And the plan to bring Israel’s post-2023 genocidal warfare to the Americas
US/Israel rules of war: build a lie, then slaughter civilians from the air
There’s a widespread belief that every lie contains a kernel of truth. If it was ever the case it is not any more. The belief is a potent tool in the hands of an imaginative propagandist who is capable of inventing a lie from whole cloth. Such is the nature of the lie about Venezuela being a source of drugs. It is a lie that has been invented in front of us, in real time. For while the US has been trying to destroy Venezuela for decades, it has now become even less honest about it than it used to be.
We live in an age of the whole cloth type of lie. Joe Biden talked about seeing photos of beheaded babies that he did not, in fact, see. Tony Blinken solemnly told the story of murderers eating lunch with a dead family that never existed. Eli Beer said he saw a baby in an oven that, like Biden, he did not, in fact, see. Yossi Landau reported seeing beheaded babies that he did not, in fact, see. Direct, specific, detailed, lies.
Why they told these lies is obvious enough: to justify crimes, the enemy must be dastardly and to justify genocide, only the most lurid tales are worth telling. American media has a long and sordid history of atrocity propaganda. Specific lies are told to create specific outcomes.
In the American arsenal of lies, the “Venezuela drugs” lie is perhaps most analogous to the “Hamas uses human shields” lie. For if “Venezuela drugs” is true, any kind of “war on drugs” action is justified, the same way “Hamas uses human shields” opens up all the world to any kind of genocidal act. Any human is killable as a “Hamas human shield”, and any act of theft or warfare can be justified in fighting the drugs.
The US and Israel have learned that they can act without moral or legal restraint and have found the political costs of committing genocide containable, the levels of dissent for bringing wars to new countries (Yemen, Iran, Qatar…) bearable. Harris and Emersberger have argued recently that it is very difficult to imagine a way to avoid escalating attacks on Venezuela, however unlikely they may be to lead to “regime change”.
Post-2023 propaganda is so brazen that at times it seems it isn’t even intended to be believed by its own adherents. We are not sure of the value of debunking it. But we do so in the hope that by watching how they make a story from nothing, we can learn something about how they plan to do propaganda in their new genocidal world.
The first decades of the US assault on Venezuela’s democracy took place without the slightest “drugs” pretext
We wrote a book that debunked US government propaganda about Venezuela spanning over two decades: 1998- 2021. We showed that the US government’s lies were also the western media’s lies- as well as the lies told by prominent NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. All these dishonest institutions worked in unison to depict Venezuela as becoming a dictatorship after the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998.
In our book, you’ll find very little debunking of the idea that Venezuela is a hub for drug trafficking. That’s because that particular lie played almost no role in US propaganda about Venezuela until 2020.
On the contrary, we noted in our book that during the 1980s the organized groups in poor urban neighborhoods that later developed into the base that brought Chavez to power were largely motivated to keep drug dealers out of their neighborhoods. With hindsight, we should also have mentioned that the CIA was caught shipping drugs through Venezuela into the US during the early 1990s. A pro-US government was in office at that time.
As US-led efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s government intensified after the death of Chavez in 2013, so did ferocity of the attacks by media and NGOs on Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro. If you believed the media’s Venezuela coverage, you’d have thought that Venezuela was going through a famine – all because Maduro was tyrannical, incompetent and corrupt. That was the media’s chosen lie for that time: it had nothing to do with Venezuela supposedly shipping drugs to the US.
In 2015, when Obama first declared a “national emergency” claiming Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to the U.S., the media downplayed that lunatic claim. It was reported as a mere legal “formality” Obama used to punish Venezuela over its alleged lack of democracy and human rights.
The imperial script didn’t change initially under Trump. In February of 2019, the US brought “humanitarian aid” to Colombia (an actual hub of the US-controlled hemispheric illicit drug trade) and demanded that it be allowed into Venezuela. As late as 2019, Trump was still claiming to be motivated by a desire to bring democracy and prosperity to Venezuela. There was an obvious threat of a US invasion during the aid stunt, but it turned out to be a bluff aimed at enticing the Venezuelan military to defy Maduro. It failed.
That’s when Trump changed the propaganda script.
The “extraordinary threat” posed by Venezuela would now be sold as a reality, not a legal “formality” everyone was supposed to ignore.
