Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises and individuals, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself ~ilana.

First up, Israeli society’s latest demonstration of depravity: When they are not fantasizing and embellishing about rape (“Debunking ‘Screams Before Silence,’ Sheryl Sandberg’s 7 Oct. ‘mass rape’ film“), and raping Palestinian prisoners—the IDF and the state and societal structures that support it is fighting for the legal right to rape their enemies. Or justifying the twisted sensibilities of their military and countrymen. And, Israeli depravity is indeed endemic. (See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?� Oh yes.)

According to Truthout.org, “the Israeli Knesset, on Monday [its lawmakers, no less] was debating whether or not sexual abuse was a legitimate tactic for Israeli soldiers. (International law considers sexual violence by soldiers to be a war crime.) … Members of the Israeli government have also defended the soldiers, claiming it is wrong for the government to charge the reservists.�

Real lovelies, aren’t they?!

To its patsy press, the AP, “The Israeli military said, Monday, that “it was holding nine soldiers for questioning following allegations of ‘substantial abuse’ of a detainee at a shadowy facility where Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since Oct. 7.�

According to Middle East Monitor, “A Gaza detainee allegedly sexually abused by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman … suffered ‘a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage and broken ribs’ as a result of the immense torture he was subjected to by Israeli occupation soldiers. …One of the nine Israeli soldiers arrested for abusing him was released without charge. Deliberations about the other eight are continuing.�

Next, by Democracy Now’s telling, “A right-wing mob including members of the Knesset broke into two Israeli military bases in an effort to prevent Israeli military police from detaining the nine soldiers who were under investigation for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner at the notorious Sde Teiman facility.�

+972 Magazine’s Oren Ziv correctly elucidates that “the support of Israeli political leaders, including some members of the Knesset who participated in the riots, and the apathy of the military police all indicate that those protesting against the soldiers’ charges are ‘the face of the state,’ expressing what are “mainstream� views in Israeli society.� (Confirmed. See “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?“)

Israel’s token rape arrests, more cunningly, are part of a strategy to fend off the genocide and war-crimes charges. Israel has become adept at narrative, repeating mantras about its unsurpassed morality. One central lie embedded deep in the lattice of lies that is Israel is that, contrary to most criminal enterprises, a spectacular democracy like Israel has the absolute ability to investigate itself.

A new report authored by said 972 Magazine journalist “for the human rights group Yesh Din shows how the main role of Israel’s military law enforcement system is to maintain the appearance of internal accountability in order to shield itself from external criticism.�

Essentially, to fend off the very notion idea that this lawless thug state is not a lawless thug state, whose justice system is complicit in minting maniacal laws in support of lawless, unfathomable thuggery and cruelty.

Read my own analysis of how Israel and its courts “CO-OPT HUMAN-RIGHTS LAW� (In “Defending Gaza (II): Israel Engaged In The Mother Of All Performative Contradictions: Denying Genocide, While Committing Genocide, Effectively Asserting A Right To Genocide�.)

Israel is a lattice of lies.

Rape of hostages, held in detention without charge, bleeds nicely into extra-judicial assassination.

Ismail Haniyeh, a major political leader representing the Palestinians of Gaza, who also enjoys wide support among the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (as polls clearly show), was executed extra-judicially—how else?—by rogue state Israel.

Haniyeh is widely viewed among the people of the Arab world—not their ruling elites, who are puppets of the Axis of Genocide—as a uniter of Shia and Sunni. He was also beloved of his immediate neighbors in Gaza’s al-Shati refugee camp.

“Israeli forces [had] bombed members of Haniyeh’s family in the al-Shati refugee camp twice, killing at least three of his sons, two grandchildren, his sister and around 10 other relatives.� (Middle East Eye)

Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while committing genocide, all the while demanding the right to genocide.

The Jewish State is genocidal not because it has been denounced as “genocidal� by ostensible “antisemites� and “terrorist sympathizers,� but by virtue of its actions. Israel is genocidal by virtue of what it has done to Gaza, the people and their land.

Shortly after October 7, 2023, conceptions of vice and virtue were crystalized like never before. It was then that certain self-evident truths became crystal clear. For you are what you do. Israel’s actions within Gaza and without it have shown the world—myself, a former supporter of Israel included—in cruel relief the barbarity of Israeli state and civil society.

