The New York Times published a story showcasing a skeletal child who later died of malnutrition. A British-Israeli “journalist-investigator” accused the paper of intentionally misleading its audience. He claimed the child did not die of malnutrition but of a congenital disease. Backed by this claim, the Israeli lobby exerted full pressure on the newspaper, which, days later, published an amendment to the article reflecting this view.
The “journalist-investigator” David Collier—who, judging from the content of his X account and website, is an uncritical supporter of everything the State of Israel does—claimed to have a document from an NGO stating that the child suffered from cerebral palsy, had hypoxemia, and was born with a serious genetic disorder. He also pointed to the child’s brother, featured in one of the pictures, who did not show signs of malnutrition.
What he did not say, and what the child’s mother stated in an interview, is that the child, named Mohammed, was born in December 2023, during the Israeli offensive, without any preexisting chronic illnesses. “Doctors diagnosed him with macrocephaly, which they said was caused by nutritional deficiencies during pregnancy due to the Israeli war,” the mother stated.
She emphasized that Mohammed was healthy and of normal weight at birth. “Over the past four months of displacement, his condition worsened due to the severe shortage of food. That is when he developed acute malnutrition.” His brother was older when the Israeli attack began and had greater strength to survive. Mohammed, on the other hand, suffered from the Israeli starvation policy even before he was born—and he died because of it.
Israeli propagandists are now deploying this argument to justify the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. They no longer deny the brutal reality of starvation—though some still try—because the evidence is overwhelming and the cause so clear that their lies are exposed. What they attempt now is to deflect blame—either to Hamas, the UN, or any organization trying to help the Palestinians—or, in the face of undeniable deaths, to a preexisting medical condition.
The Wall Street Journal shamelessly published an op-ed with exactly that argument: “Hamas propaganda exploits ill children and the media goes along,” reads the subtitle. This claim was later echoed by British journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer and by the pro-Israeli blogosphere, using the supposed credibility of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as legitimacy for their narrative.
This is the way Israeli propaganda works. It is even feasible, though speculative, that The New York Times, given its openly pro-Israeli coverage of Gaza, purposefully published the piece in that way so that it would have to issue an amendment later that Israeli apologists could use to strengthen their claims. But it is not just one child. There are hundreds of them—as well as men and women of all ages—starving. At the time of writing, 193 people, 96 of them children, have died of starvation.
The reality of the situation—the man-made, Western-enabled famine—is obvious to all of us. That is why Western governments are rushing to show the most irrelevant signs of support for the Palestinians who are dying: they want an excuse in case they are asked tomorrow. But it is too late. The stain of this genocide will haunt us all because we have entered uncharted ethical territory.
“Do not do unto others what you would not want done to yourself.” This principle, known as the Silver Rule, has been articulated in one form or another as the cornerstone of ethics throughout history.
It appears in The History of the Peasant in ancient Egypt and in Confucian thought as: “Do not impose on others that which you yourself do not desire.” In the Mahabharata, the Sanskrit tradition states: “One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self. In brief, this is dharma. Anything else is succumbing to desire.”
The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Ancient Sages, when asked how to lead a righteous life, said: “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” A similar principle was echoed by Pittacus of Mytilene, another of the Seven Sages, in the words: “Do not do what you scold others for.” Romans maintained this ethical tradition, and Cicero expressed it as: “Everything you criticize in others, you should avoid doing yourself.”
The Abrahamic prophetic tradition maintained this principle as a cornerstone of its ethical framework. The revered Rabbi Hillel, who lived in Palestine at about the same time as Jesus, when asked by a polytheist to explain in short the essence of religion, answered: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.” Jesus made it the second great commandment in the Sermon on the Mount when he stated: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Muhammad famously stated: “You will not believe until you love for your brother what you love for yourself.” The Qur’an equates killing one person with killing all of humanity, and saving one person with saving all of humanity.
Jumping ahead, Kant, in his characteristically rational way, first defined it in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals as: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” He later refined it in the Critique of Practical Reason: “Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of universal legislation.”
Modern utilitarian, humanist, and atheist thinkers have continued expressing this idea as the basis for ethical behavior. John Stuart Mill implied this reciprocity when he stated: “The morality of an action depends on its consequences for general happiness.” Bertrand Russell called it “the essence of morality,” and Richard Dawkins proposed that acting in this way is what it means to be “cultured, with the power to defy our selfish genes.”
Of course, interpretations of the applicability of this principle vary, and defining what is harmful or beneficial is another discussion. But what is clear is that across traditions and in modernity, this principle remains the near-universal foundation of ethics and morality.
Following this, the genocide of the people of Gaza should not be wished upon anyone. Yet parts of Israeli society and some of its leaders express a vehement desire to inflict unimaginable pain and suffering on Palestinians—not on Hamas combatants, whether one calls them terrorists or resistance fighters, but on the civilian children, women, and men. They wish them all to starve, to be bombarded and killed, and to be removed from their homeland. They wish for their total annihilation.
