This is a companion piece to the article I published yesterday on the Naziesque tendencies of Itamar Ben-Gvir who is calling for the mass extermination of all non-Zionist in occupied Palestine. The companion article is a contribution from Jeremy Salt a Professor of Modern History of the Middle East, and is re-posted in full below the introduction. This article was originally published in the Palestinian Chronical on August 18, 2026. Please share this information broadly so that those in danger can be informed.

“If Israel does not separate church and state, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate, that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult... Our situation [in Israel] will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation... A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners [Palestinians] would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies… the Israeli Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations... [Eventually] Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

- Jewish Humanist Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Itamar Ben-Gvir is an avid worshipper and promoter of the Fascist Zionist Nazi Terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense league in the USA in 1968.

This organization plotted assassinations of Russian diplomats and carried out a wide spread bombing campaigns in the US over the two decades of the 1970’s and 80’s. Kahane recruited among the Jewish youth in the US and Israel, spreading a lethal form of Judeo fascism which taught that god ordained the purging of all non-Jewish people from occupied Palestine by whatever means necessary, including mass executions. These expulsions and/ or executions included Jews who did not adhere to the Kahanist ideology.

Being designated a terrorist in the US, Kahane moves to Israel and expands his recruitment campaign. Giving a speech in Haifa, Israel on June 28^th, 1985, Kahane incited the crowd with his expulsion rhetoric, “No one can understand the soul of those [Arab] beasts, those roaches. We shall either cut their throats or throw them out.” Then Kahane promised the crowd that, once he became the defense minister in Israel’s Knesset,

they [the Arabs] will turn on the radio and hear that Kahane has been named Minister of Defense. Then they will come to me, bow to me, lick my feet, and I will be merciful and will allow them to leave. Whoever does not leave will be slaughtered.

By the time Kahane was assassinated in the US in 1990, he had recruited tens of thousands of followers in the US and Israel. One such follower was Itamar Ben-Gvir. Young Ben-Gvir openly advocated for the assignation of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in retaliation for his signing off on the Oslo Peace Accords during the Clinton Administration on September 13^th, 1993. This was a peace initiative that only benefited the Zionist and shoved legitimate land owning Palestinians into a deeper form of occupational slavery and terror. Two years later Rabin lay dead from an assassin’s bullets while entering his car after a rally in Tel Aviv.

The Mouse that Wants to Be an Elephant: Israel and the Steroids of US Aid

By Jeremy Salt

“Whoever wins, this is not going to affect the slow and steady degradation of Israel’s standing in the US, accompanied by ultimately steady and increasing cuts in the steroids of arms supplies and economic aid.”

Jeremy Salt

The obese, sweaty Ben-Gvir, physically more repulsive than Goering, more bloodthirsty than Himmler, is now demanding that 30-40 Palestinians be killed every day because they are “not worthy of life,” a phrase that comes out of Nazi Germany and, in reality, sums up the genocide in Gaza.

In Israel’s case, the Palestinians are not worthy of life because they are human animals or the insects and snakes that Zionist rabbis, politicians and generals have described them as being over decades. Once put in that category, it is easier to kill them, to squash them, to bury them beneath tons of concrete so they die unseen and alone in the dark.

Bishop Desmond Tutu used to say that Zionism was worse than apartheid, but no one should hesitate in going further and comparing it to Nazism. Many of the Nazis were gentlemen compared to murderous trash like Ben Gvir and the gangsters around him in the cabal known as the ‘government’ of Israel.

Zionism is a fanatical ideology, more akin to a cult, it might be said, but it still has its own extreme, which is the even more murderous beliefs and behavior of the West Bank settlers, of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and others like them. Their Zionism shares with Nazism and the Islamic state the same characteristics of extreme violence, sectarian hatred, persecution of a targeted group, and rejection of all laws but their own.

The parallel lines between Nazism and Zionism, ideologically and in their mass violence, are clear for those prepared to look at them and put up with the shrill cries of ‘anti-semitism.’

Who are the true Semites anyway? Not Jewish Israelis of European stock. They have no living or genetic connection with the ancient Middle East.

The Semites, if one wants to use the word, are the Palestinians, living in the Mediterranean basin of ancient civilizations for countless generations. DNA research shows that they are overwhelmingly of Bronze Age Canaanite/‘Levantine’ stock.

Palestinian Jews have the same ancient lineage, but the Zionists don’t. They came to Palestine as European intruders who had no living or genetic relationship with Palestine, with the geography of Palestine, the people of Palestine, and even the Jews of Palestine, whom they looked on with contempt. They were cultural and historic aliens on Palestinian soil.

The Crusaders were backed by the resources of European kings, princes, popes, and cardinals; the Zionists by European governments, but the outcome was the same. Both got their hands on Palestine. The Crusaders lasted from the 11th to the 13th century; the duration of the Zionist ‘crusader state’ remains to be seen.

The Mediterranean basin has been a conflict zone for thousands of years, but these have been wars and not genocide. One side wins, soldiers die on the battlefield, civilians are killed and exploited by having their property seized or by being enslaved, but they are not wiped out and neither is there the intention to wipe them out.

‘Carthago delenda est’ was the cry that went up in the Roman Senate two centuries BCE – ‘Carthage must be destroyed ’-but it never was, not totally. Go to Carthage today and you can walk among the ruins in this outer suburb of Tunis.

Compare that to Gaza, of which 90 percent has been wiped out. If Israel has its way, the rest will soon be totally destroyed, as Israel wants nothing left of Palestine, so that in time, no matter how much time it takes, it will be entirely gone and the lie that it was always Jewish will be easier to sell.

Carthage was a Phoenician city; its mother lode was what is now Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon. Gaza is now Carthage, only much worse and destroyed with far greater loss of life, not as the unavoidable consequence of war (because Gaza is not a war but a genocide), but because the destruction of the civilian population was an aim from the start. Like 1948, the ‘war’ was a necessary means to this end.

In all the massacres in and around the Mediterranean basin over thousands of years, nothing compares with the horrors of what the Zionists have done. No strip of an ancient civilization has been so completely destroyed.

Gaza will be remembered in history thousands of years from now. It will never be forgotten. Zionism is a stain on Jewish history which can only be expunged by complete rejection of the parasitic growth that it is.

Like the Crusades, Gaza was not a massacre of locals by locals but by outsiders, in their ethnic origins and where they came from.

They were secular and used religion only as a weapon to further their cause, hijacking its symbols and turning the Star of David into a symbol of menace and forthcoming destruction. There is possibly only one greater danger to Judaism in its long history and that is Nazism, but whereas Nazism threatened the lives of Jews and the symbols of Judaism, its libraries and houses of worship, Zionism is a dagger driven towards its spiritual heart. No anti-semites could be a more dangerous enemy.

As the evidence is being bulldozed out of the way as quickly as possible, it will never be known how many people have been slaughtered in Gaza so far. They are still being killed every day, so it is not over yet but the current figure of close to 80,000 is based only on the bodies that could be counted and is nowhere near what the real figure would be, possibly hundreds of thousands.

Even on the basis of the minimal figure, nowhere in and around the Mediterranean basin in its thousands of years of recorded history has there been such slaughter, not wanton slaughter in the heat of war but the cold, calculated, ruthless aim to kill off the people and disperse the survivors beyond Gaza’s borders. This is what Zionism has brought to the central lands of the Middle East.

Where, during this history, were civilians, even women and children, regarded as no different from soldiers, to be killed without compunction? Civilians are often killed or massacred in the heat of war or in acts of revenge or retribution, but never in the tens of thousands.

The motive is also entirely different. Israel has identified its enemy as the entire population of Gaza, not the civilians trained in guerrilla warfare, manufacturing their own weapons, and facing up to the enemy in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. The enemy is the children as well as the adults. Noone is left out.

The Israelis claim revenge as a motive. After October 7, no doubt this is true. Suddenly the tables had been turned. It was not the thousands of Gazans the Israelis had been killing in their ‘mowing the lawn’ operations over decades, but several hundred Jewish settler civilians, along with hundreds of soldiers and armed settlement guards.

Revenge was certainly one motive but a lesser motive in the minds of politicians and military commanders planning the Gaza operation. The destruction of Gaza and its people and the Jewish settlement of Gaza and its eventual annexation to Israel were their deeper motives and aims.

Like occupied Syria and southern Lebanon, the goal is more ‘living space’, Lebensraum, the Nazis called it, as they looked towards Poland. The phrase fits precisely into the junction between Nazi and Zionist ideology.

‘Steroids’ is a word repeatedly frequently in recent Israeli discourse. There are many steroids, but the one that is meant is the muscle-building anabolic steroid.

It has many iterations: Netanyahu’s Hamas as “ISIS on steroids”; Naftali Bennett’s attack on Qatar and Erdogan’s involvement in the Gaza ‘peace’ board proposals as “Oslo on steroids”; Qatar’s role as ‘soft power’ on steroids; a Palestinian colloquium in New York as ‘anti-zionism’ on steroids; sanctions relief for Iran as terror on steroids; Israel’s next attack on Iran as ‘Operation Rising Lion’ on steroids; and British propagandist Melanie Phillips’ “libels” against Israel as “gaslighting on steroids.”

This is one omission from the list that has more weight than any of the others. This is Israel on steroids, first the steroid of British support and then the anabolic steroids of unending arms, political and economic support of the US for more than 70 years. This is what has enabled Israel to be what it is, to conquer all of Palestine and devastate surrounding countries.

The potential consequences of using steroids to build muscle mass in the human body are well known. No matter how impressive the muscles in the first place, the constant use of steroids can lead to shrunken testicles, liver disease, liver tumors, heart attacks and strokes ending in death, and mental problems. The out-of-control body that is Israel shows the same symptoms of disease.

The bodybuilder addicted to steroids can’t stop. Someone has to stop him, and then he has to make do with a shrunken life. In the same way, in its own best interests, the supply of dangerous steroids to Israel should have been stopped decades ago.

Without the artificiality of steroid strength, it would have been reduced to the dimensions of the small state that it is. Steroids turned it into the mouse that wants to be an elephant. Without the steroids of US arms and economic assistance, it would not have been able to bully its neighbors, to invade, occupy, plunder, assassinate and eventually commit open, flagrant, advertised-in-advance genocide. It would have been forced to deal with the Palestinians and its erstwhile neighbors as equals.

Even by Zionists, too much reliance on the US has been seen as dangerous, but to be what it is and wants to remain, Israel has to rely on someone. The problem is that no one is lining up to fill the role of endlessly indulgent uncle, to the ruin of the nephew.

What happens if the US decides to stop supply, which seems to be the direction it’s heading? Amnesty International was among 111 organizations calling on US senators to support a resolution by Bernie Sanders to block arms sales to Israel.

The vote was lost, but a dozen senators who had previously voted for arms sales voted against them. In the House, in June, 98 Democrats voted for an amendment cutting aid to Israel, compared to 103 against it. The votes are still being lost, but these figures were unimaginable just a few years ago.

The warning signs are there, but Netanyahu is vigorously biting the hand that has fed him and Israel, specifically Donald Trump’s hand. He seems intent on making life as difficult as he can for him before the midterms, probably to blackmail him into another full-scale war on Iran, while letting him do what he wants in southern Lebanon. They are diametrically opposed, but he is playing his electoral needs against Trump’s.

Whoever wins, this is not going to affect the slow and steady degradation of Israel’s standing in the US, accompanied by ultimately steady and increasing cuts in the steroids of arms supplies and economic aid.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

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This photograph provides a comprehensive view of the 3 camps. The IG Farben factory, the industrial area next to Camp I and the town of Oswiecim are visible, as are the swamps next to Birkenau, into which the ashes of those murdered in the camp were thrown.

Theses photos were taken to succinctly identify the location of the behemoth chemical company IG Farben (Lower Left of the Photo).

The international company was the chief economic instrument of the German government. It produced a vast range of chemicals and chemical products, including artificial oil, synthetic rubber, aviation gasoline, plastic, nylon, and numerous poison gases, including the deadly insecticide later used at Farben’s combined rubber factory and concentration camp, Auschwitz where the SS murdered [millions] of Jews.

(Higham, Trading with the Enemy, pgs. 151-153)

IG Farben

IG Farben was intricately intertwined with major US manufactures, owning substantial stock holdings in Standard Oil of New Jersey, Du Pont/General Motors, Standard Oil of California, to name a few. In 1929 an American affiliate was set up under the name of IG American/Chemical Corp., which at the time included interest owned by Henry Ford’s son Edsel.

The researcher Charles Higham, in his book Trading With The Enemy states that, “The wealth and power of German-American I.G. were almost beyond calculation.” By the time WWII started in 1939, Farben’s secret society known as “The Fraternity” had over 2000 corporate spies who had already infiltrated all branches of the US military and had moles in all three branches of the US government. Highly confidential meetings between President Roosevelt and his closest confidants were being noted and transferred to Berlin for review. Farben associates worked in direct coordination with SS Commandant Heinrich Himmler.

Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, in late 1941, the Nazi hierarchy had an exact accounting of all the USA’s military assets and a good estimate of the amount of time it would take to transfer to a war economy. In 1939 American IG operated under the pseudonym of General Aniline and Film, which was contracted with the US War Department to produce all of the US war propaganda films and photos. This gave Farben direct access to all US Military installations. Higham further stated, “By 1939, I.G. provided the Nazis with 90 percent of their foreign exchange, 95 percent of their imports, and 85 percent of all the military and commercial goods.”

Two CIA researchers reinterpreted the photo in 1978, and they inserted the captions and arrows on the photo. The arrows are pointing at several groups of inmates inside the camp. Also visible are several railcars next to the ramp. Smoke billowing from the chimney of Crematorium V indicates that people were exterminated in the gas chamber beneath it shortly before. Many details from the area of gas chambers II and III, and the railway platform are visible. The roofs of the gas chambers, the crematoria above them, a train by the platform and groups of prisoners on their way to the gas chambers can be seen clearly. Note the open gate at the entrance to gas chamber II and the cultivated garden in the courtyard.

The Return of Extermination Facilities

On March 31^st, 2026 another fascist governmental body (Knesset) in occupied Palestine passed a law called The Death Penalty Bill which would allow the execution by hanging of those convicted of terrorism aimed at “ending Israel’s existence.” The passing of the bill garnered immediate applause from those in the legislative chambers including Benjamin Netanyahu, and the co-author of the bill National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The last person to be hung to death by judicial decree in occupied Palestine was Nazi extermination administrator Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

At some point after the passage of the law, the decision was made to locate an extermination facility to carry out these executions. Last Tuesday, Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video at an anonymous location showing that the construction of the death facility was underway and announced, “when there are terrorist attacks, the terrorists are killed on the spot.”

According to records held by the Palestinian Prisoner Society, the Zionist occupiers of Palestine are holding 9400 prisoners in Israeli prisons, 370 are minors, 100 are women, most are being held without charge. Israeli police records show that 100 children are detained per month with the accusation that they entered Israel illegally. According to the Zionist ideology, all of these could be framed with the title of, “ending Israel’s existence” since they legally reside on land that is prohibiting the Zionist from furthering their ‘Greater Israel’ vision.

Yesterday and Today

In late 1942 the Roosevelt Administration began hearing reports from US intelligence services that were passed down through eyewitnesses in the Polish underground that the Nazis were performing mass exterminations of Soviet POW’s, Polish and Romanian civilians and other dissidents. These reports were not disseminated among the US public until after the war.

However, this is 2026 not 1942, and the reports are being disseminated to us as these events take place. This is all being funded by US tax payor dollars and Zionist supporting colonial leaders in the US and across Europe, including the orange man, and Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Andy Burnham, Ursula von der Leyen, Giorgia Meloni, and whole panorama of others which proves that supporting a genocide pays big ‘under the table’ dividends from Israeli lobbyist and military contractors. There is no cover for these people to hide from the truth anymore. There is no middle ground in a genocide. They are nothing more than what the Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa poignantly referred to as, “finely dressed well-spoken monsters who harbored the same supremacist ideologies as Zionism—these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favored, blessed, or chosen.”

On September 20^th 1969, two years after the 1967 Six Day War, pseudo-Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban spoke at the United Nations General Assembly addressing the danger and vulnerability Israel would experience if they withdrew from the current Zionist controlled territory:

We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.

Evoking the memories of Auschwitz engendered the tagline “Auschwitz Borders” that proliferated in the future commentary of Zionist pundits. In 1992, Deputy Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced President George H.W. Bush’s suspension of promised funds to Israel in an attempt to pressure the Zionists into discontinuing settlement expansion. Netanyahu claimed that the President was trying to force Israel back to the pre- 1967 “Auschwitz borders.”

Despite the Zionist hierarchy’s dishonorable use of the memories of Auschwitz as a cheap political tool to harm more innocent civilians, Auschwitz has indeed been reborn in the pseudo-state of Israel. This time it will be used in another failed attempt to placate the ever present fears that reside within the Zionist mind. Fears that only the Zionist themselves can dispel. And innocent Palestinians and their supporters will pay the price.

Emotional Retardation

If a Zionist terrorist in pseudo-Israel gets their feelings hurt by someone telling them that they are not a “chosen” person with extra-ordinary privileges but, are just regular person like everyone else in the world, they know that can go out in a psychopathic rage and grab some defenseless Palestinian child and torture, rape, murder, and dismember them with zero accountability, and that this will make them feel all better.

Their anti-life tendencies are so warped that exercising violence upon a vulnerable child has some sort of soothing effect on their mind. This is the only time that they feel like the world is in its proper order. This is the psychological maturity of a toddler who has discovered an earthworm in his back yard for the first time, and in a fit of giddiness, grabs the slimy slithering lumbricid and squishes it into a pulp that oozes through his fingers. This is the mentality of Itamar Ben-Gvir, and a hundreds of thousands of others who have been poisoned by teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Can you imagine Itamar Ben-Gvir in a one to one face off against a seasoned Al-Qassam Brigade soldier or the likes of Yahya Sinwar in his prime? Of course not. Ben-Gvir only kicks people who are shackled, it’s the Zionist MO.

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Introduction

As I have repeatedly discussed over the last three years through my own post, the pseudo-state of Israel, since its illegitimate foundation in 1948, has been gripped in crippling fear that there will be a repeat performance of the extermination program carried out by the Nazis during WWII. They teach their children that they are hated and despised from the time they are born and continue to use the Holocaust as a psychological weapon to instill fear and anxiety in their own off spring. When these off spring become adults they are anti-human powder kegs that are itching to explode. “Never forgive, Never forget,” is their standing motto.

Anyone who questions Israel’s existence, or their claimed biblical right to eradicate non-Jews near and far immediately triggers these fears and physical violence spontaneously erupts as we have all witnessed on so many occasions across several media platforms.

In its current status, Israel is internally tearing itself apart while lashing out at everything around them. When they are not busying themselves with attacking others, they turn their anger toward each other.

When the cohesion of the three main sectors of the Israel society, the Hiloni, the Haredi, and the Religious Zionist*, is not maintained by a constant propaganda campaign reminding them of their united effort to keep Zionism alive, the only glue left to hold the center together is perpetual raw violence. Child/adult rapes, murders, and suicides are common place in Israel society, with many of these offenses never being investigated or adjudicated. The more violence, the more their minds become eaten away by the infuriation they feel when the rest of the world will not blindly accept their believed supremacy over all other human beings. Its a vicious cycle that will eventually spin apart, and again scatter Zionist practitioners to the four corners of the earth.

Israel’s Curse Of The Eighth Decade

Zionist policymakers and thinkers are gripped by a strong fear that the state may not survive to see its eightieth year of existence. This is not because of external threats. In fact, some zionists are living under the illusion that following their genocidal war on Gaza and the rest of Palestine, Israel’s external fronts have been neutralized.

These included assassination of top leaders of Hamas and Hizbullah as well as several Iranian generals. More recently, Syria has also been taken out of the Resistance Axis. So, external threat is not seen as a serious issue by Israel at present.

It is Israel’s internal divisions that are causing sleepless nights among the elite. Menachem Rahat, a leading Israeli journalist and commentator, who used to write for Ma‘ariv newspaper, published a piece titled: “The Curse of the Eighth Decade”.

He wrote: “Far more threatening and dangerous to our future is the division and polarization within Israeli society.

“The same brotherly hatred that came down to the world in the days of Kayin and Hevel, which was repeated in the lives of Yitzchak and Yishmael and Ya’akov and Esav, and exploded again with the brothers’ hatred for Yosef – this is the hatred that burns among us and threatens to overwhelm the zionist enterprise.

“The State of Israel, now in its eighth decade of life and about to celebrate its 75th birthday, is today closer than ever before to the danger of a fratricidal war, each man against his brother. This is the moment to learn from history, before we destroy ourselves through the fire of hate.”

The former defense minister and prime minister, Ehud Barak, has expressed similar concerns. He has framed his concern differently arguing that Israel can either be a ‘Jewish state’ or a ‘democratic state’, but not both.

The 15-month-long genocidal war on Gaza has merely exacerbated its internal divisions. Within Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet—essentially a bunch of genocidal maniacs—opinion is sharply divided about the just concluded ceasefire. It may not last long.

An odd assortment of parties, all of them neo-Nazi in ideology, compete for influence to push their extremist agenda. The police and security minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir resigned from the coalition regime because he did not want a ceasefire in Gaza.

Neither did Netanyahu but he was forced to accept it because the Israeli army failed to achieve any of the objectives set out by the regime. Hamas has not been eliminated, northern Gaza has not been emptied out of the Palestinians and Israeli prisoners were not released through military force.

Hamas has emerged stronger. Palestinians are returning to their homes even if they are completely destroyed, and the prisoners were released through negotiations.

Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi announced his resignation on January 21. He acknowledged that the army had failed to protect Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. He will relinquish his post on March 6. Israeli media outlets have admitted that Israel not only lost the war but the army was badly mauled and has suffered major losses. Halevi is leaving it in tatters.

Netanyahu is also running scared because he faces criminal charges for fraud. This is compounded by demands that he resign over his failure to protect Israelis during the October 7, 2023 operation launched by Hamas. It was the biggest humiliation the Israeli regime and army suffered in its entire tortuous existence.

Zionist Israel’s only weapon throughout these years has been its military might. It has used it indiscriminately to terrorize its neighbors, but more particularly the Palestinians under occupation.

The US maintains a pipeline of endless supply of weapons to keep the zionist entity fully stocked. It is better equipped than all the neighbors' armies combined. The zionist genocidal war on Gaza that inflicted immense death and destruction on the Palestinians, however, failed to subdue much less defeat them. The myth of zionist invincibility lies buried in the rubble of Gaza.

Evidence for this can be found in the casualties inflicted on Israeli forces despite their hi-tech weaponry. Hamas’ Islamic fighters more than matched the invading zionist forces. After 15 months of war, the zionist army is not only exhausted but also demoralized.

Most soldiers and reservists refuse to report for duty. Others seek treatment for mental issues or commit suicide. The length of war has also resulted in Israeli military equipment being degraded due to lack of proper maintenance. True, the US continues to supply it endless amounts of weapons—bombs, missiles and the like—but it cannot rebuild the Israeli army’s morale.

The war has resulted in other problems for the zionist entity. At least 60,000 businesses have shut down including the Port of Eilat, thanks to Ansarallah’s daring attacks on ships in the Red Sea. Israeli bound ships have been intercepted and prevented from going to Israel.

Israel’s financial losses as a result of the war amount to some $70 billion. This is compounded by the fact that the most qualified and productive Israelis have fled the country. They are unlikely to return. When there is no certainty about the future, most Israelis prefer their personal well-being over ideology. Life based and propped on the theft of others’ land and perpetual oppression and killings cannot be sustained forever. There are also strong divisions between Haredim and secular Jews.

Further, the Palestinians cannot be wished away regardless of the scale of barbarism inflicted on them. The zionists have indulged in state terrorism for more than 75 years. The Palestinian resistance has only become stronger and more determined. And it will continue to grow. Time is on the side of the resistance.

The Palestinians are prepared to struggle for as long as it takes to achieve their goal of an independent state free from zionist occupation. The will to achieve freedom is always stronger than the occupiers’ capacity to oppress.

The occupied are willing to make every sacrifice. Palestinian leaders from Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, Dr Abdul Aziz Rantisi, Yahya Ayyash, Salah Arour to Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, sacrificed their lives in the struggle to achieve freedom. Ismail Haniyeh lost 66 members of his family, including three sons, four grandchildren and a sister, in the struggle.

How many zionist leaders—political or military—are prepared to offer such sacrifices? On rare occasions when a few missiles were fired at Tel Aviv, Netanyahu would rush to hide in his underground bunker like a rat. Rats do not revolutionaries or leaders make.

The US is the underwriter and financier of zionist crimes. Recent polls in the US, however, show a worrying trend. More than one-third of American Jewish teenagers sympathies with Hamas, 42 percent believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and 66 percent sympathies with the Palestinian people as a whole. This only adds to the zionists' discomfort.

It is, however, the curse of the eighth decade that truly haunts the zionists. They are psychologically defeated. Physical defeat cannot be far off. The West Asian region, indeed the entire world would be a far better place without the racist zionist entity.

Notes:

Hiloni (Secular/Liberal)

“The largest group are the Hiloni. These are the secular Jews making up 40 to 50% of the population. They dominate Israel’s tech sector and form the backbone of the economy and the military. They’re generally non-religious Zionists and see being Jewish as a cultural identity and Israel as a liberal democracy with Western values. No democracy, no high-tech. Under this slogan, hundreds of those working in the Tel Aviv high-tech sector.”

Haredi (Ultra-Conservative)

“They’re the ultra-orthodox and the most conservative… Only around half work official jobs. And though they contribute fewer taxes, they’re often entitled to more state support because of their low income. Since Israel’s founding, military service has been mandatory for most Jews. But the Haredi were exempt if they were in full-time religious studies.”

Religious Zionist (Ultra-Right)

“They are deeply committed to the state and strongly represented in the military. But their vision of Israel is not secular. They think that the land was given to Jews by divine right and that Israel is a religious project.” They are the ones currently in power.

(See more at @uncivilized_media)

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҈ This report is detailed at length. I have reviewed and included information from over three hundred articles, books, testimonies, and court documents that I have gathered over the last several years. It was at the encouragement of some of my followers who have survived being subjugated to clerical child sexual abuse that kept me going. They are the ones who carried the moral weight of this story and literally paid for it with their own blood. To recount these events was the least I could do to bring this evil to light. This report is dedicated to them.

҈ Warning: This report includes graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse. No graphic images of abuse are included in the article with the exception of art work provided by survivors. These testimonies portray some of the worst things that human beings could do to each other. We have access to 3000 years of written history that can be used as an instrument that will allow us to hurdle this predatory phase of human evolution. For those who claim that we cannot change the world in a way that ensures these things never happen to anyone again, not only are they categorically wrong, they are the problem.

҈ I have spent a considerable part of the last decade researching, documenting, interviewing, and writing about the etiology of child sexual abuse in religious institutions. Another door opened in April 2025. It had a mezuzah nailed to it.

“The technical definition of pedophilia is having sex with a prepubescent child and that’s a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for psychiatry and psychology. So if you have sex with a child under 13 or who is prepubescent, that’s called pedophilia…

“These are very damaged individuals, who are psychiatrically very disturbed. They have very serious personality disorders (they’re often labeled as psychopaths) and possibly brain abnormalities. This is a core group of very dangerous predators.”

