Genocide is a crime, ‘the crime of all crimes.’ It stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attaches to genocide ~ilana

Because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is neither war nor war crime ~ilana

IF it is portrayed as a war crime; genocide—the methodical, malicious murder of the many—can be dismissed as incidental to battle; a mere case of, “Oops, bad things happen in war.” You hear the last phrase all the time from Israel’s supporters, as they gush their enthusiasm for the Israeli State’s crimes.

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization provides cover and lends imprimatur for criminals and criminality. You mitigate and minimize genocide when you call it a war crime.

This is precisely the point of Israel and its co-belligerents: The purpose of framing Israel’s ongoing extermination of Palestinian society in Gaza as a byproduct of war—the same having commenced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem—is to give the impression that industrial-scale mass murder is often incidental to war. Bad things happen in the butcher’s shop of war.

But genocide—legally and morally—is a stand-alone crime; it is not a crime attached to a set of mitigating or explanatory circumstances. The Israeli State, gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate mass murder, is thus a criminal entity. Perhaps not a common criminal, but, nevertheless a criminal country, a threat to the comity of nations. It doesn’t take a Carl von Clausewitz, famed Prussian general and war theorist, to figure this out.

Disquieting though this is, a better source of metaphor for Israel than von Clausewitz is Truman Capote. He is the originator of the true-crime genre, in which a real event is treated with fictional techniques and turned into a literary work of art. That Capote’s In Cold Blood certainly is.

The Israeli State, to commandeer and paraphrase Capote, is that “rarity, a natural killer—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.”

In the crime he anatomized, Capote encountered the “single-killer concept” and “the double-killer concept.” Israel comes under the nation-killer concept, given that the nation, with thumping majorities, backed the killing of Gaza. Currently, it is by a preponderance of 71 percent that Israelis support the war on Lebanon.

In any event, because it is an indefensible crime for which there are no extenuating circumstances or traditional defenses—genocide is not a war crime.

The manifestly willful attempt to destroy a society and its people is a crime for which the death penalty—execution of those involved—has, historically, been meted. The exculpatory agents of Israel’s crimes against humanity are, alas, incapable of reasoning from fact, ethics and logic. Like programmed automatons, they therefore recite a counterfactual storyline, an ideological meme.

HASBARA AND A FLORET OF BABY FLESH

Israel’s odious excuse-making has come to be known as Hasbara.

In Hebrew, hasbara is the name of the verb to explain (lehasbir). It means explanation. Exculpatory constructs, assorted Hasbara, serve to coat Israel’s corporeal crimes against humanity with ideological respectability, to give these some imagined purity of purpose.

Think of Hasbara as the steady supply of bogus constructs with which to rape reality.

The facts of mass murder have been undercounted so far in a 649-page list of every Palestinian recorded killed in Israeli attacks. Two hundred and twenty-six pages of these, list the names of children 18 years and younger, including 14 pages of newborns and babies under a year old. Each name corresponds to a body, identified and interred. The last 11 pages list Palestinian elders, ages 77- to 101-years-old, all older than the country that killed them. (Via The Electronic Intifada.)

This carnage is being dismissed as a byproduct of war, executed within the matrix of Israeli “self-defense,” as Hasbara has it.

Hasbara to what end? To propagandize international audiences into sympathizing exclusively with Israel and demonizing Arabs. (+972 Magazine.)

Hasbara to dress up tiny dismembered babies, courtesy of Israel’s American baby-busting bombs, as something other than a little torso, and a miniature groin, from which a floret of baby flesh protrudes, where once a chubby little leg kicked. (https://x.com/DaniMayakovski/status/1833695316165398763. ) I am told by an expert code writer that the embed code generation for these tweets of mangled baby flesh has been disabled. Censorship down to the code in the service of Hasbara. (https://x.com/Afcq1954/status/1837472434707902578).

Hasbara to frame the specter of baby flesh peeled away to expose gleaming white bone—little bodies and minds shattered for life should they live—as the doing of a third party. “I didn’t do it,” jokes Bart Simpson in that all-American parody, The Simpsons. Hamas made me do it. CNN’s Hasbara, which ascribes an almost-attractive raffishness to IDF criminals, has it that the Occupation made Israeli soldiers commit their crimes.

Hasbara to help leave refugees with no redoubt, and nothing to their name but a nylon dome above their heads. Gaza’s homeless must wait to parry whatever next thrust Israel will deliver in… “self-defense.”

In-the-heat-of-battle Hasbara greases the skids for a Jewish Taliban and his posse of soldiers, whooping it up, as they explode one more mosque among the hundreds they’ve already vaporized.

