to take immediate steps toward the signing and ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”
“If our gathering here today is to mean anything, it must mean that in fidelity to all those whose lives were destroyed or savagely damaged on August 6, 80 years ago, we refuse to live in such a world of nuclear proliferation and risk-taking,” said Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington. “We will resist, we will organize, we will pray, we will not cease, until the world’s nuclear arsenals have been destroyed.”
A line crossed, a standard shattered
3 December 2025 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/a-line-crossed-a-standard-shattered/
In the stark, unforgiving waters of the Caribbean, the United States crossed a line from which it will be difficult to return.
That line was crossed with two chilling words allegedly spoken by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth – “kill everybody” – followed by the deliberate execution of two unarmed survivors clinging to the wreckage of a suspected narcotics vessel they had just been fired upon.
This was not tough policy.
It was not “self-defence,” as the White House claimed in a statement so threadbare it insulted the intelligence of the nation and the world.
By every moral and legal standard the United States once professed to champion, it was a summary execution.
It was murder.
Let us dismantle the fiction immediately. “Self-defense” implies an imminent threat. A person clinging to splintered wood in open water, after their vessel has been destroyed, presents no such threat. They are combatants rendered hors de combat – out of combat. The Law of Armed Conflict, the Rules of Engagement drilled into every service member, and the fundamental tenets of humanity all scream the same command: you do not fire on the helpless. This was not a split-second decision in a hot firefight; it was a deliberate order from the highest level of the Pentagon to kill defenseless individuals.
Secretary Hegseth, a figure whose previous commentary has often glorified a cartoonish, hyper-aggressive vision of American power, seems to have mistaken the U.S. military for a personal vengeance squad. The mission was interdiction. By all accounts, it was successful – the boat was stopped. The suspects were in the water. At that point, the lawful options are clear: capture and detain, or if logistically impossible, leave them to be retrieved by their own forces or coastal authorities. The one unthinkable, illegal option is to become judge, jury, and executioner from an office in the Pentagon.
The damage here is catastrophic, and it unfolds in layers.
First, it is a deep moral stain. It announces to the world that under this administration, America has abandoned the principle that even its enemies possess an inherent dignity and a right to surrender. America has done the very thing they have historically accused rogue states and terrorists of doing.
Second, it is a tactical and strategic disaster. Every potential adversary, from naval militias to guerrilla forces, now has a potent new recruitment pitch: “The Americans will show you no mercy. They will kill you even if you surrender. Fight to the death.” It endangers every U.S. service member in future engagements, stripping them of the legal and ethical shield that the rules of war are meant to provide.
Third, it shreds the credibility of the U.S. military as a professional institution. The military chain of command exists precisely to prevent such barbarism. The fact that this order was reportedly given, and reportedly followed, suggests a terrifying corrosion of legal and ethical training. Who transmitted the order? Who pulled the trigger? They, too, bear responsibility, but the paramount guilt lies with the Secretary who allegedly issued a manifestly unlawful command.
If talk in Washington is correct, this is not a scandal about policy differences; it is about the crime of murder. Secretary Hegseth is unfit for his office and must be immediately relieved of duty. Furthermore, a full, independent criminal investigation – not an internal Pentagon review – must be convened. If the facts are as reported, he must be charged accordingly.
To do anything less is to become complicit. It is to declare that the United States now stands for the law of the sea only when it is convenient, and for the law of the jungle when it is not. America’s strength has never flowed from ruthlessness, but from their unwavering claim to a higher standard. That standard has not just been compromised; in those bloody waters, it was deliberately and fatally sunk. America must recover it, and that process begins with holding Pete Hegseth accountable to the fullest extent of the law.
The Nuclear Cult
ever since the first test of an atomic device, “the diabolically-named ‘Trinity’ atomic blast, when Manhattan Project scientists placed bets on whether or not it would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s been clear something pathological afflicts many in the ‘nuclear priesthood.’
“Step-by-step, they turned to an atomic religion, closed societies, a ‘state inside a state.’”
Karl Grossman, June 18, 2012, https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/18/the-nuclear-cult/
Nuclear scientists and engineers embrace nuclear power like a religion. The term “nuclear priesthood” was coined by Dr. Alvin Weinberg, long director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the laboratory’s website proudly notes this. It’s not unusual for scientists at Oak Ridge and other U.S. national nuclear laboratories to refer to themselves as “nukies.” The Oak Ridge website describes Weinberg as a “prophet” of “nuclear energy.”