Haredi Communities

Israel’s Haredi Communities are composed of Ultra-orthodox Traditionalist practitioners of Judaism. In these communities, Torah Law, as compiled in the Tanakh, and the subsequent oral and written Talmudic interpretations of these laws, forms what is called the Halacha. The Halacha are the basic religious codes that guides civil interactions that all members of the community are bound to follow. In Israel’s system of law these courts are supposed to operate in parallel to the state (civil) system of law. However, according to the Rabbinic Courts that govern these communities, Torah Law and Halacha Code supersedes State Law. This means that the Rabbinic Court’s understanding of these codes, in regard to the actions of those living within the community, is the final word on whether any sort of award or punishment should be meted to a community member.

In March of 2026, with fierce opposition, the Knesset passed a bill that extended the legal arm of the Rabbinical courts with few exclusions. However, as Israel continues to inch closer to a total theocracy, communal members are strongly encouraged to bring ALL communal disputes to the attention of the Rabbis before considering actions in the civil courts.

Contemporary Rabbinic commentary on the corpus of literature that produced the Halacha often includes an extensive amount of discussion about what observers may think or say about a community members behavior, especially observers from outside of the community. Guarding the reputation of the community often usurps the individual rights of a single community member.

The authoritative framework of these communities model those of ancient Israel with a stringent patriarchy where women are expected to fulfill a subservient “helper” role and children have no rights. Obedience to the male religious leaders that occupy the pinnacle of these structures is assumed. Modesty, holiness, and religious purity are guiding principles of Haredi life. Men are to maintain their focus on the study of Torah and other associated teachings; women are to support the men emotionally, physically, and often financially, while maintaining focus on raising their children within Haredi norms.

In this tightly controlled system, there is a deliberate effort among these communities to isolate themselves from the majority of Israel society, in order to avoid secular contamination of Haredi purist values. Gender segregation is the norm across all Haredi streams. Some sects require a certain degree of separation between males and females on buses, enforce segregated sidewalks, and do not allow images of women on billboard advertisements. Some communities hold different store and clinic hours for each gender to avoid possible visual and physical contact. And it goes on, separated play grounds, women are only examined by female doctors, etc. These indoctrinations are instilled at the earliest possible age of all Haredim children.

In Haredi communities homogamic marriage is considered “a religious and communal obligation.” Arranged marriages are typical, with community rules “about who can marry whom, and who can have children by whom.” Open dialog about sex in a public manner is forbidden in all cases, as well as public displays of affection between married couples. Husbands should keep a distance from their wives when walking in the public sphere and never address their wives by their first name. In the privacy of their home more restrictions apply to prevent secular deviance. Some of the regulations pertaining to marital copulation in the Haredi Ger Hasidic sect were published in a document at the University of Michigan Library:

Ger Hasidic rules prescribe that the couple, among other things, should never kiss each other’s body, [they] instruct that the man should always be on top during intercourse, and that both should remain dressed. Moreover, the couple should not have relations before midnight, they must keep silent during sex, they should fulfill the act quickly, and should not have relations more than twice a month.

Secrecy

If a Haredi community member publicly denounces or condemns another member of the group, this is considered a grievous sin (hillul hashem) bringing shame to the whole community, the Torah, and God. According to the Talmud, this sin can be completely absolved only by the offender’s physical death.

A metaphorical “Wall of Silence” surrounds the community, keeping any egregious violation of State or International law by community members under a veil of secrecy. The Rabbinical Court are the gate keepers of these secrets. When the wall has been breached by a member of the community, dire consequences immediately ensue, including threats against the breacher and their relatives as well as verbal, physical, and financial assaults, which attempt to contain the secret and the member who exposed it. These reactions mimic the retaliatory methods widely displayed by Catholic Bishops and the priest who are under their rule who were accused of raping children.

To spotlight one particular case among the hundreds of thousands of cases, in November of 2021 the psychologist, best selling author, and serial rapist Chaim Eliezer Walder was outed by several of his victims through the media outlet Haaretz. When he became aware of the accusations, he immediately sent “his messengers” to intimidate the victims he brutalized and the two religious leaders who were supporting them. Other senior religious leaders joined Walder in attacking his victims, whose only motives in speaking out were to facilitate their own psychological survival and save other Jewish children from suffering the same fate.

Hearing about the accusations that were levied against Walder, extreme ultra-orthodox Rabbi Hans Zvi Yisrael Thau, the de facto dean of the prominent Religious Zionist Seminary Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem, published a letter in VINnews due to his concern that the ‘religious purity’ of the Haredi Communities was being threatened. Zvi Thau provides the theological backing for the Religious Zionist Party led by the fascist extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. In the letter Zvi Thau stated that, “We Have Become Involved In Mob Justice Towards Any Person Accused Of Intimate Crimes.” His jeremiad continues claiming that the rabbinic sages of the past (Chazal) say, “that one who publicly shames his friend is worse than a murderer” and that, “the claim that those who do not denounce this person (Walder) are harming the victims is the “mother of all sins.””

Walder’s female and male victims were as young as 9 years old; many had come to him for counseling, some were relatives. One survivor sought Walders expertise to help him mitigate a previous history of sexual assault by a trusted adult, only to be raped again by Walder. This ‘double rape’ testimony is common among survivors of sexual abuse from Roman Catholic priest. Another survivor had presented to the Rabbinical Court (Beth Din) a recorded phone conversation she had with Walder, where he tried to persuade her to withdraw her testimony and threatens to commit suicide if she does not. Some of the survivors had filed complaints to Israeli Police years before a Haaretz article surfaced with the story. The repeated mantras from the District Attorney’s office of ‘lack of evidence’ or ‘lack of public interest’ became the authorities’ byline and the cases were closed.

Walter self-terminated on December 27, 2021, less than two months after his ousting. Walter’s defender, Rabbi Hans Zvi Yisrael Thau was hit with allegations of sexual abuse, rape of a minor, and an opened police investigation in early November of 2022. Other victims claimed to be abused by Zvi Thau came forward exposing decades of child rape. The file on the investigation was turned over to the Jerusalem District Attorney for review, in July of 2023. As of September of 2025, the case seems to have faded into the black hole that has disappeared so many of these cases.

When I read this story a statement from another Haredi member whose daughter was sexually assaulted by a serial pedophile in his community back in 2016 came to memory. When being interviewed by a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who was investigating child assault in Israel’s Haredi communities he said,

“It’s still a deep dark secret among [these] religious communities; they don’t believe a child can be raped.”

Sexual Repression & Gynophobia

The information that follows identifies a similar pattern that I observed during my research on the Clergy Sex Abuse Crimes of the Roman Catholic Church and their Protestant counterparts. The prime ingredients to create a Child Rape Culture are all in play here. One is the religious supremacy of the clerical elite that maintains strict control over their co-religionist members. This includes the hubris it takes to teach believers that one set of religious texts can address all possible moral questions everywhere and always.

Two is sexual repression, where the narrative on human sexuality is dominated by those same clerical elites. This includes promoting sexual ignorance through banning any public discussion on the topic and holding up celibacy as a genuine means to spiritual purity. This sexual repression invariably manifests as uncontrolled sexual compulsion by the clerical elites themselves and their guarded inner circle of accomplices. Thus, the sins of the masters become broadly disseminated among the most vulnerable of the community; wreaking havoc on the physical and psychological development of innocent children while obstructing those who try to protect them.

Three is the subjugation of the women within the community. As the systemic frame of ancient Israel is revived, so are the inhumane stereotypes that marked gender relations in ancient biblical cultures, where affluent men consider women to be “sexual property.” The horrific accounts that follow are rife with misogynistic behavior that displays repeat performances of the tales that litter Israel’s antiquity.

These accounts highlight a blatant denial of the feminine side of God explicitly depicted in the second chapter of the Genesis creation stories. In this, the Potter (Yahweh) and Mother Earth (Adamah) put forth an egalitarian effort to create the androgynous Adam. In any human community where the mutual partnership narrative becomes diminished the functionality of the system becomes distorted. When women have no voice in communal affairs, half of the creative intelligence the community has to offer is forfeited, causing the system to operate with one eye blind.

To express one case in point, it is to the ignorant shame of overbearing men that women have largely been rejected or ignored as the primary moral agents in human reproduction. This is despite the fact that when it comes to the reproducing part, gestation and birth, the women are the ones who are exerting all the physical, emotional, and mental effort. By extension women are the significant moral agents in socioeconomic family life. Absent of an equal, and level playing field for both genders, the human race (the only race) faces extinction!

As is evident in the recently recorded testimonies of abuse survivors that have erupted in Israel over the past two years, the system that was meant to maintain subordination and control, prompted insubordination and rebellion among many women from the group. Rejecting the stifling life of a captive house maid of the patriarchal system they are breaking ranks and speaking out in an attempt to claw back their sexual dignity and mental clarity.

The Stories

On April 2^nd , 2025, an article titled, The Bottom of Black that appeared in the Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom began circulating on digital media platforms exposing the dark side of the Haredi ultra- orthodox elites. Women between the ages of 20 to 45, using pseudonyms to protect their identities, presented testimonies of intricately organized religious rape rituals that had been performed for over four decades across Israel. There were repeated testimonies of single digit aged children being forced to participate in the enactment of near death experiences where they would be cast in the role of a human sacrifice to obtain redemption and transcendence for the sins of the community.

The article presented interviews with mental health professionals who were helping the survivors sort through the trauma they had been programmed to suppress by the perpetrators. These doctors elicited the expertise of other professionals in Israel and from Europe who had published the findings of extensive research on organized ritual abuse; including Michael Salter , Yehuda Froman and Johanna Schroeder who are all well known in the field. Froman, like myself, indicates the roots of the abuse are embedded in the rigid ideology that is taught and practiced in Haredi schools.

One survivor began unraveling her hidden past with these words:

It’s always a dark place. There are between six and nine men there. They tie me to the bed by my hands and feet, stand in a circle, mumble prayers or blessings, and there is the rabbi who always leads the situation and says what to do. There is a ceremony, and each of them rapes me.

The rituals were captured in photos and on video providing lucrative financial opportunities for the perpetrators. The more traumatic the scenes were, the more profit they made on the dark web. The materials generated could be used to extort money, elicit favors, threaten key individuals, or satisfy the most diabolic sexual compulsions of those in the upper echelons of power, in Israel and elsewhere. As the Jeffrey Epstein saga has well established, sexual exploitation of children is a near trillion dollar a year industry.

Most of the women survivors who testified, “come from national or ultra-Orthodox religious communities” the article read, while further stating that there were “testimonies of similar cases that have also occurred in secular society.”

I remember a five-pointed star on the floor, usually red. When the ceremony was in the forest - the five-pointed star was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle. The rabbi says a blessing: ‘Blessed is the one who permits prohibitions,’ men around pray with a tallit [prayer shawl], sometimes they were dressed in black and the rabbi had a white cloak. There were several men and boys around the age of 16-17, who participated in the ceremonies for the ascension. They prayed to Baal Peor.

There was a time they asked me to dig a hole and laid me in it. There were times they injected me with something and said, ‘Now you will feel better,’ and then my body would go limp. They would recite Psalms repeatedly, like ‘A Psalm for David, God is my shepherd, I will not be lacking.’ They told me ‘You are special, you are chosen,’ and they would inject me... I remember a lulav, Hanukkah candles, a shofar.

There were an endless number of complaints filed with the Israeli police in the districts of their jurisdiction. Few were pursued. It was as if all the way up the accountability ladder, at every stop, someone had a vested interest in not going forward with the investigation of these cases. In the rare cases where a conviction was adjudicated, the sentences were lenient, often with early releases. The perpetrators spent less time in incarceration than the victim/survivors spent experiencing the torturous abuse.

Dr. Daphna Armon, the director of the Complex PTSD Department at the Be’er Yaakov Mental Health Center, offers an explanation as to why survivors who file complaints with local law enforcement are often considered unreliable by prosecutors:

“Currently, when victims get up the courage and go to a police station, they are asked to provide a coherent narrative. They are asked to provide a timeline, with a beginning, a middle and an end – and to talk about things that happened to them perhaps before they even acquired a language,” Armon states. “And all of this is happening at a time when, inside their heads, there are voices shouting that they mustn’t tell or they will be killed. And then they seem terribly distracted and cannot listen to the questions – and it looks bad.”

The attorney Rotem Aloni who specializes in representing victims of sexual assault had been alerted by several families about religious ritual gang rapes as early as 2019. The locations where the assaults took place were, “concentrated within the ultra-Orthodox” communities and often happened in “educational institutions.” Of the hundreds of victims she knew about, she represented twenty, filing criminal charges with the Israeli civil courts. After five years of sandbagging, all the cases were “shut” due to “lack of evidence.”

As the testimonies continued to trickle into the offices of seasoned Israeli clinicians over the years, it became apparent that judges, police officers, politicians, physicians, rabbis, teachers, and corporate CEO’s, the cream of the crop of Israel society, were the ones participating in the rituals.

Clinicians relayed that their offices experienced “broken bones…urinary tract infections… deliberate malnourishment.” They relayed testimonies that included years of denial of medical treatment, and incidents of secret births carried out by medical personnel.

My father is there, my mother is there, a rabbi from the community. I’m tied to the table, looking at the window and imagining how I’m jumping through it, how I’m tying a rope, dangling from there by rappelling to the stones. I kept wishing it wouldn’t happen. That’s what makes it special... I kept thinking how it wouldn’t happen, how I’d get out. I kept telling myself I wasn’t there. It’s terribly hard to understand that I was there. That this is me - the crooked girl.

One Psychiatrist indicated that the easy access to children in the Haredi communities is why the victimization begins at such an early age, “Usually around the age of three, four or five. And it continues for quite a long time… There are also cases of abuse of children of primary school age.” And the horror stories continued to pour forth:

You have no idea what ritual abuse is. The human brain cannot comprehend it. You can’t imagine what it means to program a three- year- old girl through rape and sadism so they can do whatever they want without anyone knowing…

Their trafficking of me happened all over the country. They moved me from ceremony to ceremony. Naked men stood in a circle. My therapist, her husband, and her son harmed me, and there were dozens of other girls and boys who harmed me. There were ceremonies and rituals meant to make me forget… The police have known about this for a year, but they don’t have the tools to deal with it.

The people who will fall are very, very senior figures. These people run communities and government agencies. They threaten us. I have children I need to protect. Something needs to be set up that can deal with this.

They tried to make us like them – the people who caused us endless pain.

Undue Toxic Shame

The perpetrators are well versed in the workings of the human psyche. Due to the lack of psychological maturity and the still developing brain capacity when the ritual abuse occurs, survivors may not obtain the language to express what has happened to them until decades later. Through repeated exposure, the children’s will to resist is destroyed and they give up on experiencing any form of normalcy in these settings.

According to the information provided in The Bottom of Black article, during these rituals the chosen children are subjected to continual erosion of their self worth.

In order to humiliate the children and instill feelings of guilt and shame in them, they show them naked pictures of themselves or give them food and tell them that they ate “carrion” (rotten flesh), organize staged weddings” between children, humiliate them by eating feces and stage their burial.”

One psychologist explained that, “One of the psychological methods for committing “the perfect crime” is to turn the victim into a perpetrator.” Here she is referring to testimonies of abusers forcing children to harm other victims or animals. Another clinician added, “They were forced to hurt others. And then it is as if they have no reason to go and tell what happened, because they are part of it, because they also caused harm.”

Soul Murder

Children in Haredi communities are taught to have faith and trust in their elder community members. The lead Rabbis are understood to be the direct agents of God. When these same Rabbis participate in the children’s abuse it creates a deep and lasting spiritual wound in the child’s bodymind. Stunned by the betrayal, the child feels as though God has abandoned them and cannot save them from the repeated violations. When the perpetrators’ tactics of dehumanization and humiliation include forcing the child to harm other children, they soon become convinced that they have permanent moral defect, and are unworthy of being saved. When you teach a child to no longer have faith in anything in the world around them, they eventually stop having faith in themselves and lose the will to embrace life. This is an unforgivable crime against the spirit of life that is present in all people. This is what is defined as soul murder.

The Knesset Hearings

By June of 2025, news of the Rape Rituals had hit the main stream, and there was a joint Knesset committee hearing on ritual sexual abuse held in June, and again in late July where survivors testified. In the face of law makers, one woman said she was five years old when the “unbearable abuse” from religious and educational leaders started. “They tied me up in every possible way, using whips and electric shocks, raping me.” Her attackers claimed she was “defective” and needed to be “fixed.”

One survivor’s terror lasted for over fifteen years.

I experienced ritual abuse over many years until my late teens and was forced to harm other children. I chose to speak out and make my voice heard. I received threats after revealing my story. From age five to age 20, I was harmed in these ceremonies… I filed a complaint with the police that was closed after a few months, and I know of other cases that were closed.”

This same woman survivor had received testimonies from others who were caught in the same diabolical web, “who claimed that doctors, educators, police officers, and past and present members of the Knesset were involved in these abuses.”

Another survivor who testified under the condition of anonymity started being trafficked when she was 11 years old by her cousin. She was taken to “sadistic” clubs:

There were public events, and there were internal ceremonies where I was tied to a tall post with handcuffs. Around me, there were other handcuffed victims with rituals of drinking menstrual blood and the slaughter of cats and other animals. They told me no one would believe me if I spoke out.

She went to the police 5 years earlier who dismissed her complaint. She appealed and her appeal was accepted, “I came to testify while on pregnancy bed rest, but the case was closed again due to lack of evidence.”

They said I was imagining things. I presented a recorded testimony from someone who admitted to harming me, but she was never summoned for questioning. Treat this as terrorism!

Another testimony at the hearing came from a woman who recounted events in explicit detail. I have included a large part of her testimony here to help the reader understand how serious these crimes are. She begins, I “was around 15, tied to a torture bed in [a] basement in the Tel Aviv area.” This “training” session included family members:

I remember a situation where I am tied to a bed. In a way that I can’t move at all. There are a lot of people around me and I’m trying to resist. I’m trying- and their holding me from both shoulders so I won’t try to lift my head. But every time I’m peaking, I see that they’re holding a snake in their hand and they’re very, very, cruelly putting it inside me. The pain is horrible and I’m screaming. Then they pull it out and I see that it’s all covered in blood, and they just butcher it, like, they tear it apart into a bowl, and then they make me drink it. And they drink it themselves, mixing the- my blood with the- whatever it is that a snake has, the snaked blood , I don’t know exactly what they did with its venom blood. They just slaughtered it there.

“And then the explanation was, now I’m basically a gateway. Now I’m an opening. Now I’m sacred. Anyone who wants to join the family, the cult- they don’t call it a cult, they called it a family, a group, whoever wants to join basically has to go through me. This was the argument that stood behind it. And then- like, that’s my role, I’m not allowed to run away from my role. I’m not allowed to run away from my mission, and that’s my assignment.

And in a random conversation with someone, she told me, she mentioned, that she remembers “girls training.” That’s something that, if I’m not mistaken, I gave testimony to the police about, I said that every Monday I had to show up to a certain place and there they would give us training. Basically they were training us to be prostitutes. Threats, intimidation, very, very dangerous things.

“Understand this: I am getting psychological, emotional treatment [at that time]. I would go to my therapist, leave the therapist, and they would be waiting for me outside.

“What is important for me to say is that nothing was done that I know of regarding my case. My case was closed [they said], I’m not coherent, I’m imagining things. It’s closed not due to lack of evidence but, due to “lack of guilt.”

A psychologist also testified at the hearings stating that time and again she and her colleagues had brought testimony after testimony to the attention of the police, and never heard from them again.

Once the testimonies were heard, Knesset member Pnina Tamano-Shata, in a flash of myopic brilliance, requested that, “Israel Police meet with the State Prosecutor’s Office and other relevant agencies “to understand the scale of the phenomenon, where it exists, and then come up with some kind of action plan — even a preliminary one.” It seemed that she hadn’t comprehended the testimonies that were just presented in the last two months. The people that she just asked to come up with an “action plan” were the same people who are suspected of participating in the ritual rapes? The devils were in the room!

Constantly Terrified

Within a week after the release of the Bottom of Black article, on April 10^th of 2025, an Israeli psychology graduate Shoshana Strook posted a video on social media accusing her parents, Avraham and Orit Strook, as well as Rabbi Hans Zvi Yisrael Thau of taking her to rabbi rape ritual ceremonies (RRRC) beginning at 2.5 years old. At these rituals she was filmed being raped and the videos were sold to pedophile websites for profit. By age 13 she was being prostituted by her father in Tel Aviv to ritual rape groups. As previously mentioned Rabbi Zvi Thau is the senior Rabbi of the Zionist Seminary Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem. Orit Strook, a Knesset Minister of Settlements and National Missions, is an ardent Zionist supremacist who is quoted as claiming “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Orit Strook has repeatedly called for the expansion of Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank.

Shoshana made contact on Facebook with another survivor of RRRC who referred her to Israeli psychologist Dr. Naama Goldberg who specializes in helping patients traumatized by the cycle of prostitution and was one of the clinicians at the forefront of exposing RRRC. (Insert Pg. 5) In the video she explicitly states that her life is currently under threat from organized crime operatives. She had already filed a complaint with Israeli police before fleeing to Italy in hopes of finding a safe haven. In the video she requests help from the general public to share what she has posted.

When Shoshana Strook originally decided to post this video she was not aware of the Bottom of Black article, and yet her testimony has stark similarities to the testimonies of other victims/survivors that recount their experiences of ritual abuse.

On April 22,2025 Ynet reports that the Shashona’s “incident” began when Israeli police received an emergency call from “the daughter of the public’s wife” on or around March 1^st, 2025. They responded to the call and a criminal complaint was filed with one of the police stations in Israel. Due to the fact that the charges were filed against public figures there was a ban placed on publicizing the charges until the accused has had a chance to be questioned. There was a request to lift the ban presented to the courts which was rejected by the sitting Judge, Menachem Mizrahi on April 22,2025. The judge further stated that,

a review of the investigation file shows that this is a very preliminary investigation - in relation to which, at this stage, reasonable suspicion is extremely low - if not lower… a decision has not yet been made to file an indictment, and the District Attorney's Office's position is that there is not enough evidence to file an indictment. This fact somewhat weakens the strength of the public interest in publishing the affair, although it does not negate it.

With this publication ban in effect, Google, X, Wikipedia, Facebook, and other media outlets started downgrading or swiping Shoshana Strook’s video and associated posts on Israeli media platforms. This soon filtered across the West. Below is a caption of an anonymous editor requesting that Shoshana Strook’s Wikipedia page be deleted.

For reasons that were then unknown, Shoshana returns to Israel from Italy, “in a panic” and asks the police to protect her from her would-be assailants. A later article claims that her mother Orit Strook, flew to Rome to rescue and/or force her to return to Israel.

In a December 6^th,2025 Facebook post Shoshana professes solidarity with Yael Shitrit, one of the survivors who testified at the Knesset hearings in June and July of that year. They had been communicating with each other on the platform. She states that Shitrit “writes and I identify with every word.” Within the post, Shitrit and Shashona concur that,

The abusers are not monsters in the dark…they are members of the Knesset, Officers. Heads of the communities, Rabbis. People with power…People who threaten. People who can make any one of us disappear. And that’s real chaos. If they tell you I committed suicide- don’t believe it.

Due to the repeated child abuse she suffered, Shoshana developed PTSD and dissociative identity disorder (DID), where her mind is crowded with different identities that present fragmented memories of her past abuse. Apparently at one point in her life she confided in her parents that she had lesbian inclinations. After experiencing a memory flash back of ritual abuse on January 12th of this year she writes a Facebook post,

In recent days, memories of the conversion therapy I underwent as part of the sadistic cult I grew up in have been coming back to me again and again.

“Different identities tell me about the part I also participated in these conversion therapy sessions. My father and Rabbi Thau were the two people who forced me to participate in these rituals over and over again. Rituals in which I was forced to harm other women in order to erase my lesbian identity.

Rituals in which gay men and children were asked to put their hands on my chest and in this way, through sadistic torture and threats, force me to understand that I am attracted to men, and force them to understand that they are attracted to women. These identities were trained to think that they are attracted to men. To the point that my central identity thought and was programmed to look for a man all the time. Other identities were programmed to be prostitutes.

The interest of my father and Rabbi Thau was of course economic. I was pimped out in Tel Aviv starting at the age of 13. They basically completely erased my ability to experience healthy sexuality with a woman and made me hate my sexual identity and myself on the most difficult levels possible.

I experience flashbacks of this over and over again and my anxiety levels right now about sharing this are extremely high, because we were promised that the moment we told it, we would be hospitalized.

We want to believe that there are good people in the world and that we are allowed to write and share the difficult things we went through during adolescence.

Despite the repeated threats that she has experienced, Shoshanna continues to provide updates on her status through social media. In late February 2026 she sets up a crowd funding page at Israelgives.org to develop a fund to cover legal expenses for her pending case. She is not aware that the prosecutors office had already suspended any further investigation into the matter. The funding page begins to receive some donation responses. Then comes two Facebook post dated February 28^th, 2026:

I grew up in the Jewish settlement of Hebron. Starting from age 2.5, my parents took to pedophile rituals, in which I’ve been programmed, trained using drugs, hypnosis, sexual abuse... When I was 13 my father started pimping me out in Tel Aviv, made money off my back. The abuse continued until a much older age...

“What happened now is that even though I’ve already published it and told my story, my father keeps hurting me. He came to my apartment (two weeks ago) and abused me again. He brought another person with him, who he is training to be my next handler after my father dies... Since the last assault I left my apartment and I have no home.

At this point, Shoshana was in frequent communication with the attorney Ayelet HaShachar Saidoff who was providing pro bono advice. In a later post Saidoff states that Shashona told her that the rape described above was, “at gun point.” In another post dated the same day Shashona states, “I filed a complaint with the police regarding the assault and obtained a protection order against my biological father as a result.” She also informs the readers that she has evacuated her apartment and is “moving between the homes of kind people who are helping me.”

Shoshana’s cries for help began to get some traction. An X commentator with handle “B.M.” had been translating Shoshana’s post and broadcasting them on the platform. A post with a copy of her original video received 4.3 million impressions as of March 6^th, 2026, with over 15,000 re-post. By the second week of March, she had gathered enough funds to hire lawyers to represent her. It’s hard not to think that her abusers were getting concerned about the possibility of a forthcoming trial. At this point none of the accused had been called in for questioning.

Searches for information on the case began to flourish among internet surfers, and more history of the Strook family began to emerge. It became apparent that in the family atmosphere where Shoshana was raised, hate was being inculcated as a virtuous emotion and brutal violence was acceptable behavior whenever one lost control of their mental faculties. Pictured below is her brother, who also raped her, with a some history on him.

Those who had been following Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza over the last 2 years recognized that this was the same sociopathic disease that had spread to a largest portion of Israel’s population.

Disappeared

On March 15^th, 2026, Orit Strook, Shashona’s mother announced that her daughter had died in a Facebook post, “With a broken heart, I update you on the passing of our beloved daughter Shoshana.” Shoshana was 34 years of age. According to reports from Israeli media, Shashona was found in a vacation home in the Northern Galilee village, Amirim. Emergency teams who were dispatched to the scene attempted resuscitation and failed to revive her. No reports indicate who alerted the emergency team.