By closely observing Israel in action over nine months, in Gaza and beyond, and then, as closely, listening to and chronicling Israeli and Jewish leaders, stateside and in Israel, as they walked the walk—immutable truths about the Jewish State were easily deduced commensurate with Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Thumping majorities across Israel’s public sector, private sector and “third sector,� you name them—have been justifying, finessing and fibbing about their army’s “high-tech murder spree� in Gaza, a campaign that Israel and its American underwriters have taken to the West Bank, and are poised to continue in Lebanon, if allowed.

Thus, the labels “antisemite� and “terrorist sympathizer� amount to a blood libel leveled at millions, perhaps billions, in the Global South, in particular—although the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred hearts across the world.

So far, the watching world has been peacefully protesting genocide through the written and spoken word, or by marching and voting.

Caught in the act, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to demand cavalierly the right to kill and deceive. The world is instructed to, first deny Israel’s genocide, then justify it or risk defenestration.

To no avail.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,� said Jesus (New Living Translation). Verbatim, Matthew 7:20 reads: “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.�

In pointing to human action as the undeniable key to man-made reality—Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Ethics of Argumentation go even further than did Jesus in Matthew 7:20.

ISRAEL, EFFECTIVELY, CLAIMING AUTHORITY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

Our overlords who art in D.C. and their overlords in Tel Aviv strive to condition us, at once, to watch Palestinians die daily en masse, and either justify or deny the holocaust visited on them by the Jewish State.

Countering this parallel universe being enforced by the Axis of Genocide are Dr. Hans-Hermann Hope’s Ethics of Argumentation. Particularly handy here is “the legal theory of ‘estoppel,’� attributed by Dr. Hoppe to Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian legal theorist. It is “the legal principle that bars a party from denying or alleging a certain fact owing to that party’s previous conduct, allegation, or denial.� (Emphasis added.)

I’d venture that still stronger than legal estoppel apparently allows is the fact that Israel is denying current and ongoing genocidal acts at the very same time it is committing them! Israel is engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide while committing genocide.

It is a performative contradiction, then, for Israel and its backers to dispute that the Jewish State is committing genocide at the very same time that the Jewish State is carrying out the denied deeds.

Genocide, ethnocide and domicide are, obviously, never justified and can never be exculpated. Therefore, to assert that you are just and justified as you carry out the manifest genocide, ethnocide and domicide of a people; is to not only perform a contradiction, but to embody one, all the while demanding the unique authority to carry out all of the above.

To be mired in such grotesqueries, as Israelis indubitably are, is to be less than human, less than coherent, less than sane. The Greek philosophers would have concurred.

ISRAEL HAS ACED THE GENOCIDE BAR

Laws against genocide impose no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

Lest we be accused of arguing in circles, the concept of genocide must be reasonably qualified and clarified. And, in particular, the reference here to the positive law’s definition of the systematic, methodical annihilation of a people.

Natural-rights libertarians are seldom enamored of legal positivism, which generally conflates justice with the law of The State. Our all-too-small cohort is, for the most, wedded to the natural law, a higher law—a system of ethics knowable through reason, revelation and common sense.

“By natural law,” propounded the great Southern constitutional scholar James McClellan, in Liberty, Order, And Justice, “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

I would further argue that even as he is mired in evil—as Israelis certainly are—man knows right from wrong full-well. He knows he is perpetrating evil even as he does so.

Since it is anchored in the very nature of man, the Natural Law is the highest law known to man, and is therefore a priori just. More often than not, any vestiges of natural law still present in the positive law have been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

So, while it is a rare occasion when natural-rights libertarians defer to the positive law in a positive way; it can and does happen that this or the other state law is inoffensive in that it does nothing to undermine the natural rights of man—those to his life, his liberty and his property.

To the extent that the positive law comports with the natural law—to that extent it is inoffensive. Such is the case of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which articulates, mostly, a set of negative rights, whose enforcement imposes no burden whatsoever on anybody other than on the sadistic, sociopathic serial killer.

The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus.

Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality—the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.

When Americans reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they habitually extol the virtue of Pax Americana, but never the horrors of it. Having shaped the annals of the past, regime historians, naturally, speak a great deal about Hitler, but hardly at all about Hiroshima.