That is not war. Even war has rules—hence the Geneva Conventions, which state that in armed conflicts, civilian harm must be avoided. In war, the warring parties have a conflict to resolve; they may seek to subjugate the other, but not to exterminate them entirely. One side may wish harm on the other, but it accepts the possibility of suffering a similar fate, even if it tries to avoid it. When that is no longer the case—when one party intentionally seeks the total annihilation of the other and has the means to achieve it, while the other has little to no ability to stop it—we call it genocide, but no word truly captures it.
It is difficult—and perhaps impossible—to justify a war as ethical, but war can be waged with some ethics. In Gaza, there are none, because the most fundamental rule of ethics is ignored.
It is not the first time this has happened in history, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last. It is, however, the first time a genocide has been publicly broadcast, and almost no one can claim ignorance. This holds especially true for Western governments that have enabled Israeli rhetoric and actions. Their support for Israel, even as its intentions were made explicitly clear, amounts to acquiescence in those actions. The rest of the world has been less silent, but equally incapable of stopping it.
The possibility of something like this occurring while Israel maintains near-impunity poses many serious questions about international institutions, international law, and human rights. But one goes to the core of the social order under Western states: under which ethical framework—religious, secular, atheist, or otherwise—do Western governments operate if they do not uphold the first principle of ethics? It is an important question to ask because much of their legitimacy—and our safety—depends on it.
The Israeli government, for its part, has lost all legitimacy not only because of the genocide it is committing, but also because it has failed to uphold a principle central to Jewish life, according to Rabbi Hillel, and its entire claim to legitimacy is built upon being a state for the Jewish people.
Plato said, “…for this is the Law and the Prophets”?
Plato? Sounds rabbinical to me.
It’s biblical, not from Plato.
Matthew 7:12
You are right. I misquoted it, trusting another source instead of checking the original. That is my bad—apologies. I’ve deleted it.
we is all human beans, as Wuk sez.
for curiosity: how does one say your first name?
K or S for the C?
this is one of the numerous issues ive come across learning Latin the way i did.
no grammar, no understanding of declensions, etc…just word for word translation, from Cicero to a legal pad, via a Harper’s Latin lexicon,lol…while the boys were doing naps.
from that latin, however, i can read El Pais, or some Italian newspaper(not French, too many extra letters)…even a Catalonian newspaper.
but i just get the Gist.
My apologies, I missed this comment last week!
Curro is pronounced with K.
There seems to have been some mangling of the Christian Gospel. Yes, both Matthew’s sermon on the mount and Luke’s sermon on the plain provided the “do unto others” maxim, but not so much in the context of greatest commandments. Rather the commandments are from Matthew 22 where the first is “love the Lord your God..” and the second to “love your neighbor…” “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Spoken as an answer to some Pharisees.
The second great commandment is indeed a version of ‘Do unto others…’ since the entire commandment says ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’, linking one’s self to the ‘self’ of ‘your neighbor’. And the enlargement of ‘who is my neighbor?’ is the story of the good Samaritan, who gives assistance to someone he does not know, and who is not therefore, as far as he knows himself, of his own faith.
Well said. But it’s also degrading values around the world because few countries are trying to do much about it. Yemen is an exception.
You have to wonder how many of the F-18 pilots who were bombing Yemen got into the gig because all they wanted to be from age six was Luke Skywalker.
How to break it to them that, umm:
Yemen is Tattooine
The Houthis are the Rebel Alliance
And their carrier strike group —Yep!— its the Death Star.
Not sure if you were referencing this , but it’s quite real, the action/fantasy movie worldview.
As somebody said it Telegram: “we’re only starving sick children” is not as strong a defense as one might think…
There is almost a hint of thr common refrain during Covid. Only those who already have morbidities are at risk. Wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people making these decisions do think that starving sick children is less of a crime.
I also wonder if this rationale will end up bringing up the question: “why are there so many sick children in Gaza, BEFORE the war?” Could it be because starting almost 20 years ago, Israel has calculated the number of calories a person needs to not be considered malnourished, and has limited the amount of food trucks allowed into Gaza based on those calculations? Often allowing LESS than what they figured was needed to prevent malnutrition.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-starvation-diet-gaza/11810
…isn’t it the Golden Rule?
And I fear this ethical framework has been in tatters for a while now. Rules of war in Europe were loosened critically during the World Wars (one example would be the widespread acceptance of the idea that hostages taken from among civilians can be killed, which contradicted the earlier notion that hostages sacrificed their freedom rather than their lives). For Europeans outside of Europe, I think the rules may have been looser to begin with but were also loosened substantially in the early 19th century (IIRC there were some precedents in brutality established in Algeria and Chechnya that went beyond previously acceptable behaviour). This is just a new outburst of self-righteous total warfare, a problem that was never really dealt with because it was practiced by the winners as well as (though I think not as much as) the losers.
That is often called the golden rule in the US, the better to avoid the real golden rule, which is: Whar you have done to others, can be done to you.
…or possibly “Those who have the gold make the rules.”
Or, those who make the rules can take all the gold for themselves.