“The circumstances surrounding Shoshana’s death remain unclear. She was reportedly found dead in her home in northern Israel. Police have opened an investigation into the case.” The Jerusalem Post reported. Shoshana was interred on the same day her death was announced at a Jewish Cemetery in Hebron. Strict guidelines limited the “number of participants due to the sensitive security situation in the area.” - i.e. Israel had been bombed by Iran the previous day.

On the website hyperlinked above that posted the funeral arrangements and prayer times, the comments section was loaded with scathing remarks aimed at Shoshana’s parents and their supporters:

“Is anyone planning to investigate the case?”

“@A Why not? Why are you opposed? Do you know something that no one else knows?”

“Here we see Shoshana, daughter of Orit Stork, in black and white. There is no place hot enough in hell to burn all the people of lies and poison who enlisted to cover up the blood of the unfortunate woman.”

“Why aren’t the parents shown in this whole case? Don’t they care about the peace of their children? What does it mean to say “found lifeless”? What is a savior? They don’t show a drop of concern or sadness!! Whoever offers their condolences to the parents should erase it from their minds because from what it seems, it doesn’t bother them at all!!”

“There is no limit, even for those who were accused by their own family, who sat on it seven times, who sat in sackcloth and ashes for their wickedness.”

In an Israel Hayom article published on March 19^th, 2026, Reporter Ariel Kahane reveals more pertinent information ,

Since Orit Strok had meanwhile become a government minister and the threats from Iran had increased, the fear that the daughter’s situation would be exploited by terrorist elements also grew. Therefore, the security agencies were also informed and intervened.

It’s not clear as to exactly what Kahane means by “security agencies were…informed and intervened,” Was Shin Bet hunting Shoshana Strook at the request of her accused mother?

Protests were held in Zion Square in the center of Jerusalem immediately following the news of her death. Several women’s rights groups demanded further investigations into the case. A silent protest took place in the afternoon, where organizers demanded change and justice for Shoshana and all victims of ritual abuse. “We’re here because we want to make sure nothing like this ever happens again,” one protestor told the reports. Yael Shitrit, a survivor who gave testimony in the Knesset meetings, and was in close contact with Shoshana stated that, ““We spoke with her [Shoshana] that morning. She didn’t want to die. She wanted a home and security…If this nation doesn’t wake up, we’re the next in line,”

Peering Through A Crack In The Wall of Silence

Ten weeks after Shoshana Strooks death, the anti-zionist media outlet Canary published an article that featured quotes from seasoned Pro-Palestinian authors, Susan Abulhawa and David Sheen. Both have been exposing Israel’s deadly occupation practices against Palestine’s indigenous population, as well as the wholesale slaughter levied by the IOF forces against all Israel’s neighbors for decades.

The article reports that the Gush Etzion Regional Council which administers 22 illegal settlements directly south of Jerusalem, issued a public statement that point blank admits that ritual rapes are occurring in Israel. Canary’s excerpt of the statement reads,

We wish to state in the clearest possible terms: we condemn acts of abuse and those who commit them. Sexual abuse, and certainly that described as systematic and ritualistic, is a heinous crime that wounds not only the victims, but the entire fabric of our community… The acts described, attributed among others to people from Gush Etzion, are an expression of pure evil and moral depravity that has no place in human society, and certainly not in our community.

This is the first time that a municipal council in Israel has confirmed what survivors of these abuses have been saying over the last four decades. The article reminds the reader that, “the Israeli regime remains in denial” as Israel’s Foreign minister excoriated the UN’s recent decision to add Israel to its “sex abuse blacklist.”

The article indicates that the Shashona Strook’s testimonies were a leading factor that provided the impetus for the public statement. Another key incentive was a recently televised one hour documentary produced by journalist Ron Zinger on Kan11, an affiliate of Israel’s Public Broadcasting Corporation. The documentary featured live testimonies of survivors of RRRC that had taken place in the Gush Etzion Region, as well as other damning evidence. The complete documentary with english subtitles can be viewed below:

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Bottom of Black (English Translation)

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“The Bottom of Black”: Girls Raped in Cult Rituals Reveal the Horrors – Investigation

“I went through painful sodomy, I really felt like I was splitting in two. It’s a terrible experience, but there’s something about these things, maybe in their strangeness, that’s like... Maybe the hardest part is these things that if you tell them, they’ll think you’re crazy. I remember many types of severe sexual abuse, but there’s something about these abuses, the rituals, that are the bottom of blackness.”

In direct words and a clear voice, Emunah (a pseudonym, like all the names of the victims in the article) describes the severe abuse she endured, she says, as a child. Organized sexual abuse that included, among other things, “rituals,” supposedly religious. Horrific rituals in which religious people, some of them members of her family, sacrifice her for the sake of ascension or redemption.

Emunah is not the only one. More than ten women aged 20-45 with whom we spoke describe a serious phenomenon that raises serious concerns that in Israel, as in many countries around the world, a serious phenomenon of organized sexual abuse of children is occurring right under our noses.

“Maybe the world knows that rape takes place, that incest occurs, but the world doesn’t know this,” says Emunah. “They managed to keep these acts a secret for years, maybe because of their madness... It was always very, very strange. As if there was an internal logic there, but it was so crazy... The strangest things happen there, which are normalized in a ritualistic and orderly way. There is a time, there is a time when this verse is said and when that verse is said, there is such an order that it seems like things are supposed to be done this way...”

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Each of the women we spoke with as part of the investigation has a different life story.

They come from different regions of the country, from north to south. Each is at a different place in her life. Some are students, others work and manage careers and family lives, and there are also young women who are barely surviving, clinging to life by the nails.

They are women who did not know each other before, grew up in different communities and come from different sectors and sects, and yet - the stories of ritual abuse they describe are similar in a way that requires us to listen and not close our eyes. Some of them were harmed in a preschool educational setting or in a girls’ educational setting, others in the family home, in a yeshiva or in a synagogue. In this setting, we present only a very small sample of long hours of interviews and information, and some of the descriptions presented in this article are difficult to read. The great concern of everyone who spoke to us is that organized sexual abuse of children continues to occur even today.

Ayala: “It’s always a dark place. There are between six and nine men there. They tie me to the bed by my hands and feet, stand in a circle, mutter prayers or blessings, and there is the rabbi who always leads the situation and says what to do. There is a ceremony, and each of them rapes me.”

“Blessed is He who permits prohibitions”

Sacrifice. Binding. Punishment. Correction. Transcendence. Redemption. These are some of the concepts that repeat themselves. The prayers, the murmurs, the ecstasy all around. The extreme pain, the humiliation, the torture. The crushing of personality and soul. Testimony and testimony and testimony and testimony of women who experienced organized abuse in their childhood that included, among other things, gang rape carried out as part of rituals and rituals.

We met them over the past few months. We spoke with family members of some of the victims, with treatment providers and with experts in Israel and abroad in the field of trauma and dissociation (a range of conditions from emotional distancing to complete disconnection from emotions, sensations, memories, and more, p.s.). We gathered information about the phenomenon of organized ritual abuse of children - as it is known, and is known, throughout the world.

The picture that emerges from all the information we have gathered is disturbing and difficult. It requires, at the very least, a thorough and meaningful investigation by law enforcement authorities. “It is a national-religious mission to expose the phenomenon and get down to investigating the truth,” a religious community official involved in the details of the phenomenon tells Israel Hayom.

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“Sometimes the testimonies are so shocking that you doubt the credibility of the speakers.

On the other hand, since the reports are repeated in a similar way from victims who don’t necessarily know each other and from different regions of the country, it sounds like they are well-founded.”

Most of the women we met come from national or ultra-Orthodox religious communities, although “Shishab” has received additional testimonies of similar cases that have also occurred in secular society. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that this is not a sectional spotlight, but rather a beam of light directed at suspicion of some of the most serious crimes imaginable, which are being committed in a parallel and transparent world, even though it is so black and dark.

The names of several rabbis were repeated in some of the testimonies. Several complaints filed at various police stations across the country were all closed, relatively quickly. Even when suspicions arose in the past about the existence of a network that harmed children in Jerusalem, police investigators, at best, did not have sufficient tools or knowledge to carry out their task.

In that case, which was extensively exposed in 2019 on the program “The Source” and raised suspicions of the activity of a pedophile network that harmed dozens of children in the Nachlaot neighborhood, investigators tended to believe that it was an “invention,” an “exaggeration,” or a “panic” by parents and caregivers - and the case was closed almost without relevant indictments.

A man named Benjamin Satz was convicted in 2013 for committing indecent acts and sodomy on girls and boys aged 5 to 8. Another suspect was acquitted due to doubt. In practice, dozens of girls and boys were left damaged and required years of emotional trauma therapy.

Corinne, whose daughter Eden was abused: “There’s an entire community that’s hiding, and it seems like a lot of people have something to hide. Eden talked about six men who participated in the rape – and something like that needs to be kept a secret. It’s hard to fight an entire community.”

“Not marginalized people”

“I remember a five-pointed star on the floor, usually red. When the ceremony was in the forest - the five-pointed star was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle. The rabbi says a blessing: ‘Blessed is the one who permits prohibitions,’ men around pray with a tallit, sometimes they were dressed in black and the rabbi had a white cloak. There

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were several men and boys around the age of 16-17, who participated in the ceremonies for the ascension. They prayed to Baal Peor.

“There was a time they asked me to dig a hole and laid me in it. There were times they injected me with something and said, ‘Now you will feel better,’ and then my body would go limp. They would recite Psalms repeatedly, like ‘A Psalm for David, God is my shepherd, I will not be lacking.’ They told me, ‘You are special, you are chosen,’ and they would inject me... I remember a lulav, Hanukkah candles, a shofar.”

Limor: “When the ceremony was in the forest – the pentagram was marked with a hoe and around it were lit candles in a circle,” Photo: GettyImages

Limor (not her real name) grew up in an ultra-Orthodox religious home. Her father, she says, was always violent towards her and her mother. Over the years, she even required medical treatment in a hospital and was accompanied by a professional because of injuries caused by the violent abuse she suffered.

According to her, it was her father who brought her to those “ceremonies.” The manner of arrival, by relatives, characterizes many testimonies. Limor says that sometimes the ceremony took place in the forest, sometimes in a closed apartment. There were times when she saw and heard other children being harmed. Testimony regarding other children also repeats itself in some cases. In many of the testimonies we heard and became familiar with, women also participate in the ceremonies and abuse.

“Organized rape of children is one of the most horrifying phenomena I encounter,” says Dr. Anat Gur, a psychotherapist specializing in treating women and trauma, head of the psychotherapy program for treating sexual trauma at Bar-Ilan University and the Tel Aviv Assistance Center. “It’s a phenomenon that is probably much more widespread than we think. It’s found in many places you wouldn’t expect it to be.”

Boaz (pseudonym), a senior therapist in the religious community, agrees: “The perpetrators, for the most part, are not marginalized people in the community. One patient told me, ‘You see, this is the one who blows the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.’ The shofar is the symbol of the pipe - the man who is considered the most spiritually worthy is the one who blows the shofar, because he is closest to

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God. And he is the one who tells her that she is evil, that he is helping her atone in this incarnation. Do you understand the distortion?”
“A crime without witnesses”

In addition to the women who dared to meet and talk to “Israel Hayom,” there is information among professionals about other victims who report sadistic ritual abuse in their childhood. The content that emerges is similar. The information indicates that in most cases the sexual abuse began in very early childhood at home, by a father, grandfather, or other relative. In another part of the cases, the abuse occurred in an educational or therapeutic setting.

“What I’ve seen over the years,” says Dr. Gore, “is that those who go through these things suffer horrific damage. This is also one of the problems with disclosure, because the victims are so shattered that it’s hard to believe them. The more cruel and sadistic the abusers are and the younger and more horrific the abuse was - the less likely the criminals will be brought to justice, because there’s no one to testify.” The abusers shatter the victims’ souls so much that it becomes a crime without witnesses, which of course serves the society that continues to abuse or carry out these rituals.”

Dr. Joyana Silberg, an international expert in the treatment of dissociative disorders in children and adolescents and former president of the International Association for Trauma and Dissociation, spent five years treating 70 children who were suspected victims of organized abuse in Israel. In Chapter 14 of her book “The Child Survivor,” she describes the severe symptoms the children suffered from “due to multiple forms of abuse - physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual.”

Dr. Silberg cites several sources for the numerous testimonies about the cases of organized abuse in Jerusalem. In one of the cases reported in the professional literature, a child who was injured in Israel and treated in the United States described how several men tortured him and recreated an incident in which they submerged his head under water.

The descriptions of sadistic abuse are repeated in all the testimonies we heard, such as in Emunah’s story: “There was a ceremony like a circumcision that I went through. I was 10 or 11 years old. It was in the synagogue of the settlement. They tied me up, a kind of binding of Isaac, and injured my penis.

“My father is there, my mother is there, a rabbi from the community. I’m tied to the table, looking at the window and imagining how I’m jumping through it, how I’m tying a rope, dangling from there by rappelling to the stones. I kept wishing it wouldn’t happen. That’s what makes it special... I kept thinking how it wouldn’t happen, how I’d get out. I kept telling myself I wasn’t there. It’s terribly hard to understand that I was there. That this is me - the crooked girl.”

Dr. Joyana Silberg: “I had hope that there would be an understanding in Israel that this is an international phenomenon, and that there would be cooperation between elements in Israel and other countries. But when a complaint was received and a case was opened in Israel, the police did not conduct the investigation as required.”

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“The Youngest and Most Vulnerable”

Organized sexual abuse, as mentioned, occurs worldwide. Researcher Michael Salter defines it as “a conspiracy by several attackers to abuse several victims.”

Rabbi Dr. Udi Froman quotes Salter in his article “Ritual Abuse in the Land,” who defines ritual abuse as an ideological framing in organized contexts of child sexual abuse, “which function as strategic practices, through which abusing groups instill a misogynistic worldview in victims, through violence, in order to control them.”

“In other words,” Rabbi Froman writes in his article, “ritual abuse occurs when a religious, political, or spiritual authority uses its position of power to manipulate the belief system of victims and thereby control them.” He argues that “ritual abuse is primarily a strategy employed by groups involved in producing images of child abuse, child prostitution, and other forms of organized abuse, and does not constitute a separate category of violence.”

“Using a position of power.” Rabbi Dr. Udi Froman, photo: Eliora Efrati

Rabbi Froman also presents the study by Johanna Schroeder and other researchers from Germany, who examined attitudes among 165 adults who testified that they were victims of organized ritual sexual abuse, as well as the attitudes of 174 professionals who supported victims of this type of abuse. In 88% of the reports from both groups - therapists and victims - the same ideological expression emerged. The ideological content and goals were also presented in a similar order: “justifying violence,” “justifying sexual exploitation,” and “maintaining power and control.” They were followed by “maintaining group commitment and promising redemption.”

“Researchers conclude that ideologies are primarily a means of justifying organized sexual violence,” says Rabbi Froman. However, in his article, Froman claims that some reports in Israel indicate that ideology was not only a means of justifying organized sexual violence - but was at the root of the abuse.

Rabbi Froman refers, for example, to the Nachlaot affair, which “is just one of many similar affairs, most of them in Haredi neighborhoods. For example, a private Haredi court writes that ritual sexual abuse is cruel and frequent, and is accompanied by traumatic, accusatory and confusing rituals. The abuse is committed by large criminal organizations and/or cults and/or secret organizations, with financial investment and recruitment of auxiliary personnel. The abuse brings large profits for its perpetrators, such as satisfying perverted desires, trade and pornography, threats and extortion, and more.”

According to Froman, the court’s document describes the practice of organized attacks: “From preparing the scene, to recruiting collaborators from educational institutions and transportation drivers, to the ceremonies themselves... The ceremony is led by an important rabbi. After a Torah lesson, about once every two weeks, parents of children gather for what is called ‘Tikkun HaNeshma’. All the couples recite Tehillim together, sing verses in tune over and over again, all while standing without clothes. They stand in a circle, naked, pray, light candles. The children in the middle of the circle are also naked.”

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In a document intended for parents, educators and rabbis, the Haredi Shaarei Mishpat court in Jerusalem details many methods and actions that abusers employ - with the aim of warning and showing alertness to the spreading phenomenon and to protect children. Among other things, the document states that in order to protect themselves from exposure, the abusers’ actions are deliberately carried out in an extreme and illogical manner, “so that even if the children tell, they will sound completely delusional.”

A “partial” list describes actions such as the use of costumes and masks by the perpetrators, along with sadistic torture such as putting the children’s hands in boiling water, drowning them for a few seconds, or threatening them with aggressive animals, in order to frighten them and increase the effect of the trauma. Other actions mentioned are the insertion of objects and work or kitchen utensils.

In order to humiliate the children and instill feelings of guilt and shame in them, they show them naked pictures of themselves or give them food and tell them that they ate “carrion”, organize staged “weddings” between children, humiliate them by eating feces and stage their burial.

“All confidence in themselves and their ability to resist is destroyed,” says Froman. “The regular and frequent abuse is so destructive that the children despair of ‘normality’ and abuse becomes a routine in their lives. Psychiatrists have diagnosed a complete ‘personality breakdown’ in the normal part, so the child continues to function normally at school.”

According to Dr. Silberg, in each group, each participant may have their own motivations, such as sexual deviations, bizarre ideological affiliations that include performing rituals, or financial enrichment - for example, through human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation - or the production of images of child sexual abuse. The motivations are not necessarily shared by everyone.

Dr. Silberg further notes that networks engaged in the production and distribution of child pornography, including organized abuse, have been exposed all over the world, and “despite the recurring, almost ideological skepticism, there have been several successes around the world in convicting members of organized abuse networks.”

Over the years, there have been several examples of cases in which authorities have been able to expose and convict members of such networks. According to Dr. Silberg, as well as other researchers, since the development of the Internet, and especially the development of peer-to-peer networks and the darknet, the phenomenon of child sexual abuse has intensified.

“These are the youngest and most vulnerable victims in society,” it is claimed. “Live-streaming platforms from home make it possible to exploit children in front of a camera and broadcast videos of the acts to the whole world, without leaving a trace.”
On the other side of the screen, cyber-investigation experts are aware of the high demand among consumers for extremely horrific videos, including sadistic child abuse. In a conversation with Israel Hayom, Dr. Silberg emphasizes that it is very difficult to track down members of such an organization, since most of the activity takes place on the darknet.

“I had hoped that in Israel there would be an understanding that this is an international phenomenon and that there would be cooperation between elements in Israel and other countries,” she says, but in reality, “when a complaint is received and a case is opened in Israel, the police did not conduct the investigation as required. The investigators treated each case as if it were individual. If you separate each case and do not look at the overall picture, you do not ask where all the points lead. And maybe they did their best and the attackers were simply more sophisticated.”

Dissociation and a thorn in it

“I don’t want to go to school, I don’t want to!” Ayala (a pseudonym) says in tears. “I don’t want to ever go again. Never. I don’t want to! No! No! The teachers at school are scary. I don’t want to be taken away from school. I don’t want to go to this class anymore.”

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Ayala’s words are mixed with tears. In these very moments, she is sucked back along with the memory attack. Although she is 25 in chronological age, she is currently 9 - and there is nothing that can convince her that the danger has passed. Even when her partner mentions “Do you know you are already a big girl?”, trying to bring her back to the here-and-now, she remains terrified. Trembling deeply from the past.

Like many of the victims we met, Ayala also faces the challenges of dissociation. This is a survival mechanism of detachment that protects the child’s psyche during the injury, which will be explained later. Ayala grew up in a religious community in a family with many children. “In many community communities, children walk around alone,” she says. After years of acute deterioration in her mental state, which included severe anxiety attacks, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, severe suicide attempts and ongoing suffering - the clear inner knowledge that she had been raped emerged.

Memories began to emerge in severe flashbacks in which, to this day, she relives the abuse she experienced. This is also a familiar phenomenon that recurs in some of the cases we encountered.

Prof. Daniel Brom, a clinical psychologist and director and founder of “Mtiv,” the Israeli Center for Psychotrauma in Jerusalem, listened to a recording in which Ayala is heard during the memory attack, describing how she is taken from school to a scary place, where she is beaten, tied up, and led to a place where painful things happen to her.

“She talks about rabbis who abuse her and take control of her with statements about being in direct contact with God,” writes Prof. Brom. “The form of the conversation is familiar to me as a conversation with a woman with dissociative identity disorder. I have seen such phenomena in the clinic quite a bit. Since 1990, I have repeatedly met children and adults who talk about organized abuse by men who not only abuse sexually, but also film their actions.

“I have heard the stories both personally from my patients and from therapists who have come to me for guidance, individually or in groups. I have no doubt that the phenomenon of organized sadistic abuse exists in the State of Israel, and the stories are often very similar. It is difficult for me to say whether all the cases are connected, and I assume that there are several groups that have learned the methods of abuse that cause the victims to become unreliable witnesses.

“In my experience, people who have gone through such things are truthful, but because neither the courts nor the police are familiar with dissociative phenomena, the investigations of these cases do not go well, and the cases I was involved in ended in acquittals due to the abusers’ doubt.”

“Silence, make disappear”

“There are injuries that occurred in the building and there are in the forest,” Ayala continues, “there are in a cemetery and there are in a synagogue, in all sorts of unusual places. In the building, you go down the stairs and come to a very messy room with a lot of tools, cans of paint, a lot of boards. In the middle of the room there is a bed, more like a wooden table. It seems there are more rooms there, because there are injuries that I really remember being in one room and hearing a child being hurt in the other room, and then I know what they will do to me.

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“I hear children screaming, crying. It’s always a dark place. There are between six and nine men there. They tie me to the bed by my hands and feet, stand in a circle, mumble prayers or blessings, and there is the rabbi who always leads the situation and tells everyone what to do, and everyone listens to him. There is a ceremony, and each of them rapes me.

Ayala: “Violences occurred in cemeteries and synagogues, in all sorts of unusual places,” Photo: Moshe Shai

“Sometimes the great rabbi comes, and then he leads the ceremony. He talks to Hashem, and Hashem tells him what to do. He puts one hand on my heart, one hand on my penis, and it hurts when he talks to Hashem. There are times when I scream, and there are situations where I stop because I know they’re going to hit me on the head. There were cases where I didn’t cooperate or cried and I knew I deserved punishment. There were a variety of punishments, crazy things: they put my head in a bucket of water for a long time, they beat me with a cable, there’s also a mikveh and a taharah, where they clean me thoroughly, and then they dip me in a spring of water and explain to me that I need to be pure.

“There was a time when they took out a Torah scroll and started with the Binding of Isaac. One of them read, and they simply did what they read about me. They tied me up, put the knife to my neck, and the Lord said to put the knife down. Then there was rape.

“There was an event in a cemetery, and I see a place where there are stones with many words written on them, and then they tell me to get into a pit and cover me with sand. I don’t know how I stayed alive.”

Nurit: “They tied me up, and the experience is that they are trying to imitate the binding,” Photo: From the painting “The Binding of Isaac” by Caravaggio, from 1603

Noya was sexually abused by educational personnel who cared for her in early childhood. The same people, she says, invited other men into the setting who participated in ritual abuse. The abusers were severely violent and used extreme and powerful sensory stimuli, which helped her consciousness to split.

“I always had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she says. “I was hospitalized, I had nightmares, eating disorders. I also had flashbacks of small fragments of moments from the injury, but I didn’t understand what they meant.”

“In her youth, dissociative seizures began that looked like epileptic seizures. When I would return home beaten and bruised from the abuse, for example with a head injury or blood from my lips, I would say that I had a seizure on the stairs.”

No one asked too many questions, and in her older years, when the trauma was over, Noya consciously decided to forget. “I told myself that nothing had happened to me. I had a mantra that I repeated over and over: ‘Silence, hide, make disappear, move, disguise, turn off, hide, throw away, disconnect, forget.’ And I really did forget, for a few years.”

Noya: “I told myself that nothing had happened to me. I had a mantra that I repeated over and over again: ‘Silence, hide, make disappear, move, disguise, turn off, hide, throw away, disconnect, forget.’ And I really forgot, for a few years.”

During these years, Noya fulfilled her dreams and established her life - until the difficult memories began to bombard her consciousness. Over the years, and later during the treatment she underwent, “figures” created during the abuse began to surface, figures that held the difficult memories in place.

“When there is such massive and extreme harm, the symptoms are extremely severe, especially dissociation,” says Sylvia, a therapist from the center of the country for victims of complex post-traumatic stress disorder due to prolonged childhood abuse. “It is a defense mechanism of the psyche that manifests itself in detachment at various levels. It can be detachment from bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts and memories. Dissociation allows the victim to get up the

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next morning and lead a normal life - go to school, play with friends, study and build her personality despite the massive threat she is subjected to. The mechanism is activated during the harm as a response to an existential threat or unbearable pain, or as a result of the abusers’ use of mind-altering substances.”

Dr. Sagit Blumrosen-Sela, a clinical psychologist specializing in the treatment of trauma related to sexual abuse, dissociative identity disorder, and autism, sees cases of dissociative detachments and patients dealing with dissociative identity disorder (DID) in the clinic.

“Today we are discovering that dissociative identity disorder is more common than previously thought. Many of those who suffer from it are not diagnosed - either they hide it, or they don’t tell themselves. Many of them are hospitalized and receive incorrect diagnoses. Many psychiatrists are not familiar enough with the phenomenon, and it is important that they understand that these can be patients who lead normative lives, work, study, raise children. There are real gaps between normative functioning and the abysses that are not expressed in the outside world.”

According to her, “This is a mechanism created as a defensive reaction to intense physical or emotional pain, when it is impossible or dangerous to fight or flee, and parts of an experience are removed from the accessible stream of consciousness. When the injuries recur, a system of identities may be created that carry the traumas, while disconnecting the memories and emotions associated with them from ordinary consciousness.”

Based on years of evidence from around the world, there are situations in which the perpetrators are aware of the possibility of creating such a disorder in young children. “One of the patients underwent repeated sadistic attacks, with the perpetrators’ intention to cause a split in her consciousness, so that she would not remember or tell. When she was an adult, she even met one of the attackers in a mall and did not recognize him,” says Blumrosen-Sela.

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To train evil

“There’s an atmosphere of excitement, as if we’re doing the most sacred and noble thing in the world,” says Nurit. “I was very young. The pictures showed people and verses... I have scars on my penis. They hurt it, they damaged it. It’s an act that involved a lot of cruelty, abuse, humiliation, control, ownership, all under the guise of religion and high spiritual work. It’s taking God and using him for passions. It’s something central to my traumas. On the other hand, something like that happens once, but the abuse itself is a way of life... Therefore, the destruction inside is very great. So yes, the damage and consequences of these things are terrible.”

Nurit: “This is an act in which there was a lot of cruelty, abuse, humiliation, control, ownership, all under the guise of religion and high spiritual work. It is taking God and using him for passions. The destruction inside me is very great.”

Throughout his many years of experience, Boaz has met dozens of survivors of cults who were harmed by rituals, but also in many cases of patients who were harmed by rituals only at home, “usually by fathers or uncles who used, over years and chronically, rituals they invented and mixed in religious texts and content.”