This religious, cultish element is integral to a report done for the U.S. Department of Energy in 1984 by Battelle Memorial Institute about how the location of nuclear waste sites can be communicated over the ages. An “atomic priesthood,” it recommends, could impart the locations in a “legend-and-ritual…retold year-by-year.” Titled “Communications Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia,” the taxpayer-funded report says: “Membership in this ‘priesthood’ would be self-selective over time.”
Currently, Allison Macfarlane, nominated to be the new head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says she is an “agnostic” on nuclear power—as if support or opposition to atomic energy falls on a religious spectrum. Meanwhile, Gregory Jaczko, the outgoing NRC chairman, with a Ph.D. in physics, was politically crucified because he repeatedly raised safety concerns, thus not revering nuclear power enough.
Years ago, while I was working on a book about toxic chemicals, the publisher asked that I find someone who worked for a chemical company and get his or her rationale. I found someone who had been at American Cyanamid, the pesticide manufacturer, who said he worked there to better support his growing family financially.
But when it comes to nuclear power, it’s more than that—it’s a religious adherence.
Why? Does it have to do with nuclear scientists and engineers being in such close proximity to power, literally? Is it about the process through which they are trained—in the U.S., many in the nuclear navy and/or in the insular culture of the
government’s national nuclear laboratories? These laboratories, originally under the Atomic Energy Commission and now the Department of Energy and managed by corporations, universities and scientific entities including Battelle Memorial Institute, grew out of the World War II Manhattan Project crash program to build atomic bombs. After the war, the laboratories expanded to pursue the development of all things nuclear. And is it about nuclear physics programs at universities serving as echo chambers?
Whatever the causes, the outcome is nuclear worship.
And this is despite the Chernobyl or Fukushima Daiichi catastrophes. It’s despite the radioactive messes exposed at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production facility and at Los Alamos and other national nuclear laboratories most of which have been declared high-pollution Superfund sites where cancer on-site and in adjoining areas is widespread. It’s despite the continuing threat of nuclear war and the horrific loss of life it would bring and nuclear proliferation spreading the potential for atomic weapons globally. Still, they press on with religious fervor.
“Most of them are not educated about radiation biology or genetics, so they are fundamentally ignorant,” says Dr. Helen Caldicott, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility whose books include Nuclear Madness. “They are ‘brought up’ in an environment where they are conditioned to support the concept of all things nuclear.” Further, “nuclear power evokes enormous forces of the universe, and as Henry Kissinger said, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” And “they practice denial because I think many of them in their heart really know that what they are doing is evil but they will defend it assiduously, unless they themselves or their child is diagnosed with cancer. Then many of them recant.”Linking the “nuclear priesthood” to the Manhattan Project is Michael Mariotte, executive director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The scientists involved weren’t really sure what they were unleashing, and had to have a certain amount of faith that it would work and it would not destroy the world in the process. After they saw the destructive power of the bomb, they were both proud and horrified at what they had done, and believed they had to use this technology for ‘good.’ Thus nuclear power was born,” says Mariotte. “The problem is when you have this messianic vision that you are creating good out of evil, it is very difficult to turn around and realize that the ‘good’ you have created is, in fact, also evil.”
Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, says ever since the first test of an atomic device, “the diabolically-named ‘Trinity’ atomic blast, when Manhattan Project scientists placed bets on whether or not it would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s been clear something pathological afflicts many in the ‘nuclear priesthood.’ Perhaps it’s a form of ‘Faustian fission’—splitting the atom gave the U.S. superpower status with the Bomb and then over a 100 commercial atomic reactors, so the ‘downsides’ have been entirely downplayed to the point of downright denial. Perhaps the power, prestige and greed swirling around the ‘nuclear enterprise’ explains why so many in industry, government, the military, and even apologists in academia and mainstream media, engage in Orwellian ‘Nukespeak’ and monumental cover ups….The ‘cult of the atom’ has caused untold numbers of deaths and disease downstream, downwind, up the food chain, and down the generations from ‘our friend the atom’ gone bad.”
A parallel situation exists in Russia, the other nuclear superpower. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, a biologist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and environmental advisor to Presidents Yeltsin and Gorbachev, says the nuclear scientists there refer to themselves “atomschiky” or “nuclearists” and “think and act as a separate, isolated caste.” From the beginning of nuclear technology in the Soviet Union, they “were enthusiastic about the great, the fantastic discoveries of splitting the atom and developing enormous power. This ‘secret knowledge’ was magnified by state secrecy and a deep belief—in the Soviet Union as in the United States—of atomic energy ‘saving the globe’…There is a remarkable similarity in the argumentation of these groups here and in the United States. Step-by-step, they turned to an atomic religion, closed societies, a ‘state inside a state.’”
