Peter Myers Digest: Police assault Jill Stein and arrest her at campus protest
(1) AIPAC-Funded U.S. Senators Threaten ICC: “You have been warned”
(2) Columbia crackdown led by university Prof who is also a spook for NYPD
(3) Dershowitz threat: defund any Uni that divests from Israel
(4) Columbia students join ‘Citywide Day of Rage for Gaza’
(5) Police assault Jill Stein and arrest her at campus protest over Gaza
(6) TikTok was banned for showing videos of Gaza genocide, breaking media PR censorship
(7) Ron Unz: Masks come off, revealing ZOG
(1) AIPAC-Funded U.S. Senators Threaten ICC: “You have been warned”
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64439
‘Target Israel And We Will Target You’: AIPAC-Funded U.S. Senators Threaten ICC Prosecutor
Chris Menahan
May. 06, 2024
A group of AIPAC-funded Republican Senators sent a letter to the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor threatening him with retribution if he dares to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.
From <https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-you-have-been-warned-republican>Zeteo, “EXCLUSIVE: ‘You Have Been Warned’: Republican Senators Threaten the ICC Prosecutor over Possible Israel Arrest Warrants”:
In a terse, one-page letter obtained exclusively by Zeteo, and signed by 12 GOP senators, including Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz of Texas, [ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan] is informed that any attempt by the ICC to hold Netanyahu and his colleagues to account for their actions in Gaza will be interpreted “not only as a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States.”
“Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators tell Khan, adding that they will “sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.”
Rather ominously, the letter concludes: “You have been warned.”
In a statement to Zeteo, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said, “It is fine to express opposition to a possible judicial action, but it is absolutely wrong to interfere in a judicial matter by threatening judicial officers, their family members and their employees with retribution. This thuggery is something befitting the mafia, not U.S. senators.”
On Friday, The Hague-based office of the chief prosecutor published an unprecedented statement on Twitter, calling for an end to threats of retaliation against the ICC and attempts to “impede” and “intimidate” its officials. The statement added that such threats could “constitute an offence against the administration of justice” under the Rome Statute.
Every Senator on the list is funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
These cowards would never issue threats like this in defense of America but they’re more than happy to break international law issuing terroristic threats in defense of Israel.
When the GOP controlled all three branches of government under Trump, they claimed they were powerless to defend our border, deport illegals, stop Big Tech censorship, secure gun rights and so on but now with the slimmest of majorities in the House they’re passing <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64425>$95 billion giveaways to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan (with zero dollars to secure America’s borders), <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64438>banning TikTok for Israel, <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64419>approving the FISA spying laws to spy on Americans for Israel, <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64428>passing bills to outlaw “anti-Semitism” on college campuses for Israel and threatening the ICC without a care in the world for the laws of America or the “international rules-based order.”
(2) Columbia crackdown led by university Prof who is also a spook for NYPD
Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook
Columbia crackdown led by university prof doubling as NYPD spook
Rebecca Weiner is a Columbia U. professor who also serves as intelligence director of the NYPD. Mayor Eric Adams credits her with spying on anti-genocide student protesters and directing the militarized raid that dislodged them from campus.
The violent crackdown carried out on Columbia University students protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip was led by a member of the school’s own faculty, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has declared.
During a <https://www.youtube.com/live/B8YGRzarLjM?si=D_hs2zsj3wxbQkdo> May 1 press conference, just hours after the New York Police Department arrested nearly 300 people on university grounds, Adams praised adjunct Columbia professor Rebecca Weiner, who moonlights as the head of the NYPD counter-terrorism bureau, for giving police the green light to clear out anti-genocide students by force.
“She was the one that was monitoring the situation,” Adams explained, adding that the crackdown was carried out after “she was able to — her team was able to conduct an investigation.”
On April 30, dozens of police in riot gear descended on Columbia’s Hamilton Hall after students seized the building earlier in the day, citing a request from the administration. Several hours later, officers <https://x.com/_elkue/status/1785480912433487999> used a heavily armored NYPD BearCat vehicle to enter the building through the window on the second floor and arrested those inside, while another team swept up members of the encampment outside.
Starting on April 17, students at Columbia escalated their ongoing protest against Israel’s genocidal assault on the besieged Gaza Strip. They encamped on school grounds, stating their refusal to leave until the university fully divested from its Israeli-related investments. That protest model has since spread to over 100 other universities in the US, and even been taken up abroad, with similar actions occurring at Leeds University in the UK and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Just a few hundred meters from the Gaza protest encampment, Weiner maintained an office at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Her SIPA <https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/communities-connections/faculty/rebecca-weiner> bio describes her as an “Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs” who simultaneously serves as the “civilian executive in charge of the New York City Police Department’s Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau.”