According to him, “This is a takeover of the mind. The child is forced to take on the role that is sewn for him. If they tell him, for example, that he came to fix the world and therefore he must suffer, or that suffering must be overcome, that if he learned to survive what was done yesterday, the suffering must be increased - because he is the victim. The child is told that if it is not him, they will have to choose another child from the family to sacrifice.

“In the rituals there are invented prayers, mumblings, songs with religious texts. I think that with the help of the mantras and mumblings, not only the victim dissociates, but the perpetrator also dissociates himself. Immediately afterwards, he can go to the synagogue and blow the shofar. There are cases of such institutionalized organizations around the world, in which the techniques for creating dissociation - detachment - in a child are repeated.

Boaz (pseudonym), a senior therapist in the religious community: “The child is forced to take on the role that is being sewn for him. He is told, for example, that he came to fix the world and therefore he must suffer. He is told that if it is not him, they will have to choose another child from the family to sacrifice.”

“I think that in the patients I met, the abusers were devilishly sophisticated, but I think they didn’t read it in some manual but rather arrived at it through intuition. As if evil has intuition. In one case, there was a patient who had been subjected to massive abuse that caused her external harm, a lot of humiliation and contempt. To this day, decades later, she believes that she is a creature from another world. Even if she understands intelligently that this is not true - emotionally she was meant for this.

“Or how easy, for example, to tell a child that he was born from the power of impurity and therefore must now suffer? These mantras go so deep, especially when a child is abused and brought to the brink of death, certainly spiritual death, but in some cases that I have encountered, some of the abuse was also almost killing, and then leaving him alive. In such a situation, there are changes in consciousness, and the beliefs that are ingrained become part of the blood, because what is stronger than a person who almost died - and was saved?”

“An organized, planned ceremony”

As we are about to say goodbye, Eden’s mother shows me a picture of her daughter smiling broadly and her eyes laughing. “Look at the girl I lost,” she says painfully. “Write for her.”

“When Edna was 25, she started remembering the rape she had experienced as a child,” says Corinne, the mother. “It was a very unusual rape. She called it a gang rape that happened like a play, in which everyone had a role. When she had flashbacks, it just came flooding back and she told shocking things. Events of men from the community doing something together, a gang rape with a lot of violence, drugs, nudity. Somehow after that she came home clean and unharmed, it’s not clear how. She filed a police report and the complaint was closed. She fell apart from that.”

Pages 23 & 24

According to the mother, her daughter began to suffer from severe anxiety attacks and reached states that were defined as psychotic, when in fact she mainly expressed great terror while being convinced that the main perpetrator would murder her. “She really felt like she was being followed. There is an entire community here that is hiding, and it seems that many people have something to hide, and some people turn a blind eye or are too weak. Eden talked about six men who participated in the rape - and something like that needs to be kept a secret. It is difficult to fight an entire community. There are also people who are unable to believe.”

Many of the women we met described that in some cases there were ceremonies in which stories from the Bible were supposedly reenacted. The reenactment of “The Binding of Isaac,” for example, is repeated in five of the testimonies.

This is how Nurit describes it, for example: “They tied me up, and the experience is that they are trying to imitate the ‘Akeidat Yitzhak,’ even though it’s not the same thing because I’m a girl. It’s taking a certain symbol, using it however you want and connecting it to a type of circumcision... There’s nothing in the halacha that requires doing the Akeidat Yitzhak like that. But still, the feeling is that things are being read, texts are being said, that it’s really an organized, planned ceremony, there’s a process. It’s legitimizing evil.”

Arnon, a senior clinical psychologist who, among other things, guides therapists in the field of trauma, encountered signs of ritual abuse four decades ago, and several times in clear cases until recent years, when he began to “fear that this was some kind of network.”

He said, “There is a distorted reading of Kabbalistic sources here. I think these are psychopaths who are recruiting Kabbalah to objectify and exploit their victims. When ‘kabbalistic’ forces combine with the desire to exploit sexually - it’s a bomb. Anyone who is truly afraid of God should be careful and stay away from this stream like fire.”

“I’m sure it also exists in the secular world. The spiritual world can be used to justify exceptions and deviations from the norm, while conducting oneself in a way that requires blind faith. They can decide to do it in a synagogue, in front of the most sacred thing we have. We’ll do it in holy clothes, we’ll say the names of God, and they’re using the idea that there are people who are allowed, who are even commanded, to behave differently than usual.

“But the idea of ​​prohibitions being lifted for certain people is foreign and alien to the religious world. It’s dangerous, because at a certain point they believe themselves when they perform the horrible rituals you’ve heard about. These are the most shocking things I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m afraid they believe they’re bringing God closer in this way.”

“Stealing the Faith”

“In order for a child to survive, he often becomes attached to the abuser with no choice,” says Boaz. “Like Stockholm Syndrome. He believes the abuser has a role in the world. Part of the catastrophe of healing is that suddenly, after 30 years, a person realizes, ‘What, I didn’t have a role? Was it just evil?’ And that’s a truly enormous, suicidal break, because it collapses everything. They are robbed of their faith from within.

“At school, they pray and talk about private providence, about how everything has a reason and God runs the world, but He is not here for her. This is terrible mind control, and it takes many years of therapy to touch this pain. Therefore, any testimony you hear is just a fraction of what actually exists. The spiritual harm here is unbearable. Just as sexual harm is a harm to trust in people, spiritual harm is robbing a child of faith. In my opinion, there is a function of faith in the soul - and those who have their faith robbed will always feel that pain.”

Pages 25 & 26

Noga, who according to her was in a “cult” that engaged in organized and ritual abuse of children until a late age, says that “there is some kind of agreement with the gods. The whole theory is that everything is in the name of ‘correction.’ The words ‘the great correction’ are repeated. For the great correction, one must suffer, first of all because suffering purifies and promotes redemption...

“The gods I remember are Baal Peor and Ashtoreth. I vaguely remember statues. I remember them saying, ‘Our Lord Peor and our Lady Ashtoreth.’ It’s really disturbing because these are ‘Dos’ who observe the commandments of Judaism, light and heavy, not as a show. They truly observe the commandments of the Torah according to the Orthodox stream. They despise Reformers and at the same time, in a parallel universe, they are truly idolaters.

“I had a connection to something, I can’t explain. Both a very strong faith and a connection to God that was very innocent, and they took advantage of that. As if a girl who is so spiritually open and connected, it’s easy to instill messages in her and give her a twisted twist.”

What messages?

“Messages that stem from confusion between values, between heaven and earth, between darkness and light, between evil and good. It’s about getting to the root of things, to the dirtiest, lowest places, and supposedly raising them to holiness, and in the name of this they create a lot of distortions. They actually blur the boundaries between good and evil, between sexuality and love, and family. Everything that can be mixed and mixed - they do. There were rituals in which people dressed in the opposite gender, transvestites like that, very promiscuous sexuality of men with children, men with women, and also within the family.”

“A religious-national mission”

During the investigation, we were exposed to harsh and horrifying, unimaginable descriptions. How is it possible that horrific crimes against children are being committed for years under the noses of all of us, and especially law enforcement officials?

“We, the care providers, also have an existential need for denial,” says Dr. Gore. “When you hear that a woman who collaborated with the abusers would wash the victimized child of the remains of the abuse, your whole soul screams - this can’t be, this can’t be.”

“Just as the girl disconnects, because she knows that if she doesn’t forget what happened, she won’t be able to continue living - we, the witnesses, also have to make a choice, conscious or unconscious, whether we are willing to believe that such horrific things are happening. It undermines our very private existence, so there is an imperative of silence here that is not only external, but also on an internal level.”

“In religious terms, these are the most serious offenses that can occur. Revealing the story is important, and especially catching the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. Beyond the physical and sexual harm, there is also spiritual abuse here,” says a religious figure involved in the details of the abuse and very disturbed by

Pages 27 & 28

the information he has been exposed to in recent years from testimonies of victims.

“It’s important to understand - these are the most serious offenses that can exist in Judaism,” he continues. “From a religious point of view, it’s blasphemy. Many of the victims in the ceremonies are taken there by relatives, who also sexually abuse them, and this is a sin of incest. If the perpetrators have a religious motivation, this is idolatry. Therefore, it is a religious-national mission to expose the phenomenon and get down to investigating the truth, and every person who values ​​religion should demand the investigation of the truth.”

Alongside the defensive mechanism of doubt, when we see the terror of death that has been embedded in our bones, when we understand the rocks of silence that have been cast, and the chains of diabolical threats that have bound the victims - to deny without examination is a privilege we do not have.

The crimes allegedly committed in the testimonies we collected and obtained by “Shishab” were not allowed to be heard in court, were not allowed to be thoroughly investigated. These are serious offenses for which the precise law has not yet been drafted, and yet - based on existing sections of the law, including human trafficking and sections on rape offenses - the law enforcement authorities are obligated to investigate complaints of unspeakable monstrous wickedness.

Comments

The Israel Police stated: “Every complaint received by the police is examined in depth and professionally, and investigators are working as necessary to examine possible connections between similar cases, in accordance with the findings that emerge as part of the investigation. The issue mentioned in your request is known to the police and is under investigation. Naturally, at this stage we will not elaborate further.”

Dr. Naama Goldberg, CEO of the “We Don’t Stand By - Helping Women in the Cycle of Prostitution” association, said: “Unfortunately, I have been hearing similar testimonies for many years, describing identical patterns of these abuses. Sometimes they are so shocking that you doubt the credibility of the speakers. On the other hand, since the reports are repeated in a similar way from victims who do not necessarily know each other and from different regions of the country, it sounds like they are well-founded.”

“Furthermore, from my professional experience working with victims of crime, the victims who have come to me over the years match the behavior of someone who was sadistically victimized in childhood.

“The dissociative episodes, the time gaps that passed before it was possible to talk about it, etc., confirm the fact that the complainant was exposed to such abuse at a young age. This is a terrible story that must be heard loud and clear and thoroughly investigated by the state.”

Orit Soliciano, CEO of the Association of Assistance Centers for Victims of Sexual Assault, said: “In recent years, the Association of Assistance Centers for Victims of Sexual Assault has received inquiries about ritual sexual assaults. These are assaults that are committed mainly in closed societies, under the pretext that they are part of a religious ritual. There is no doubt that the bond of silence in religious society often prevents the exposure of difficult cases of exploitation and harm, so it is of great importance to surface these assaults, in order to give words to what is happening and allow the victims to release the secret.”

THE END

Editors Note: This article comes in two parts with an introduction from the author and a follow up article from a guest writer Stefan Moore published on Consortium News June 24. 2024. Another tale of the sordid history behind the evil workings of the pseudo state of Zionist Israel.

In December of 1938, a worn Jewish politician acutely foretold what was about to unfold in Europe:

“It is possible to imagine without difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews.”

Leon Trotskey

The Rejection of Political Zionism in Pre-War Germany

From the 1870’s into the 1930’s Jewish emigration from Germany came to a near halt due to improved social conditions. In 1871 full emancipation was afforded to the Jews of the newly formed German Empire with “complete equality before the law.” This included citizenship, the right to vote, hold political office, employment in civil service, the legal, and medical fields, the opportunity to teach in the universities, to own property, run their own businesses, and freely practice their own religion.

With these newly acquired political and civil rights set in place, upward economic mobility for German Jews rapidly ensued in the following decades. Within the next generation a virtually seamless integration emerged in Germany’s urban centers. Judeo-Christian marriages and cross conversions between Judaism and Christianity became commonplace. The cultural fusion that followed was inevitable as a new and unique middle class formed in the Empire.

The historian Mark Wischnitzer commented that during this period “Jews had a feeling of security and confidence in German culture and power,” which they played a part in creating. In “the economic boom after the Franco-Prussian War [1870-1871] was partly their work; they launched huge enterprises in banking, railway construction, mining, shipping, textile industry, clothing manufacture, the chemical industry,” Wischnitzer explained. As the decades unfolded into the new century, the dual cultures enhanced each other and German Jews became participants and patrons of the arts and sciences while spending generous sums on museums, universities, and hospitals.

When WWI erupted in the summer of 1914, over a 100,000 German Jews served their country with 12,000 of those sacrificing their lives. By the 1930’s, 76% of the total German Jewish population of approximately 525,000 held citizenship. These were German Jews who were content to practice the faith of their forefathers while giving unwavering loyalty to their German fatherland.

Herzl’s Zionism

The Father of Political Zionism Thedore Herzl, convinced that Zionist Colonial Capitalism was the cure for Jewish persecution across the globe, envisioned the creation of a theocratic Jewish ethnostate in Palestine. In this venture, the religion of the oppressed would again become the religion of the oppressors. Not only would Political Zionist Supremacy be implied, but those who administered the state would indisputably proclaim that they are projecting the authorized belief system and objective moral order that defines what it means to be a Jew. Those who dissented would have to be banished or eradicated. This strict interpretation within the Zionist Movement deeply concerned some of Herzl’s co-religionists.

Herzl convened the 1^st (Transnational) Zionist Congress in Basal, Switzerland in 1897. There were 204 participants in attendance from 17 countries. These conferences were held annually until 1901 and every two years afterward. In 1904 Herzl died from a heart condition at 44 years of age; there were 6000 mourners from across Europe at the funeral in Vienna, Austria. His close companion and confidant David Wolffsohn succeeded Herzl as President of the Zionist Organization (ZO) in 1905.

The 9th Zionist Congress

In late December of 1909, the 9^th (Transnational) Zionist Congress was held for six days in Hamburg, Germany. This was the first Transnational ZO Conference on German soil and was well attended by the local branch of nearly 500 Hamburg members. There were heated disputes over David Wolffsohn leadership practices and some delegates questioned the practicality of the Nationalist (Political) Zionist agenda of declaring a Jewish State in Palestine. The in fighting became so intense that the Congress began splintering into pieces.

The Senior Delegate Chaim Weizmann, and other Political Zionist tried to depose Wolffsohn as President of the ZO. When that was out voted, the Political Zionist attempted to have Wolffsohn censured. The Zionist Historian Sabrina Shutz writes that, “the majority of Hamburg’s Zionists supported the leadership of the ZO” preventing Wolffsohn’s censure, and the meetings ended in a stalemate. “Never the less,” Shutz concludes “the Ninth Zionist Congress marked the end of Wolffsohn’s presidency and with it the dominance of political Zionism.”

As the reports of the Congress were broadcast through the weekly Jewish Review, (a Zionist propaganda press outlet) and across other German newspapers in January of 2010, the majority Non-Zionist German Jewish constituency went into a rage. They were appalled as the reports of the proceedings insinuated that the Zionist movement was supported by “German Jews.” Over the next four weeks, letters from the German Jewish Citizenry began to pour in to the Frankfurter Zeitung, Frankfurt Germany’s daily local news outlet that had an international audience. A January 27^th, 1910, edition was picked up by the Los Angeles Herald:

One contributor succinctly describes the obvious problem with the National Zionist emigration program, beginning at the bottom of the first column:

“German Jews cannot possibly cherish the hope of forming part of the Jewish Nation reestablished in Palestine. Were they to do so they would rightly be regarded now as foreign bodies in the state which cannot be assimilated by the organism of the state… We German Jews want to have nothing to do with a phantom which will estrange us from our fatherland and is calculated to impede our development which promises to result in our being placed on a footing of absolute equality with our fellow citizens.”

Another contributor responds with sympathy for the plight of persecuted Jews in Germany, and then asserts that the Congress should focus their efforts directly toward the relief of those who are in distress. The writer continues, “German Jews … consider and feel that they are Germans, and do not merit the reproach cast upon them by anti-Semites that they are a nation within a nation. The idea of founding a Jewish national state has always been and is today, Utopian…”

On the Ground In Palestine

Anti-Zionism continued to hold sway among the majority of Jewish communities across Germany into the 1930s, while the pantheon of Zionist leaders continued their faltering effort to sell the mass migration plan to their co-religionist. By 1929 the membership of the Zionist Organization had fallen from its height of 200K in 1918 to a shadow of its former self at 50K members.

The reality on the ground in Palestine for Zionist Jewish immigration and settlement development became bleak in the 1926 - 1933 period. In 1926, 7,365 Jews emigrated out of Palestine cutting the Jewish population growth for that year in half; in 1927 there was a population decline as over five thousand more left while just over twenty seven hundred came in. By 1928 all existing settlement construction stopped and designs for new settlement projects were discontinued due to lack of funds and manpower.

Due to stock market crashes in the late 1920’s the majority of international contributions to the Zionist Organization were suspended indefinitely. The leaders of the entity that administered the Zionist project on the ground in Palestine, known as the, Jewish Agency, were at their wits end. In 1933, the Treasury Secretary for the Agency Eliezer Kaplan explained that the Agency was operating at a deficit of £500K (equaling 2.5 million dollars) which was 3X the amount of contributions for that year. “The sole task of the Executive Committee in recent years has been: how to maintain the status quo and prevent bankruptcy,” Kaplan noted. When compiling this information, the Zionist Historian Edwin Black stated that, “If the Jewish Agency’s financial picture did not improve, the question was not if the Zionist Organization would go bankrupt, but when.” For the national Zionist hierarchy there was no light at the end of this tunnel.

With the parallel rise of Adolph Hitler’s ultra-nationalist, white supremacist political party gaining the Chancellery in Germany in January of 1933, the Political Zionist feared that heightened persecution of Jews in Germany could compel other well-known migration and resettlement aid agencies to offer assistance that was refugee focused, not Israeli statehood in Palestine focused.

One such agency, The Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) stationed in the US, was laying plans in April 1933 of a mass resettlement of German Jews to South America. This entity was well funded and had successful mass migration projects since 1903. They had already received verification from several Latin American countries to accept the refugees.

“But the Zionist movement saw these relief efforts as a threat because the solutions excluded Palestine,” Edwin Black writes. “More important, the donations would divert funds from the Zionist movement… [and the] movement would suffer economic ruin in the process.” (See Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, Pg. 90)

The Zionist Organization’s senior executives decide that in order for Theodore Herzl’s dream of a Jewish Supremacist State to be fulfilled, drastic measures would have to be taken…

The Treachery of the Nazi-Zionist Alliance

By collaborating with the Nazis, a small group of Zionists weakened anti-fascist resistance and contributed to the genocide of Europe’s Jews, writes Stefan Moore.

By Stefan Moore
Special to Consortium News
June 24, 2024

As uncomfortable as it may be to many, Israel’s current apartheid policies took shape in the lead up to the Holocaust when Nazi Germany and a small group of influential Zionists formed an alliance to build their ethno-nationalist states.

On Aug. 25, 1933, German Zionists signed an agreement with the Nazi government that allowed some wealthy German Jews to immigrate to Palestine in exchange for purchasing German goods that were then exported to the Jewish community in Palestine.

As part of the deal, the Zionists also agreed to lobby the global Jewish community to end their boycott of German goods that began when Hitler came to power.

A 1933 memo from the Zionist Federation of Germany to the Nazi party promised: “should the Germans accept the cooperation of the Zionists, these (sic) would try to dissuade Jews abroad from supporting the anti-German boycott.” (See pages 231-232 of Lucy Dawidowicz’s book, The War Against Jews: 1933-1945)

The so-called Transfer or Haavara Agreement (named for the Tel Aviv company where the funds were transferred) was endorsed by official representatives of Nazi Germany.

For the Zionists, the deal allowed affluent German Jews to keep some of their capital and resettle in Palestine. For the Nazis, the agreement not only helped rid Germany of a small portion of its Jewish population (60,000 between 1933-1939) but, critically, it doomed the boycott movement to failure and opened up the global export market for German goods to boost its economy.

For the majority of mostly non- and anti-Zionist Jews around the world, it was a treacherous betrayal that deprived them of one of the few weapons they had to fight the Nazis.

It was symbolised by the freakish image of the Haavara transport ship, the Tel Aviv, with its name inscribed in Hebrew on the bow, and the Swastika flag hoisted on deck.

In the decades before the agreement, Zionists’ efforts to build a Jewish state in Palestine had been slow. Even after the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, British authorities limited Jewish immigration and Jews found it difficult to acquire enough land to displace the indigenous Arab population. By 1920, Jews had only been able to purchase less than 2 percent of Palestinian land.

For the Zionists, Hitler’s ascendance presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to supercharge immigration to Palestine: Israel’s future leader, David Ben Gurion, said “what Zionist propaganda for years could not do, disaster has done overnight.”

And according to German-Jewish journalist and historian Hannah Arendt,

“anti-Semitism was an overwhelming force, and the Jews would either have to make use of it or be swallowed up by it. In expert hands [such as David Ben-Gurion & Co.] this ‘propelling force’…would be used in the same way that boiling water is used to produce steam power.”

Who Should Be Saved

What was left out of the Zionist project, however, was the fate of the vast majority of European Jews who were being marginalized, attacked and murdered.

In his history of the British Mandate, Le Septième Million, Israeli journalist Tom Segey wrote (see page 539) that “saving European Jews did not figure at the head of the priorities of the [Zionist] ruling class.” Rather, “the foundation of the State was primordial in their eyes.”

At a Zionist Labor Party conference in 1938, Ben Gurion laid out his formula for who should be saved after Britain’s offer to rescue thousands of Jewish children from Europe:

“If I knew it was possible to save all the children in Germany by taking them to England, and only half of the children by taking them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second solution. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but the historic interest of the people of Israel.”

However, it wasn’t just any children the Zionists wanted in Palestine, such as the majority from the impoverished shtetls of Eastern Europe and Russia.

“We want only the best of Jewish youth to come to us…only the educated to enter,” declared Israel’s future president Chaim Weizmann (see page 498 of Ben Hecht’s book A Child of the Century) at the 1937 World Zionist Conference in Zurich, Switzerland,

“the other Jews will have to stay where they are and face whatever fate awaits them. These millions of Jews are dust on the wheels of history and they may have to be blown away. We don’t want them pouring into Palestine. We don’t want Tel Aviv to become another low-grade ghetto.”

Indeed, the Zionists and Nazis were kindred spirits: both were building ethno-nationalist states premised on racial purity — a concept increasingly espoused at the time — and both vehemently opposed the assimilation of Jews in Europe.

“The attitude of the Zionists towards the encroaching menace of fascist domination in Germany was determined by some common ideological assumptions:” writes German journalist Klaus Polkhen, in No. 57 in The Secret Contacts:

“The fascists as well as the Zionists believed in unscientific racial theories, and both met on the same ground in their beliefs in such mystical generalizations as ‘national character (Volkstum)…and ‘racial exclusiveness.’”

Seeing Eye-to-Eye With Fascists

A memo to the Nazi party from the Zionist Federation of Germany on June 21, 1933, (page 155 of Lucy Dawidowicz’s A Holocaust Reader) assured the fascists that they saw eye to eye:

“Our recognition of the Jewish nationality allows us to establish clear and sincere relations with the German people and its national and racial realities…because we too are against mixed marriages and for the maintaining of the purity of the Jewish group.”

Athur Ruppin, a sociologist who headed the Palestine Zionist Executive, drew directly on Nazi master race theories.

He believed that Zionism required “racial purity” and that “only the racially pure come to the land.” Inspired by the work of Nazi scientists, he performed skull measurements to demonstrate that Ashkenazi Jews were superior to Yemeni Jews and argued against immigration of Ethiopian Jews because of their lack of “blood connection.”

In fact, some Zionists were elated by Nazi anti-Semitism. At a 1937 Berlin meeting with Adolf Eichmann, Feivel Polkes, a member of the Zionist underground army, commended the terror in Germany:

“Nationalist Jewish circles expressed their great joy over the radical German policy towards the Jews, as this policy would increase the Jewish population in Palestine so that one can reckon with a Jewish majority in Palestine over the Arabs.” (See Polkhen’s No. 74 in The Secret Contacts)

Polkes’s admiration was reciprocated by Eichmann, who claimed, “had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist there was.”

Given their similar views on race and nation-building, the Nazis gave the Zionists preferential treatment in almost every sphere (see No. 62 in Polkehn‘s The Secret Contacts). They were the only non-Nazi group allowed to wear their own uniforms, fly their own flag and espouse a separate political philosophy up to 1939.

While the German Ministry of Propaganda banned all newspapers published by the Communists, Social Democrats, trade unions and other progressive organizations, the Zionist paper, the Judische Rundschau, was allowed to publish its propaganda unhindered from 1933 to 1939.

Unlike the German Zionists, most Jews in Europe were resisting the fascists — fighting them in Spain — where 30 percent of the American Lincoln Brigade were Jews — and in Poland, where half of the 5,000 Dombrovski brigade fighters were Jewish, smuggling arms to Eastern European ghettos and pushing for other countries to come to their rescue.

At the same time, Zionists were doing everything possible to scuttle these efforts.

In 1938, when a global conference of 32 countries convened in Evian-les-Baines, France, to address the issue of German and Austrian Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, only the Dominican Republic came to their rescue, offering up to 100,000 Jewish refugees “vacant areas of fertile land, excellent roads, and a police force that maintains law and order.” (See page 315 of Post Uganda Zionism on Trial.)

Despite the generous offer, “the Zionists’ hostility was naked and uncompromising,” wrote Holocaust researcher S. B. Beit Zvi

“Zionists were resistant (see page 218) to anything liable to jeopardize their fundraising revenues …. If the Jews of America contributed to the colony in the Dominican Republic, they might give less to the Jewish National Fund or the Keren Hayesod [United Israel Appeal].”

Similarly, Zionists were hostile to various other proposals and offers to resettle Jews in Australia, the Soviet Union, Japan, Madagascar and Alaska. (See page 260 of The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black.)

“Focusing on Palestine as the ONLY legitimate destination for large-scale emigration, the World Zionist Organization rejected opportunities from 1933 onwards to resettle German Jews in havens or homes other than Eretz Yisrael,” wrote American historian Edwin Black: “The Zionist stance made it clear: Palestine or nothing.” (See page 260 of Black’s The Transfer Agreement.)

Even by 1943 when the Holocaust was well underway, Zionists continued to block Jews who tried to settle outside of Palestine.

When a large group of American orthodox rabbis marched in Washington, D.C., asking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rescue Europe’s Jews, Zionist leaders dissuaded the president from meeting with them.

Playing to American anti-Semitism, the head of the World Jewish Congress, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Samuel Rosenman, from the American Jewish Committee, told Roosevelt that the protesting rabbis were first-generation immigrants who were “not representative of American Jewry” and not the kind of Jews with whom Roosevelt should meet. Indeed, when they arrived at the White House, they were told (untruthfully) that Roosevelt was not available.

The Kastner Train

Perhaps no other incident exemplified the Zionist betrayal more than the saga of the Kastner Train, which involved collaborating with Nazis over the fate of Hungarian Jews.

In April 1944, at the height of the exterminations, Adolf Eichmann offered a deal to Joel Brand, the head of the Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee: the Nazis would spare the lives of one million Hungarian Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks and other goods from the Allies.

Brand immediately flew to Istanbul to present the proposal to the Jewish Agency which, as Brand later said, lacked any sense of urgency, since it was more focused on Jewish emigration to Palestine than the slaughter in Europe.