With regard to the historic retrospective on the American-enabled genocide in Gaza—you know, when the agile liars who monopolize the discourse plead their case—the Electronic Intifada’s director, Ali Abunimah, renders his verdict on humanity’s inaction in response to Israel’s barbarity.

Mr. Abunimah gets to the quick of the human experience, and I paraphrase:

If you did nothing and said nothing during the genocide of the Gazans, we know exactly what you would have done during the genocide of the Jews.

Nothing.

With the exception of countless, selfless healers and humanitarians, heroes all, humanity has, by and large, abandoned the Palestinians of Gaza. This collective silence must not be forgiven nor forgotten, seconds Dr. Tarek Loubani, a physician, and the medical director of the Glia project, currently operating with great difficulty in Gaza.

“When I was in Ukraine,� attested Dr. Loubani, who had brought his medical team to that battle theater, too, “I never worried that the Russians would bomb me.� The Russians absolutely obey the imperative to protect and respect medical teams. In Gaza, all medical teams are forfeit, fair targets for extermination by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

On that grim score, “More than 685 health workers have been killed and 900 wounded during attacks on medical facilities and medical transport� in the course of Israel’s onslaught. This last Wikipedia account is likely, you guessed it, already outdated. How many more of Gaza’s healers have disappeared into the maw of the Israeli Security State? Many hundreds, reports The Intercept, an influential American news site.

Speaking to the Electronic Intifada, which is described as “Palestine’s weapon of mass instruction,� Dr. Loubani gave one of the most lucid renderings of the unremitting acts of a “genocidal, maniacal army in Gaza,� operating unhindered. Like Mr. Abunimah, he spoke emphatically to the imperative not to forgive those who’ve done nothing and said nothing, conveniently, until now.

If you have been silent so far—or, enveloped by the warm smell of a growing herd are conveniently piping up eight months into the sacking of Gaza—you must not be forgiven.

Historically, Mr. Abunimah’s aphorism tracks with the manner in which most of conservatism’s celebrity pundits had comported themselves during the ramp-up to the war on Iraq, for that war’s duration, and with how most have been conducting themselves in the course of Israel’s unimpeded genocide against Gazans (the Ghazzawi?).

Kelly Conservatives (Bonus Material & Background)

I am not here speaking of unserious conservatives, like podcaster Megyn Kelly, for example, who deserves mention if only because, dear reader, you deserve some levity and laughter occasionally.

If nothing else, it is amusing to hear the Kelly vanity production call out America’s campus kids, selfless souls protesting a holocaust, for being unattractive, ugly. To an empty vessel, there is nothing worse than forgetting your facial fillers and falsies.

Myself, I think that Mohammad Khatami, a software engineer arrested at the sit-in at Google’s office in New York, is beatifically beautiful. Techie Ray Westrick, arrested in California, also in protest of Project Nimbus—some kind of killer-Cloud-AI collaboration with IsraHell—is supermodel lovely. (Roll the tape or scroll down this text to look.)

Contra Kelly, behold beautiful protesters:

Still on the topic of the Kelly conservatives who missionize for mass-murder: I have to wonder who’s truly ugly deep down, Megyn?

How about the pampered LA Zionist thugs who took metal rods to the sculls of peaceful encampment protesters? How about those doing their evil utmost to logistically hamper “humanitarian aid deliveries at scale� to Gaza? How about the sated Jewish settlers and their doughy offspring, fat families, instructing their larded young on how to help starve other human beings? How about the observant IDF soldier, tooting, during a telephone interview, his religious platoon’s acts of murder and torture in Gaza, all in fluid, contempt-dripping, American-accented English?

Bombastic without and barren within: The IDF collective might wear fatigues, but it does nothing to camouflage its libertine, licentious , sexually depraved, pornographic culture.

The culture comes from the top:

His flesh softer than sin, Rabbi Col. Eyal Karim, the head of the military rabbinate of the Israel Defense Forces, had indicated, in 2016, that “as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to …satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will… .” News of the rabbinical rape-injunction came courtesy of Israel’s YnetNews.com.

Without a doubt, The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth ~ilana

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) continues to martyr the Palestinians, as it marches them up and down and across the Via Dolorosa that is the Gaza Strip.

By the time you read this—and as I write—the number of Palestinians murdered, maimed and displaced by The Devil’s agents will be, already is, out of date.