In that role, according to SIPA, Weiner “develops policy and strategic priorities for the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau and publicly represents the NYPD in matters involving counterterrorism and intelligence.”
The NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau currently maintains an office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it coordinates with Israel’s security apparatus and maintains a department liaison. Weiner appears to serve as a bridge between the Bureau’s offices in Israel and New York.
A 2011 AP <https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44255142> investigation revealed that a so-called “Demographics Unit” operated secretly within the NYPD’s Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureau. This shadowy outfit spied on Muslims around the New York City area, and even on students <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nypd-under-fire-for-monitoring-muslim-students/> at campuses outside the state who were involved in Palestine solidarity activism. The unit was developed in tandem with the CIA, which has refused to name the former Middle East station chief it posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division.
The “Demographics Unit” appears to have been inspired by Israeli intelligence as well. As a former police official told the AP, the unit attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.” […]
(3) Dershowitz threat: defund any Uni that divests from Israel
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64440
Alan Dershowitz: ‘Any University That Divests from Israel Should Have Its Federal Funding Terminated’
Chris Menahan
May. 07, 2024
Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz said Monday that “any university that divests from Israel should have its federal funding terminated.”
You can trash America all you like and divest from US companies but don’t you dare divest from Israel.
As I reported last week, <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64436>Dershowitz is planning to engage in “massive offensive lawfare” against “anti-Semitic” pro-Palestine protesters in order to “bankrupt” them.
This should give us an idea of the type of lawfare he’s looking at. <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64428>The “Antisemitism Awareness Act” the House passed last week is directly aimed at cutting federal funding to universities by empowering civil rights complaints from Jewish students who claim they feel “unsafe.”
I guess we’re going to hear next how Jewish students feel “unsafe” because their campus isn’t subsidizing Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.
In related news, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced over the weekend that his state will “never” divest from Israel but will use “all law-enforcement tools” at their disposal to shut down pro-Palestine protests, which he characterized as “illegal.”
Abbott in March <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64355>signed an executive order to punish “antisemitic rhetoric” on college campuses and in April <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64413>cheered the arrest of pro-Palestine protesters at UT Austin.
Abbott’s hands are tied when it comes to securing our border but he’s more than happy to ignore the law and trash the Bill of Rights in defense of Israel.
(4) Columbia students join ‘Citywide Day of Rage for Gaza’
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/city-news/2024/05/07/columbia-students-merge-with-hundreds-for-citywide-day-of-rage-for-gaza/
Columbia students merge with hundreds for ‘Citywide Day of Rage for Gaza’
The New York Police Department arrested at least 27 protesters.
BY SARAH HUDDLESTON AND AMIRA MCKEE • MAY 8, 2024 AT 7:32 AM
Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the Amsterdam Avenue and 116th gates in a “Citywide Day of Rage for Gaza” <https://www.instagram.com/p/C6nP6_CMHo3/?hl=en> protest at around 4 p.m on Monday, before traveling over 50 blocks downtown to join hundreds in a demonstration that lasted over six hours.
As the group merged with protesters from elsewhere in the city, including those from Hunter College and New York University, police presence intensified and New York Police Department officers arrested 27 demonstrators marching in the street—throwing multiple demonstrators face-first to the ground before holding them down and zip-tying their wrists behind their back.
The “Citywide Day of Rage for Gaza” protest marked the largest demonstration in part organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest since the NYPD <https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2024/04/30/nypd-sweeps-occupied-hamilton-hall-arrests-dozens/> swept campus on April 30—arresting <https://www.columbiaspectator.com/city-news/2024/05/01/nypd-confirms-arrest-of-109-individuals-following-sweep-of-occupied-hamilton-hall-and-gaza-solidarity-encampment/> over 100 protesters, dismantling the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” and clearing occupied Hamilton Hall.
Protesters began marching from 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue to Lexington Avenue and 110th street before boarding the subway and heading downtown to join protesters from Hunter College and throughout New York City. Around 800 protesters flooded Madison Avenue, marching through the Upper East Side only blocks from the commencing 2024 Met Gala.