Back in Budapest, Eichmann proposed another deal to Zionist leader Rudolph Kastner, Brand’s colleague from the Committee: in exchange for $1,000 each ($25,000 in today’s currency) Eichmann would allow the departure of 1,684 mostly affluent Jews, including Kastner’s family and friends, to escape to Switzerland by train. As part of the arrangement, Kastner agreed to not inform Hungarian Jews that they were being sent to their deaths in the crematoriums.

Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Jews — almost the entire rural Jewish population of Hungary were deported to Auschwitz, where most were gassed on arrival.

In 1954, an Israeli judge ruled that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil” by negotiating with Eichmann to save some Jews, while “paving the way for the murder of Hungarian Jewry.” He was assassinated on 15 March, 1957. by members of the Lehi, Israel’s right-wing militia, for collaborating with Nazis. Kastner was later rehabilitated as a hero in Israel.

Many still maintain that the Haavara Agreement and Kastner’s deal with Eichmann were pragmatic decisions to save the lives of thousands of Jews and help build a Jewish homeland. But, as American journalist Lenni Brenner wrote about Haavara,

“All excuses that it saved lives must be strictly excluded from serious consideration…it saved wealth, not lives… or, more properly, a piece of the property of the German Jewish bourgeoisie”

In the end, collaboration with the Nazis by a small group of Zionists broke the global boycott against Germany, weakened anti-fascist resistance worldwide, and contributed to the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

Indeed, the Zionists-Nazi Alliance became part of the ideological foundation of Israel’s apartheid and genocidal policies today.

Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker whose films have received four Emmys and numerous other awards. In New York he was a series producer for WNET and a producer for the prime-time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for the national film company Film Australia and ABC-TV.

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Across the sea, there came a multitude
Sailing ships upon the wave
Filled with the visions of Utopia
And the freedom that they crave
Ravage, plunder, see no wonder
Rape and kill and tear asunder
Chop the forest, plow it under…

Kansas: Song For America

Wars for Wealth, A US Legacy

To put it plainly, the United States practices a predatory capitalist economic system where someone, somewhere has to be murdered everyday in order for it to function. When people hear this, they often ask me for evidence to back up this statement. This comes as a surprise to me as I wonder how so many people can be uninformed about their own nation’s bloody conquistadorial history. I tend to think the US populace is mixed in this regard with those who care to know, since accurate information on US history is readily available to anyone has access to a library and/or the internet, and those whose attentions are largely consumed with chasing money in order to get their ever shrinking income to cover their ever rising cost of living. Some people find it overwhelming to discuss such matters because, to know hints at complicity.

When asked for examples of this my mind becomes crowded with possibilities. Previous to the current terror campaigns that the US/Euro/Israel coalition is carrying out against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Venezuela, a US/Saudi led coalition that included the help of 16 other supporting countries waged an eight year slaughter fest against Yemen. They claimed the purpose of the war was to stop a Yemenis civil war, however in a closer review of US history it can be certainly stated that the primary focus of all US wars is to maintain US hegemony across the globe. This conflict was initiated during the Obama administration and was carried through the next two administrations of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

At one point in the conflict it was revealed that due to the US/Saudi blockade of Yemeni ports that prohibited crucial aid to the poorest of the poor in Yemen, every 75 seconds a child died from starvation. When Yemenis children were not being starved to death they died from more direct means. War crimes committed by US Military Contractors were ubiquitous throughout the conflict.

ABC News, as well as several other news outlets, reported at the time that on August 9th 2018 around 8:30am an air strike hit within 10 feet of a loaded school bus in the crowded market in Dhahyan, Yemen, killing 41 children and 11 adults. Human Rights Watch (HRW) received photos and videos from a lawyer who visited the site on August 11^th. These images showed markings that identified General Dynamics Corporation in Garland, Texas as the producer of the bomb. Other markings captured in the photos identified Lockheed Martin. HRW verified that these bombs were consistent with ones used in other air strikes in Yemen. One on September 10^th,2016 that killed 31 civilians and another October 8^th, 2016, that killed over 100 civilians. As of 2017 Lockheed Martin was by far the world’s largest profiteer from the business of war with $51 billion in total sales, and $2 billion in profits that year. General Dynamics Corporation was listed number 6 in a list of the top 20. Incidentally, 11 of the top 20 were corporations based in the USA.

When the US Congress in 2019 attempted to cease arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in order to address the famine in Yemen, the Trump Administration vetoed the initiative on three separate occasions. The result was the deaths of over 377,000 Yemeni civilians. Is not our current catastrophe little more than a repeat performance from familiar political and economic actors?

The Road to the Economic Enslavement of the US Public

Today, within the empire of the United States of America, predatory capitalist economic forces dominate every aspect of our lives. These forces seat in the mind of the individual a continual nagging anxiety that pushes any other definition of what it means to be human beyond consideration. In this environment our animalistic nature is projected and glorified while relentless advertisers deceive us into believing that where we are, is not where we should be, and that ultimate satisfaction is just a step away as they guide us into the next debt ridden economic trap.

The economic trap that affects well over 75% of the US population, and by correlation affects the population as a whole, has been in the works for at least 70 years. To unfurl the backdrop, at the end of World War II the US experienced an economic boom. In this era 1 full time male wage earner could cover the expenses of a family household while saving enough to afford a decent retirement for both parents. From 1948 to 1973 productivity rose to 96.7 % and wages followed with a slight lag rising 91.3%. During this period, economic elites continued to chip away at the gains afforded to the working classes below them through the New Deal reforms. As these elites used their enormous profits to sway the minds of those who occupied the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state and federal governments; policies were set in place that suppressed wage growth for most of the population. From 1973 to 2013 productivity rose 74.4% as wages showed little change in the same time period, rising 9.2%.

If wage increases had continued to follow rising production levels as it did during the boom era, and congress had not allied themselves with the predatory cannibals who reside at the top of the economic ladder, the federal minimum wage would have been $25.95 per hour by year 2021. This, in a large part, caused the increasing and inhuman wealth gap between the top and bottom income receivers. Those at the bottom 10% of the population, the working poor, continue to be pecuniary cuisine for economic elites as their wages actually decreased from the year 2000 to 2013 by more than 5%.

Stealing Our Family Time

The cost of family living and having children did not decrease however, but grew exponentially. In 1960, the cost to parents for raising a child thru their 17^th birthday was around 2% of total expenditures. In 2013 that same cost was 18%. Seeing the lifestyle that their parents enjoyed during the boom slowly fading from reality, post boom parents scrambled to cover the cost/income gap. One income households became two. Time spent at work increased and family time decreased. As a result of these economic shifts, parents gradually became less mothers and fathers and more money chasers, and for many the hope of being parents began to disintegrate. In the 18 year period between 1960 and 1978 the average births per woman plummeted from 3.65 to 1.76. All this while the economic elites, who suffered no such consequences, smiled in approval as family time for much of the population became their time at virtually no cost to them.

Today the United States exhibits the widest wealth gap between the rich and the poor than any other developed nation on earth. According to the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts data, as of March 27th, 2026, the bottom 50% of the US population (171.2 million people) had a combined wealth of 3.98 Trillion Dollars, while the top .1% of the population (3.4 million people) carried 22.24 Trillion Dollars in wealth.

America’s top 1 percent, for instance, holds more than half the national wealth invested in stocks and mutual funds. Most of the wealth of Americans in the bottom 90 percent comes from their homes — the asset category that took the biggest hit during the Great Recession. These Americans also hold just around three-quarters of America’s debt.

The current US Debt load as of this writing is 38.90 Trillion dollars. The economic elites claim that the bottom 90% of US Citizenry are on the hook for 3/4 of this debt, or about 29.18 Trillion dollars. It does one well to remember that during the Mortgage melt down of 2008, the US Government bailed out the banks who committed fraud against tens of millions of American Tax payors to the tune of 29 Trillion Dollars! This shifted the private debt of criminal bankers to a public debt and on to the backs of the US Citizens that these bankers robbed! Many of these predatory capitalist bankers are still running our economy today! YOU NOR I CREATED THIS OUTLANDISH DEBT! WE DIDN’T CAUSE IT, WE DIDN’T CREATE IT, AND WE DIDN’T CONTROL IT, AND WE SURE AS HELL ARE NOT PAYING FOR IT!!!

A recent OXFAM Publication reported :

Extreme inequality under the Trump administration

The Trump administration is accelerating many of the trends of the past 45 years, with tax reforms that favor the ultra-rich, major cuts to the social safety net, and significant rollbacks for workers’ rights.

As a result of Trump’s tax reforms, supported by the Republican majority in Congress, the highest-earning 0.1 percent will see their taxes fall by an estimated $311,000 in 2027, while the lowest-income households—people making less than $15,000—will face tax increases.

It’s not just the economy that is growing more and more unequal. The Trump administration has made moves to prioritize profits over people, actions that are drivers for social inequality. This includes deregulating corporate polluters, privatizing public services, and attacking basic civil rights protections.

The Forced Conscription of Our Hard Earned Tax Dollars

According to the latest Institute For Policy Studies Report authored by Lindsay Koshgarian and Hanna Homestead:

More than half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. But last year, instead of investing in programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a Big Ugly Bill that cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans, cut health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.

According to the study, you and I paid $4049 dollars for weapons we didn’t ask for and wars we didn’t start.

The average taxpayer in 2025 paid:

• $4,049 for weapons and war, vs. $2,492 for Medicaid, which provided health insurance to 68.5 million Americans in 2025 — about one in five Americans.

• $1,870 for Pentagon contractors, more than twice as much as the $770 the average taxpayer paid for troops’ pay even as many troops rely on food stamps to feed themselves and their families; and 15 times as much as the $124 the average taxpayer paid for school lunches and other nutrition programs. The school lunch program alone serves about 30 million kids, while the average CEO pay at the top five Pentagon contractors in 2025 was $24,632,610.

• $136 for nuclear weapons, seven times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the U.S. Postal Service, a provider of good jobs and affordable deliveries, especially in rural areas.

• $119 for mass deportations and detentions, six times as much as the $19 the average taxpayer paid for the Federal Aviation Administration amidst a dangerous shortage of air traffic controllers and a recent deadly crash.

• $57 for aid to foreign militaries, including support for Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, vs. just $49 for diplomacy to foster peace and prevent war.

• Our 2025 tax receipt doesn’t show the cost of the recent war on Iran, which started in February 2026. But if we place the 2026 Iran war costs in the context of our 2025 tax receipt and put the cost at $35 billion — a line the U.S. is likely on the verge of crossing — the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran, eight times more than the $16 the average taxpayer paid for a full year of home heating and energy assistance in 2025. In FY 2024, nearly 6 million households received help with heating and energy costs, including 2.5 million households with older adults, 2.1 million households where someone had a disability, and nearly a million households with young children.

If you worked and paid taxes in 2025:

• On 50 workdays your income taxes would have gone to weapons and war; including 23 workdays paying taxes for Pentagon contractors;

• On 9 workdays your income taxes would have gone toward all federal food and agriculture programs, including food stamps and free school lunches;

• On fewer than 7 workdays your taxes went toward all federal education programs, including public K-12 schools and higher education;

• For half a day, your taxes went toward international aid programs, many of which were cut by the Trump administration;

• And for 13 minutes, your taxes went to the now-defunct Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS).

Your Tax Receipt Reads as follows:

Receipts provided by: Institute for Policy Studies

In closing I leave you with a few words from one of our official US sponsors:

Breathe

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🎄A Christmas Message of Solidarity and Hope - With love, Brummy

In this season of light piercing the deepest darkness, as we remember the birth of a child in Bethlehem—a vulnerable refugee born under occupation—our hearts turn to Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, and all lands scarred by injustice and war.

To our brothers and sisters enduring unimaginable hardship in Gaza and beyond: your resilience in the face of devastation inspires the world. To those in Lebanon trying to rebuild amid ruins under constant israeli bombs, and in Yemen standing firm through endless trials: your courage reminds us that hope endures even in the longest nights.

We pray especially for the martyrs—the countless souls who have sacrificed everything for freedom, dignity, and justice. May their memory be a eternal light, guiding us toward a world where no child fears bombs instead of celebrating birth, where no family is torn apart.

To the brave resistance fighters who stand on the frontlines every day, risking and giving their lives in the struggle for liberation and freedom: words can never fully capture our gratitude and love for you. Your unwavering courage, your refusal to bow before tyranny, and your steadfast defense of the land and its people embody the highest meaning of dignity and humanity. You carry the dreams of generations on your shoulders, and in your resistance, we see the unbreakable spirit of justice itself. We honor you, we love you, and we are forever indebted to your sacrifice.

And to the global pro-Palestine community—the millions who have marched, spoken out, boycotted, and stood unwavering these past two years: thank you. Your solidarity has been a lifeline, a beacon of humanity in dark times. You have shown that compassion knows no borders, and that the fight for a free Palestine is a fight for us all.

This Christmas, may the message of peace on earth ring louder than ever. May 2026 bring ceasefire, return, rebuilding, and true justice.

From the rubble rises hope. We stand with you, always.

Free Palestine. Free Lebanon. Peace for all.

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After reading the Stack Note above that was forwarded to me by my dear friend and colleague Sean Griobhtha, an intellectual reservoir was tapped and a myriad of thoughts on the subject poured forth. I immediately swept away the printed words that had cluttered my desk over the last several months in order to create a literary space to respond in kind. This is what came of it.

What follows is a response to the note that is depicted above.

There are two pivotal events that set Christianity on the path to be the dominant religion in the Western hemisphere for over 2 millennia. These are there stories.

1)

Constantine’s Rise

In 312AD, the Roman General Constantine eliminates his rival Maxentius’s army at the battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome, and became the undisputed Caesar of the Western Roman empire. Previous to the battle, Constantine looks beyond the plain and sees a cross of light in the sky, while simultaneously a voice enters his mind and proclaims, “Conquer by this.”

Seeing this as a sign from God, Constantine orders his soldiers to mark their breast plates with the sign of the cross as they march toward Maxentius’s forces. According to the histories, after the victory, Constantine adopted Christianity as a belief and became the senior benefactor of Christians across the empire. The cross became the standard of Constantine’s color guard that led his soldiers into battle and the emblem was forged on each combatant’s shield.

Eventually, the cross, a symbol of suffering and torture, replaces the fish as the central symbol of Christianity, and the crucifixion takes center stage while the life and teachings of Jesus, and the resurrection into new life are pushed into the background. As the former Pauline Priest, James Carroll states,

“The cross signifies the problem: When suffering is seen to serve a universal plan of salvation, its particular character as tragic and evil is always diminished.”

The short version reads- suffering becomes a necessary “holy” experience that leads to salvation.

In 325AD, in order to generate a solidified Christian populace across the empire, Constantine ordered a meeting of a council of bishops in the city of Nicaea, Bithynia (modern day Turkey). At this meeting he recounts his vision of Milvian Bridge to the bishops and they sketch a set of primary Christian belief statements declaring other statements to be anathema (heresy). Over the next several centuries, these statements evolved into what is known as the Nicene Creed. Using the same mould as previous Roman Emperors, this creed defines God as a punitive magistrate who will come “to judge the living and the dead.” Those who lived or died in sin would be condemned to an eternity in the fires of Hell.

Fifty five years later, in 380AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, officially declared Nicene Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, and prohibited all other forms of worship. Two years later Theodosius I issued a second decree of death for all Manichaean monks, Manichaeanism being a chief competitor of Christianity. This seated a theocracy where the line of authority between the State and the Church became blurred. In this, the religion of the previously oppressed became the religion of the oppressors. Religious oppression marked the path toward Theodosius I’s declarations. One good example among many, in 315AD Constantine issued an edict making it a crime for Jews to proselytize to non-Jews, i.e. recruit new believers. Within the next hundred years it became a crime punishable by death.

Within the span of less than a hundred years, Jesus as the humble servant, the healer of the poor and marginalized, slowly fades within the hierarchy, and Jesus the super god, hero warrior of the apocalypse emerges to lead his legions into the final battle for salvation.

When Constantine became the sole Roman Emperor in 324AD, the Christian population of the Roman Empire was estimated to be around 10%. Within the first quarter of the 5^th Century (425AD), Christians held the overwhelming majority population of the empire. Christianity went from being a small evolving religious sect that had spawned from Judaism, to being a religion that shaped world politics. Christianity was now imperial, and mimicked the top down structure of the Roman Empire. The emperor had his territorial governors to help manage the state. The Pontiff had his bishops who became the ecclesial regional managers of the Church. Dissenters were eliminated and their assets confiscated and turned over to the imperial treasury.

This patriarchal hierarchy, that placed ultimate power over doctrinal matters in the hands of the few bishops of Rome and their intermediaries remains today. Like all hierarchical structures, their prime objective is to elicit strict obedience from the population to those who occupy the pinnacle of the structure.

2)

The Augustinian Shift and the Battle for the Mind

Not long after Emperor Theodosius I’s edict, A young Roman African and Manichaean teacher of rhetoric Aurelius Augustinus comes under the tutelage of a Christian Roman Governor of Milan named Ambrose. Through the influence of his Christian mother and conversations he had with Ambrose’s teacher, Simplicianus, Augustine begins to consider a conversion to Christianity. In 386 AD he converted, within 4 years he was ordained a priest and in 395 he was tapped to be the Bishop of Hippo (current day Annaba, Algeria). Augustine was convinced that it was his task to interpret the Christian scriptures in a proper manner that would lead his congregations to eternal salvation.

In Augustine’s time in human history, the creation stories situated in the first three chapters of Genesis were accepted by many as historical fact. It’s worth mentioning that the Christian theologian’s appropriation of these stories as their own, and the subsequent interpretations that followed, were loathed by the Jewish scholars who had a legitimate claim to the narrative. In their arrogance, the Christian writers assumed that they provided the conclusive context in which to read the Jewish scriptures, since all that happened before the Gospels was only in preparation for the coming of Jesus.

It is also important to note that the literacy rate in Rome in 400AD would have been around 10% of the population. This means that the general populace of the empire had few alternatives but to believe the interpretations presented by the Catholic Christian Bishops. As time progressed into the Middle Ages the literacy rate significantly declined leaving populations even more vulnerable to the influence of the Catholic Bishops.

The bishops were the princes of The Church and had considerable political, economic, and ecclesial power within the regions they controlled. Each claimed to speak for God in all administrative affairs. More than this, they held the keys that unlocked the door to the Kingdom of Heaven. For those who believed, without their favor, salvation was unattainable.

With the advantage of hindsight and widespread literacy that we enjoy today, it has become obvious to many that reading the Biblical text as a historical fact book lays the breeding ground for misogyny, racism, and unwarranted religious exceptionalism. Including the notion that, ‘my god’s right and yours is wrong and I’m willing to kill you prove it!’

For those who have been following the current conflict in Palestine, this false narrative has been used repeatedly by zionist commentators to justify their aggression and extermination of the Palestinian people.

A Toxic Misinterpretation

Augustine’s crowning achievement within the Catholic tradition is centered in his theory of Original Sin, and the associated theory of Substitutionary Atonement. Augustine’s theory of Original Sin derives from his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve located in the book of Genesis in the Jewish Torah.

This utterly bizarre reading of the events that followed Adam and Eve’s creation in Genesis 2-3 not only did violence to the spirit of the ancient Jewish authors who composed the text, but robbed this creaturely fable of its narrative power. Previously viewed by Jewish congregants as an attempt to explain the persistence of human suffering in a volatile world (Pathos), Augustine’s interpretation places Eve, and by association Adam, in an unescapable rock and hard place.

Within the brief sketch of the creation story seen below you can click the hyperlinks for more context.

At Gen. 2:17, the anthropomorphic character of God enacts a brutal prohibition that prevents our first parents from accessing wisdom…

“but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

With this prohibition in place, all moral discussion is forbidden, leaving our original ancestors in a state of moral ignorance.

At Gen. 3:1-5, Eve has a consultation with a Serpent who suggests that the Creator is withholding critical information about the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Serpent further states that the prohibition was instituted with a hidden agenda, that prevents her from becoming knowledgeable like the Creator, which actually turns out to be true as seen at Gen. 3:22.

At Gen.3:6, Eve, longing to gain wisdom, heroically breaks the prohibition and eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Eve then shares the fruit with Adam and immediately self-consciousness erupts with the anxiety of being naked and vulnerable overwhelming them. Hearing the oncoming approach of their Creator they hide behind the leaves of the garden…

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” (Gen 3:7)

Augustine interprets Eve’s defiance as an unforgivable offense against the Creator, that not only condemns our first parents to an eternity away from God, but this offense is inherited by their offspring, leaving humanity to wallow in a perpetual state of moral calamity, bound to a life of sin, and eternally alienated from the life affirming force of the Universe. Augustine overlooks the fact that the character of the Creator in this story, like the god depicted in the Book of Job, can hardly be understood as moral in any sense of the word. Eve, like Job, seems to hold the moral line in the narrative.

What would have happened if Eve and Adam had not eaten the fruit?

They, and their offspring would still be in a position of arrested moral development, unable to discern between sinful and good acts because they are denied the knowledge necessary to make such decisions. This interpretation placed an unnecessary chasm between God, our source, and the rest of humanity, instituting a tensive relationship between creator and the created.

When you link Augustine’s theory of Original Sin with the understanding of Substitutionary Atonement, Jesus would not have become incarnate had Eve and Adam not sinned. Jesus would not have “died for our sins” (1 Cor: 15:3) because there would be no original sin to forgive. Looking at the scriptures in this context, Eve suffers a double damnation, not only as the first sinner (I Tim 2:14), but ultimately becomes responsible for Jesus’ death on the cross.

The Canadian Historian Margaret Wade Labarge stated that this yoke of guilt associated with Eve’s damnation was a lingering thorn in women’s side from the time of Augustine through the Middle Ages and continues into the current period.

[The] fallen daughters of Eve… were so constantly lectured on their natural inferiority and their inheritance of Eve’s guilt, as well as hedged by so many prohibitions about their behavior, their level of stress must often have been unbearably high.

In this distorted reading, Jesus’ message of abundant new life through the resurrection takes a back seat, and Jesus himself becomes an auxiliary instrument who is manipulated by the human actions of our first parents.

Nonetheless, Augustine’s theory was accepted at the Council of Carthage in 418AD and eventually became Church Doctrine. This acceptance significantly shifts the defining moment in Christian history, from Jesus’ appearance on the human stage around 30AD preaching a new Gospel, to a focus on human sin and the ever widening gap between where we came from and where we are today.

Guilt, Madness, and Fomenting Self-Hatred

In his autobiography Confessions, Augustine depicts his decade and a half history of deep neurotic turmoil over his inability to completely abstain from human sexual expression. Unable to discern the difference between sexual objectification (lust) and honorable sexual admiration (a sacred gift), Augustine becomes mentally entangled in an either/or, body V. spirit, mind trap. This dualistic palette becomes the foundation on which Augustine colors his future theological theses. Echoing the sentiments of Mersault’s statement at the beginning of this article, the seasoned theologian Matthew Fox states,

Augustine planted dualisms of body vs. soul, sexuality vs. spirituality, nature vs. grace, male vs. female alongside his notion of original that fashioned a dualistic Christianity that spread in Western Europe and beyond…

“Christianity became less and less moored to Jesus and his teachings and to the original meaning of the Christ event… Unmoored from the gospels, it became moored to the needs of empire-building including invoking the idea of “redemption” (understood as redemption from original sin) as the rallying cry to conquer peoples of the earth…

“[This] astonishingly leaves out the teachings of Jesus. No mention whatsoever of “love thy neighbor”; “what you do to the least you do to me”; “Be you compassionate as your Father in heaven is compassionate”; the Beatitudes; or justice.”

Despite Jesus’ insistence in Luke 17:21 that the bodyspirit are one, and that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, Augustine viewed his sexual longings as an obstacle that prevented him from a full communion with God. This developed into a festering sense of self- loathing.

In a scene depicted in his Confessions that carries allusions to Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane, Augustine retreats to a garden that adjoins his dwelling to sort through his fierce mental anguish. In this scene, he begins to physically assault his own body,

I was beside myself with madness that would bring me sanity. I was dying a death that would bring me life. . . . I was frantic, overcome by violent anger with myself for not accepting your [god’s] will and entering into your covenant. . . . I tore my hair and hammered my forehead with my fists; I locked my fingers and hugged my knees.

In what seems to be a hallucinatory state, Augustine continues his lament,

I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes. . . . In my misery I kept crying, “How long shall I go on saying ‘tomorrow, tomorrow’? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?

Although Augustine appears to make peace with himself at some point, since he did not dislodge the root of woundedness that resided within himself, the learned, compulsory, negative, behavior patterns that often accompany inner conflict continued to find an outlet in an altered form, causing Augustine’s self-hatred to levy a pernicious influence on his interpretation of the scriptures.

This neurosis became projected onto the congregations that listened and believed his words. Highlighting the unbridgeable distance between humans and God, God’s contempt for his creation became a reoccurring theme that textured Augustine’s oratories, peppered with misogynistic and antisemitic overtones.

In his Sermon Preached at Chusa, experiencing the warped and twisted turmoil within, he expresses God’s hatred for his own congregants:

You are all twisted, and you want God to be like what you are, not what he is. But if you are satisfied with him as he is, then you will correct yourself and align your heart along that straight rule from which you are now all warped and twisted. Be satisfied with God as he is, love him as he is…

He doesn’t love you as you are, he hates you as you are. That’s why he is sorry for you, because he hates you as you are and wants to make you as you are not yet…God hates you as you are but loves you as he wants you to be, and that is why he urges you to change. (author’s emphasis)

Who’s the Boss?

As previously discussed, some interpretations of Genesis 2-3 claim that divine justice demanded its “pound of flesh” through Jesus’ brutal torture and execution on the cross as the only fitting expiation for Eve and Adam’s offense. As Roman Catholic doctrine dictates, “all men [people] are implicated in Adam’s sin,” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, pg. 102, Para. 404). This means that without Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross to alleviate mankind from this original sin, all people would be condemned to hell for eternity. This includes children previous to their age of consent, who have yet to achieve any sense of abstract concepts like love, hate, envy, or pride.

In a parallel narrative, some theologians try to absolve God the father of being responsible for ordering Jesus’ execution with the concern that this could cast the Creator into being labeled as a sadistic child abuser. In this version, commentators claim that once the first couple ate the fruit, they switched their allegiance from God to Satan who appeared to them in the form of a serpent, and that it was Satan who demanded the blood sacrifice to free humans from eternal sinfulness. As the story goes, the powers-that-be complied with Satan’s demand. It is this interpretation that views the world as a battle ground between God and Satan, and that once Jesus- the warrior- returns, he will set things right.

Believe it or not, this is the predominant theory currently espoused by most Fundamental Christians in the West!?! It is the interpretation that is held by the Fundamental Christians that are near to the ear of our current POTUS. It is this “righteous” interpretation that our current leaders use to justify the open slaughter of innocent civilians all over the world.

If this second narrative takes precedents over the first, then Satan is the culprit, right? Wait a minute… who the hell is running the show here?

Did God, the all-powerful and all-knowing, wake up one day and announce, ‘I was scheduled to play golf with Moses and Elijah today, but instead I think I will create my arch nemesis and call him Satan; who will eventually have my son brutally tortured and murdered.’

Concocting such notions as this supreme act of self-sabotage renders the whole Original Sin theory as absolutely senseless. In this context, I suspect that any truisms found within the Biblical Scriptures reveal much more about us as human beings, than they reveal to us about God.