Jump a level of abstraction, from the torrid reality engulfing Palestinians, to meditate upon the meaning of what I just said.

On the meta level—the very act of updating the numbers of the dead and displaced in the narrow time-space of a topical essay is significant. It speaks to the industrial-levels and methods of murder adopted by the IDF. It speaks to a genocide, ethnocide and domicide to which we must bear witness as best we can, with the hope that the story of Palestinian travail will end in triumph.

RAFAH, RIP, SITS ON A CONTINUUM OF GENOCIDE

The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, exists on one craven continuum of evil. There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after ~ilana

Like the numbers of Palestinians murdered and maimed, the debate over Rafah—to invade or not to invade—is already out-of-date or obsolete. Rafah was nothing but a fleeting and artificial demarcation, concocted reflexively by partners to genocide, Israel and America.

The reflexive instinct of Israel and its American cobelligerent, in my opinion, was to separate genocide before Rafah from genocide after the invasion of Rafah.

With so much fuss and feathers over Rafah-as-a-red-line; the complicit parties likely felt that the 35,091 Palestinians killed and the 78,827 injured before Rafah could be made to stick in the public’s head as somehow “lawful,� legitimate casualties of “war.�

While the contrived and cynical talking point was being “performed� in the media, by early May, the IDF dogs of war had already set upon Rafah, an urban setting ringed by the tents of refugees, with characteristic ferocity. The incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south, alas, exists on one craven continuum of evil. There is no qualitative difference between the IDFs actions in Gaza before the invasion of Rafah and after.

Having been corralled capriciously hither and yon; from the north down to the south, and up again; Gazans have now been shooed from Raffah, at the southern tip of The Strip, where the refugees had huddled helplessly, up to Al-Mawasi, and other barren coastal stretches, rendered barren because of prior IDF blitzkriegs.

There, these Palestinians many times displaced will await the next phase of Israel’s holocaustal war—an adjective used by American novelist John Updike, who wrote before the high-priests and elders of the Anti-Defamation League issued linguistic restrictions—and twisted psychological warfare against them.

By May 12, and in tandem with the assault on Rafah and the near-closing of that single humanitarian corridor—Israel’s serial killers had begun “revisiting� Northen Gaza, starting with the bombing of Jabalia. However, and to be clear, tank shelling and aerial interdictions across the Gaza Strip, from Jabalia to Deir al Balah down to Rafah, have been a non-stop, continual reality for Gazans, courtesy of the gleeful IDF.

Keeping up with the number of casualties Palestinians sustain from hour to hour since the contrived, orchestrated debate over Rafah was begun is impossible.

Six-hundred thousand people, who were herded down to Rafah, are on the move, having since been uprooted again. Sixty people perished on May 9. (Democracy Now!) “Between the afternoons of 13 and 15 May … 142 Palestinians were killed and 314 were injured, including 60 killed and 80 injured in the last 24 hours,� reported the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). At least 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced, and 1.1 million, mostly children, are starving. Quit the “food insecurity� euphemism. Israel is starving them.

As I said, no sooner does one jot the numbers down than they become obsolete, only ever accreting. In their cunning tradition of coopting the language of human-rights law in order to violate it; the Israelis frame eviction as merciful evacuation. The number of evictions aforementioned (600,000) has now swelled since the previous paragraph. Eight-hundred thousand people have been displaced from Rafah in the last two weeks.

The American, Israel-First Idolaters are still claiming that all this is a tidy lie. Conditions in Gaza belie what our “lying eyes� tell us. I continue to recommend a variation on Richard Pryor’s wry wisdom about he who has been caught in flagrante delicto. The reader must believe his eyes, not the lying Israelis. Believe the evidence in front of your eyes. The Israelis and their Israel First American enablers are, plainly put, lying.

Since I updated the numbers above, a new chyron crawled across my mobile screen: 35,233 murdered; 79,141 maimed, in addition to the thousands who’ve been buried beneath tons of rubble—”37 million tons of bomb-filled debris that could take 14 years to clear.â€�

This is not a Whodunit. The serial killers are known to us, are friends of ours, are supported by us. ~ilana

The U.S. has undertaken the role of IDF deputy in advancing the genocide of Gazans. ~ilana

American foreign policy is a museum of horrors in which Gaza 2023/2024 is the main exhibit.