2020: Enter the “Venezuela drugs” lie
In 2020, Trump said the US would give a $15 million reward to people who helped capture Maduro. Trump’s Department of Justice formally charged Maduro (and many of his top officials) with attempting to “flood the United States with cocaine”. The same media that had downplayed Obama’s declaration of an “extraordinary threat” from Venezuela began to report Trump’s ridiculous claims with minimal scrutiny. In other words, the media followed the new White House script on Venezuela.
But massive plot holes in the new script were obvious and easily found in establishment media – in articles that were written before Trump changed the script. Business Insider, citing the US Strategic Command, had published a map (shown below) in 2017 showing the countries from which illegal drugs flowed north towards the US. The routes were overwhelmingly from Colombia, with barely any from Venezuela. In fact, the article never mentioned Venezuela at all.
An additional plot hole: in September of 2020 photos and video emerged of Juan Guaido smiling with ( and being chauffeured around by) members of the armed Colombian drug-trafficking gang, Los Rastrojos. Juan Guaido was the Venezuelan legislator that Trump had christened as Venezuela’s interim president in 2019.
The man the US tried to install as Venezuela’s president, and a drug lord
Yet another plot hole: The Alex Saab case. In 2020, the U.S. government kidnapped Saab, a businessman and special envoy for Venezuela’s government, and charged him with money laundering, but it did not accuse him of drug trafficking. The U.S. claimed Saab had illegally profited from Venezuelan government contracts – and that he had moved the profits through US banks, thus bringing him under universal US Treasury jurisdiction. The US claimed Saab was a key player in Maduro’s supposed corruption network. If that were true, wouldn’t Saab have played a role in “flooding US streets with cocaine” as Trump now alleged?
While Saab was imprisoned, articles appeared spreading US claims that Saab had been an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). But if Saab had betrayed Venezuela he’d have been given asylum in the U.S., not kidnapped and imprisoned. And he would not have dared return to Venezuela.
Saab was released in 2023 in exchange for ten US citizens who were imprisoned in Venezuela. Saab, who is Colombian-born, not only returned to Venezuela but was appointed Maduro’s Minister of Industries and National Production.
Manufacturing fear, not consent
The other day, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed a reporter who asked him about a recent UN report on the illegal drug trade. The reporter noted that 87% of US-bound shipments go through Colombia and Ecuador; only 5% go through Venezuela. “I don’t care what the UN says” huffed Rubio in response . To add to the absurdity, Rubio said this while visiting Ecuador, where US-backed rightwing rule has, since 2017, transformed the country into a key part of the illegal drug trade.
Rubio’s contemptuous response raises a chilling question. Does the U.S. even care if the public buys the drug pretext?
Is “manufacturing consent” important to them at this point – when the US is openly sponsoring a Holocaust in Gaza? It seems they don’t care very much if we hate what they do. They simply don’t think we can stop them.
The eternal “War on Drugs”, real-world countries with drug problems, real-world solutions to drug problems…
The war on drugs was coined by Richard Nixon in 1971, formally declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982. By contrast, the US occupation of Afghanistan ended after 20 years. After Israel’s occupation of Palestine (77 years), the war on drugs, 43 years on, must be one of the longest running wars in the world. Drugs aren’t really a belligerent though, so it isn’t actually a war.
In fact the changing legal status of drugs, the infrastructures of police, informants, incarceration, counterinsurgency, and US regime change campaigns have all been very useful US foreign policy tools in the USA, in the Americas, in Afghanistan, in Southeast Asia, in Eastern Europe – all over the world. Colombian and Bolivian peasants, Black people in the US, understood the “drug war” as a rhetorical tool to oppress them. But the “drug war” is much more than this: it is a sphere of massive wealth accumulation in its own right, with the fortunes deposited ultimately in Western banks. It is a method for raising off-the-books cash to pay for bribes, assassinations, massacres, and land theft operations. It remains the principal rationale for a number of US government agencies and millions of American jobs – between the illegal drug trade and the law enforcement and judiciary officials whose livelihoods depend on it.
Watching TV series like The Wire or Narcos, you get a false sense of how the business evolves and control of it moves from one group in one city to the next. The big picture missed on prestige television is that this is a global business which, like all big business in this world, can only occur with active facilitation by the US and will ultimately end up in US oligarchic hands – which it has. Which is why neither the drug business nor the war on drugs are going anywhere. If regime change succeeds and Venezuela becomes a colony of the US again, you can expect the country will actually become a drugs hub like Afghanistan was during the decades of US occupation and Colombia is today.