Dr. Heidi Huttner, who teaches sustainability at Stony Brook University, explains:
“As in so many parts of our industrialized and mechanized culture, there is no thought of consequences, or connections to the larger web of science, health, and human and nonhuman life…The nuclear culture becomes absolutely caught up in its own language and story. This self-enclosure feeds, validates and perpetuates itself. Without an outside critique or ‘objective’ third eye, any such culture loses the ability to self-regulate and self-monitor. This is where things become dangerous.”
Russell Ace Hoffman, author of The Code Killers, Why DNA and Ionizing Radiation Are a Dangerous Mix, says: “It is a cult. It fits all the classic definitions of a cult. It’s an elitist, war-mongering, closed society of inbred, inwardly-thinking, aggressively xenophobic, arrogant pseudo-nerds stuck in ideas that are at least half a century out of date…Another cult-like behavior is they don’t care about the suffering of their victims. Not one bit.”
Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston, an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology in Santa Cruz, recounts spending three days at a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored conference for people involved in the atmospheric monitoring program at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada. “Many of the scientists and technicians in attendance were from southern Utah and St. Georges County area where the heaviest atomic fallout from the Nevada test site occurred…I did not find a single man who saw a connection between fallout and cancer rates, despite the fact that most had suffered. My initial reaction was that these folks truly ‘drank the Kool-Aid’—true believers through and through.”
“The nuclear industry requires buying into an orthodoxy,” explains nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson. “I know, as I was in it as a senior VP.” He tells of how, after he voiced concerns and criticism, an industry lawyer “told me, ‘Arnie, in this industry, you are either for us or against us, and you just crossed the line.’ The same thing happened to [outgoing NRC Chairman] Jaczko I know of one nuclear engineer with 40 years of experience who committed suicide five days after Fukushima because he simply could not accept that his life’s work was based on erroneous assumptions. He had worked on the Mark 1 design [the GE design of the Fukushima Daicchi plants].”
Alice Slater, New York representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says the “nuclear scientists are out of touch with reality. They talk about ‘risk assessment’—as though the dreadful, disastrous events at Chernobyl and Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of ‘risks and benefits.’ They’re constantly refining their nuclear weapons—Congress has budgeted $84 billion for over the next 10 years to maintain the …’reliability of the nuclear arsenal,’ and $100 billion for new ‘delivery systems’—missiles, submarines and airplanes. After the horrendous effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everyone knows these catastrophic weapons are unusable and yet we’re pouring all this money into perpetuating the national nuclear weapons laboratories. They’re not including the Earth in their calculations and the enormous damage they are doing. They’re involved in the worst possible inventions with lethal consequences that last for eternity. Still, they continue on. They’re holding our planet hostage while they tinker in their labs without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth.”
Dr. Chris Busby of the Health and Life Sciences faculty at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and author of Wings of Death, Nuclear Pollution and Human Health, says:“What we are seeing with nuclear scientists is a desperate need to control their environment and their lives and the forces that may affect their lives by creating a virtual universe which they can deal with by mathematics and by drawing straight lines on paper.”
It’s the “cult of the nuclearists,” says Busby. And this construct of the nuclear scientists seeking to “control nature with mathematical equations that make them feel safe” sets up a “collision with reality”—and a “way we are going to destroy ourselves.” The belief in nuclear power is “far beyond anything scientific or rational,” says Busby, who has a Ph.D. in chemical physics.
Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, says the “religious passion for nuclear technology” started with the “guilt” of those in the Manhattan Project. “Those in the ‘nuclear priesthood’ knew that these horrible bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and they wanted to make up for that…They developed atomic energy for warfare and then thought it had other uses—and they would do anything to make that work.” But the civilian nuclear technology they devised was also deadly, and this realization was too “devastating to be accepted” by the “nuclear originators” or those who followed who “spend their days with their buddies, their colleagues, all thinking the same way.”
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, in his 1955 book The Open Mind, wrote: “The physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons….In some sort of crude sense…the physicists have known sin.”
Whether out of indoctrination, misguided belief, an obsession to “control nature,” the lure of the cult, closeness to power, job security, or their seeking to perpetuate a vested interest, the “nuclearists” have a religious allegiance to their technology. On a moral level, they have indeed sinned—and continue to do so. On a political level, they have corrupted and distorted energy policy in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. On an economic level, they are wasting a gargantuan portion of our tax dollars.
Choices of energy technology should be based on the technology being safe, clean, economic and in harmony with life. Instead, we are up against nuclear scientists and engineers pushing their deadly technology in the manner of religious zealots.
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
Zionists Are Freaking Out About Losing Control Of The Narrative.
Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.
Caitlin Johnstone. Nov 19, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/zionists-are-freaking-out-about-losing?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=179311938&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.
“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”
“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. 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.”
Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.
“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here.
It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:
- The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
- Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
- People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
- People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.
Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.
I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.
You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.
There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.
Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.
She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.
“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”
“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”
Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.
I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.
It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.
Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.
The Invention of “Ethical AI”
Kissinger declared the possibility of “a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms,”
How Big Tech Manipulates Academia to Avoid Regulation
Rodrigo Ochigame, The Intercept, December 20 2019
The irony of the ethical scandal enveloping Joichi Ito, the former director of the MIT Media Lab, is that he used to lead academic initiatives on ethics. After the revelation of his financial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier charged with sex trafficking underage girls as young as 14, Ito resigned from multiple roles at MIT, a visiting professorship at Harvard Law School, and the boards of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the New York Times Company.
Many spectators are puzzled by Ito’s influential role as an ethicist of artificial intelligence. Indeed, his initiatives were crucial in establishing the discourse of “ethical AI” that is now ubiquitous in academia and in the mainstream press. In 2016, then-President Barack Obama described him as an “expert” on AI and ethics. Since 2017, Ito financed many projects through the $27 million Ethics and Governance of AI Fund, an initiative anchored by the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. What was all the talk of “ethics” really about?
………………….. Inspired by whistleblower Signe Swenson and others who have spoken out, I have decided to report what I came to learn regarding Ito’s role in shaping the field of AI ethics, since this is a matter of public concern. The emergence of this field is a recent phenomenon, as past AI researchers had been largely uninterested in the study of ethics……………………………
At the Media Lab, I learned that the discourse of “ethical AI,” championed substantially by Ito, was aligned strategically with a Silicon Valley effort seeking to avoid legally enforceable restrictions of controversial technologies………………….
I also watched MIT help the U.S. military brush aside the moral complexities of drone warfare, hosting a superficial talk on AI and ethics by Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and notorious war criminal, and giving input on the U.S. Department of Defense’s “AI Ethics Principles” for warfare, which embraced “permissibly biased” algorithms and which avoided using the word “fairness” because the Pentagon believes “that fights should not be fair.”
…………………….IT lent credibility to the idea that big tech could police its own use of artificial intelligence at a time when the industry faced increasing criticism and calls for legal regulation.
…..corporations have tried to shift the discussion to focus on voluntary “ethical principles,” “responsible practices,” and technical adjustments or “safeguards” framed in terms of “bias” and “fairness”…………………………..
To characterize the corporate agenda, it is helpful to distinguish between three kinds of regulatory possibilities for a given technology: (1) no legal regulation at all, leaving “ethical principles” and “responsible practices” as merely voluntary; (2) moderate legal regulation encouraging or requiring technical adjustments that do not conflict significantly with profits; or (3) restrictive legal regulation curbing or banning deployment of the technology. Unsurprisingly, the tech industry tends to support the first two and oppose the last. The corporate sponsored discussion on ethical AI” enables precisely this position. ……………………….
Thus, Silicon Valley’s vigorous promotion of “ethical AI” has constituted a strategic lobbying effort, one that has enrolled academia to legitimize itself. Ito played a key role in this corporate-academic fraternizing, meeting regularly with tech executives. The MIT-Harvard fund’s initial director was the former “global public policy lead” for AI at Google. Through the fund, Ito and his associates sponsored many projects, including the creation of a prominent conference on “Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency” in computer science; other sponsors of the conference included Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
……………………………………….. After the initial steps by MIT and Harvard, many other universities and new institutes received money from the tech industry to work on AI ethics. Most such organizations are also headed by current or former executives of tech firms……………………..
Big tech money and direction proved incompatible with an honest exploration of ethics, at least judging from my experience with the “Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society,” a group founded by Microsoft, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon in 2016. PAI, of which the Media Lab is a member, defines itself as a “multistakeholder body” and claims it is “not a lobbying organization.” In an April 2018 hearing at the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Partnership’s executive director claimed that the organization is merely “a resource to policymakers — for instance, in conducting research that informs AI best practices and exploring the societal consequences of certain AI systems, as well as policies around the development and use of AI systems.”
……— the partnership has certainly sought to influence legislation…….
…………………………………………………………………………………………………… the corporate-academic alliances were too robust and convenient. The Media Lab remained in the Partnership, and Ito continued to fraternize with Silicon Valley and Wall Street executives and investors. …………………………………..