Hasbara to ostensibly explain away another possessed IDF demon grimacing maniacally while reciting The Shmah, our “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” prayer. He then levels a mosque. “Have an explosive Sabbath,” roar these particular IDF, before bursting into popular song, “The Nation of Israel Lives,” and sharing that they had just wired up a house of prayer in Khirbet Khizaa, Khan Younis, in the central Gaza Strip. Next I want to see their faces, scores of them, appear on our screens from the Hague. But will Hasbara tools like Matthew Miller, ensconced in the State Department, allow it? Rhetorical.

Israel’s Hasbara facilitates “Israel’s conceit of invincibility,” in the words of commentator Mouin Rabbani. It has marred the West’s morality, but will never contaminate the natural law, and has yet to fundamentally change the common law.

Civilizing systems of ethics still stipulate that no one has the right to kill a single innocent human being, directly or indirectly, let alone hundreds of thousands of them—for by the time the Israeli serial killers are cajoled into stopping the carnage, there could be, in the informed opinion of American patriots like Ralph Nader, between 250 to 500,000, maybe more, Palestinian deaths brought about by Israel.

Easily—that is if the Lancet, the medical journal of record, and the human rights community don’t obfuscate the truth. The scholar Norman Finkelstein, author of Gaza, An Inquest Into Martyrdom (2018)—an exegesis of fact and law—has strongly suggested that they, too, have been compromised.

MINARCHIST, ANARCHIST OR STATIST: GENOCIDE IS FORBIDDEN!

International law is not at odds with the natural law or the libertarian law on the matter of industrial-scale mass murder. For reasons obvious, there should certainly be no difference between how classical liberals or anarchists understand the non-aggression axion in this context. Minarchist, anarchist or statist; genocide is verboten in libertarianism.

Craig Mokhiber, one of this country’s most principled specialists in “international human rights law, policy, and methodology,” explains:

International law does not allow a claim of self-defense to justify crimes against humanity and genocide. Nor does it magically overcome the international humanitarian law imperatives of precaution, distinction, and proportionality, or the protected status of hospitals and other vital civilian installations.
In addition, the presence of people associated with armed resistance groups (even if proven) does not automatically transform a civilian location or protected structure into a legitimate military target. If it did, the common presence of Israeli soldiers in Israeli hospitals would equally render those hospitals legitimate targets. Attacking hospitals is not an act of self-defense. It is an act of murder and, in systematic and large-scale cases, of the crime of extermination.
A claim of self-defense does not justify collective punishment, the siege of civilian populations, extrajudicial executions, torture, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the targeting of children, the murder of aid workers, medical personnel, journalists, and UN officials- all crimes perpetrated by Israel during the current phase of its genocide in Palestine. And all shamelessly followed by claims of self-defense by Israel’s defenders in the West.’  (Via Mondoweiss)

Having figured out, over this pixelated page, that genocide must be addressed as a crime, not a war crime, I humbly discover that I stand on the shoulders of “Raphael Lemkin.

Lemkin was … first …to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the amorality of war.” Genocide is “the gravest and greatest of crimes,” and thus dubbed “a crime against humanity,” wrote Lemkin, a Polish, Jewish human rights lawyer.

“‘The term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that,’ Lemkin explained in a 1945 article. ‘More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations’—cultural institutions, physical structures, the economy—’of the life of national groups.” (Via Mother Jones.)

Much like any good libertarian, Lemkin was a natural-rights thinker, whose reasoning about genocide—the intentional murder of the many—was derived from reasoning about the crime of homicide. Mass murder, essentially, is when “the natural right of the individual to exist” has been sundered many times over.

As to the offender: If the individual may not gratuitously and serially kill people; neither may the collective, the state, exterminate a class of people. It should make no difference as to whether the felon is a lone criminal or the “common force,” to use Frédéric Bastiat’s natural-rights nomenclature. In The Law, Bastiat writes this:

“Since … force by an individual cannot legitimately be… used against the person, freedom, or property of another individual, by the same argument, the common force cannot legitimately be used to destroy the person, freedom, or property of either individuals or classes.”

WHEN MONEY MEDIATES MURDER

If words matter, then boy! does money count.

The Israel Lobby, AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is an almighty fifth column which ought to have long since come under corruption investigations and dismantled (ditto the ADL). At the very least, AIPAC, a blatant Israel operative, ought to have been forced to register as a foreign agent and scrutinized.

The first such endeavor was attempted by William Fulbright decades back. In 1963, by Wikipedia’s telling, Fulbright—academic, statesman and politician—had implicated AIPAC in laundering five million tax-deductible dollars “from philanthropic Americans,” by ostensibly sending the money to Israel “and then recycle[ing] it back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel.”