Over 800 protesters flooded the streets on the Upper East Side. […]
(5) Police assault Jill Stein and arrest her at campus protest over Gaza
Jill Stein accuses police of assaulting her at protest
MIRANDA NAZZARO – 04/29/24 6:39 PM ET
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on Sunday alleged police assaulted her and other demonstrators shortly before being arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.
“Basically, the police charged us despite our efforts to de-escalate, they charged us with bicycles. And you’ll see … plenty of footage of that around the internet,” Stein said Sunday on NewsNation’s “NewsNation Prime.” “They basically used their bicycles as a weapon to push us back, to push us over onto our backs.”
Stein was among <https://thehill.com/homenews/4627558-green-party-presidential-candidate-jill-stein-arrested-at-pro-palestine-college-protest/>more than 80 people arrested Saturday after the demonstrators “refused to leave after being asked multiple times,” according to a statement from the Washington University in St. Louis.
“In my case, one of the officers actually lifted up one of my feet, you can see in some of this footage, where I’m basically being thrown backward, like onto my head, and I wiggled out of that assault, and was told by the officer that I was assaulting him, which is absolutely ludicrous.”
Stein said she was charged with assaulting an officer and told NewsNation she has “really sore” ribs.
She said she was expecting to go to the emergency room to check for a rib fracture after she claimed the police “rammed” the handles of their bikes into the demonstrators’ chests and rib cages.
Protests calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war have roiled college campuses for days, prompting the arrests of hundreds of student and faculty demonstrators across the country.
Stein’s campaign account posted a video of the candidate being escorted off campus by two police officers, with her hands apparently tied behind her back. Her campaign <https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/1784411081340809348>said she was arrested along with her campaign manager, Jason Call, and deputy campaign manager, Kelly Merrill-Caye.
She and the other protesters were released around 2 a.m. on Sunday from the St. Louis County Jail, her campaign stated.
Washington University in St. Louis said the protesters arrived on campus on Saturday “with the intention of causing a significant disruption to the university.” The group began to set up a camp in violation of university policy, and school officials “made the decision to tell everyone present that they needed to leave.”
The Hill reached out to Washington University in St. Louis for comment.
Stein said she felt “enormous solidarity” with the student protesters.
“Because they’re the ones who really are risking everything right now to demand a kind of a moral response to this moral emergency and this genocide, which is rolling out every day on our video screens and on our iPhones,” she said.
“I felt so much respect for them that they are risking their ability to stay in the university, to graduate, to have their credits, to maintain their housing — they have put it all on the line in order to challenge a system that is fundamentally not serving us. In particular, they are challenging the university … to divest from Boeing, in particular, with whom the university has large contracts,” she added later.
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
(6) TikTok was banned for showing videos of Gaza genocide, breaking media PR censorship
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64438
Blinken Blames Social Media for Israel Losing PR War; Romney Agrees, Confirms TikTok Ban is to Help Israel
Chris Menahan
<https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64438>InformationLiberation
May. 05, 2024
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has blamed social media and TikTok for Israel losing the PR war in Gaza.
While speaking before the McCain Institute on Friday, Blinken lamented that social media is allowing the world to see “the inescapable reality of people who have and continue to suffer grievously in Gaza,” whereas in the past the “information environment” was controlled by a few newspapers and TV outlets who could shape the narrative.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who was interviewing Blinken, concurred and added that the US banning TikTok is being done to help Israel in their PR war.
Transcript via <https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/antonyblinkensedonaforum2024.htm>American Rhetoric:
SENATOR ROMNEY: Why has the PR been so awful? I know that’s not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that, which is, I mean, as you’ve said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It’s like, why are they not screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire and bring home the hostages. Instead, it’s all the other way around. I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they — how have they/ and we/ been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Look, I mean, there are two things. One is that, look, there is an inescapable reality, and that is the inescapable reality of people who have and continue to suffer grievously in Gaza. And that’s real and we have to — have to — be focused on that and attentive to that. …
And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
SENATOR ROMNEY: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I’d note that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.
{comment by Chris Menahan}
As Romney noted, the TikTok ban — <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64404>which was stuffed into the $95 billion giveaway for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan — was done for Israel.
Ben Shapiro, who championed the TikTok ban, told his followers in March that it was an <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64336>”anti-Semitic conspiracy theory” that the ban was done for Israel.
Multiple congressmen at the time <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64336>had already stated explicitly that the TikTok ban was to help Israel because they were losing the PR war.