Chicken or the egg? We should try just making some rules, see what happens… interestingly, this is only the second time I have promoted indoctrination of The Book of Yves. There is gold in this; bask in her radiance, live in abundance forever more.
The colonial wars that resulted from 19th century imperialism provided ample precedents for genocidal behavior. As witness the German war against the Herero in Namibia (Southwest Africa). Or the massacre of millions (an exact number has never been determined) in King Leopold’s Congo Free State. Or the near-extermination of Native Americans (a policy much admired by Hitler).
What happens in the colonies, or on the frontier, doesn’t stay there.
Dresden.
Or, as McNamara put it w.r.t. Curtis LeMay’s campaign of firebombing Japanese cities:
Excellent documentary. Also very relevant regarding nuclear strike psychology.
In the 2024 Presidential “election,” nearly 150 million Americans voted for continued genocide via the democrat candidate Harris… democrat party supporters, mostly.
It’s a long ways to ’28, and if we’re still around we’ll see how many republican party supporters are supporting genocides (Lebanon? Syria? Iran? (Gaza and West Bank will be bones, dust, and avoided subjects)), but for now we have lists of Americans (voter rolls, registrations) who give their consent to war crimes and crimes against humanity– we’d be fools not to use this, fools not to name and shame.
Democrat voters need to be held to personal account for their criminal culpability and for enabling this mass-murder and genocide.
Please do not see this as a partisan issue. More than 150 million voted for the Republican candidate and got . . more genocide. Did you not see the picture on NC today of the Republican delegation posing with the world’s foremost war criminal? My understanding is that the evangelical population, by and large supporters of the Zionists, are heavily Republican voters. Mike Huckabee example #1.
As I suggest to my friends and acquaintances in those rare moments when I discuss politics with them (what’s the use?) don’t focus on the man, however deplorable (ha ha) you may find him, focus on the system that left us with a choice of Harris or Trump, Trump or Biden, Trump or the horror, to quote Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, of Hillary Clinton.
In general I would argue the “evangelical” population, to the extent it has interest in foreign affairs, sees things in the context of an ongoing war between Christianity and Islam in which they see no way for Islam to make peace. I do not agree with the “large supporters of Zionism”, though certainly in the dispensationalist “wing” you see that.
75 million voted for Harris. 77 million for Trump. And both candidates were in favour of supporting genocide.
Cripes, not sure how I spat out those numbers– yes, your counts are correct, but Trump had promised to end that “war” too, whereas Team Harris was already a direct party to the genocide that Team Trump now are the owners of.
I remember him saying he’d end the Ukraine war withing 24 hours (haha). I didn’t realise he said the same for Gaza. Of course I’m sure he’d consider the entire population being killed or expelled would be ending it.
This just is not a political issue. It is a human issue. Either you’re for life, or you’re for death, and most don’t recognize how that choice implies their own.
What “ethical framework”? The only consistent guiding principle for any sort of international “moral” framework for the US and the empires before it is:
“Because we said so, and we have the military hegemony to state any terms we want. Just try and stop us.”
This seems like it has always been the case since the rise of nation-states. This is by no means a great thing, just that this sort of pattern seems to arise again and again and again throughout history, and unfortunately, unless somebody has the ability to project enough force to make the US/Israel back down over what is happening in the Gaza strip, it will continue.
I guess I am a reluctant realist. While I have never thought that war/conflict are ever good, protests and civil disobedience/harsh words or condemnation will only go so far if you are dealing with an entity that has the ability as well as the inclination to squelch all dissent with overwhelming force. Soft power always seems to rely on a certain degree of hard power backing it up and if you have a powerful empire like the US acting in bad faith, the only way to stop it is being in a position where you can successfully challenge it by force.
I am not happy about the above realization, but it seems that is the way things are and have largely ever been with all of history’s empires.
The Melian Dialogue is, sadly, evergreen … 😑
And so is the fate of the Athenians after being so unjust. The strong only do what they will while they’re still strong, after all.
“The Israeli government, for its part, has lost all legitimacy not only because of the genocide it is committing, but also because it has failed to uphold a principle central to Jewish life, according to Rabbi Hillel, and its entire claim to legitimacy is built upon being a state for the Jewish people.”
As so often, the Bible authorised by King James clearly states the Jewish solution to the problems created by Jews lusting for Palestinian blood and land and for those bearing false witness, whoever they may be, whether press barons, journalists, lawyers or Western politicians, because they too are steeped in the blood of children:
“18 And the judges shall make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother; 19 Then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother: so shalt thou put the evil away from among you. 20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit no more any such evil among you. 21 And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” Deuteronomy 19:21
The West may have an ethical framework in theory but we are after all man the rationalizing animal. And one of those rationalizations is to pretend that the victims are some other species or a lesser version of our own.
So, sadly, what is happening in Gaza is anything but unprecedented. What’s different in our modern age is that we in our homes become witnesses and therefore participants. When we can see that the victims are people like us there’s no way to talk our way out of that one. This is why the Pentagon decided no more “living room wars” except of the watch the bombs explode in Baghdad variety. Then it’s just a fireworks show or, as one Israeli pilot said, “a bump on the wings.” And everybody loves fireworks.