Does drug addiction cause harm? Of course it can. Many countries around the world have programs to address these harms. Some are harsh, like the Taliban’s faith-based prohibition program in Afghanistan. Others, like Iran’s program of registering addicts and providing a maintenance dose, are less so. Cuba has had success with a model of registration and compulsory abstinence with community support. Recreational marijuana (and alcohol and tobacco) is legal and big business in Canada. Venezuela has a fairly punitive approach. But only the US has gone to war with drugs for 45 years and counting.
It’s always been known how the US could win the war on drugs: legalization and state control. But many would lose from that victory, and these are all-important constituencies: police, state agencies, covert operators, bankers, and narcotraffickers galore. Don’t ask America to turn her back on its most beloved. The drug war is the gift that keeps on giving.
But that doesn’t answer why the switch of lies happened five years ago. About this, we can only speculate. Why did the US decide to change from vilifying socialism and alleging procedural constitutional violations to instead scream about “drugs”?
The answer is unlikely to be deep. Perhaps there was a focus group where one pretext was going stale and another resonated better. Perhaps the “drug” pretext carries with it the possibilities of more incremental demonstrable “wins” – a video of a blown up boat, perhaps seizures of planted contraband for photos, more deportations of Venezuelans. Maybe this is a better image and content engine than one regime change failure after another.
Drugs are also a pretext that gives the US more freedom to attack or threaten other neighbours, since there are few socialists in power and drugs can be attributed to anyone. Then again, socialists can also be invented where they don’t exist.
Regime change remains a very difficult proposition, even if the US expands its atrocities, as it almost certainly will. Exposing their lies must have some value, but much more than that is needed to stop them.
[Note: if you didn’t watch me and Nick Estes talking about the Book of Joshua on Red Nation, that discussion and the books therein – the Joshua Generation, Laying Down the Sword, and Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians – might be good to check out before or after reading this one.]
This replaces the Geneva Convention
Human progress is over. We’re in the Book of Joshua genocidal timeline
The history of the next thousand years is being decided in our time. Will the species survive? Should it? We certainly won’t solve climate change if we can’t stop a genocide. We won’t be reviving nuclear non-proliferation with nuclear-armed states whose leaders quote genocidal passages of the bible and name their doctrines (“Samson Doctrine”, “Gideon’s Chariots”) after the book’s most violent plot points.
The changes happening go way beyond shifts in the locations of borders. We are far past the question of which corrupt ruling party will animalistically feed at the trough.
These are changes in religion, ideology, the basis of belief and how we decide what’s true and false.
The old world was one of a hypocritical liberal facade.
That world is gone.
You thought that science and technology were governed by a progressive spirit of open inquiry? Actually they are governed by ruthless, racist Darwinism.
This is science now
You thought that education, law, journalism and medicine were governed by professional standards and ethics about truth? In fact they are governed by insider-group corruption in which lying is as easy as breathing.
You thought that warfare was governed by the United Nations charter and UN resolutions with the force of law, with its doctrines on the responsibility of occupiers, the right of resistance? In reality, warfare is governed by the Torah and the Book of Joshua’s entreaty to wipe out the memory of Amalek – men, women, draft animals, and especially children.
You thought that the treatment of prisoners was specified in the Geneva Convention? The truth is, it is specified in religious texts on the treatment of slaves and in Hollywood tropes about how funny sexual violence is when committed against “criminals”.
This is humor nowHe’s hiding nothing: he’s proud and he’s protected
It is sadder and sadder to watch people of conscience raised in the old system continuing to appeal to international law, screaming into the void that US / Israel actions are illegal.
They’re not illegal in the book that matters, my friends, and that book is the Book of Joshua, a book of massacre and genocide.
The world is ruled by elites educated in the Bible + Race Science
What you believe is what you were taught at an early age. That’s why, for all the neoliberal restructuring, for all the austerity of constant budget cutting and degradation of the student experience, education will never be completely privatized. Elites will never abandon the chance to propagandize students from an early age, even if they wouldn’t dare send their own kids to those schools. What they want (and what they have) is a situation where they control what kids are taught in public school and they control what their own kids are taught in private school. Their kids are to learn superiority. Yours are to learn their place.