Once Augustine substituted human sin in place of Jesus as the defining event in Christian history, the doctrine of Original Sin and those doctrines associated with it, became systematically predatory and Jesus became identified as the first necessary victim. Many more victims from many faith traditions were soon to follow.

The Push Back

Several Catholic theologians who were contemporaries of Augustine, confronted him on the problematic issues that his translation posed. One of Augustine’s chief detractors was the Celtic monk Pelagius, who was famously noted for contending that God had created humans with free will and the full ability to do good without the divine intervention of Jesus’ crucifixion. Augustine had powerful friends in the political and religious circles and relentlessly pursued Pelagius through ecclesial councils causing his excommunication in 417AD. Pelagius’ writings were permanently condemned at the Council of Carthage in 418AD.

And many more over the next 1600 years continued to push back against this warped vision that called for the congregants to obediently worship God out of fear. Their numbers are too numerous to mention here. Those that come immediately to mind include the brilliant theologian Peter Abelard who in 1130 AD wrote that, “Christ came to show humans how to live, not to submit to a brutal death willed by a sadistic Father.”

Abelard further insists that Christians must not serve out of fear, but out of love as Jesus taught us. For his efforts he was, at one point, condemned to perpetual silence and temporarily excommunicated by Pope Innocent II, which was later lifted after his death.

More recently, the theologian Mae Forrest Barnes issued a warning in a February 2024 article that Augustine’s doctrines “can easily be used as a weapon against the faithful.” And, indeed it was used as just that, in particular against women, and with devastating effects. Barnes concludes that these effects are “catastrophic and ongoing.” She further defines Augustine’s teachings as, “a severe and self-hating theology that has lasted long past its due.”

Augustine, Up Close and Personal

In conclusion to this writing, I would like to share with you some previously unknown information that was brought to my attention within the past few weeks. I leave it to you, the reader, to determine whether Augustine’s shadow is still breathing down our necks.

It has been 15 years since my mother passed away on July 22^nd, 2010. She was 83 years old at the time. She was a deeply spiritual and devout Irish Catholic throughout her life and passed that tradition down to each of her 13 children, the same as her parents did to theirs.

On December 18^th, 1969 five days before Christmas, my father, at 44 years of age, died of a heart attack at 4:00 am in the morning. This left my mother, at 42 years of age, with 13 children to raise on her own, the youngest was 11 months old. From that moment forward…

She cried every day for the next five years. She never remarried, and it was her belief in a loving source that carried her forward. When I witness the tears of those mothers who mourn the loss of those so dear to them in Gaza, I am reminded of my mother’s tears.

My mom’s funeral card. Notice the words of the prayer, begging for “mercy,”

asking for leniency in “Thy Judgement,” and the focus on the “blood” from

Jesus’ crucifixion. The reference to the “devouring flames” of hell, the

begging for angelic intervention, as not to become another burnt offering

to a punitive God. The Augustinian influence is inescapable even after death.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

I received a phone call from one of my older siblings two weeks ago who said that they found a trove of documents that belonged to our parents in a storage area. One of these documents was a hand typed personal journal that was dated, Sunday, January 25^th, 1988, composed by my mother at 63 years of age.

Within these two pages of stark, honest self-reflections, the instances of self-recrimination and self-loathing have Augustine’s finger prints all over them. At one point she even considers that death would be “better” than continuing life in this stint of anguished turmoil. At the height of feeling as though her pain was beyond the reach of any one’s healing compassion, she calls out to the only one left who might take the time to listen, and even this is held in doubt as she claims to her Maker, “Do I despair that you can even heal me?”

Many people with good intent have come to explain to me that my mother’s belief in the healing power of Jesus was not real, and only a figment of her imagination. Those that did seem to have missed the point. Giving my mother a lesson in epistemology was not going to help heal the woundedness inside of her. Jesus was a reality to her and her mental construct was the one that counted since she was the one who was in deep pain. People eventually did come into my mother’s life that did take the time to listen. Throughout the next twenty years my mother did heal, and came to know joys that were beyond her imagining at the time she wrote this journal. This story leaves me convinced that the key player in my mother’s healing was herself, and she can call this healing influence whatever she wants. Augustine be damned!

A 6 minute video which gives a brief synopsis of Augustine doctrine of Original Sin can be accessed here: Augustine’s Original Sin Theory

A special thanks to Mae Barnes for her help in writing this article! Her full essay, I Hate Augustine and So Should You, can be found here: I Hate Augustine .

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An Introduction

Kevork Almassian was born and raised within a lower middle class Armenian Christian family in Aleppo, Syria in 1987. He studied International Relations at the university in Damascus before furthering his education in France and Lebanon. When the CIA and Hillary Clinton took their horror show on the road and began their terror campaign in Syria in 2011/2012 in an attempt to topple the Assad government, many Armenians fled the country. Kevork Almassian’s brother was kidnapped in 2012 and held for a $12K ransom by the fanatical militant group Al-Tawhid. Soon after his release, Almassian’s family left Syria to secure their own safety.

Since taking refuge in Germany, Almassian has faced repeated smears that tried to tie him to Germany’s far right elements, and has evaded assassination attempts after being “doxed by editor-in-chief of T-Online Lars Wienand and Syrian Islamist activist Nahla Osman.” There has also been attempts to revoke Almassian’s refugee status, and have him deported back to Syria where he would likely be arrested and tagged for execution upon arrival for exposing the nefarious actors behind Syria’s dirty war These actors would include the current US placed President of Syria, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

Amidst all this, Almassian has emerged as the undisputed chronicler of the Syrian war and its aftermath. His article posted below unpacks the history that led up to the colonization of Syria by Western political operatives with help from their Middle East proxies such as the Qatar Emir. These parasitic vultures have their eyes fixed and their mouths salivating over Syria’s resources being pillaged by Western Corporate Capitalist predators, as Israel is currently in the process of absorbing Syria’s territory up to and including Damascus.

The History

Kevork Almassian begins:

When [Judge Napolitano] asked me on his show how Syria ended up with Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as its “president,” I could almost hear the cognitive dissonance on the other side of the screen. How does a man who was once the emir of al-Qaeda in Syria, a co-founder of ISIS by any reasonable historical reading of his trajectory, become Washington’s chosen man in Damascus?

For me, the answer is not a mystery. It is the logical end of a dirty war that began not with Syrian protesters in 2011, but in an American-run prison camp in Iraq years earlier.

And if anyone still suspected this was “just a conspiracy theory,” a former CIA officer – John Kiriakou, who went to prison for exposing CIA torture – has now said publicly what many of us have long argued: Jolani is, in all likelihood, a CIA asset.

Let’s start with the timeline, because the timeline alone already screams “intelligence operation.”

The Timeline

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani was in a CIA-run prison in Iraq – Camp Bucca – alongside another familiar name: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Both men were released in early 2011. “Coincidentally,” that is exactly when the regime-change war in Syria begins. Within weeks, Baghdadi goes on to lead what becomes ISIS, and Jolani crosses into Syria to found Jabhat al-Nusra – officially al-Qaeda’s franchise in my country [Syria].

Washington designates Nusra a terrorist organization. The UN follows suit. On paper, Jolani is the enemy. The State Department even slaps a $10 million bounty on his head.

But bounties are cheap. Cruise missiles are expensive. And for over a decade, while the US flattened cities in Iraq and Syria allegedly to fight “terrorism,” it somehow never found the time, or the coordinates, to seriously target Jolani or his core command structure, even though he controlled large swaths of Syrian territory from Aleppo countryside all the way to Idlib.

Because Jolani and his men were fighting the one government Washington had already decided must go: the Syrian state under Bashar al-Assad.

This is where Operation Timber Sycamore comes in: a multi-billion-dollar CIA covert program that funneled weapons, money, and training to so-called “rebels” in Syria. They were sold to Western audiences as “moderate opposition.” On the ground, those moderates were a disappearing species. What existed in reality were hardline Salafi-jihadist factions, with Nusra at the top of the food chain.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the mask, the logo on the paperwork, the brand name you could sell to Congress and CNN. The real muscle on the ground was Jolani’s men and other takfiri groups, who did the actual fighting, took the actual territory, and imposed their version of rule.

Weapons went “to the moderates.” The moderates magically handed them to al-Qaeda. Everyone in Washington pretended to be surprised. No one stopped the pipeline.

Over the years, the mask slipped. US officials themselves began to speak of Jolani as something more than just a former enemy.

James Jeffrey, Washington’s former envoy to Syria, openly called Jolani “an asset” for US strategy – not my word, his. Robert Ford, the former US ambassador to Syria, has publicly admitted that he personally worked with Jolani to “take him out of the world of terrorism” and polish him into a politician.

Think about what that means: the same US that claims to be fighting an endless war against al-Qaeda quietly devotes diplomatic energy to rehabilitating the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda into a partner, a useful strongman, a future head of state.

I said on the show, and I repeat it here: I believe Jolani was recruited in Camp Bucca. The timeline makes no sense otherwise. You don’t walk out of an American-run prison and, weeks later, magically have the networks, the money, the arms, and the logistical capacity to found al-Qaeda in Syria, right at the moment when Washington and its allies need a battering ram against Damascus.

Recently, former CIA director David Petraeus even sat with Jolani and told him, “Your success is our success.” What more do people need? A signed employment contract?

But let’s assume, for a moment, that you still think this is a stretch.

Enter John Kiriakou

Kiriakou is not a YouTuber chasing clicks. He is a former CIA officer who went to prison because he exposed the torture program and named the torturers. His loyalty is clearly not to the Agency’s PR department.

Recently, on Unfettered Speech, he described the Jolani situation bluntly. Here is the essence of what he said, which Judge Napolitano played on air:

-The “new president” of Syria is a former al-Qaeda member and a co-founder of ISIS.

-This same man is welcomed at the White House.

-Senior US officials, including the Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East, travel to meet him.

-President Trump suddenly lifts sanctions on Syria as Jolani consolidates power, prompting Syrians – desperate and exhausted – to dance in the streets.

The only thing that makes sense is that Jolani is a CIA asset, per Kiriakou.

When a former CIA officer who has already sacrificed his career and freedom to tell the truth looks at the pattern and says, “This is our guy,” it is not a conspiracy theory anymore.

Now, you may ask, why would the United States and its allies back such a man? The answer lies in what Syria used to be, and what it has now been turned into.

Before this war, Syria, for all its flaws, was a horizontally integrated state. People identified themselves as Syrian first and then Armenian, Druze, Christian, Alawite, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurdish, and so on. The state’s foreign policy aligned with Iran and Hezbollah, supported Palestinian factions, and kept a real deterrent posture toward Israel.

For Washington and Tel Aviv, this was unacceptable.

The goal was not “democracy”; that word is just wrapping paper. The real objective was to remove a government allied with Iran and replace it with a fragmented landscape: a weak central authority in Damascus, surrounded by sectarian cantons and warlord enclaves, all dependent on foreign patrons.

Jolani is perfect for this role.

For Israel, he brings vertical division. A man with a long al-Qaeda pedigree ruling Syria is a nightmare for minorities: Christians, Druze, Alawites, Shi’a, many Kurds, and other smaller communities. They will not accept al-Qaeda rule. So they retreat into their own militias, their own cantons, their own de facto mini-states, exactly in line with old Israeli strategic doctrines like the Yinon Plan, which openly advocated fragmenting neighboring states along sectarian lines.

On the ground, we already see it:

-Druze militias running their own affairs in the south with quiet Israeli backing.

-Kurdish forces in the northeast under US protection, managing their own autonomous zone.

-Alawites discussing an autonomous coastal enclave.

-Christians living in silence and fear.

You don’t need formal borders on a map to balkanize a country. When I, as a Syrian of Armenian origin, stop thinking of myself as Syrian first and start thinking purely as Armenian, when I instinctively fear my neighbor because he is from another sect, the balkanization has already happened in the mind.

For Washington, Jolani is equally “useful.” He has promised to normalize relations with Israel, to open Syria’s markets to Western capital, and to hand over the country’s resources from the hydrocarbons east of the Euphrates to the gas fields under the Mediterranean to American and allied companies.

A 24-million-person country reduced to a reconstruction market: $300 billion worth of contracts, infrastructure projects, and “investments.” But for investors to feel safe, they need a strongman in Damascus who can project the illusion of stability while remaining utterly dependent on foreign protection.

That strongman, in their design, is Abu Mohammed al-Jolani.

But Jolani is not acting alone. Around him is a constellation of Western intelligence veterans and “conflict resolution” NGOs acting as intermediaries.

British MI6 circles, under figures like Jonathan Powell – former chief of staff to Tony Blair – are central in managing this process. Powell runs an organization called Inter Mediate, which specializes in “talking to armed groups.” Behind the humanitarian language lies political engineering.

One of Inter Mediate’s operatives, a woman named Clare Haigh, is now said to have an office inside the Syrian presidential palace, advising Jolani on how to talk, how to dress, how to handle journalists, how to sell himself as a reformed jihadist turned statesman.

Osama bin Laden’s favorite journalist

And then there is Qatar. Ahmed Zaidan – once Osama bin Laden’s favorite journalist, photographed sipping tea with him and broadcasting his tapes on Al Jazeera – is now a personal adviser to Jolani.

Make it make sense.

An al-Qaeda emir, handled by US and British intelligence veterans, advised by bin Laden’s favorite media man, massaged by Western PR consultants, welcomed in Washington, and crowned in Damascus as “president.” If you wrote this as fiction, an editor would tell you it’s too on the nose.

Since Jolani took power through an international and regional deal that pushed Assad aside, over 11,000 people have been killed. Many of them are from the very minorities the West loves to mention in speeches but abandons in practice.

Videos circulate of his fighters asking terrified villagers at gunpoint, “Are you Muslim or not?” and executing those who give the “wrong” answer, including Druze and Alawites who are not recognized as “true Muslims” by their extremist ideology.

Christians, who had already suffered massive emigration between 2011 and 2024, are being squeezed further. They have no organized armed force, no foreign sponsor. They are expected either to live under the mercy of an al-Qaeda-bred regime or to leave the land of their ancestors.

This is what Washington’s “asset management” looks like in human terms.

If you are an American reading this, you might be tempted to say: “This cannot be. My government would never knowingly empower al-Qaeda.”

But it already has, repeatedly. From Afghanistan in the 1980s, when US intelligence backed the Mujahideen (and, indirectly, their Arab foreign fighter allies), to Libya and Syria in the last decade, where jihadist factions were instrumentalized against secular or nationalist governments, the pattern is clear.

The names and acronyms change. The logic does not.

The Strategy

The same establishment that lectures the world on “democracy” and “human rights” is perfectly willing to install a man like Jolani as the ruler of one of the oldest civilizations on earth, as long as he delivers strategic gains:

-breaking the Iran–Syria–Hezbollah axis;

-fragmenting Syria into weak, controllable pieces;

-opening its resources and markets to Western and Gulf capital;

-and giving Israel unprecedented strategic depth and security.

Everything else – the massacres, the ethnic cleansing, the collapse of national identity, the destruction of ancient communities – is treated as collateral damage.

Syria’s Future

I am often asked what Syria will look like in five or ten years. I wish I could answer with optimism. Right now, the forces pushing to turn my country into a permanent vassal state – ruled by a former al-Qaeda emir, policed by foreign intelligence, exploited by foreign capital – are incredibly strong.

But nothing in this region is permanent. People who come to power by cutting off other people’s heads often lose their own.

If there are still sane voices left in Western politics – people like Tulsi Gabbard, whom I mentioned on air – they must at least recognize this insanity: backing an al-Qaeda emir as “our man in Damascus” is not just immoral; it is ultimately self-destructive.

Syria does not need Jolani. The West does not need Jolani. There are Syrians who can have friendly relations with the United States without being former al-Qaeda commanders, without murdering their own people, without turning an ancient nation into a laboratory for extremist social engineering.

The question is not whether such alternatives exist. They do.

The question is whether Washington and its allies want a sovereign, stable Syria, or whether they prefer a shattered, cantonized carcass kept alive just enough for the next “asset” to feed on.

Kevork Almassian’s original article and other articles can be accessed here:

https://x.com/KevorkAlmassian/status/1996896486336979383

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At exactly eleven in the morning, they burst through the clinic door, four men whose hands were trembling, whose faces were pale with that particular terror known only to those who have just carried death in their arms. Their clothes were soaked in blood, and in their arms lay a boy, fifteen years old, his head limp, his breath shallow, his life fleeing him with every convulsion of his chest.

Just minutes before, he had been standing at the entrance of his tent,

a child among the ruins of childhood,

beside this very clinic where I sit now, writing with hands still sticky with his blood.

More than half a mile away from the so-called “yellow line,” where armored machines squat like iron beasts watching for movements they no longer distinguish, man or child, danger or breath.

And then, a shot. Not aimed. Not justified. Not needed. A single pointless eruption of metal from a soldier’s weapon, as casual as flicking ash from a cigarette.

The bullet entered the boy’s back.

Tore through muscle, ribs, and soft lung tissue. Burrowed into the lower lobe of his right lung and nested there like a cold, uninvited parasite.

Inside him bloomed a dark crimson flower: a hemothorax, a drowning from within.

He arrived to me suffocating, gasping like a fish thrown onto sand, his breaths desperate, uneven, and filled with the rattle of blood. Each cough spat out fragments of his own life.

His right chest was silent, no air entered. Only the thick, suffocating weight of blood collecting around the torn lung, crushing it, crushing him.

“Doctor,” someone whispered, “save him.”

As if salvation were something I could command.

Still, we tried. Oh, how we tried.

With the pitiful remains of what once was a medical system, a few oxygen masks, trembling hands, gauze that runs out too quickly, medicines that arrive too late, we worked.

We secured what we could of his airway. Cleared blood from his mouth.

Gave oxygen through a mask that hissed like a dying animal. Pressed on wounds. Stopped the bleeding we could reach. Stabilized his pressure with what little fluid we had.

And then, with the urgency of men fighting the tide itself, we sent him in the ambulance to the nearest hospital, the kind of place where, under normal conditions, a child like him could be saved.

But nothing here is normal. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever.

And I swear on whatever remains of my soul: this did not happen at a frontline. Not during battle.

Not in crossfire.

No, this happened during what the world, in its infinite appetite for illusion, calls a “ceasefire.”

A ceasefire in which a child can be shot in broad daylight for standing at the doorway of his shelter.

A ceasefire where safety is not a promise, only a rumor.

A ceasefire where life and death depend not on rules or agreements but on the idle whim of a man holding a rifle.

And yet, the boy, that poor boy, looked at me before we sent him away. He tried to speak, but blood filled his throat. His eyes said everything.

“Why?” The eternal question.

The question that has no answer, because the world that should answer it long ago sold its conscience for comfort.

I do not know if he survived the journey. But I know this:

A civilization that permits this, that accepts this, that grows accustomed to this, is a civilization already standing at the edge of the abyss.

You can visit Dr. Ezzideen at:
https://x.com/ezzingaza

-Brummy Taz

The Spirit of Resistance is arising in all of us. My friend and colleague Brummy Taz has published a 5 minute video to mark the one year anniversary of the Lion, the Liberator, the Eternal Light - the Martyr, Yahya Sinwar. A true Prince of Peace!

Peace be upon you, Abu Ibrahim,

Humble, devout, the prisoner, the fighter,

History will write you as the first line

In the epic of liberation’s dawn.

From the rubble, a nation rises,

From your sacrifice, a people endure,

Yahya Sinwar, immortal icon,

Palestine’s heart beats forever in your name.

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Sometimes I wonder if Western correspondents understand what colonialism actually is. Perhaps their conditioned, US centric, arrogance has blinded them from the true definition of the word, and the devastating consequences that this definition carries for themselves and the receivers of the defined. One case in point, in December 2021, Frontline correspondent Martin Smith sat down with Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for an interview. Smith wanted to discuss what would be the status of women, now that the US had withdrawn from Afghanistan in August of that year, and the Taliban were back in control of the Capitol Kabul.

Keep in mind, the US military industrial complex had just spent the last 20 years waging one of the most brutal war campaigns the world has ever seen against Zabihullah Mujahid’s fellow countrymen. This was classic US colonialism of the violent extremist sort against the Afghanistan population. Under the guise of hunting Bin Laden for execution in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, the war drug on for another 10 years after Laden’s death, wreaking havoc on the Afghan people. As the Central Asian Region watched in horror, the civilian fatality rates skyrocketed, and any trust that may have been afforded to the US foreign policy decision makers had long past forfeiture. Minimal direct death counts from Brown University’s Cost of War Project weighs in at 243,000 killed, 70,000 were Afghan civilians.

Martin Smith was not interested in discussing the 2 million war widows and their children that the US and their associates created and then abandoned in Afghanistan. He didn’t want to discuss the sharp rise in heroin overdoses that had emerged in the West from the cash crops of Afghanistan’s opium fields. Instead Smith asks the Taliban spokesperson, “Why should the United States trust you?”

It was suggested that I watch this Frontline Episode by a friend who knew I had done extensive research on the history of British/US interventions in Afghanistan. She wanted my opinion on Smith’s work. She never got it. After Smith asked the Taliban spokesperson this question (not even 10 minutes into the episode), I walked away in disgust at the arrogance of the Western correspondent’s questioning. ‘Who in the hell do we think we are!’ my mind shouted.

After withdrawing its troops, the US seized control of 7 billion dollars of Afghanistan’s assets. In February of 2022, the Biden Administration decided to steal half of the assets and allot 3.5 Billion to compensate 9/11 victims, and the other 3.5 was to go to humanitarian aid for Afghanistan, as 95% of the population was starving to death. To this date neither amount has been released as specified. In February of 2023, a New York Federal Judge ruled that the federal courts lacked the jurisdiction to seize the funds allotted for the 9/11 victims. The irony begins to run thick here as the Afghanistan aid funds are being withheld because the US does not trust that the Afghan Government will not use them to commit violent extremist acts of terrorism.

Same Play, Different Theater

My repugnance would again be aroused when reviewing the Italian journalist Francesca Borri’s interview with the leader of Hamas in Gaza Yahya Sinwar on October, 5 of 2018. At this time Hamas and Israel were attempting to negotiate a cease fire agreement. “Why should the Israelis trust you?” the journalist questioned.

As this pattern repeats among Western Journalists the message becomes clear. The blood thirsty colonizers are the only ones to be trusted; the colonized are despicable sub-human chaff that are undeserving of trust, or human life for that matter. Perhaps these journalists live under the illusion that the US and Israel are not the two most dangerous terrorizing entities on the planet or, they are paid well enough to jump down the memory hole and forget that this is the case.

To belabor the point, on the day of the interview with Yahya Sinwar, Israeli snipers had killed 3 Palestinians and wounded 376 others along the Gaza/Israeli border fence as the Great March of Return demonstrations, that were backed by Sinwar and the rest of the Hamas leadership, were in full swing. 7 of the wounded were in critical condition. No injuries were reported by the Israelis on the opposing side of the fence.

It seems the only thing the Israelis could be trusted to do was perpetuate lies and murder their neighbors. I don’t recall ever hearing of a Western journalist asking an Israeli Prime Minister or a US Secretary of State, “Why should we trust you?” Nevertheless, Yahya Sinwar responded:

First of all, I never went to war—war came to me. And my question, in all truth, is the opposite. Why should I trust them? They left Gaza in 2005, and they simply reshaped the occupation. They were inside, now they block borders. Who knows what’s really going on in their minds? And yet, that’s what trust is all about.

Upon review of the article that contained the interview with Yahya Sinwar, it became obvious that Francesca Borri knew little to nothing about the life threatening ramifications that the Palestinians faced within the zionist Israeli’s external siege of the Gaza Strip. In fact, with the questions she asked and the demeanor of her approach toward Sinwar, one would swear that she was acting on behalf of the Israeli government, or at least acting as an agent of Western Supremacist. Another thing that became apparent while reviewing the Borri/Sinwar interview as well as other interviews with Sinwar, was that he was a skillful statesman and a brilliant strategist. A full copy of the interview can be viewed here, and you can judge for yourself.

Reshaping the Occupation

In September of 2005, a proposal by PM Ariel Sharon from 2003 became realized, and the remaining Israeli settlements in Gaza were evacuated and Israeli troops withdrew from the Strip. Sharon hailed this in the international media as peace initiative; while the Israeli leadership and military simultaneously imposed a crippling external siege on the Gaza Strip that manipulated all social, economic, and political aspects of Gaza life. Other than continuing their genocidal tendencies against the Palestinians in Gaza, this allowed Israel to forego any further peace negotiations with Hamas, and arrested any further development toward a Palestinian State. This also enabled Israel to focus on expanding settlements in the West Bank which increased by 15,000 during the time of the of the withdrawal. What follows are a few of the details of what Yahya Sinwar refers to as a “reshaped” occupation:

Not included in the list above, Israel controls the flow of drinking water, the operation of waste water treatment facilities, Gaza’s electrical grid, food production, telecommunications, and other utilities. Israel military calculated the minimum caloric intake for each Gazan inhabitant and used it to determine the number of aid trucks that were allowed into the Strip. Once control was attained, the Zionist began the systematic reduction of all the primary necessities for a healthy physical life while clamping down on the number of Palestinians moving in and out of the Strip. Then they stifled the flow of revenue wherever possible, and began reducing the Palestinians’ existence one calorie at a time.

This was a genocide in slow motion, where the Zionist and their supporters wished for the Palestinians to accept victimization as their destiny, and to politely cooperate in facilitating their own extermination. As one twitter/X author, Brummy Taz opined, this was Netanyahu’s “wet dream.”

This didn’t happen of course. Like any other group of dignified human beings, Gaza’s Hamas defense forces began an aggressive resistance campaign as the enclave’s government, the Hamas political Bureau, began the work of finding ways to circumvent the siege’s deadly initiatives so that the population could survive.

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After speaking with several Gen Z adults in my community over the past couple of weeks, I was impressed by their knowledge of the current Palestinian /Zionist conflict and the genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Many were aware of the Zionist Supremacy narrative that has captivated the citizens of Israel, and the immoral indifference with which the IOF soldiers treated the people of Gaza and the West Bank. However, some were not aware of what happened on October 7^th, 2023.

The inquiries they presented in the midst of these conversations revolved around trying to get a broader understanding of the history of the Palestine conflict and the US’s involvement. This in turn led to questions about US Colonialism in general. For this, I am re-posting an article from October 2022 with some minor updates, for the Gen Zr’s who asked me about it and other new subscribers who may not be aware of it, as it was not previously categorized on my Stack page.

The Meditative Mind

I began a consistent practice of thought clearing meditation in 2014. As my meditation practice became deeply seated, and the journey of dissolving the negative behavior patterns that I had adopted through my social conditioning was well underway, I spontaneously began looking into the causes of suffering that were affecting our domestic and global settings.

Previously, I had not given much attention to US history other than what I was taught in my primary and secondary education classes; a history that claimed that the actions of our nation’s forefathers were always honorable and glorious, and the actions of others were despicable and cowardly. Being raised in the 60s and 70s and exposed to US mainstream media sources, it was obvious that US domestic and foreign policy had a heavy influence on the rest of the globe. This being the case, I sought the writings of independent journalists, noted historians, US policy commentators, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the literary masters, past and present, to get a better understanding of the current scope of unnecessary human suffering and its root causes.  