It is my conviction that Gaza is much more than just one more American foreign-policy failure, an event and topic to swill around like mouth wash, spit out and move on, once the usual “tsk, tsk� bromides have been disgorged.

Uncle Sam’s usual deathly mixture of ignorance, cruelty and superiority has been exceeded with respect to Gaza. It is my belief that the United States’ open, even-energetic support for genocide is a defining event in the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations—repeatedly and vigorously vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against Israel’s atrocities, justifying Israel’s violations of the law, as well as, alternatively, pretending these violations had never occurred and making like the laws of man and the laws of God don’t apply to Israel.

This American failure is probably qualitatively different from blunders that went before. What the United States has approved in Gaza is the crime of all crimes, appallingly carried out in broad daylight.

Duly, the annihilation of a community and the landmass that supports it has been achieved. The arteries of supplies that sustain this Palestinian society are all but closed. The mass murder of members of the targeted group proceeds apace. Daily. Shamelessly. Before our very eyes. And as I write.

It is the case of the senile (Joe Biden) supporting the criminally insane (Israel).

To press my point: Mass graves are uncovered near the ruins of the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Therein hundreds of Palestinians have been interred, bodies stacked, some handcuffed, others still tethered to medical tubes. The White House’s response amounts to, “Where, what, who, and how can this possibly be? Who could have done this horrible thing? Yes, we, too, want answers right away. Let’s do the forensics. Let’s ask the Israelis to look into it, shall we? See you tomorrow.�

This is not a Whodunit, you feckless, malevolent morons.

The serial killers are known to us. We know who murdered over 34,183 Palestinians and maimed an estimated 77,143. The serial killers loosed on millions of Gazans—their guns at the ready, pointed at the civilians huddled in the southern tip of the Strip—these are friends of ours.

Empowered by Empire, Israeli serial killers are not on-the-lam, running from the Law. They are free to come-and-go, to travel, to hobnob; at liberty to enjoy undeserved freedoms, as their innocent victims are confined, held captive, catacombed, awaiting death by one or another diabolical means. In fact, the serial killers of the Palestinians of Gaza are proudly paraded as freedom fighters in their country of Israel, and are backed and exculpated by the powerful in our own country, the United States of America.

Support for Israel’s offensive against Gaza’s civilians comes courtesy of our carpetbagger representatives, left and right. Israel is lavished with munitions despite the fact that the American taxpayer’s endorsement of the carnage these cause began dropping in November of 2023. By late March of 2024, a Gallop poll reported that 74 percent of Americans were keenly engaged with the topic and a majority now opposed Israel’s excesses.

Even young Evangelicals might well be rethinking their allegiances.

Exquisitely sensitive to its Christian Zionist base in America, the Jerusalem Post, honestly if opportunistically, divulged that, “Young Evangelical support for Israel has plummeted. Seven out of 10 Evangelical and born-again young Evangelicals … surveyed as far back as 2021 adhere to the postmillennial and amillennial theological views, which see the Jewish people and the state of Israel as no longer necessary in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the second coming.�

So settled in their habits, indications are that the elders of the Zionist, Christian Right have failed to read their young.

Indeed, these are austere days for American leadership and reputation. By dint of undertaking the role of IDF deputy in advancing genocide in Gaza—the United States has crossed a threshold. In Gaza, Uncle Sam has finally achieved an official or formal inversion of all cherished, universal values. It has earned the “Great Satan� appellation it was once awarded.

There is a vast power differential in the US-Israel relationship. The colossus that is the American Hegemon appears helpless before the tiny Jewish State, leading one to wonder which country deserves the Great Satan moniker and which the Little One.

On the scale of national crimes and misdemeanors, Gaza is simply indefensible. And our young sense this and are incensed by it.

For now, the degenerative process in America is being halted by students. “[F]rom Massachusetts to California,� students have gathered from far and wide demanding an accounting from their representatives for the industrial-scale mass murder being carried out in their name.

Among the protest was a Jewish sit-in dubbed the “Seder-In-The-Street to Stop Arming Israel,� on the second night of the Passover. Reports “Democracy Now!�:

“The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel. ‘At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,’ Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told Democracy Now! ‘The Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.