Empathy requires imagination–sociopathy the opposite. Our rulers these days are of that latter category.
Of course it’s unprecedented: never before has the hypocrisy, arrigance, and viciousness of the supercilliously moralizing monsters been exposed before everyone like this. The ball is innthe humans’ court now, unfortunately and, I suppose we’ll prove ourselves 100 times more cowardly and deceitful than the alleged “good Germans.”
Curro Jimenez, thanks, great article!
One minor grip:
The West’s Ethical Framework
MightWill Not Recover After the Israeli Genocide in GazaThe powers that be in the West have started a new Cold War (although it is distressingly HOT in Russia/Ukraine where America/NATO’s thinly veiled proxy is sending missiles into Russia – something which was unthinkable in the last Cold War). And almost from the very start, the West has made a mockery of the “moral high ground” by it’s actions in Gaza. This reflects a deep, deep misunderstanding of how the last Cold War was “won”, and why the USSR collapsed. It was NOT a military victory.
Prisoner 174517, Primo Levi, one of the most human of men, uses the word ‘Müselmann’ during his incarceration in Monowitz. This German slang term was used both by inmates and Kapos to describe those who were the most severely emaciated – in a state of living death. These ‘Müselmen’ were the prisoners who shuffled, always expressionless, always looking downwards, and who were the first to be picked by the SS in selections for the Birkenau gas chambers. These individuals were often seen as having lost the will to live and considered to be on the verge of death.
And so they did die.
Yet “Muselmann” literally translates to “Muslim” in German.
Why did German and Jew alike identify the weakest – their Untermensch – as Muslims ?
The question that then niggles is this. Has there long been such a labelling of Muslims ?
Is it inherent in the attitude of Jews, even during their own dreadful persecution, and now reflected in the very worst of Zionism – in such dehumanising of Gazans as in Netanyahu’s labelling them “human animals’.
Is this a wider held but concealed perception?
Language is important. This identity, if ingrained, even partially, would explain a lot of the ease with which sub human treatment has been meted out so brutally to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank (and of whatever religion).
In this form of Zionism Jews are always superior and have God given entitlement.
The echoes with Nazi Aryanism and lebensraum are inescapable.
I have seen several truly alarming claims by British Jews on social media in recent days that the response of the Israeli regime to the Hamas atrocity has been entirely proportionate, even inadequate, and that the Dahiya doctrine is totally justified.
This is not the simple ‘othering’ of prejudice as described by Gordon Allport, but something far more insidious.
There is no reason in this case, for the fundamental humanity in the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would be done by” to apply.
I’d guess that Islam is historically associated with fatalism, which is looked down upon as pathetic and enfeebling in a culture increasingly obsessed with freedom and free will. The association certainly shows up in 19th century Russian literature (Lermontov for one consistently referred to fatalism as the Muslim way of seeing things – though he sympathised with it) and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in English-language writings too. Of course, it’s true that predetermination was not the only theological stance in Islam, nor was it remotely exclusive to it (Calvinism springs to mind), but I guess it seemed “defining” enough for this association to take hold.
It’s funny, in not so funny way: I got the impression that Germans generally associated fatalism with the Russians. One odd place where I ran into this was the memoirs by Hans von Luck, generally considered the examplar of the “Good German,” mostly because he was no one important enough to have been involved in obvious war crimes, was close to the “action,” mostly on the Western Front, as a fairly junior officer, and he generally seems to have been a nice guy of a sort. However, the way he describes his captivity as a POW in USSR shows some rather, eh, interesting worldview and one aspect of it was the contrast he kept drawing the fatalism of the Russian gulag inmates who shared the same complex as the German POWs and the Germans who were not, or so he says. I don’t know if I want to recommend it to anyone–there are sone interestibg nuggets that are tossed out carelessly, but he strikes me as such a smarmy type that I don’t really trust him. But even if he made stuff up, how he chose to tell some of the stories is telling…
I’ve seen Russians associated with fatalism in English fairly often, but, if it makes sense, not the other way around. That is, we are stereotyped as mindlessly obedient to what we think is our fate, sure, but fatalism is not seen primarily as “a Russian way of viewing things” in the global context. But in the examples I recall, fatalism is associated with Islam and Muslims – and not just the other way around. Like they invented it, or at least perfected it.
The Nazis also saw Slavs as sub human, but, of itself, fatalism does not confer inferiority, and permit the absolute dehumanisation that dominates Revisionist Zionism, and the current Israeli far right.
Additionally, Stoicism was a valued subset of Ancient Greek culture, and passivity essential in Taoism, and some areas of Buddhism.
Though, as Jabotinsky originated in Eastern Europe, then that is another layer of the onion.
IMO (I am not Muslim) “fatalism” in Muslims is their manifestation of their faith in Allah. Whatever happens is God’s will – so why struggle against it?
As per TiPi below – “fatalism” in Taoist/Buddhist practice is manifestation of acceptance. “Everything is suffering” and “nothing is permanent” – so why fight?