Global Suffering

The information I retrieved was deeply concerning. I discovered that the country that I call home, the United States of America, was and still is, practicing the ancient dysfunctional act of conquest as a means to secure resources and concentrate wealth to a minute portion of its population.

Former State Department official William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, identifies one hundred and sixty-eight occasions between 1798 and 1945 that the US has intervened militarily in foreign countries. In the same text, Blum chronicles almost a half century of US military interventions in foreign affairs from 1945 to 1994, totaling fifty-five in that time frame. The US has significantly increased the number of interventions since the 1990s. The Congressional Research Service issued a report on March 8th of this year that was certified by the Library of Congress stating that there have been 251 interventions between 1991 and 2022.

Image retrieved from Ben Norton at Multipolarista.com

In the majority of cases the US pitted social, political, economic, and religious factions in foreign countries against each other to weaken the countries’ defenses so that the US could more easily exploit their resources and confiscate their wealth. Much of this is largely unknown to the US population. The true motives of the people who orchestrated these events is not printed in authorized history books. This is one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.

Predatory Economics 

I also discovered that due to the predatory and self-destructive form of economics that the US practices, which favors people competing (rather than cooperating) to obtain the primary necessities that sustain life for all; national and global income inequality has reached planetary devastating proportions. The sociologist Peter Phillips, in his book, Titans of Capital, published in 2024, displays some of the cataclysmic effects of these economic policies,

[Global poverty] was slowly declining during the three decades preceding the pandemic, but this trend was reversed in 2020, after Covid -19 spread. At that point, inequality was amplified as wealth concentration accelerated for the 1% and declined for the 99%, forcing 180 million more people into extreme poverty. Developing countries, women, and ethnic minorities were the hardest hit by the pandemic. The number of people in extreme poverty rose to more than 700 million. According to the World Bank, the rate of global extreme poverty reached 9.3 percent in 2020, up from 8.4 percent in 2019. *

According to Oxfam statistics presented in May of 2022, in a publication entitled Profiting from pain, during the Covid- 19 pandemic, on average a new billionaire emerged every 30 hours. During a similar timespan, an average of every 33 hours, one million more people edged closer to extreme poverty. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on $1.90 per day. **

In a precursory volume from 2018 titled Giants: The Global Power Elites, that led to Phillips book noted above, he gives a stark monetary understanding of the ramifications of these economic policies for the rest of the globe,

80% of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population live on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live on only $1.25 per day.

Phillips goes on to state that of the global population, “twenty-five thousand per day, more than 9 million people per year, die from starvation and malnutrition.” 3.1 million of those are children under the age of five. That’s one human life lost every 3.5 seconds. In the time it took me to write this sentence, another is gone. This is another one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.

As the research continues, I have become convinced that, due to the problems the world faces today, we cannot afford to lose one person to starvation per day. This means that we need every bodymind healthy, available, and engaged, in developing new measures to address some of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.

One of the many benefits of a consistent practice of meditation is coming to understand what each of us as individuals has control over. Ultimately, we are endowed with the ability to control ourselves. In a representative democratic society, we are afforded the right to control who gets elected to represent us in the government. This right is exercised through a legitimate voting process. There are times when people who are citizens of foreign countries commit horrendous civil rights violations beyond our borders. These violations are often condemned by our representatives in government, and by many in the citizenry who speak out publicly, as they should be. However, as citizens of the United States, we ultimately only have control over what our government does in our name. Trying to control, through coercive means, that which is beyond our internationally accepted reach only leads to unnecessary US-initiated suffering.

Domestic Suffering

Shifting the focus of these words to the domestic arena, who are we becoming as a nation? Are US citizens able to easily embrace life, liberty, and experience happiness through meaningful involvement with others? Are our chosen leaders coordinating with us to create a domestic environment where people can feel secure in exercising their creative potential and flourish as a national family?

 One of the foundational texts that comes from the Chinese ethical tradition, the Tao Te Ching, indicates that all violence, even that which is well intentioned, rebounds back to its origin (Tao V.30). This means that any violent and self-destructive policies that our government has initiated abroad will lead to violent and self-destructive consequences at home. And to preempt a common misperception that there is a latency period between violent acts and their negative consequences, there is none. The negative physical and psychological consequences of violent acts immediately cling to the agent(s) who perform them. When the seeds are sown the harvest is immediate.

The Human Cost

There is not enough room in this writing to detail the many political and economic violations that have, and are being, levied on the whole domestic population. If we look at the cost to US soldiers who are ordered to the front lines of the forever wars that the US has long been involved in, it can provide insights that help us understand how violence reciprocates and how unnecessary suffering can exponentially expand to encompass the most vulnerable people. As I write this, I am keeping in mind that the political decision to sacrifice the lives of those people the politicians are supposed to serve, so that they and other imperial minded elites can expand their personal wealth, is diabolically evil.     

 What follows is a look at the military sector of our society which, for our purpose here, includes veterans and active personnel. According to 2021 statistics that would be approximately 6% of the US population or 20.3 million people.

 According to an article published May 27, 2022 on the website of the Military Suicide Research Consortium, “mental health rates have risen 65% in the military since 2000, with 936,000 troops diagnosed with at least one mental health issue in that time, according to the new data.” The same article states, “Suicide within the military has soared since 2005 as the military has waged two wars at once, and this year may set a record with troops committing suicide at the rate of one per day, according to Pentagon figures.” The clinical psychologist and military veteran, Craig Bryan who was interviewed for the article stated that, “the top reason… these guys are trying to kill themselves is because they have this intense psychological suffering and pain.” In the same writing, Army Col. Carl Castro, who is working in coordination with Bryan in a Pentagon funded research project on suicide prevention and treatment, said, “The core of the issue is that it's not that people who attempt suicide … want to harm themselves as much as they want the pain they're currently in to stop, and they don't see any other way out.”

As the US continues these policies the physical and psychological fallout will increase. Another article released in March of this year by the American Addiction Centers (AAC), expresses the prominent risk of substance abuse involved with soldiers who experience multiple military deployments. The publication, which was reviewed by the AAC’s senior editor Dr. Scot Thomas, a clinical psychiatry preceptor at the San Diego VA Hospital, confirms,

Several deployments can have a cumulative effect in terms of the related stress and trauma. During deployment, service members may experience numerous traumas, including witnessing death or serious injury of others, become seriously injured themselves, partake in hand-to-hand combat, etc. Those on their third or fourth deployments report more problems, such as using medication to cope with combat-related stress, than those on their first or second deployments… In just 8 years between 2001 and 2009, the number of painkiller prescriptions written by military doctors quadrupled.

Another study put out by the American Warriors Partnership, titled Operation Deep Dive, that has been circulating in the news recently determines that the suicide and self-injury mortality rates of former service members in the US are 2.4 times greater than previously thought. This study puts the self-initiated death rate of former service members to at least 44 per day. 

The negative domestic ramifications of the war for wealth policies that the US conducted in the first 20 years of the new century are continually displayed in Western media. Not just families, but whole communities were decimated by the spread of violence. On July 11, 2020, an article from the Daily Mail reported that “Master Sgt. Andrew Christian Marckesano, 34, died by suicide in front on his wife on Monday… Marckesano's suicide was the 30th from the 2nd Battalion - 508th parachute  infantry regiment, which had the highest casualty rates of any unit during the Afghanistan war.” Marckesano’s fellow soldiers referred to him as, the real “Captain America” as he had served six full tours in Afghanistan and many other tours overseas before he returned home to his family and a job at the Pentagon. Another soldier who served with Marckesano indicated that military personnel losing their limbs due to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was a daily event. The continual witness of such savagery is bound to tear the psyche beyond any tolerable limit.

Another soldier from the same battalion, Staff Sgt. Allen Thomas, fell victim to suicide in 2013. After being taken to the VA Hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to receive an emergency psychological evaluation, he was turned away due to lack of beds and sent home with prescription pain killers. A few days later Thomas suffered a mental collapse and in the midst of a flashback killed an elderly couple, who were his neighbors, and their dog, before turning the gun on himself. Thomas, like Marckesano had children. Losing a parent to suicide is devastating to a child. Children who lose a parent in this way are three times more likely to commit suicide in their pre-adult years.    

Eric Edstrom, an infantry lieutenant who graduated from West Point in 2007, and was deployed to Afghanistan shortly afterwards, provides poignant, on the ground, insights into the effects that the US’s war for wealth policies have had on soldiers who are unaware that their deployments have nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom. In his book, Un-American: A Soldier's Reckoning of Our Longest War, he writes:

I protected myself and three-quarters of the men in my platoon.  I endangered and hurt many.  I lived in mud shacks and trolled dirt roads for IEDs, either with my tires or, worse, my boots.  We did dangerous humdrum unilateral patrols without conducting any meaningful training with Afghan security forces. I accomplished nothing that one could consider worth fighting for. I wasted a lot of taxpayer money. The Afghans I met either didn't want us there or wanted us to stay long enough to relieve us of our money, taxpayer dollars that the military was aching to spend on exorbitant military contracts, knowingly lining the pockets of warlords, guilty of human rights abuses. On the ground, the war felt mostly dubious, illegal in scope, and unjust in terms of proportionality.  Many of my friends died or became permanently handicapped. I personally buried one of my West Point classmates in Arlington National Cemetery, handing the folded flag to his crying mother. Another one of my soldiers killed himself after returning home. One of my soldiers is serving life in prison after murdering and dismembering the body of someone whom he never knew in a bathtub in Oregon.

There are thousands upon thousands of stories similar to Eric Edstrom’s. They can be found on websites founded by former military, intelligence, and civilian national security officials, who are exposing the self-defeating nature of contemporary US foreign policy and the true costs of war. The Eisenhower Media Network , Veterans For Peace,  and Vietnam Veterans Against the War , name a few.

The Familial Cost

On May 23, 2019 the US army posted a question on Twitter asking service members “How has serving impacted you?” I found a few tweets in response from soldiers that reported positive impacts. Several tweets were from soldiers who were still in the midst of severe and prolonged mental and physical suffering that began soon after their deployment. Of the five thousand plus answers that flooded in over the next thirty six hours, the vast majority were not from soldiers. They came from the families and friends of the soldiers who were dead. These stories recounted the horrors experienced when humans are sent to slaughter one another and the devastating aftermath when, what was left of them, returned home. The tweets from the second and third group, exposed information seldom reported in the mainstream press, and other US propaganda outlets.  Below are some samples. I quote them anonymously out of respect for their privacy.

Many veterans were virtually disappeared from the army’s records as if their service meant nothing.

“It mangled my health and defrauded me my service related claims by ‘losing’ my documents. Though I kept them all, somehow the VA just keeps losing them or rejecting them on account of the Army having no record of ANYTHING I ever did apart from enlist and get honorably discharged.”  

Some of the stories drew a direct line from the violence experienced while in the service to domestic violence at home.

“My father's successful military career taught him that he's allowed to use violence to make people do what he wants because America gave him that power.”

“Made me grow up with a hyperparanoid and controlling father. My sister and I were hardly allowed to step out of our room. He had horrible anger issues, admitted to contemplating suicide. My family says he used to be different before enlisting. He wanted to be an artist.”

Other tweets vividly depicted the cross generational aspect of the wars for wealth, covering five wars over a seventy-five year period.  

“My father was career military, serving in WWII & Korea. My mother often said, ‘He came back from the war a different man than who she married.’ He suffered from PTSD, had horrible nightmares, and was prone to angry outbursts. They're buried together at Fort Snelling.”  

“My uncle served in Vietnam. Before his deployment I was told he was a vibrant young man who never touched a drop of alcohol. After coming home he couldn’t put the bottle down, lost a good job with the Boston Fire Department and died with the needle still in his arm.”

“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.”

Still others, described an innocence at both ends of the gun. 

“My friend from high school came back from Iraq suffering from PTSD. The last conversation we had was how he had to kill kids the same age of his children and felt guilty. Two months later he swallowed a bullet in the bed while his wife and kids were in the living room.”

The tweets went on and on, reporting incidents of rape of women soldiers by their own troops, reoccurring nightmares, missing limbs, crushed bones, disintegrating organs, chemical poisoning, denied benefits, withheld pay, reneged promises of all sorts, homelessness, soldiers who came home and just disappeared. These are the real impacts of war.

The investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal, in his book The Management of Savagery, further displays the lifelong effects of war levied against military personnel. In discussing the wars in the middle east that took place during the Bush and Obama administrations, he saw this as a, “a series of mind-bogglingly pointless interventions that had made legless, armless, and otherwise combat- singed veterans a common sight across the country.”

It’s one thing for the empire to indoctrinate their children to believe that the past leaders of the empire could do no wrong. It is quite another to continue to propagate such false narratives to recruits and military cadets, including the idea that they will be honored human instruments fighting for freedom and democracy. This leaves them completely unprepared for the mind blistering shock they receive in the midst of their deployment when they find that what they are doing is not spreading freedom and democracy at all, but instead generating enslavement and plutocracy. It is a twofold moral betrayal on the part of the imperial elites. One is physical betrayal, of the blunt force trauma type, which literally destroys the soldier’s body. The other is a psychic betrayal that renders the mind so incapacitated, it eventually destroys itself.

While addressing the power structure that initiates and supports war, the social critic Caitlin Johnstone stated that:

 The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is the most evil, soulless and destructive force on this planet. The young people who are duped, manipulated and financially coerced into joining its war machine come back horrifically traumatized by the experiences they have in the situations they are placed in. Something better is needed. This cannot continue.

The shame for this rests on the shoulders of not only the empirical elites who amass huge profits and political power at the expense of soldiers’ lives, but also, on people like me, if I know about it and do nothing to try to stop it. In the ignorance of these events, one is void of the ability to do anything about it. Once I have been informed of these happenings, the longer I linger in addressing it, the more my shame grows. It is hard for me not to think that the original intentions of these soldiers were admirable, morally sound, and life affirming.

When I relay the information given here to friends and acquaintances, I have been accused of being un-American. How could making an honest effort to save soldiers’ lives by stopping these senseless wars be defined as un-American?          

In closing, I would like to remind myself and the reader that we, as a nation, are not destined to do this. This is not our purpose in life. How ridiculous it would be for me to claim that a system that was created by human beings, could not be dismantled and redirected toward peace by human beings. The wheels are already in motion to stop this madness. Some of the drivers are soldiers themselves.

Note: I would like to give special thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for pointing me to the tweets of those who were suffered the ramifications of war.       

* Peter Phillips, Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity, The Censored Press 2024, Ch.1, Pg.8

** Profiting From Pain, Pg. 3

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After speaking with several Gen Z adults in my community over the past couple of weeks, I was impressed by their knowledge of the current Palestinian /Zionist conflict and the genocide that is taking place in Gaza. Many were aware of the Zionist Supremacy narrative that has captivated the citizens of Israel, and the immoral indifference with which the IOF soldiers treated the people of Gaza and the West Bank. However, some were not aware of what happened on October 7^th, 2023.

The inquiries they presented in the midst of these conversations revolved around trying to get a broader understanding of the history of the Palestine conflict and the US’s involvement. This in turn led to questions about US Colonialism in general. For this, I am re-posting an article from October 2022 with some minor updates, for the Gen Zr’s who asked me about it and other new subscribers who may not be aware of it, as it was not previously categorized on my Stack page.

The Meditative Mind

I began a consistent practice of thought clearing meditation in 2014. As my meditation practice became deeply seated, and the journey of dissolving the negative behavior patterns that I had adopted through my social conditioning was well underway, I spontaneously began looking into the causes of suffering that were affecting our domestic and global settings.

Previously, I had not given much attention to US history other than what I was taught in my primary and secondary education classes; a history that claimed that the actions of our nation’s forefathers were always honorable and glorious, and the actions of others were despicable and cowardly. Being raised in the 60s and 70s and exposed to US mainstream media sources, it was obvious that US domestic and foreign policy had a heavy influence on the rest of the globe. This being the case, I sought the writings of independent journalists, noted historians, US policy commentators, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and the literary masters, past and present, to get a better understanding of the current scope of unnecessary human suffering and its root causes.

Global Suffering

The information I retrieved was deeply concerning. I discovered that the country that I call home, the United States of America, was and still is, practicing the ancient dysfunctional act of conquest as a means to secure resources and concentrate wealth to a minute portion of its population.

Former State Department official William Blum, in his book Killing Hope, identifies one hundred and sixty-eight occasions between 1798 and 1945 that the US has intervened militarily in foreign countries. In the same text, Blum chronicles almost a half century of US military interventions in foreign affairs from 1945 to 1994, totaling fifty-five in that time frame. The US has significantly increased the number of interventions since the 1990s. The Congressional Research Service issued a report on March 8th of this year that was certified by the Library of Congress stating that there have been 251 interventions between 1991 and 2022.

In the majority of cases the US pitted social, political, economic, and religious factions in foreign countries against each other to weaken the countries’ defenses so that the US could more easily exploit their resources and confiscate their wealth. Much of this is largely unknown to the US population. The true motives of the people who orchestrated these events is not printed in authorized history books. This is one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.

Predatory Economics

I also discovered that due to the predatory and self-destructive form of economics that the US practices, which favors people competing (rather than cooperating) to obtain the primary necessities that sustain life for all; national and global income inequality has reached planetary devastating proportions. The sociologist Peter Phillips, in his book, Titans of Capital, published in 2024, displays some of the cataclysmic effects of these economic policies,

[Global poverty] was slowly declining during the three decades preceding the pandemic, but this trend was reversed in 2020, after Covid -19 spread. At that point, inequality was amplified as wealth concentration accelerated for the 1% and declined for the 99%, forcing 180 million more people into extreme poverty. Developing countries, women, and ethnic minorities were the hardest hit by the pandemic. The number of people in extreme poverty rose to more than 700 million. According to the World Bank, the rate of global extreme poverty reached 9.3 percent in 2020, up from 8.4 percent in 2019. *

According to Oxfam statistics presented in May of 2022, in a publication entitled Profiting from pain, during the Covid- 19 pandemic, on average a new billionaire emerged every 30 hours. During a similar timespan, an average of every 33 hours, one million more people edged closer to extreme poverty. The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on $1.90 per day. **

In a precursory volume from 2018 titled Giants: The Global Power Elites, that led to Phillips book noted above, he gives a stark monetary understanding of the ramifications of these economic policies for the rest of the globe,

80% of the world’s people live on less than $10 per day, the poorest half of the global population live on less than $2.50 per day, and more than 1.3 billion people live on only $1.25 per day.

Phillips goes on to state that of the global population, “twenty-five thousand per day, more than 9 million people per year, die from starvation and malnutrition.” 3.1 million of those are children under the age of five. That’s one human life lost every 3.5 seconds. In the time it took me to write this sentence, another is gone. This is another one of the root causes of unnecessary global and domestic suffering.

As the research continues, I have become convinced that, due to the problems the world faces today, we cannot afford to lose one person to starvation per day. This means that we need every bodymind healthy, available, and engaged, in developing new measures to address some of the greatest threats humanity has ever faced.

One of the many benefits of a consistent practice of meditation is coming to understand what each of us as individuals has control over. Ultimately, we are endowed with the ability to control ourselves. In a representative democratic society, we are afforded the right to control who gets elected to represent us in the government. This right is exercised through a legitimate voting process. There are times when people who are citizens of foreign countries commit horrendous civil rights violations beyond our borders. These violations are often condemned by our representatives in government, and by many in the citizenry who speak out publicly, as they should be. However, as citizens of the United States, we ultimately only have control over what our government does in our name. Trying to control, through coercive means, that which is beyond our internationally accepted reach only leads to unnecessary US-initiated suffering.

Domestic Suffering

Shifting the focus of these words to the domestic arena, who are we becoming as a nation? Are US citizens able to easily embrace life, liberty, and experience happiness through meaningful involvement with others? Are our chosen leaders coordinating with us to create a domestic environment where people can feel secure in exercising their creative potential and flourish as a national family?

One of the foundational texts that comes from the Chinese ethical tradition, the Tao Te Ching, indicates that all violence, even that which is well intentioned, rebounds back to its origin (Tao V.30). This means that any violent and self-destructive policies that our government has initiated abroad will lead to violent and self-destructive consequences at home. And to preempt a common misperception that there is a latency period between violent acts and their negative consequences, there is none. The negative physical and psychological consequences of violent acts immediately cling to the agent(s) who perform them. When the seeds are sown the harvest is immediate.

The Human Cost

There is not enough room in this writing to detail the many political and economic violations that have, and are being, levied on the whole domestic population. If we look at the cost to US soldiers who are ordered to the front lines of the forever wars that the US has long been involved in, it can provide insights that help us understand how violence reciprocates and how unnecessary suffering can exponentially expand to encompass the most vulnerable people. As I write this, I am keeping in mind that the political decision to sacrifice the lives of those people the politicians are supposed to serve, so that they and other imperial minded elites can expand their personal wealth, is diabolically evil.

What follows is a look at the military sector of our society which, for our purpose here, includes veterans and active personnel. According to 2021 statistics that would be approximately 6% of the US population or 20.3 million people.

According to an article published May 27, 2022 on the website of the Military Suicide Research Consortium, “mental health rates have risen 65% in the military since 2000, with 936,000 troops diagnosed with at least one mental health issue in that time, according to the new data.” The same article states, “Suicide within the military has soared since 2005 as the military has waged two wars at once, and this year may set a record with troops committing suicide at the rate of one per day, according to Pentagon figures.” The clinical psychologist and military veteran, Craig Bryan who was interviewed for the article stated that, “the top reason… these guys are trying to kill themselves is because they have this intense psychological suffering and pain.” In the same writing, Army Col. Carl Castro, who is working in coordination with Bryan in a Pentagon funded research project on suicide prevention and treatment, said, “The core of the issue is that it’s not that people who attempt suicide … want to harm themselves as much as they want the pain they’re currently in to stop, and they don’t see any other way out.”

As the US continues these policies the physical and psychological fallout will increase. Another article released in March of this year by the American Addiction Centers (AAC), expresses the prominent risk of substance abuse involved with soldiers who experience multiple military deployments. The publication, which was reviewed by the AAC’s senior editor Dr. Scot Thomas, a clinical psychiatry preceptor at the San Diego VA Hospital, confirms,

Several deployments can have a cumulative effect in terms of the related stress and trauma. During deployment, service members may experience numerous traumas, including witnessing death or serious injury of others, become seriously injured themselves, partake in hand-to-hand combat, etc. Those on their third or fourth deployments report more problems, such as using medication to cope with combat-related stress, than those on their first or second deployments… In just 8 years between 2001 and 2009, the number of painkiller prescriptions written by military doctors quadrupled.

Another study put out by the American Warriors Partnership, titled Operation Deep Dive, that has been circulating in the news recently determines that the suicide and self-injury mortality rates of former service members in the US are 2.4 times greater than previously thought. This study puts the self-initiated death rate of former service members to at least 44 per day.

The negative domestic ramifications of the war for wealth policies that the US conducted in the first 20 years of the new century are continually displayed in Western media. Not just families, but whole communities were decimated by the spread of violence. On July 11, 2020, an article from the Daily Mail reported that “Master Sgt. Andrew Christian Marckesano, 34, died by suicide in front on his wife on Monday… Marckesano’s suicide was the 30th from the 2nd Battalion - 508th parachute infantry regiment, which had the highest casualty rates of any unit during the Afghanistan war.” Marckesano’s fellow soldiers referred to him as, the real “Captain America” as he had served six full tours in Afghanistan and many other tours overseas before he returned home to his family and a job at the Pentagon. Another soldier who served with Marckesano indicated that military personnel losing their limbs due to improvised explosive devices (IEDs) was a daily event. The continual witness of such savagery is bound to tear the psyche beyond any tolerable limit.

Another soldier from the same battalion, Staff Sgt. Allen Thomas, fell victim to suicide in 2013. After being taken to the VA Hospital in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to receive an emergency psychological evaluation, he was turned away due to lack of beds and sent home with prescription pain killers. A few days later Thomas suffered a mental collapse and in the midst of a flashback killed an elderly couple, who were his neighbors, and their dog, before turning the gun on himself. Thomas, like Marckesano had children. Losing a parent to suicide is devastating to a child. Children who lose a parent in this way are three times more likely to commit suicide in their pre-adult years.

Eric Edstrom, an infantry lieutenant who graduated from West Point in 2007, and was deployed to Afghanistan shortly afterwards, provides poignant, on the ground, insights into the effects that the US’s war for wealth policies have had on soldiers who are unaware that their deployments have nothing to do with spreading democracy and freedom. In his book, Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War, he writes:

I protected myself and three-quarters of the men in my platoon. I endangered and hurt many. I lived in mud shacks and trolled dirt roads for IEDs, either with my tires or, worse, my boots. We did dangerous humdrum unilateral patrols without conducting any meaningful training with Afghan security forces. I accomplished nothing that one could consider worth fighting for. I wasted a lot of taxpayer money. The Afghans I met either didn’t want us there or wanted us to stay long enough to relieve us of our money, taxpayer dollars that the military was aching to spend on exorbitant military contracts, knowingly lining the pockets of warlords, guilty of human rights abuses. On the ground, the war felt mostly dubious, illegal in scope, and unjust in terms of proportionality. Many of my friends died or became permanently handicapped. I personally buried one of my West Point classmates in Arlington National Cemetery, handing the folded flag to his crying mother. Another one of my soldiers killed himself after returning home. One of my soldiers is serving life in prison after murdering and dismembering the body of someone whom he never knew in a bathtub in Oregon.

There are thousands upon thousands of stories similar to Eric Edstrom’s. They can be found on websites founded by former military, intelligence, and civilian national security officials, who are exposing the self-defeating nature of contemporary US foreign policy and the true costs of war. The Eisenhower Media Network , Veterans For Peace, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War , name a few.

The Familial Cost

On May 23, 2019 the US army posted a question on Twitter asking service members “How has serving impacted you?” I found a few tweets in response from soldiers that reported positive impacts. Several tweets were from soldiers who were still in the midst of severe and prolonged mental and physical suffering that began soon after their deployment. Of the five thousand plus answers that flooded in over the next thirty six hours, the vast majority were not from soldiers. They came from the families and friends of the soldiers who were dead. These stories recounted the horrors experienced when humans are sent to slaughter one another and the devastating aftermath when, what was left of them, returned home. The tweets from the second and third group, exposed information seldom reported in the mainstream press, and other US propaganda outlets. Below are some samples. I quote them anonymously out of respect for their privacy.

Many veterans were virtually disappeared from the army’s records as if their service meant nothing.

“It mangled my health and defrauded me my service related claims by ‘losing’ my documents. Though I kept them all, somehow the VA just keeps losing them or rejecting them on account of the Army having no record of ANYTHING I ever did apart from enlist and get honorably discharged.”

Some of the stories drew a direct line from the violence experienced while in the service to domestic violence at home.

“My father’s successful military career taught him that he’s allowed to use violence to make people do what he wants because America gave him that power.”

“Made me grow up with a hyperparanoid and controlling father. My sister and I were hardly allowed to step out of our room. He had horrible anger issues, admitted to contemplating suicide. My family says he used to be different before enlisting. He wanted to be an artist.”