Israeli academics wrote a study, Scenes from School Life, (in Hebrew) in 2014 (reported in Ha’aretz) going into schools and writing what they saw. The title of the Ha’aretz article: “Israeli teenagers: racist and proud of it.” Given how fast one rises through the ranks in the Israeli military, the teenage subjects of that book are likely in the middle- and upper echelons of the genocidal Israeli establishment. They learned a doctrine of their own ethnic supremacy and they learned to hate others – leftists, Arabs, and especially Palestinians.
Outside of the West it’s much the same. Evangelical churches are everywhere in Latin America and Africa and their progenies march under the Israeli flag.
What’s nationalistic about a Brazilian politician flying the Israeli flag?
Muslim kids in Asia learn that there is an Ummah, a Muslim nation, of billions, but the educational network financed by Gulf monarchies teaches them that their true enemies are other Muslims.
The White Empire is a disciplined empire. It presents a united front to defend genocidal Israel. Western countries are willing to sacrifice honor, dignity, even handy underwater pipelines and cheap energy, for the greater genocidal good. Meanwhile those it rules like animals of burden are not united, but easily turned – until their turn comes to be slaughtered – against the enemies it selects.
The genociders’ only book is the bible, their only science is race science and their only language is total violence.
Reject it all: the lies of their old world and the depravity of their new one
The only possible starting point to defeat them is to reject every element of their world view and all of the objects they created to fool you.
Appeals to international law or courts, the UN, diplomatic channels, humanitarian rules, the human spirit or the transformative power of truth are, at this point, stupidity.
No matter how minimal, they will never grant your demands. No matter how sound, they will never be persuaded by your arguments. They rule. And they will never be overthrown by international law or nonviolence.
The fight for the future is not against a liberal ideology that doesn’t live up to its idealism.
It is a fight against an ideology – propagated in schools, church, the movies and TV – that combines the most genocidal books of the Bible with the most vicious genetic Darwinism. They believe they have every right to kill and enslave you. To bring about the future they want, they have to believe that.
Liberals have discredited themselves supporting genocide, loosening their control over the public discussion. Right-wingers have rushed in to fill the vacuum, but the America First (& Israel A Close Second), antiwar right will not lead the US out of support for genocide. Facing massive public disgust, the antiwar right have been put forward by a Zionist media establishment as a shield for conservatives. They are here to save the right-wing from deserved contempt, not lead their people to an anti-genocide struggle. Serving as a rhetorical curtain to hide authentic anti-imperialist voices from the public, ultimately, they too, serve the racist, Zionist agenda.
The controversy is fake. It isn’t the enemy of my enemy – they aren’t enemies at all.
Over the past few weeks, something called a “civil war” on the “antiwar right” unfolded online, in which far-right and farther-right influencers went on one another’s talk shows and then streamed, saying mean things about one another.
Much of it was ad hominem; a lot of it involved globally irrelevant insider US political discussion. But a portion of it was about US foreign policy. That latter portion involved these right-wingers discussing the source of their criticism of US support for Israel’s genocide and trying (and failing) to find enough common ground to work together, before crashing and burning calling one another federal agents (unusual since all are supporters of police and of federal agencies).
Let’s put some time into understanding
how this “antiwar”, right-wing position is manufactured;
how the things these figures have said might be satisfying to listen to for those fed up with Israel’s genocide and liberal support for it; and
why there will be nothing of any anti-genocide value coming from any of these figures – indeed, there is good reason to think that the whole thing is contrived – and to the benefit of the genociders.
1. Manufacturing the “antiwar right”: Genocide debate culture and the antigenocide bloc’s abusive relationship with Piers Morgan
Before he went on Piers Morgan’s show, George Galloway told his viewers that Piers Morgan was irrelevant and no one should go on there and give Morgan relevance. But Morgan, a right-wing TV broadcaster who, pre-2023-genocide, was known outside of the UK for his commentary on various celebrities, reinvented himself as the host of debates about Gaza.
Initially, he was famous for belligerent hounding of pro-Palestine guests with “DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS?” (a practice he still follows like praying the rosary).
But when Egyptian-American comedian Bassam Youssef went on the show and achieved some viral moments, mainly through the use of his comedic talent of mockery, anti-genocide viewers started to join the game, watching and looking for “gotcha” moments in the debates to share. Many, including Galloway, eventually went on the show, producing more viral clips to send around.