Resistance is not fatalism. Resistance is the rock in the stream. Resistance endures.
Those who endure, survive.
The West’s Ethical Framework is chimera, sure they came up with Atlantic Charter and then fire bombed Hamburg and Dresden, then Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They came up with the UN Charter but allowed Israel in, bombed North Korea flat and, well, I can’t even come up with anything like a complete list.
To discuss the West’s Ethical Framework is an exercise in futility.
At least presently we have the internet (for now) to witness vice’s tribute to virtue in real time.
The West’s Ethical Framework is Calvinball.
IMO, if it existed, it has gone long before that. The Atlantic Charter and all that other stuff was at most an unsuccessful patch-job.
A lot of the indignation in such articles and responses is the cognitive dissonance involved. It’s provoked by the unavoidable reality of Israeli intentions versus the “legitimate security needs” of these “blameless and peace-loving people.” (I nearly gagged when I heard that line from some US politician).
The project has always been how to square that need with Israel’s behavior. What Israel’s self-perceived security needs really means is removing the threat posed by those millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. After all, who could trust them to accept Israel stealing their land, either before or after 10/23. (The security needs of THOSE souls doesn’t count). This project could have been pursued in a relatively kind and benevolent way, over time, had Hamas not been so rude as to force the issue, making all this unpleasantness their own damned fault.
Hence Israel was forced to hurt them. It’s kind of like the brutish husband, whose abused wife manages to sneak in a sucker-punch. All Hamas really did was “force” Israel to hurt them (meaning ALL Palestinians), here meaning to press for a Final Solution right now, with less consideration for the PR. The situation was forced on Israel, you see, and happily at this moment they are in a position to fully resolve matters with the full support of the US. Israel, collectively (it’s not just the settlers) is doing what it’s always really wanted (for their “legitimate security needs”).
Watch and notice that the US will pick up the bill of the final removal of the millions of surviving Pals, beyond the ordinary extraordinary expenses the US has picked-up for Israel over the years. (Israel being the #1 recipient of US foreign aid, BEFORE factoring in all the indirect aid in the way of no-interest loans, at-cost purchases of discounted military hardware, and dozens of other accounting dodges; not to mention the #2 recipient of aid, Egypt, effectively bribed onto the sidelines for the sake of Israel’s security. The security of the Suez Canal is a legitimate US concern, but the point remains, and if Israel’s legitimacy were genuinely recognized in the region none of this would be near the issue it is).
The other thing to notice, as it becomes impossible not to see what is going on the more blatant Israel intentions become, is the extraordinary amount of political and PR control they have over the US and the West. Why, this very post could be taken as “supporting terrorism,” as could NC for such posting.
Being able to see things for what they are makes it easier to address a given problem squarely, and in this case that means working towards a more appropriate relationship with God’s Chosen People.
,
I’ve never wished so much that the afterlife is a real thing. In the face of our impotence in stopping the horror unfolding in Gaza, one can at least cling to the hope that these genocidal monsters will have the smugness and the glee with which they inflict so much suffering wiped from their demonic faces when the most brutal form of celestial justice is being meted out to them.
Not only do I mourn the brutal, unrelenting loss of life in Gaza, I must now also mourn the loss of who I thought I was as a person. This genocide is shattering the illusion of who I thought I was – someone who’d never wish ill upon another person, nor allow hatred to flower in their heart. Netanyahu and his band of blood-thirsty, genocidal monsters have stolen that from me. The innocence of childhood shielded me from being mature enough to understand the brutality of apartheid when it was happening here in South Africa. By the time I was old enough to truly understand what people who look like me had had to endure under that brutal system, the whole thing had “ended”, the “new South Africa” had been born, and the moniker of “rainbow nation” was making headlines around the world. With Nelson Mandela openly embracing those who put him in prison for 27 years, hating the oppressors would have felt like sabotaging this nation building project. The air was thick with the spirit of reconciliation and for many of us emerging from the cocoon of childhood our identity was shaped by that prevailing national mood. Reconciliation, forgiveness, loving thy neighour, universal brotherhood etc were the ideals we strived to live by. That left very little room for hatred to blossom.
But things are different now, Not only do I wish for these Israeli psychopaths to burn in hell, I can for the first time in my life say, without any equivocation, that I absolutely hate these people. The feeling of powerlessness to stop them is debilitating, and has festered into the hatred I feel towards them. I respectfully ask the non-believers on here not to lecture me about the absurdity (as they see it) of believing in a Deity that will hold these monsters accountable someday, we all must find a way to cope and to deal with the horror that we are being subjected to. My way is to wish that a special place in hell awaits them.
Rant over…
In my dreams, the Genocidaires and their accolaideaires are transported to another world, well, it is just in dreams, a maybe woeful statement of a mechanism to stay sane. My rage knows only my own woeful bounds.