Regardless of individual actors’ intentions the corporate lobby’s effort to shape academic research was extremely successful. There is now an enormous amount of work under the rubric of “AI ethics.” To be fair, some of the research is useful and nuanced, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But the majority of well-funded work on “ethical AI” is aligned with the tech lobby’s agenda: to voluntarily or moderately adjust, rather than legally restrict, the deployment of controversial technologies. How did five corporations, using only a small fraction of their budgets, manage to influence and frame so much academic activity, in so many disciplines, so quickly?
…………….The field has also become relevant to the U.S. military, not only in official responses to moral concerns about technologies of targeted killing but also in disputes among Silicon Valley firms over lucrative military contracts. On November 1st the Department of Defense’s Innovation Board published its recommendations for “AI Ethics Principles.” The board is chaired by Eric Schmidt, who was the executive chair of Alphabet, Google’s parent company,…….. The board includes multiple executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, raising controversies regarding conflicts of interest. ……………………
The recommendations seek to compel the Pentagon to increase military investments in AI and to adopt “ethical AI” systems such as those developed and sold by Silicon Valley firms. …………………………………………..
“some applications will be permissibly and justifiably biased,” specifically “to target certain adversarial combatants more successfully.” The Pentagon’s conception of AI ethics forecloses many important possibilities for moral deliberation, such as the prohibition of drones for targeted killing.
The corporate, academic, and military proponents of “ethical AI” have collaborated closely for mutual benefit. For example, Ito told me that he informally advised Schmidt on which academic AI ethicists Schmidt’s private foundation should fund. Ito even asked me for second order advice on whether Schmidt should fund a certain professor who, like Ito, later served as an “expert consultant” to the Pentagon’s innovation board…………….Kissinger declared the possibility of “a world relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms,”….
No defensible claim to ethics” can sidestep the urgency of legally enforceable restrictions to the deployment of technologies of mass surveillance and systemic violence. Until such restrictions exist, moral and political deliberation about computing will remain subsidiary to the profit-making imperative expressed by the Media Lab’s motto, “Deploy or Die.” While some deploy, even if ostensibly “ethically,” others die. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/
Patrick Lawrence: The Voices of Many Jews
“Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it.”
these people speak not for the destruction of Israel but for its restoration to sanity — and, so, its salvation.
October 28, 2025, By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/10/25/patrick-lawrence-the-voices-of-many-jews/
This very welcome letter marks out the significantly worsening alienation between world Jewry and the Zionists’ defacement of the Judaic tradition.
At last, at last, Jews with powerful voices have gathered en masse — a critical mass, I would say — to condemn Israel and the savage spree of murder, starvation and terror it inflicts as we speak upon the Palestinians of Gaza and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank.
You may by now be aware of the open letter signed by 450–plus American, European and Israeli Jews and made public this week. In it, this sprawling group of distinguished personages denounces the criminality of the Zionist regime and asserts “the universality of justice and the fair and equal application of international law.” The signatories also call for the international community to impose immediate sanctions on apartheid Israel.
This is very big, in my read. I say this not because of what is in this document — calls for justice of this kind are by now many — but, straight to my point, for whose names are on it.
You may know of this letter and you may not, I ought to add: The Guardian reported it in its Oct. 22 editions. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, also had the story right away. Arab News had it, too. So did Middle East Monitor, The New Indian Express, and, stateside, Common Dreams. In Britain, Jewish Voice for Liberation, J.V.L., picked it up.
But the British daily is at writing alone among major Western media to report on this momentous call for worldwide action against the Zionist state. We read nothing of it in major Western media and hear nothing from the mainstream broadcasters. I will return to this important point shortly.
“Join the Worldwide Jewish Call,” as the letter is titled, was organized and put out by an apparently ad hoc “coalition” called Jews Demand Action. The document and various appendages explaining it are here. As the Jews Demand Action website makes clear, the intent is to announce a continually engaged movement in the cause of justice — justice for Palestinians, justice for the Zionist fanatics guilty of perpetrating a genocide, a term the group uses with obvious conviction and also with obvious anger. Among much else, the letter features a form by way of which Jews can sign the petition and receive updates on actions to come.
“At last, a serious global Jewish call for sanctions on Israel,” J.V.L., the British version of Jewish Voice for Peace in the United States, proclaimed in the above-noted report.
Yes, at last.
Lots of other Jews have stood publicly against the apartheid state, many for a long time. There is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, the wonderfully outspoken rabbi and author of The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (Bais Medrash and Primedia eLaunch, 2020), there is the aforementioned Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jewish organizations and students active on university campuses and in the streets of major cities. Unqualified praise to them and the many like them I cannot list in full.