In the process, Morgan managed to position himself, through the selection of guests and his treatment of them, as the arbiter of legitimate voices on both sides, pro- and anti-genocide. When the anti-genocide audience neared exhaustion of Morgan’s incitement and abuse of pro-Palestine guests, Morgan would throw in an adversarial interview with an Israeli official or paid agent. This is part of the abusive relationship between leftists and Morgan: these dramatic moments of confrontation with Israeli genociders keep leftists hoping Morgan will find humanity. He won’t, but his keeping up the act keeps the viewers from giving up.
The Oxford Union, and now Jubilee’s show Surrounded, have also used the debate format as engines for the production of viral video clips, with explosive success during this genocide. The debate form is itself a type of propaganda, because of what it assumes: two or more people, acknowledging one another’s humanity and a good-faith framework of rules, using argument and counter-argument to try to help the audience determine the truth, sharpening and discovering their own positions in the process.
Morgan (and Oxford and Jubilee) exploits those assumptions to hide what is actually happening: a production stage-managed by the genociders, who win regardless of whether their side wins or loses.
Morgan chooses who debates whom, and irrespective of who “wins” on that day, the person setting up the debate (Morgan in this case) who holds the power to promote or de-emphasize specific voices. In this way the debate host (or the host of a big podcast) holds the power to control the opposition*.
[*Anti-imperialists will still go to these debates because the calculation of whether to boycott or attend is a tactical one, which is probably why Galloway first boycotted and then attended. We need visibility to make our points too and have to trade that against all the benefits the genociders get from these debates. It’s a powerful propaganda system indeed if you’re willing to participate in it even knowing what it is.]
With one exception (Fuentes, whose brand is based on being excluded and supposedly leading a movement of the excluded) every one of the antiwar right voices discussed in this article has been on Morgan’s show.
Just a couple of America and England Firsters having a friendly chat in Saudi Arabia
A right-wing figure can be created as an antiwar voice by the simple expedient of Morgan hosting a debate and putting them in that position.
2. The temptations of the antiwar right and the creation of the mirage
Given that the right-wing is (in the US) big, richly resourced, and actually controls state power, it may give (false) hope that the rise to hegemony of an antiwar right could stop the genocide. Given that part of the right-wing presents itself as anti-establishment and wanting to overthrow the system, it might give the (false) hope of an anti-system alliance of right and left to overthrow the genocidal system.
Here’s how the antiwar right created and nurtured these false hopes, creating an antiwar mirage that leads to nowhere in the weeks leading up to this “civil war”.
Tucker Carlson. He rightly ridiculed Ted Cruz’s use of the text of the Book of Genesis (12:3) – where God told Abraham that he would bless those who blessed him – to support the 1948-created Zionist project. By interviewing Iranian President Pezeshkian, he rightly demystified the idea of an American journalist talking to a head of state designated as an enemy (Iran).
But like Bernie Sanders, AOC and others, he sees what he’s doing as ultimately looking out for Israel. “I’m not even anti-Israel,” he said. “I like Israel.” If Tucker is America First, then like the liberals he opposes, his America includes Israel (A Close Second).
Candace Owens. She rightly called Israel’s atrocities against children “demonic” and “satanic”. Full of righteous contempt for the Israel lobby’s work to silence all opposition, she has modeled the courage of not backing down in the face of name-calling and cancellation efforts. She’s been bringing details of the Epstein network of sexual violence to her large audience. And while she supported Israel for many years, she “will never support Israel again.” Unlike many online influencers she also reads. Actual books. And changes her views based on new information, which fills anti-imperialists with the (false) hope that she might be brought to that position, becoming a powerful communicator for the cause (she won’t).
A friendly bet for charity
But she also presents to her audience the imperialist invention of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and tells them that the Nazi holocausts were equalled or surpassed by Bolshevik atrocities. In her discussion with Nick Fuentes, she said she’s increasingly skeptical of the whole history she’s been taught (to which Fuentes’s only retort was “you sound like a leftist…”), but doesn’t recognize that anti-communist atrocity propaganda is also a huge part of the history she’s been taught (lies about Indigenous peoples genocided by the Anglo-Americans, about Haitians during their 1804 revolution against French slavers, about Indian sepoys during the failed 1857 war against Britain, about Africans resisting the Scramble for Africa…) When it comes to this genocide, this means she has no way to investigate the false atrocity propaganda about October 7. Indeed, she argues that the whole event was orchestrated by Netanyahu (on whom Candace, like liberals, hyperfocuses, and therefore, like other Zionist liberals, fails to recognize the breadth and depth of support for atrocity in Israeli society).