Pray for long life. I was looking over pictures from my first and only trip to South Africa a few days ago. I have a dream that one day, when real revolution comes to west – in the form of the irate, impoverished, economically imprisoned masses repeating Bastille Day coups d’état from Manhattan to Manchester to Munich – I’d like to be sitting somewhere near Mouille Point, Cape Town watching it all unfold on television while sipping on a Sahara Dry … may ${DEITY} grant us both this glorious outcome.
#iHateThemAllToo
As well as our own helplessness, my worry is how Israelis themselves will be able to live with their own future individual and collective guilt for the massacres being perpetrated, allegedly in the name of their security and safety.
The victims are both the dead and injured and the enacters of that violence.
Military training requires dehumanising of the enemy, and a transition to amorality in the executors of violence. There can be no empathy.
Dahiya, for instance, involves direct punishment of the innocent.
How might snipers become human again after operations involving shooting Palestinian children through the head or genitals (both documented war crimes) ? How might remorse affect them ?
How can the militarism integral to the everyday actions of the Israeli state ever transmute to peaceful co-existence ? If it cannot then the continued existence of that state has to be questioned.
The decline of Sparta and other martial cultures ought to hold some answers, but currently Israel cannot afford a single defeat or its entire existence will be seen as being threatened.
That is when the nuclear threat for the planet will be at its height.
I hate the Western leaders enabling the genocide (making them guilty of genocide per the Geneva Convention they created and signed), whereas I despise the (never again my &ss) Israelis and wish for them both to share the same place in hell (and history).
“Not only do I mourn the brutal, unrelenting loss of life in Gaza, I must now also mourn the loss of who I thought I was as a person. This genocide is shattering the illusion of who I thought I was – someone who’d never wish ill upon another person, nor allow hatred to flower in their heart. Netanyahu and his band of blood-thirsty, genocidal monsters have stolen that from me.” and “Not only do I wish for these Israeli psychopaths to burn in hell, I can for the first time in my life say, without any equivocation, that I absolutely hate these people. The feeling of powerlessness to stop them is debilitating, and has festered into the hatred I feel towards them.”
There’s nothing I can add to your rant, Thuto, other than to say that I share similar feelings and helplessness. Thank you for posting.
Ditto
Thank you Judy2shoes.
I just need to say how grateful I am to be able to come to NC and find understanding and depth I cannot find anywhere else and most certainly not IRL. To read the comments in this thread make me feel I am not alone. Would that we could all hold the Palestinians IRL to let them know we care…similar to the way Tony Aguilar held that little boy who came up to him to thank him. I cannot get those images out of my head, and watching Nima, while showing Chas Freeman the clip from the Tucker interview, crying while Chas Freeman kept swallowing, was heartbreaking. It really hit me then how absolutely powerless I am to stop the genocide.
Dear one, those who are touched, and those that bear the desecration of their humanity, one alone can only bear witness. Universal humanity is the argument.
Thank you, Alice X.
This is pure magic
In this vein Clare Daly and Mick Wallace spoke with Glenn Diesen about the moral and political bankruptcy of the EU:
Clare Daly & Mick Wallace: How the EU Became a War Project
Glenn Diesen
Aug 06, 2025
45 min.
https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/clare-daly-and-mick-wallace-how-the-92b
They bring up that even such war hawks as Reagan and Thatcher demanded respect of international law or in Reagan´s example, an arms embargo against Israel over Lebanon. As meaningless as that might have been. But also Lebanon was not of the scale of Gaza, naturally.
Now here is my objection:
All these old-schoolers – even Mr. Kissinger is among them – who are invoked today for the calls for justice, rule of moral principle and basic conduct of decency – might have acted presumably with more respect for other nations and intern. law simply because they could afford to.
My assertion is:
Today neither of those would act any different from our Macarons, our Stürmers, our Schultzs today. We are in this situation because “empire” is truly being challenged for the first time in centuries.
It´s systemic and not – and here I would disagree with Daly, Diesen and Wallace – incompetent political personnel.
Which from a certain POV makes it such a scary situation. There is no wiggling room left. And so you can change the personnel you will get the same result more or less (of course certain “dangerous” people won´t get into power. But this was no different in the past.)
There used to be small space for choices called democracy – or to paraphrase “MATRIX” – democracy is another word for the illlusion of choice.
Once this system is standing to the wall with its back it won´t offer that space any more – the illusion of democracy hast to go. As covertly as it can be done. If remaining in power and wealth is the only axiom.
After all, the same powers that are responsible for Gaza have been responsible for the major crimes against humanity since the rise of Europe 600 years ago. There is nothing unusual about anything that is happening today looking at it in the long run. Sadly.
Whatever pretense the West had with their supposed moral superiority over the countries of the Global Majority is now dead. It died in Gaza. Those countries will no longer put up with the constant lectures and finger waging and throw Gaza right back in their faces – as they should. We are now the ‘baddies.’ We support jihadists, we support Al Qaeda, we support Nazis, we support state-sponsored terrorism and now we support and defend in your face genocide and the slaughter of children. The west now no longer has any moral foundation left and all is left is political expediency and profit taking.