The Intercept reported on Saturday that Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who co-sponsored the TikTok ban (<https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64428>and the Antisemitism Awareness Act) said in a closed-door meeting with <https://mondoweiss.net/2023/05/no-labels-another-trojan-horse-for-israel-support-without-media-scrutiny/>the Israel-First “No Labels” party that Congress moved to ban TikTok because “you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated” to oppose Israel on the platform. […]
Comment (Peter M.): But Generation Z is already waking up. Banning Tiktok and allowing police and Zionist thugs to attack protestors will only convince them that ZOG is a reality. Conspiracy theories will become mainstream.
(7) Ron Unz: Masks come off, revealing ZOG
https://www.unz.com/runz/israel-gaza-the-masks-come-off-in-american-society/
Israel/Gaza: The Masks Come Off in American Society
RON UNZ
MAY 6, 2024
[…] The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising that the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world are loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
An important turning point may have come on April 17th when Columbia University President <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minouche_Shafik> Minouche Shafik, herself of Egyptian origins, was raked over the coals by a Congressional Committee for permitting anti-Israel protests on her campus. Her interrogators claimed that these were “antisemitic” acts and caused some of Columbia’s Jewish students to “feel unsafe,” a dire situation that seemingly trumped both freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Shafik may or may not have agreed with those arguments, but she surely remembered that just a few months earlier her counterparts at Harvard and Penn had both been summarily purged for giving the wrong answers, and she hardly wished to share their fate. So she firmly promised to root out all such public antisemitism at her university and soon afterward 100 helmeted NYC riot police were invited onto the campus to crush the demonstrations and arrest the protesters, mostly charging the latter with “trespassing,” a rather strange accusation given that they were enrolled students on the grounds of their own campus.
This sort of harsh and immediate police crackdown seems almost unprecedented in the modern history of college political protests. Back in the 1960s, there were a few scattered cases of police being called in to arrest militant protesters who had seized and occupied administrative offices at Harvard, paraded around with firearms at Cornell, or burned down a campus building at Stanford. But I have never heard of peaceful political protesters being arrested on the grounds of their own college merely for the content of their political speech.
Although the crackdown at Columbia demanded by those members of Congress was obviously intended to quell American campus protests, it predictably had the opposite effect. Scenes of burly, helmeted riot police arresting peaceful college students on their own campus went viral on social media, inspiring a wave of similar protests at numerous other colleges across the nation, with police arrests quickly following in most locations. By latest count, <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-college-protests-encampments.html> some 2,300 students have now been arrested at dozens of universities.
The actions by the Georgia State Police at Emory University seemed particularly outrageous, and <https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1783676560677142896> a Tweet containing a clip of one of those incidents has already been viewed some 1.5 million times. A 57-year-old tenured professor of Economics named Carolyn Frohlin was concerned at seeing one of her own students being wrestled to the pavement and walked towards him only to find herself brutally thrown to the ground, hogtied, and arrested by a couple of hulking officers led by a sergeant. CNN anchor Jim Acosta was <https://www.mediaite.com/news/i-still-cant-get-over-that-cnns-jim-acosta-stunned-by-violence-used-in-viral-arrest-of-professor/> utterly shocked when he reported this story.
Even worse scenes took place at UCLA as an encampment of peaceful protesters was violently attacked and beaten by a mob of pro-Israel thugs having no university connection but armed with bars, clubs, and fireworks, resulting in some serious injuries. A professor of History <https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-05-04/ucla-faculty-protest-hammer-museum-gala> described her outrage as the nearby police stood aside and did nothing while UCLA students were attacked by outsiders, then arrested some 200 of the former. According to local journalists, <https://twitter.com/thenation/status/1786441856055742933> the violent mob had been organized and paid by pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman.
I have never previously heard of organized mobs of outside thugs being allowed to violently assault peaceful American student protesters on their own campus, something that seems far more reminiscent of turbulent Latin American dictatorships. The closest example that comes to mind might be the notorious 1970 “Hard Hat Riot” in New York City in which hundreds of pro-Nixon construction workers battled similar numbers of anti-war protesters on the streets of lower Manhattan, an incident so infamous that it has an extensive <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot> Wikipedia page of its own.
However, a somewhat different but much closer and more recent analogy may exist. After Donald Trump launched his unexpectedly successful presidential campaign, right-wing, pro-Trump speakers invited to college campuses were regularly harassed and assaulted along with their audiences by mobs of violent antifa, with many of the latter apparently recruited and paid for the purpose.