I have no certain idea why it took these hundreds of influential people with self-evident consciences so long to join these others against the entity that insists on calling itself “the Jewish state.” To hazard a surmise, the past two years of Israel’s unspeakable barbarism have surely been a torment for the signatories of this letter, as for countless Jews the world over, as they have sought to distinguish their faith and their traditions from the conduct of the ultra-nationalist regime that is supposed to merit their allegiance but has emphatically lost it.
If I had to choose one sentence in this letter above all others for its significance and power — I would rather not but I will — it would be this: “Our solidarity with Palestinians is not a betrayal of Judaism, then, but a fulfillment of it.”
After this truth comes these:
“When our sages taught that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world, they did not carve exceptions for Palestinians. We shall not rest until this ceasefire carries forward into an end of occupation and apartheid.”
This is the conceptual frame within which the signatories address António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, as well as “presidents, prime ministers, heads of state, [and] permanent representatives to the United Nations.” While approving of the ceasefire, or what remains of it at this point, the letter states,
“And yet there should be no doubt that this ceasefire is fragile: Israeli forces remain in Gaza, the agreement makes no reference to the West Bank, the underlying conditions of occupation, apartheid, and the denial of Palestinian rights remain unaddressed.”
“As Jews and as human beings, we declare: Not in our name,” the letter states. It then lists the four key demands the signatories advance in their names: Respect for the authority of the International Court of Justice (Yes!), a rejection of the complicity Western governments have forced upon their citizens, a full military withdrawal, the supply of aid and everything else needed to reconstruct Gaza, and, finally, “to refute false accusations of antisemitism that abusively deploy our collective history to tarnish those with whom we stand together in the pursuit of peace and justice” (Yes again times 10!).
You find some big names among the signatories (and the open letter does not give the full list): Daniel Levy, previously a “peace” negotiator for Israel and now a prominent critic; Gabor Maté, the physician-psychotherapist; Wallace Shawn, the playwright, actor, and reliable old leftie; Amy Eilberg, an American rabbi and activist; Peter Beinart (one of the organizers of Jews Demand Action), Naomi Klein, the “progressive” Canadian writer; Yuval Abraham, who co-directed No Other Land, the documentary that took an Oscar last year.
If I do not put the point too simply, these people speak not for the destruction of Israel but for its restoration to sanity — and, so, its salvation. They do not mention the two-state solution in their letter, but one gains the impression it is this for which they hope. One may differ strenuously with them on these points (as I do, emphatically), but what I will shorthand as their moderation is part of what makes their open letter so important: These are (shorthand again) mainstream Jews.
Who can say how carefully or how many presidents, prime ministers, U.N. reps, etc. will consider this letter? But this is not the salient point. This letter marks out the significantly worsening alienation between world Jewry and the state that is supposed to represent its home. And in so doing it widens and deepens the already evident isolation of the Jewish state. This latter effect may not be the intent of the open letter’s signatories, but it will prove unmistakably to be among the document’s consequences.
A Growing Consensus
We represent the growing consensus of world Jews, not the Israeli government,” the letter declares in one of its subheads. Exactly so. And as The Guardian piece cited above points out, the open letter should be read alongside some stunning numbers coming out of the most recent opinion polls. In a recent Washington Post survey, 61 percent of American Jews asked think Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza; just under 40 percent stand with the open letter’s signatories: We witness a genocide.
In a poll that does not distinguish between Jews and non–Jews, The Brookings Institution finds that 45 percent of those surveyed think Israel is committing genocide. A recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac University indicates 50 percent of register voters agree; among Democratic voters the number is 77 percent. On Thursday Reuters published a survey indicating that 59 percent of the Jews and non–Jews polled think the United States should recognize Palestine as a sovereign state.
I see a highly significant conflict growing ever sharper between the increasing number of outspoken Jews of conscience and those many — and they remain very many — who continue to defend the righteousness of the Israeli terror machine. Things are getting especially awkward for mainstream media such as the Zionist-supervised New York Times, wherein we find no mention of Jews Demand Action and its forthright open letter. This cannot end well for the Times and all the pilot fish that follow it.
However long the Times stays silent, however many media billionaire Zionists take over and corrupt, however many Bari Weisses they put in high places, this will do nothing other than discredit these media. They are effectively complicit in the Zionists’ defacement of the Judaic tradition. This is another way the open letter is important.
The world has long and urgently needed to hear from the “we” whose names are on this letter. Non–Jews need to learn of and make the distinction between Judaism and the frenzied Zionism that now rules Israel so they can think clearly of these questions. And as they are well aware, those Jews who reject Israel’s ultra-nationalist Zionism must make themselves heard for the sake of Judaism, too.