Nothing to disagree with here, but what has made me heartsick–forced me to withdraw a little from the world–is the silence of so many people, including beloved friends, including Jewish and liberal friends who I came up with, with whom I had endless earnest conversations about the Shoah, about the Nuremberg trials, Hannah Arendt, through college and beyond. The idea that the world ‘woke up’ this week to the genocide. . .
Of COURSE the west has wiped out one population after another for half a milennium, and other countries and people have committed genocide. The miserably hypocritical way that this has taken place in plain sight, though, carried out by the Jews, of all people, the dreadful lying hypocrisy of our govts, D and R. . . Couple this with the utter moral bankruptcy of our current confederacy of nimrods that’s destroying 10 million dollars worth of contraceptives today, the intentional cruelty. . .
You can tear your hair out; you can remind yourself that it’s not about you, which leaves you feeling still smaller and more impotent. I once had a tidy audience on social media for my own takes on events, trying to rise to Marx’s challenge that addressing current events as history is the hardest and most important work, perhaps, that one can do politically. But when you’ve lost all belief in half of your interlocutors, people you loved, and know that the other half know and are heartsick, too, that millions more are bludgeoned with you into stupefaction. . .
Liberals hold up half of the capitalist sky. I’m no longer trying to reach them. Why I spent years earnestly trying to do so I have no idea. I am on my way to snarling disgust with them, too. . .
“I am on my way to snarling disgust with them, too. . .”
Me too, Matthew. I’ve had it with all the insane arguments that there’s a lesser evil…or whatever. I wonder if the Palestinians can tell the difference between Blue-sponsored genocide vs Red-sponsored. Somehow, I doubt it, and as we know, both parties are all in on it and counting their filthy lucre they are making for sponsoring it.
Norman Finkelstein, Cornel West, Nadine Strossen in conversation
Norman Finkelstein in Conversation with Cornel West and Nadine Strossen | Free Speech and Gaza
August 7, 2025
200 min.
https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-in-conversation-with-cornel-west-and-nadine-strossen-free-speech-and-gaza/
Thank you!
Empathy. We desperately need a global revolution of empathy.
Indeed. Revolution, said loud. Evolution said softly by the Philosophers.
Does that mean Geneticists.
A Universal Humanity, within their and universal material means.
I await such evolution.
An interesting symbolic thing has happened at the White House. Trump has paved the Jackie Kennedy rose garden with travertine. It will soon become gray and greasy with the DC air pollution instead of the pristine look it has in the sun of coastal Florida.
Even better, it is surrounded by a border of American flag sewer drain covers where the flag stripes are grills for all the effluvia of events on that terrace can seep away.
All the loose morals and ethics of those who gather on that terrace can be conveniently sprayed away.
The US as well as Israel is ethically and morally dead
Don’t try to discuss this over on reddit, which is a speech-free zone. I was banned from r/news after I posted a couple stories covering the shootings at the GHF aid sites a month ago. One of my posts received over 400 upvotes before it was removed. I asked why it was removed, and got a ban for daring to question the gods (mods).
Content about Israel on the major sub-reddits is highly moderated by what I call ‘volunteer censors’ to the point you’ll rarely see a post critical of Israel while negative posts about Palestinians are green-lighted.
For example, the most popular “Gaza” post on r/worldnews in the last 24 hours is titled “Picture agencies drop Gaza photographer after documentary reveals hunger images were staged”.
There’s no point in going to the large subs. The large subs are infested with pro-Israel, pro-Democrat, and occasional far right bots. Find niche places like Stupidpol. The bot ratio is reasonable there.
In the meantime, British Foreign Secretary, at the forefront of claiming Israel has the right to self-defence, and continuing to provide surveillance flights over Gaza from Cyprus to gather intelligence for Netanyahu, and arms etc., to Israel, has just stated
“I am proud to present the UK for election to the UN Human Rights Council… As Keir Starmer said to the UN General Assembly… human rights speak to our inherent dignity, the very essence of what it is to be human”. Hypocricy thy name is Lammy. I don’t know how they can sleep at night.
Lammy, alongside Starmer, should face trial in the Hague for his corruption (his studies at Harvard were financed by Jewish interests) and support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the classic tradition there are two versions of the golden rule,…
The described above & the one for colonialism, Empire, & everyone else.
which goes, “He whom has the gold, makes the rules. :(
Gaza is what intergroup conflict has always been like, really, and if people in the West actually studied history these days, they would realise it. Most conflicts, from ancient times onwards, have been about you or me. I want the land, I drive you out and kill as many of you as necessary to make that happen. This is the history of colonialism from the Akkadian Empire onwards. The use of violence and terror to control people and territory has been a constant feature of warfare up to the present day, and “ethnic cleansing” is simply a label invented in the Balkans a generation ago to describe something that is essentially timeless.