On April 15, 1973, Fulbright told Face the Nation, a current affairs television program, that “Israel controls the U.S. Senate. … [and that we] should be more concerned about the United States interest rather than doing the bidding of Israel … The Senate is subservient to Israel, in my opinion much too much.”

That was the end of Fulbright’s campaign.

Underscored in 1973, Fulbright’s reality has reached its nadir in 2024. On July 23, American law-makers-cum-Israel-lap-dogs leap to their feet some 50 times, with cheers and deafening applause, to express adulation for mass murderer Bibi Netanyahu, who is named as an offender by the International Criminal Court.

From Fulbright whose re-election bid AIPAC helped torpedo in 1973, to Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two charismatic Americans with grassroots support, who’d refused to do Israel’s bidding, in 2024: AIPAC (track it) continues to buy influence, and to subvert Americans whenever they attempt to exert their popular will against that of the Israel donor-class.

Progressive representatives Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Cori Bush of Missouri dared to voice disgust for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza. That was the end of the Bush/Bowman bids for office.

While we’re deconstructing Israel’s lexicon of crime, do please quit calling its “Operation Swords of Iron” in Gaza a war. It’s not.

GENOCIDE IS NOT WAR

Israel’s onslaught on Gaza—from my diligent daily tracking, the Israelis have comfortably settled into massacring between 30 to 100 individuals, each day—is not a war by any definition.

In Gaza, there are no armies arrayed one against the other. This is no war between equal, opposing warrior forces. There is no parity on the battle field, only, for the most, the bullyboy’s aerial blitzkrieg carried out against a trapped civilian population. In terms of matériel, not the quality or morality of its men, the Middle East’s most powerful army is also among the world’s top 20 military forces.

The IDF’s extermination campaign against a population of cornered civilians has indeed been disrupted by pockets of asymmetric guerilla warfare from non-state resistance fighters. Their exploits are available in full on the X platform  of military analyst Jon Elmer.

Gleaned from my close observations over 11 months; the Gaza-based Hamas fighting brigades are no fat cats; they are skinny young Ghazzawi men, some in sandals, slinking among their ruined homes, darting in-and-out to defend what is left of their communities. These fighters are indubitably of the Palestinian people and for the people, as Palestinians see them.

And the way Palestinians see things is all important. The art of getting along, differences and all, is imperative in conflict resolution. Realpolitik demands not dominance, but that dueling perspectives be taken into consideration. Israel and America should not foist their reality on their opponents.

At any rate, let us try to avoid a dialogue of the deaf, and remember that words matter. They mediate action. Use them accurately: Genocide is the kind of crime that stands alone; no mitigation or extenuation attach to genocide. By extension, Israel is waging genocide, not war, and … Americans want it stopped.

For all their initial stated eagerness; most of our countrymen (61 percent now) want Israel’s genocide halted. Americans, moreover, want to stop arming Israel, as a June poll from CBS showed (via The Intercept). This includes 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans.

Beholden to donor-class dominated politics, the regnant villains of the Stupid and the Evil Parties are, nevertheless, refusing to end the genocide in Gaza. Yet it must be stopped. Actively and urgently so, given that, in an attempt to bury the crime of all crimes; Israel has shifted the focus to its northern front, to Lebanon.

©2024 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, September 20
The Mises Institute, Power & Market, September 23
LewRockwell.com, anti-war, anti-state, pro-market, October 5

Ilana Mercer is paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist. Her new book is “The Paleolibertarian Guide To Deep Tech, Deep Pharma & The Aberrant Economy” (February 2024). Mercer is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish and grew up in Israel from which she fled, aged 19, never to return.  She had refused the military. Her focus, since October of 2023, has been genocide. A war against civilians is a war on civilization. Or, as one sage succinctly put it, “At a time of genocide; genocide is the only issue.”

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I have no reason to celebrate the transfer of more than 100 Canadian newspapers including half-ownership of the National Post from Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. to Izzy Asper’s CanWest Global Communications Corp. Shortly after the CanWest media acquisition flurry, I was fired by the new owner of the Vancouver-based North Shore News, after writing a successful weekly column there for two years. On the heels of the same press purge, I was booted from a perch I’d held at the Calgary Herald for a year.

My American readers will recognize Conrad Black as the Chairman and CEO of one of the world’s largest newspaper groups. Among its more than 200 publications, Hollinger International counts The Daily Telegraph in the UK, The Jerusalem Post in Israel, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Conrad Black is a conservative and a relatively hands-off proprietor. When he pens the occasional op-ed piece, it is always a wonderfully wrought tour de force. The new media boss’ lesser facility with ideas and words has not prevented him and his progeny from tirelessly agitating in editorials for the governing liberal party. Mr. Asper is becoming known for his editorial activism, an accusation that has revived the Canadian apoplexy over “media concentration” or “cross ownership”—always a familiar bugaboo in the minds of bureaucrats and other befuddled statists.