I do not accept that any great wave of anti–Semitism is breaking upon us — there is no “ferocious surge,” in Joe Biden’s preposterous phrase. But the potential for such a turn, given the extent of Israel’s inhumanity in combination with its claim to be “the Jewish home,” is obvious.
The Zionist hoards love the threat of anti–Semitism: How well it serves their pernicious purpose. At last this insidious ruse is countered by those whose voices count for most — the voices of Jews.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
They Tell Us To Fear Muslims While The US Empire Terrorizes The World
Caitlin Johnstone, Oct 25, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/they-tell-us-to-fear-muslims-while?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=177062499&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The other day I published an essay titled “Zionists Push Islamophobia Because It’s Easier Than Getting People To Like Israel,” based on the conspicuous overlap between virulent Israel supporters and people who promote hatred of Muslims.
What I didn’t know at the time until readers alerted me was that Drop Site News had put out an article last month about a leaked polling report commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs which actually found that promoting Islamophobia is the most effective way of combatting the way worldwide public opinion has been turning against Israel.
“Israel’s best tactic to combat this, according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high,” Drop Site’s Ryan Grim writes. “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.”
So this is an actual, planned tactic. The shrieking vitriol we’ve been seeing about Islam and Muslims lately is being deliberately and systematically fomented as a calculated strategy.
One of the moronic things about this latest wave of Islamophobic hysteria is that the US and Israel and their allies are vastly more murderous and tyrannical than the entire Muslim world combined.
The Trump administration is currently sending the world’s largest aircraft carrier and a bunch of warships to the waters off Latin America, where they’ve been waging a bogus new war on terror with increasingly frequent attacks on boats carrying alleged “narco-terrorists”. They’re not even disguising the fact that this is actually about preparing for regime change interventionism in Venezuela, a government that Washington has long sought to topple because of its massive oil reserves and noncompliance with the capitalist world order.
The US power alliance is constantly doing things like this. Waging wars, bombing countries, imposing starvation sanctions, staging coups, backing proxy conflicts, meddling in foreign elections — all with the goal of total planetary domination. It’s accepted as the baseline norm and the western press often barely even reports on its abuses (did you know Trump has bombed Somalia more than 80 times this year?), but that doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical.
And we’re being told day in and day out that we all need to be afraid of Muslims, who even with a worldwide population of two billion still manage to be far, far less violent and destructive than the US-centralized power alliance.
Hell, the most abusive Muslim states are US partners in crime like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose genocidal butchery in Yemen was backed by the US and its allies from 2015–2022. The UAE is funding genocidal atrocities in Sudan right this very moment. The US-centralized empire is the most destructive power structure on earth, and the most destructive Muslim states are backed by that same western power structure.
The empire we live under is everything we’re trained to fear. Our own rulers are the murderers. Our own rulers are the terrorists. Our own rulers are the tyrants. Our own rulers are the problem.
Our rulers want us shaking our fists at Muslims, immigrants, disobedient governments, and members of the other mainstream political party so that we don’t start shaking our fists at them.
It is now antisemitic to object to Israeli football hooligans causing violence in your city
Laura and Normal Island News, Oct 18, 2025, https://www.normalisland.co.uk/p/it-is-now-antisemitic-to-object-to?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1407757&post_id=176482013&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Aston Villa football club caused outrage when it banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from an upcoming UEFA Europa League match. The pathetic excuse was that West Midlands police had intelligence that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were planning violence. Aston Villa took that intelligence seriously, just because Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had been violent at other European football matches.
In previous incidents, local authorities sensibly lied to protect Israeli fans, and pretended local fans caused the violence, disregarding camera footage and eye witnesses. News outlets such as Sky News were quick to apologise for their initial reporting and correct the narrative. This saved them from getting the same treatment as journalists in Gaza.
I’m proud to say I’m one of the few journalists who has consistently stuck to the officially authorised version of the truth, which is as follows:
In Amsterdam, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were innocently chanting words such as “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left” and the all-time classic, “Death to Arabs”. Obviously, only a racist would object to such chants.
Video footage shows Maccabi Tel Aviv fans carrying chains, and terrorising train passengers, and threatening journalists, and beating up random members of the public who had nothing to do with the football match. Outrageously, some local people attempted to defend themselves against these fans.
As we all know, it’s antisemitic for anyone to defend themselves against Israelis, whether they be Palestinians, or local football fans, or random people who did not know what the fuck was going on.
When Israel attacks your people, the only non-antisemitic response is to throw your people under a bus and blame them for being attacked. However, Aston Villa decided to ignore that principle, provoking outcry from all the politicians who are owned by Israel.