The whole apparatus of humanity in war, from the nineteenth century onward, depended upon a particular concept of war between organised states with disciplined armies and limited political objectives, and it functioned tolerably well so long as it was limited to that concept of war. The problem the West has is that it has been confronted many times since the end of the Cold War with conflicts to which these assumptions simply don’t apply, and it has chosen to deal with this confusion, as you would expect, by pretending it doesn’t exist. The West is now floundering around because it no longer has a normative framework of any kind that enables it to interpret acceptably what is actually happening in Gaza. Because a state that sees itself as western, and seeks and enjoys western support, is behaving in this entirely traditional, ruthless manner, it is struck dumb and schizoid. Its only recourse is to pretend it’s not happening
“I want the land, I drive you out and kill as many of you as necessary to make that happen. This is the history of colonialism ….”
Yeah, Aurelien, I fear you are correct.
I stopped by the other day to talk to a neighbor who has a small commercial greenhouse and raises veggies to sell at her local stand. The area has been under a pall of smoke from the Canadian wildfires for the past week, making working outside unpleasant, as well as retarding the ripening of local crops. We discussed this and then she looked at me and said: Why aren’t we panicking? Why isn’t somebody doing something? Why is everyone so apathetic?
Good questions. Faced every morning with the latest updates of the continuing Palestinian Genocide, with reports of global heatwaves and shrinking rivers and melting glaciers, the enormity of the disaster seems too great to resist.
At dinner with friends last night, I asked, after a glass of wine made me desperate, do you wake up at 2 AM and wonder what the consequences of just about everyone on the planet hating the United States will lead to? They laughed and said, well, at our age we really don’t have to worry. It’s all on our grandkids. And talked about their latest purchase from Amazon. And the food left on our plates could have easily fed a family in Gaza. Or Somalia.
“At dinner with friends last night, I asked, after a glass of wine made me desperate, do you wake up at 2 AM and wonder what the consequences of just about everyone on the planet hating the United States will lead to? They laughed and said, well, at our age we really don’t have to worry. It’s all on our grandkids. And talked about their latest purchase from Amazon. And the food left on our plates could have easily fed a family in Gaza. Or Somalia.”
I can’t muster the words to express how I feel about this, Eclair. My brain doesn’t even want to contemplate the complacency and lack of compassion being expressed by your dinner companions for their own grandkids, not to mention the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, reciprocity is much over-rated. One could for instance posit as follows:
I do unto you as I wish and can just as I know you would in my place.
On this logic, robbing, raping, murdering someone makes as much sense as groveling.
Abstract rules don’t provide all-season all-purpose solutions.
You have to take substantive decisions. Tax the rich. Feed the poor. Heal the sick. Brake for squirrels.
Kant’s philosophy is very different from the other statements.
Jesus said: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” which is a more positive version of “don’t do what you don’t want done unto you.” of the other quotes but it should still lead to a similar or better equilibrium of reciprocity.
Kant apparently said “Act in such a way that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of universal legislation.”. If true that’s the whole problem with Western Civilisation right there!
Rather than being a rule that any party can apply bilaterally to judge their own behaviour, Kant’s rule is a universal normalising rule by which one can judge others. Cue human rights, responsibility to protect, liberal interventionism and all the foreign policy disasters of the 21st century….
I agree. People who once went to a lecture on Kant have caused more suffering in the world than those who once went to a lecture on Foucault. Alasdair Macintyre produced an epic takedown of Kants injunction to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” by showing that with a little determination anything could be made into law with universal application (“everybody should obey me” for example) But when Kant went on to suggest that there was an obligation (the “categorical imperative”) to obey any law that could be represented as a universal rule, whatever the consequences, he opened a box of horrors.
Years ago, a student asked me what distinguished the work of economists like Smith and Ricardo from Walrus and Marshall and, thinking quickly on my feet, I replied that the former had insights into behaviour which were provisional and open to change whereas the latter were primarily concerned with systematising their assumptions about human behaviour into universal rules or laws and they might best be likened to the situational thought and behaviours in a good novel or play compared to Kantian universality which had turned the Enlightenment into a simple series of universal truths and rules and regulations which civilised/totalitarian societies must blindly follow to make this the best of all possible worlds. The seminar rapidly turned into a discussion on moral relativity, culture and instinct as applied to the problems of harmonisation in the EEC, a subject much in the news at that time.
Thuto:
Wow, your honest description of your own hatred in your comment above is, in my opinion, getting to the heart of the matter.
I was in a group discussion a week ago and a friend in that discussion imagined roughly the following:
I would force Trump to his knees and have Speaker Jonson put a gun to his head and my friend would stand next to speaker Johnson with a machine gun. My friend would then tell speaker Johnson that if he didn’t shoot Trump in the head, my friend would machine-gun all of the MAGA supporters in the back of the room.
Do such honest expressions of individual personal hatred indicate that perhaps collectively we may be on the way to some kind of total war or do such public reflections on one’s own hatred also help to reveal a deeper commonality we all share (our capacity for intense hate) and through such recognition offer some kind of hope for an eventual way out.
It seems like a close call.
Ethics aren’t part of any ‘framework’ in the west. They simply don’t come into the thinking or policymaking – or activity of western governments and corporations.
Officially, they do – but practically, they don’t.
Democracy and freedom are the two most touted, and the two least applied. We say we have both, but in reality we have neither – and we have never had either.