This sort of very physical “deplatforming” was intended to ensure that their threatening ideas never reached impressionable college students and led conservatives to begin organizing their own groups such as the Proud Boys to provide physical protection. Violent clashes occurred at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Berkeley_protests> Berkeley and some other colleges, while similar antifa riots in DC disrupted Trump’s inauguration. From what I remember, most of the organizers and financial backers of these violent antifa groups seemed to be Jewish, so perhaps it’s not surprising that other Jewish leaders have now begun employing very similar tactics to suppress different political movements that they regard as distasteful.
{The black-clad Zionist thugs who attacked protestors at UCLA reminded me of Antifa too. The only difference was the colour of the masks; the Zionist thugs wore white, whereas Antifa’s were black – Peter M.}
Some years ago a former senior AIPAC official once <https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/05/20/just-a-coincidence-im-sure/> boasted to a friendly journalist that if he wrote anything on a simple napkin, within 24 hours he could get signatures of 70 Senators to endorse it, and the political power of the ADL is equally formidable. Therefore it was hardly surprising that last week <https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinian-campus-protests-columbia-congress-df4ba95dae844b3a8559b4b3ad7e058a> an overwhelming bipartisan 320-91 majority in the House passed a bill broadening the meaning of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the anti-discrimination policies of the Department of Education by codifying the definitions used in our Civil Rights laws to classify those ideas as discriminatory.
Although I haven’t tried to read the text, <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/1/us-house-passes-controversial-bill-that-expands-definition-of-anti-semitism> the obvious intent it to force colleges to expunge such noxious activities as anti-Israel protests from their campus community or face loss of federal funds. This represents a striking attack against academic freedom as well as America’s traditional freedom of speech and thought, and may also pressure other private organizations to adopt similar policies. In a particularly ironic twist, <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/us/politics/antisemitism-jews-republicans-democrats-congress.html> the definition of antisemitism used in the bill clearly covers portions of the Christian Bible, so the ignorant and compromised Republican legislators have now wholeheartedly endorsed banning the Bible in a country in which 95% of the population has Christian roots.
While I doubt that we will see any arrests that would survive legal challenge, once controversial ideas are increasingly banned from all respectable venues, much of the public, perhaps even including some confused law enforcement officers, may vaguely begin to assume that they have actually become illegal.
Although it received very little media coverage, the implications of this proposed legislation are certainly dramatic. Put simply, “antisemitism” is the dislike or criticism of Jews and “Anti-Zionism” is the same thing with regard to the State of Israel. So potentially banning any criticism of Jews or Israel would certainly represent a remarkable legal development in our society.
This massive suppression of all political opposition to Zionism through a mixture of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means has hardly escaped the notice of various outraged critics. Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate are young Jewish progressives very sharply critical of Israel and its current attack on Gaza, and in their most recent livestream video a day or two before that Congressional vote, they agreed that Zionists were the greatest threat to American freedom and that our country was “under political occupation” by the Israel Lobby.”
They may or may not have been aware that their angry denunciation closely paralleled one of the most notorious Far Right phrases of the last half-century, which condemned America’s existing political system as nothing more than <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_Occupation_Government_conspiracy_theory> ZOG, a “Zionist Occupation Government.” Over time, obvious factual reality gradually becomes apparent regardless of ideological predispositions. […]
When we are faced with a government run by individuals who seem to have little political independence, it is worth speculating upon the means by which such nominal rulers are controlled. Several years ago <https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-john-mccain-jeffrey-epstein-and-pizzagate/> I discussed some strong indications of those possible methods, perhaps explaining some of the strange political decisions or bizarre reversals that otherwise may seem so puzzling.
Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia’s entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.
An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.
More and more thoughtful Americans are becoming aware that on so many important matters our two major political parties often seem more like separate wings of a single political entity, sometimes labeled the “uniparty.” […]
Several months ago a young military serviceman named Aaron Bushnell from a strongly Christian background became so distraught at his country’s active involvement in what he regarded as the supreme crime of genocide that <https://www.unz.com/runz/the-jewish-roots-of-the-gaza-rampage/#question-7-the-impact-of-aaron-bushnell> he set himself on fire and died in an act of protest, an event certainly without precedent in American history and extraordinarily rare elsewhere in the world. Although the story quickly vanished from our own media, the coverage on global social media was enormous, and may have lasting consequences.
After discussing that tragic incident, I went on to suggest that the dire fate of Gaza’s Palestinians might ultimately be seen as having played a similar role. Their deaths may have now suddenly revealed America’s long-concealed rulers both to our own people and to the rest of the world.
For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.
Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.