The UK’s most prominent genocide supporters, such as Michael Gove, suggested the ban of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans meant “no Jews allowed”. Please understand, it is not antisemitic to conflate Jews with Israel when Zionists do it.
Reassuringly, Sir Keir Starmer was instructed to say the ban was the “wrong decision.” The prime minister tweeted: “We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”
Just so we’re clear, Starmer meant that Israeli football fans can enjoy the game. He doesn’t give a fuck if you’re the victim of violence and intimidation.
Thankfully, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmoud has stepped in and demanded Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be allowed into the game. She has promised additional police patrols so Maccabi Tel Aviv fans can chant “death to Arabs” and beat up Aston Villa fans without retaliation. She will take full responsibility for any violence by blaming Aston Villa fans who act in self-defence.
The home secretary has confirmed that any Aston Villa fans who defend themselves will be extradited to Israel where they will get the Greta Thunberg treatment. She has demanded the chair and board of Aston Villa resign for trying to protect their fans. She has requested that Aston Villa be banned from all UEFA tournaments, and insisted we should boycott, and divest from, the city of Birmingham.
If Birmingham fails to straighten up its act, Mahmoud will not rule out airstrikes against Villa Park x
Criminalising an idea: the dangerous fiction of “ANTIFA, the organisation”
19 October 2025 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/criminalising-an-idea-the-dangerous-fiction-of-antifa-the-organisation/
Let’s talk about a magic trick. Not the kind with rabbits and hats, but the political kind, where a complex idea is made to vanish, only to be replaced by a simple, monstrous caricature. The latest magicians? Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney General, and the broader Trump administration, who are attempting to pull off the dangerous illusion of criminalising ANTIFA.
The premise of their act is that ANTIFA is a unified, hierarchical terrorist organisation – a domestic version of ISIS – that can be neatly listed, proscribed, and its members prosecuted. This is a profound and likely deliberate misunderstanding. ANTIFA, short for “anti-fascist,” is not an organisation; it is a political belief and a movement, no more a single entity than “conservatism” or “environmentalism.”
To be anti-fascist is to hold a conviction. It is to believe, based on the brutal lessons of the 20th century, that fascism – with its nationalism, authoritarianism, and intolerance – is a societal poison. This is not a radical notion. It is a principle that sent Americans and Allies to fight in World War II. Believing fascism is evil is simply logical: it is a conclusion based on observable evidence and a moral stance.
So, how do you criminalise a belief? You don’t. Instead, you criminalise the people who hold it.
This is the heart of the trick. The administration and its allies focus exclusively on the most extreme, visible, and often condemnable acts associated with the label of antifa: black-clad individuals engaging in property destruction or street brawls with far-right groups. They amplify these images relentlessly, creating a brand. They take the broad, decentralised ethos of anti-fascism and shrink-wrap it into the fictional, singular “ANTIFA” – a designated villain for their political narrative.
This branding exercise serves several purposes:
It Creates a Boogeyman: A tangible enemy is a powerful political tool. It unifies a base, distracts from other issues, and allows a leader to position themselves as the nation’s sole protector. The vaguer the enemy, the more potent the fear.- It Equates Dissent with Terrorism: By framing anti-fascism as an extremist threat, the administration attempts to delegitimise all opposition. If you protest against policies you see as authoritarian or xenophobic, you risk being lumped in with a “terrorist organisation.” This has a chilling effect on the right to assembly and free speech.
- It Absolves the Actual Far-Right: This false equivalence is perhaps the most damaging part of the trick. While loudly condemning the violent fringe of the anti-fascist movement, the administration consistently downplays the documented, and often deadlier, threat of white supremacist and neo-fascist violence. It creates a moral parallax where both sides are presented as equally bad, obscuring the fact that one side’s ideology is inherently rooted in hatred and elimination.
The legal and philosophical implications of this are staggering. In a free society, actions are criminalised, not beliefs. Assault, vandalism, and inciting violence are already illegal. The laws to address them exist. The push to designate “ANTIFA” is not about upholding law and order; it is about creating a legal pretext to target political opponents.
When Pam Bondi and the Trump administration talk about ANTIFA, they are not describing a reality. They are constructing a narrative. They are taking a legitimate political stance – opposition to fascism – and attempting to paint it as inherently violent and un-American.
We must not be fooled by the trick. The goal is not to make people safer. The goal is to silence dissent and redefine the boundaries of acceptable thought. To be anti-fascist is not to be a terrorist; it is to be on the right side of history. The real danger isn’t a black-clad protester breaking a window; it’s a government that seeks to break the foundational principle that in America, people are free to believe, and to protest, what they see fit.
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