Still, my firing, likely due to my libertarian politics, had little to do with “media concentration” per se and its alleged effects on freedom and diversity of expression.

Free speech rights are not suppressed when certain opinions are expunged from privately owned media. Government alone has the power to violate speech rights by using the force of the law. When government bans a publication or an opinion, it disappears or goes underground. You procure the publication or voice the opinion at your peril! A private outlet has no such power. Unless we presume we have a right to his property, Izzy Asper’s misguided editorial strictures are entirely his affair.

The only true monopolies are government monopolies. A company is a monopoly only when it can forcibly prohibit competitors from entering the market, a feat only ever made possible by state edict. In the free market, competition makes monopoly impossible. If Canadians don’t like Izzy Enterprises, they ought to vote with their cash and stop buying the Vancouver Sun and the National Post and stop watching BCTV. “Galaxy 500” doesn’t lack for TV channels. Radio, magazines and, above all, the Internet, render moot concerns over media concentration and freedom of speech.

A large market share is not a monopoly. If a Hollinger or CanWest expands without regulations, subsidies, licenses, or franchises, then they’ve done so fair and square. They’ve supplied at good prices products and services consumers want. Indeed, the notion that business concentration has anything to do with monopoly power is based on discredited theories. Free-market competition is a dynamic process, and market share is in constant flux. One day it’s Conrad; the next it’s Izzy—unfortunately.

It is also an unfortunate reality, however, that Canada is home to incontinent legislators. And they have been out marking their territory. To the extent that it is the beneficiary of a regulated broadcasting monopoly, CanWest receives government largesse. To the extent that government has partially nationalized newspapers in Canada, CanWest suffers the malign effects of the Regulator. What else would you call legislation that prohibits an owner from selling more than 25 percent of any newspaper to a foreign owner? Izzy’s empire would certainly not be as large if non-citizens could buy Canadian newspapers. If Canadians enjoyed freedom of association and contract, no one would complain of too much concentration and too little diversity.

So we must not allow the Regulator—and this applies in the US, which has draconian cross-ownership laws—to manage the problem created by his very existence. Do we propose to stop theft by placing the thief in charge of his stolen booty? The correct remedy, of course, is to chop off both the thief’s hands. This would make it impossible for government to confiscate our wealth and hand it over in the form of privileges to Izzy of CanWest, but would free Izzy Asper to dispose of his assets as he sees fit.

Besides being a morally bankrupt assault on property, “antitrust” laws that break up “concentrated” industries penalize entrepreneurs for their exceptional productivity. The resulting loss of efficiencies—such as the economies of scale and superior management that are instrumental in the successful concentration—does consumers no good.

To understand why there is a demand for the flaccid fare that Canadian and American media purvey—why there is such an eerie uniformity of opinion across our nations, the kind Izzy Asper’s conglomerate only reflects—we must look to the effects of the government-regulated, taxpayer-funded public school monopoly. Why are Canadians and—to a lesser extent—Americans so partial to collectivism? Why have we no concept of freedom other than sexual? Why do we fear private enterprise and love Big Brother? Because the public school system monopolizes the dissemination of ideas. John Dewey and his progressive acolytes founded modern public education with the express intention of forcibly reconstructing society. Monopoly schools remain instruments of coercion designed to strengthen “correct” social-democratic welfarism at the expense of traditional communities. Unlike libertarians, conservatives, unfortunately, have seldom objected to this monopoly; they have chosen to fight only for their values to prevail within it.

Public Broadcasting is another cultural foot and mouth that ought to be the proper focus for those who cavil about monopoly. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is an undisputed enemy of self-government. Its multimedia tendrils, nourished with taxpayer dollars, choke the national psyche and propagate the Nanny State. Canadians practically live and die with this icon. CBC dominance, moreover, is nurtured by the protectionism of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Any group seeking broadcasting rights must convince CRTC bureaucrats of the “public interest” inherent in their endeavor. Not only can it restrict access to the electromagnetic spectrum, but the CRTC also enforces and censors content.

The Canadian counterparts to Ralph Nader, the meddlesome Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians, and Robert Hackett of NewsWatch Canada, perennially excoriate the Regulator to step in to ensure chain-owned newspapers don’t abuse “the public agenda.” These busybodies forever invoke the force of the law in the service of a tyranny they term the “public good.” It is when they enlist “our children,” or declare, “It takes a village,” that my own instinct is to grab the kids and head for the hills. Pravda Inc. is far more sinister than Izzy Inc.

©2001 By Ilana Mercer
Ludwig von Mises Institute
A version of this column was first published by “The Report” Newsmagazine
June 25

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