Other tweets vividly depicted the cross generational aspect of the wars for wealth, covering five wars over a seventy-five year period.

“My father was career military, serving in WWII & Korea. My mother often said, ‘He came back from the war a different man than who she married.’ He suffered from PTSD, had horrible nightmares, and was prone to angry outbursts. They’re buried together at Fort Snelling.”

“My uncle served in Vietnam. Before his deployment I was told he was a vibrant young man who never touched a drop of alcohol. After coming home he couldn’t put the bottle down, lost a good job with the Boston Fire Department and died with the needle still in his arm.”

“My best friend joined the Army straight out of high school because his family was poor & he wanted a college education. He served his time & then some. Just as he was ready to retire he was sent to Iraq. You guys sent him back in a box. It destroyed his children.”

Still others, described an innocence at both ends of the gun.

“My friend from high school came back from Iraq suffering from PTSD. The last conversation we had was how he had to kill kids the same age of his children and felt guilty. Two months later he swallowed a bullet in the bed while his wife and kids were in the living room.”

The tweets went on and on, reporting incidents of rape of women soldiers by their own troops, reoccurring nightmares, missing limbs, crushed bones, disintegrating organs, chemical poisoning, denied benefits, withheld pay, reneged promises of all sorts, homelessness, soldiers who came home and just disappeared. These are the real impacts of war.

The investigative journalist, Max Blumenthal, in his book The Management of Savagery, further displays the lifelong effects of war levied against military personnel. In discussing the wars in the middle east that took place during the Bush and Obama administrations, he saw this as a, “a series of mind-bogglingly pointless interventions that had made legless, armless, and otherwise combat- singed veterans a common sight across the country.”

It’s one thing for the empire to indoctrinate their children to believe that the past leaders of the empire could do no wrong. It is quite another to continue to propagate such false narratives to recruits and military cadets, including the idea that they will be honored human instruments fighting for freedom and democracy. This leaves them completely unprepared for the mind blistering shock they receive in the midst of their deployment when they find that what they are doing is not spreading freedom and democracy at all, but instead generating enslavement and plutocracy. It is a twofold moral betrayal on the part of the imperial elites. One is physical betrayal, of the blunt force trauma type, which literally destroys the soldier’s body. The other is a psychic betrayal that renders the mind so incapacitated, it eventually destroys itself.

While addressing the power structure that initiates and supports war, the social critic Caitlin Johnstone stated that:

The globe-spanning power structure that is centralized around the United States is the most evil, soulless and destructive force on this planet. The young people who are duped, manipulated and financially coerced into joining its war machine come back horrifically traumatized by the experiences they have in the situations they are placed in. Something better is needed. This cannot continue.

The shame for this rests on the shoulders of not only the empirical elites who amass huge profits and political power at the expense of soldiers’ lives, but also, on people like me, if I know about it and do nothing to try to stop it. In the ignorance of these events, one is void of the ability to do anything about it. Once I have been informed of these happenings, the longer I linger in addressing it, the more my shame grows. It is hard for me not to think that the original intentions of these soldiers were admirable, morally sound, and life affirming.

When I relay the information given here to friends and acquaintances, I have been accused of being un-American. How could making an honest effort to save soldiers’ lives by stopping these senseless wars be defined as un-American?

In closing, I would like to remind myself and the reader that we, as a nation, are not destined to do this. This is not our purpose in life. How ridiculous it would be for me to claim that a system that was created by human beings, could not be dismantled and redirected toward peace by human beings. The wheels are already in motion to stop this madness. Some of the drivers are soldiers themselves.

Note: I would like to give special thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for pointing me to the tweets of those who were suffered the ramifications of war.

* Peter Phillips, Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity, The Censored Press 2024, Ch.1, Pg.8

** Profiting From Pain, Pg. 3

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Transcription:

"I don't want to be displaced again. I just want to die right now." So begins a voice note from a Gaza City medical student to Dr. Mimi Syed, as the Israeli military prepares to once again forcibly displace some 1 million Palestinians in the northern city, triggering widespread fear of another humanitarian catastrophe.

She continued: "I hate myself for being in Gaza. No one showed us any mercy. I just want to die right now. I think it's the only way I will find relief." "I don't want to be displaced again, Mimi. I'm so tired. I'm so tired."

«لا أريد أن أُهجَّر مرة أخرى.. فقط أريد أن أموت الآن». بهذه الكلمات بدأت طالبة طب من مدينة غزة رسالة صوتية أرسلتها إلى الدكتورة ميمي سيد ، بينما يستعد الجيش الإسرائيلي لتهجير قسري جديد يهدد نحو مليون فلس طيني في شمال المدينة, مما يثير مخاوف واسعة من كارثة إنسانية أخرى. وتابعت الطالبة قائلة: «أكره نفسي لأني في غزة. لم يُظهر لنا أحد أي رحمة. فقط أريد أن أموت الآن. أعتقد أن هذا هو السبيل الوحيد لأجد الراحة». «لا أريد أن أُهجَّر مرة أخرى يا ميمي. لقد تعبت.. تعبت كثيرًا».

Please Pray, meditate, and wish peace to these troubled hearts. It is the least we can do for the Health Care Volunteers in Gaza.

Having embarked on a psychological analysis of the current world scene, I can’t avoid saying something about Donald Trump. Many professional psychologists have asserted that his words and behaviors clearly and unmistakably show that he suffers from malignant NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).

Besides confirming with a medical acronym what many of us knew already, psychologists may help us exploring the issue a bit further. Narcissism is deeply linked to shame. Obviously the current POTUS experiences no conscious shame, i.e. he exhibits constantly a shameless behavior, but that is precisely a clear indication that he hosts within his subconscious mind an enormous amount of shame.

Average people feel shame when they realize that they have behaved in ways that hurt or displeased others (thus one can also distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate shame). Emotions can escalate to feelings of guilt for repeated or intentional behaviors (again, appropriate or inappropriate “feeling bad”).

Shame and guilt are matters of human life which cannot be simply eliminated. In the case of persons suffering from NPD they are deeply repressed. If they came to light all of the sudden, being huge as they are in their case, they would destroy their minds at once.

Narcissists, however, not only push such feelings down as much as they can but — unfortunately for the rest of humanity — they also project them outwards in a desperate effort to free themselves from them.

Like a rolling ball of shame running amok and continually projecting blame, Trump has not only become a liability to America, but is responsible for an enormous amount of pain and suffering inside the USA and around the world. The question then is: why? Why has the currrent political/social system given so much power to a person who is so broken? Many people have been duped, but that does not explain the situation well enough.

There must be within US society a consistent group of narcissists who identify themselves with the behavior of their chief — they already behave like him in private, but they fantasize being him, i.e. being as destructive as he is without paying consequences.

There must also be a consistent group of masochists — for lack of a better term — who are so used to be mistreated by narcissists that they find a kind of perverse comfort in the nation being led by him rather than by someone who would make them think, with the risk of bringing up to consciousness their real feelings.

Donald Trump is sick, but a healthy society keeps power away from people like him.

Years ago, I was alerted by my friend Fr. Richard Rubin to the dynamics of shame and guilt: how they play within individuals and groups, and how Christianity could be understood as an attempt to “lift the shame” — meaning the inappropriate kind of shame — from people’s hearts.

Since then, I have been testing his hypothesis, often reflecting on New Testament expressions such as “shameful death on the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Dying on a cross in Roman times was a shameful death, without a doubt, but I am now convinced that early Christians “appropriated” such shame, meaning that they made conscious the shame that they felt inside as slaves or lower class people.

And then they went further. By consciously placing “the crucified” as the foundation of their community (see 1 Corinthians 1), they not only proclaimed that the most humiliated are actually worthy but they also helped lifting the excessive shame from the shoulders of the newly converted, while the community was safely closed off to any narcissist who wandered in and attempted to project shame.

I know that this combination of social and psychological realities is fundamentally the opposite that the kind of Christianity that most people have known in their lives, especially but not exclusively in the USA. Personally, I think that learning from these 1st-century folks is worth a try.

Guy’s Comments;

Paragraphs 1 thru 9 of the article above are an excellent expression of the connection between shame and narcissism. Then things take left turn. There is no doubt that, “early Christians appropriated” the shame of the cross, but this shame was a toxic projection issued from an imperial power structure, and this shame “uplifted” no one. Instead, this projection likely evoked feelings of total vulnerability, helplessness, fear of abandonment, and a complete inability to facilitate an effective response to the actions of a superior physical power. In short, the shame afforded no life affirming effect, similar to the Yahwist narrative in Genesis 3, where Eve in her longing to attain knowledge is brutally prohibited from engaging in any form of moral discourse with the creator or the created. Had Eve remained compliant, moral theology would have been forever lost to some of the worlds most profound commentators. Once Augustine comes on the scene this toxic shame becomes stamped in dogmatic code, and ‘I am not worthy’ becomes the hall mark of Christian identity. And yes, this was highly “inappropriate.”

Shame can evoke life giving effects, if I am willing to own those occasions when I have wounded others and take the opportunity to practice honest self-reflection. As this locates the perspective within myself, I am called to explore the depths of my own self-protective strategies, to re-assess my own urges to assuage my loneliness (emptiness) with self -indulgence, and review my own self-deceptions and formulated excuses I use to shove people off who are telling me a truth about myself that I don’t want to hear. Then I can approach the offended and personally tell them, ‘I am sorry for the pain I caused you, I was wrong and it never should have happened.’

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As I read through the essays presented here by Sean Griobhtha, Sobia Quazi, Palestine Will Be Free, and other poignant commentators on the Stack who are a part of the Anti-Empire, Anti-War, and Pro-Palestinian collective, I find myself humbled and honored to be considered in their number. Each has their own unique way of identifying the peace that is always an option in times of conflict, and exposing the power structures who ignore this possibility, at the cost of “The Other’s” life and limb, in order to accelerate their own insidious genocidal motives and blatantly apparent agendas. They, like me, and a couple billion other global family members, refuse to sit idly by as any sense of humanity we have left slowly slips through our fingers.

Today, I wish to invite all of you to respond to a recent topic that has come to the fore in relation to those things that happen within our inner being and metastasizes in our outer sphere in extremely grotesque ways. This came to a head two days ago in a Twitter/X post that I have republished at the end of this writing as a case in point.

Guilt

For my part, being raised in a conservative Catholic tradition, where we learned to plead guilty to just about everything that went wrong (thanks to the neurotic distortions of scripture that were presented by the often praised Augustine of Hippo (354-430AD), that eventually became codified into Church dogma) guilt and shame became the way of our inner and outer life. It took some of us fellow travelers 60 years to untangle this conditioned web of deceit that was seated in the far reaches of our consciousness.

On the matter of guilt, I direct you to a profound in depth exploration that situates this culprit of defilement in its proper place, written by the noted French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work, The Symbolism of Evil. In his commentary, Ricoeur defines guilt for what is,

Guiltiness is never anything else than the anticipated chastisement itself, internalized and already weighing upon [one’s] consciousness; and as dread is from the beginning the way of internalization of defilement itself, in spite of the radical externality of the evil, guilt is a moment contemporaneous with defilement itself… It is because man is ritually unclean that he is ‘burdened’ with fault; he need not be the author of the evil to feel himself burdened by its weight and the weight of its consequences.

It is not by accident that this language embraces, “both the public domain of penal justice and the private domain of moral conscience” Ricoeur reminds us.

I remember those times in my childhood, when a note was sent home from one of the nuns at our Catholic grade school. The moment you saw the folded white paper sealed with a single staple, a secret warrant, you knew that bloody hell had entered the room and violence was just a flicker away.

The guilt became so internally embedded, that you learned to keep up the pressure within the confines of your own mind, as you stood alone under the ever watchful eye of an invisible, omnipresent, and angry god. In this, consciousness transforms into a guilty conscience, as you became familiar with your self-created mental torture chamber. As Ricoeur so elegantly expresses,

It is enough for the sense of sin as being before God be abolished for guilt to work its havoc; at the limit, it is an accusation without an accuser, a tribunal without a judge, and a verdict without an author. To be accursed without being cursed by anybody is the highest degree of accursedness, as Kafka shows. By the semblance of intention that remains in a radically anonymous condemnation, the verdict is hardened into fate.

One of my former mentors, a Franciscan Friar named John J. Lakers, an outstanding language philosopher in his own right, in his unpublished work titled Reflections, maps out the dynamics of internalized guilt that played a key role in his formative years.

The metaphors [of power and judgement that] evokes guilt is quite straight forward. It functions as an internalized judge who subjects [our] actions to codified systems of prescriptions and prohibitions designed to promote some “common good.” In everyday English, it clothes its judgments in a language of “should” and “should not,” “ought,” “duty,” and “obligation.” And since it seems to speak from nowhere, it seems to texture its judgements with divine authority… this language is really the voice of a committee in one’s head which activates memory traces of judgements imposed on us by significant people in our lives, and its formative power re-enforces their sad belief that a system of rewards and punishments will succeed in producing moral individuals.

Shame

As often as we see guilt, fault, and shame placed in the same box, these identifiers are not synonymous with one another. As noted above, guilt is a worthless tool in the hands of compassionate individuals; and has nothing to do with forming moral individuals; and has everything to do with indoctrinating the populous into an obedient disposition toward a particular power structure. Shame, however, is quite a different phenomenon.

Shame is a natural mechanism present in all of us that is triggered when we have said or done something that has wounded ourselves or another. It is that uneasy feeling in your gut that we all have experienced at some time or another, that lets you know that something has gone wrong.

Only those who have been indoctrinated beyond hope, those whose inner wounds have been neglected to the point that the mechanism has congealed and become arrested within a thick layer of callousness, are beyond shame. Some speculate that these individuals have been wounded on so many occasions that the bodymind develops a self-protective strategy to shield them from further injury. In this case, all feelings are choked off to the point of sociopathy, i.e., they don’t feel anything.

In this context, shame falls into two categories, it can be toxic or life giving. In the former, shame is thrust upon an unsuspecting victim who did nothing to provoke the actions of the agent. I have spent hours upon hours with clergy sex abuse survivors who have told their stories. They were violated at a young age that was well before they had attained the psychological maturity to mitigate such traumatic violence. These stories are filled to the brim with feelings of total vulnerability, helplessness, fear of abandonment, and a complete inability to facilitate an effective response to the agent’s actions. To those readers who have been witnessing the horrors that have been unleashed on the children of Gaza, which is a daily showering of toxic shame, I am sure you will find these words to be all too familiar.

One of the points of this writing was to inform the viewer that our utterly incompetent leaders are attempting to thrust toxic shame onto us, their own populations, in the US, Britain, and the other European counterparts, as well as in Palestine. Protestors beaten into submission, journalists arrested and/or murdered, threats and lethal retaliation against family members, employment termination, the whole works. All for a situation that for many of us, until recently, was beyond our scope of knowing. We didn’t create it, we didn’t cause it, and we had zero control over it, until now. And I’m here to tell you, I’M NOT HAVIN’ ANY OF IT!

Life Giving Shame

The latter, Life Giving Shame, moves in the opposite direction. In this case, I am the adult agent and I have committed the offense. This locates the perspective within myself. If the offender/ receiver relationship has not been severed, this provides me with an opportunity to practice honest self-reflection, to explore the depths of my own self-protective strategies, to assess my urges to assuage my loneliness with self -indulgence, to review my own self-deceptions and formulated excuses I use to shove people off who are telling me a truth about myself that I don’t want to hear. Close friends are good for this. Good friends are hard to find and will keep you honest. They are often the receivers of these petty slights that spawn from my anger and frustration over a particular situation.

With this in play, I have the golden opportunity to walk with personal integrity to those I have wounded and tell them, ‘I am sorry, I was being a major league asshole, AGAIN.’ “Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door to the kingdom of heaven,” the U.N. Known Poet once wrote, and it’s true. And I’m not talking about the heaven of our childhood, that is far away in another time and place, heaven now! The heaven that resides in the brief moments of peace that friends can share with one another all things real and imagined that come to them without the cast of judgement upon us.

A Case In Point

Two days ago, one of my colleagues on Twitter/X directed me to a post that was up on his feed. The poster’s name was Brandon Stanton. According to his website, Humans of New York, Stanton is a writer and photographer who runs a story telling platform that has garnered accolades from over thirty million followers.

The post is authored by an anonymous pediatric intensive care unit doctor who recently spent 2 months in Rafah among the barely breathing skull and bones of what used to be children. As I write these words Al Jazeera reports that 8 more people including 3 children have starved to death in the last 24 hours in Gaza. This is all the introduction you will need as the words below speak for themselves.

Post

Brandon Stanton

@humansofny

“When I entered Gaza, the Israeli military had a rule: I was only allowed to bring in three kilos of food. As I was weighing out protein bars, trying to get under the limit, I said to my husband: ‘How sinister is this?’ I’m a humanitarian aid worker. Why would there even be a limit on food? I’ve worked in many places with extreme hunger, but what’s so jarring in this context is how cruel it is, how deliberate. I was in Gaza for two months; there’s no way to describe the horror of what’s happening. And I say this as a pediatric ICU doctor who sees children die as part of my work. Among our own staff we have doctors and nurses who are trying to treat patients while hungry, exhausted. They’re living in tents. Some of them have lost fifteen, twenty members of their families. In the hospital there are kids maimed by airstrikes: missing arms, missing legs, third degree burns. Often there’s not enough pain medication. But the children are not screaming about the pain, they’re screaming: ‘I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” I hate to only focus on the kids, because nobody should be starving. But the kids, it just haunts you in a different way. When my two months were finished, I didn’t want to leave. It’s a feeling I haven’t experienced in nearly twenty years of humanitarian assignments. But I felt ashamed. Ashamed to leave my Palestinian colleagues, who were some of the most beautiful and compassionate people that I’ve ever met. I was ashamed as an American, as a human being, that we’ve been unable to stop something that is so clearly a genocide. I remember when our bus pulled out of the buffer zone. Out the window on one side I could see Rafah, which was nothing but rubble. On the other side was lush, green Israel. When we exited the gate, the first thing I saw was a group of Israeli soldiers, sitting at a table, eating lunch. I’ve never felt so nauseous seeing a table full of food.”

3:00 PM · Aug 11, 2025

https://x.com/humansofny/status/1954996475571646976

In closing I want to make it clear; we will never stop our compassionate involvement with the deeply wounded People of Palestine. Our commitment goes well beyond the point of when the killing stops, as we intend to infuse ourselves in the healing process that will take decades to see it through. We will not be diverted by the obscene remarks that flow from the mouths of zionist supremacist politicians in Israel and the USA, in an attempt to dampen the massive eruption of moral outrage from protestors across the planet. We are well aware that as each day passes, the total extermination plan enacted by Netanyahu and his minions becomes tomorrow’s reality. We are also aware that the children of Gaza hold the humanity of the world in the palm of their hands, and if they go, we all soon will follow. I only need to look in the faces of my own children and grandchildren to know that if the world is not safe for the children of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, the world is not safe for anyone.

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“This morning at 10, 5 activists of Free Palestine blocked the entrance to the Helicopter Division of the Leonardo SpA company. Blocking the main entrance to the headquarters and occupying the roof of one of the buildings, painting the Leonardo sign with red paint.

In the report published by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese on June 30, it emerged that Leonardo SpA, controlled by the Italian state, is one of the companies most involved in supplying Israel militarily during the genocide of the Palestinian people, and one of the companies that made more profit, closing 2023 and 2024 with record profits even thanks to the Gaza aggression.

Italy is still the third nation for war supplies to Israel, despite the ICC's genocide charges and arrest warrant for war crimes and against humanity hanging on Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister. To date, there are about 58 thousand confirmed deaths in Gaza. In a study published by Lancet in June 2024 it was estimated that more than 186 thousand Palestinians have died in Gaza since October 7, 2023 as a result of Israeli aggression and the blockade imposed on humanitarian aid.

Among those people, there are 50 thousand children killed or injured, one every 20 minutes.

According to Leonardo herself, in 2024 logistical support activities for the fleet of M-346 trainers for a total value of around seven million euros are planned.

It's unacceptable to support a criminal government that is committing a massacre and ethnic cleansing in front of the world just because it's economically convenient. Italians don't want to be complicit in this genocide.”

Added Bonus:

Eye on Palestine reported that some aid trucks trickled into Southern Gaza today. No further details were provided. “If you save one man, you save the world,” (a paraphrase from the Holy Quran).

“Palestinians receive flour following the entry of a number of aid trucks to the southern Gaza Strip.”

https://x.com/EyeonPalestine/status/1947961933463711858

There was an eye opening event that happened last Tuesday in the heart of the US Empire that quashes any notion that ordinary people, like you and I, have no agency to stop this hellish madness that has arrested control of our country. I would like to share it with you and you let me know what you think.

It was around 9:40am CST, and I was running some errands before I was to meet a client at 10am about pouring a concrete pad for his above ground swimming pool. To briefly sketch some context, I live in an ordinary small town of about 25 thousand people in Mid-Western USA. In a country where lawlessness on behalf of our greed soaked leaders is common place, we go about our daily lives still minding the traffic signals, stopping at crosswalks for pedestrians, waiting behind the stopped school buses as they are loading and unloading children, and we still pull over to let emergency vehicles pass so that they can reach a person(s) in need at the other end of their journey. You know, we basically still follow the laws we were taught to follow since we were kids so that Yeats’ “Mere anarchy is [not] loosed upon the world.”

Believe it or not, in my neck of the woods common courtesy is still a thing. You still see people open a door for another at the convenience mart, even if their hands aren’t full. In this interchange it is not unusual to hear a, “Yes Ma’am” or “Yes Sir” as that’s just the way we were raised. And a “Thank you” is the common follow up from the obligee to the obliger. Many years ago this all happened with little notice. Now, in a conflictual world that has been turned upside down, people notice! This may be the only act of care they experience for the rest of their day.

In this ordinary Midwest muddy river town some of us are politically red, some blue, others somewhere in between. And some of us have long ago given up the shades of the red/blue color spectrum and sit outside the political prison that has dominated our lives over the last three quarters of a century. Even in these little micro-metros, some people have begun to realize that John Wayne is dead, Norman Rockwell painted nostalgic fantasies, the American dream was just a dream after all, and our fearless leaders do not have our best interest at heart.

Don’t get me wrong, we have our fair share of physical/sexual violence, thievery, and corruption in this town. But that was not at the forefront currently.

So, I am sitting at one of the busier intersections of our humble burg around 9:40am waiting for the light to turn green, and I watch as a pickup truck with its tail gate down comes barreling into the intersection and makes a hard left hand turn. I, and the others awaiting their turn at the cross jaws drop as the load of new lumber that was stacked high and loose on the back of the truck comes flying out of the bed and onto the pavement at the center of intersection. The truck’s spare tire, which was sitting on top of the load, was launched over the bedside of the truck and came rolling past the front of my vehicle.

As a matter of course, I jump out of my truck and stop the tire in mid-roll and direct it back to the now stopped vehicle blocking traffic at the intersection. As I approach, the driver and passenger of the halted vehicle get out to survey the situation. The eighty something passenger was the grandmother of the fifty something driver; both were absolutely dumb struck. As I leaned the spare tire against their truck, I asked the grandmother how far they had to go and she said to Calhoun, as her eyes remained gazed at the twixty-twisted pile of wood on the pavement. Calhoun is a thirty plus mile ride from where we stood. I heard someone behind me and turned to see that a younger woman had gotten out of her car that was blocked at the intersection, and picked up one of the planks from the pile to put it in the back in the Calhouner's truck. I was kind of surprised by this as the granddaughter was still standing in a frozen position on the other side of the truck with a bewildered look on her face. The younger women literally had to ask the granddaughter to move so that she could complete her intent?!? There had to have been at least forty people blocked at that intersection that were staring at us wondering what the hell we were going to do.

I turned to grandma shaking my head,

“Ma’am, you weren’t going to get two blocks, let alone to Calhoun, with the way that load was set on your truck. Whoever did that didn’t do you any favors.”

As I spoke with her, I noticed that another person, a middle aged male, had exited his vehicle to help re-load the truck. I started smiling.

I told grandma, as I pointed up the road,

“Once you get re-loaded, take the next right and pull over. I will meet you there. Drive slow, or you’ll drop that load again.”

Then another blocked driver got out of his car and started helping re-load the lumber, then another, and then two more! I was really smiling then. ‘This is so beautiful,’ I thought. ‘People helping each other is why we’re here.’

With all the help, the fifty planks and the tire were back on the truck within about 15 minutes, and grandma and granddaughter were slowly headed up to the next turn just like I suggested. The good and noble Samaritan helpers, half-hurried back to their cars to go about their day, as I heartily thanked them all.

I met the couple at the next turn and directed them to the closest parking lot. The granddaughter gets out of the truck and I told her, “We got some work to do here and I’m late for an appointment so we gotta get movin’.” She looked at me like she was a bit perturbed. “What are you going to do?” she asked. Again, I shook my head,

“We have to unload all the planks out of this truck and re-stack the load with the tailgate closed. That’s the reason you lost the load, and the tie off strap they used to hold the load in place was loose. You got at least three quarters of a ton of weight here. If you want to make it all the way back to Calhoun, we gotta do this.”

She begrudgingly agreed as I started pulling the planks and the tire off the truck. I have to admit that I was somewhat confused by her resistant demeanor but, I was running behind and didn't have time for a heart to heart discussion. She finally pitched in and we got the truck unloaded and reloaded with the tailgate up and the strap re-fastened and cinched tight with some stainless steel wire that I had in my tool box.

I was soaked with sweat. The button down dress shirt I wore for the meeting had tar smeared on it from their spare tire I was lugging around. I turned to the granddaughter and said, “You're ready to go,” and she got back in the driver’s seat without a word. I walked to the passenger side of their truck and told grandma that they should make it to Calhoun without a problem. She gave a near emotionless “Thank you,” and they pulled off.

As I was driving to my meeting, I recalled the powerful display of spontaneous assistance that helped the Calhouners get back on the road and began smiling again.

If people spontaneously worked together to solve this issue, what prevents us from banding together to solve the larger issues that face our country today? This very real possibility scares the hell out of the moralless oligarchs who are attempting to take complete control of our lives. The fear they experience when they witness a massive display of solidarity among the ordinary populous throws them into maddening convulsions, because they know that coordinated creative energy can wield tremendous political power. Power that would dismantle their wicked networks of domination and force them to surrender the democracy that they have subverted for their own pernicious means. This “people power” as the renowned Stack author, Sobia Quazi puts it, would hold our leaders to account for the crimes they committed against us and the rest of our human family.

Notes:

Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s John Wayne movies were regular entertainment in our household. He had long been seated as the iconic US American macho male by this time, promoting individualism, American exceptionalism, and moral superiority. With the vantage of hindsight and a little research, Wayne is exposed as a US White Supremacist who glorifies war and served as a useful propaganda tool for the US military industrial complex. In later interviews he openly praises the colonialist genocide of Native North Americans and blamed the indigenous peoples for their own extermination as they were being selfish in not sharing their land. To make sure that Americans understood his position, in 1971 he stated, “I believe in white supremacy,” in an interview with Playboy Magazine. Sadly, he is still worshiped today as what it means to be an American. For a good review of John Wayne’s legacy, you can read Loren Kantor’s article on Medium.

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