Dan Bilzerian. Most anti-imperialists saw Bilzerian for the first time when he took an interview with Piers Morgan and argued that mainstream Jewish religious beliefs include a belief in the innate superiority of Jewish people, mentioning references in the Talmud about Jesus burning in excrement for eternity and insults about Mary. Bilzerian challenged Morgan’s lies about October 7, pointed out that most Israeli settlers are in fact from Europe (while Palestinians are from the region and likely descendants of West Asian Jewish people), and remained unfazed in the face of Piers’s accusations of anti-semitism.
But, like Candace, Bilzerian’s opposition to Israel is connected to opposition to “Judeo-Bolshevism”, and he cites incorrect figures about Bolshevism being fundamentally a Jewish movement and a falsified history of Bolshevik massacres. He cites Winston Churchill on “Judeo-Bolshevism”, as if he does not understand that the reason Churchill (a Zionist and keen genocider himself) made this claim was to explain his support for Zionism! Like Candace, he questions imperialist and liberal talking points about Israel and is skeptical about what liberals say about Hitler, but shares liberals’ (and Hitler’s, and Churchill’s) talking points about communism and Russia. Bilzerian notes his own Armenian origin and the fact that the Young Turks (the 20th century regime, not the liberal youtube channel) committed a genocide against Armenians in 1916, but ignores the facts that a) it was Turkish and Kurdish personnel who committed that genocide b) that the current Turkish government denies that genocide, emphasizing instead that Israel joins Turkey in that denial.
Bilzerian’s main business is the sale of scammy lifestyle courses which are marketed using photo and video montages of him doing high-end tourist activities surrounded by models and expensive items. He wants nothing to do with anti-imperialists, who want nothing to do with him.
Andrew Tate. Tate was one of the early people to debate Piers Morgan on the genocide and expressed righteous anger at the atrocities committed by the Israelis.
For people who had watched Piers Morgan bullying his pro-Palestine guests, watching Piers, who was obviously physically afraid of Tate, trying and failing to take up his usual bully role, was at least different.
Morgan the Lion vs Jeremy CorbynMorgan the Mouse vs Andrew Tate
But Tate – like Bilzerian – is ultimately on the web to create a funnel to his business, which is also selling scammy courses about how to get rich, as is apparent from even a quick glance at his twitter feed. If you like what he says about the immorality of genocide, you have the opportunity to help make Tate richer by taking one of his courses about how to get more money. In a live stream with Nick Fuentes, Tate said that he was concerned that conservative support for genocide was discrediting the conservative movement as a whole. People may lose interest in demeaning women if the messengers are genocidal: “Stop supporting genocide! It’s a bad look for conservatives!”
These political positions are nothing more than market niches for these people, internet funnels to different businesses and different age demographics (with Tucker and Candace marketing to older, Tate and Bilzerian to younger demographics). Tucker and Candace present a conservative lifestyle, while Tate and Bilzerian follow what conservatives call a “degenerate” one.
All of these flaws and worse come together with Nick Fuentes. Fuentes leads a movement, which he calls the groypers, who self-identify as racist/racialist, white nationalists, and take the posture of being downtrodden and excluded by the establishment right (they are neither downtrodden nor excluded). He is a believer in Race/IQ, believing that the origin of inequality is the biological dysfunction of the oppressed, arguing with Candace, who believes the origin of inequality is cultural dysfunction of the oppressed*. As a racial darwinist, Fuentes isn’t motivated by solidarity, humanitarian considerations, or empathy – in the hours I watched I didn’t hear him call it a genocide or express any human lament about the atrocities. His world view is of a darwinian struggle of races, and his complaint is that a “race” other than the one he identifies with is deciding on matters of war and peace when it’s his “race” that should be making those decisions.
*Speaking of selling courses, I do have a hundreds-of-hours-long podcast which is sort of a course on all of history since 1492. Among other topics, we did an episode on scientific racism, and on social darwinism, 19th century inventions to justify the Scramble for Africa. Plenty of references there too. Cost of my course is $0.
Fuentes seeks to lead a movement of what he calls white people which he thinks need to take over all the institutions and loci of power, presenting this as if it were a novel strategy and not the history of the Anglo-American Empire from the 1750s to the 1950s. Fuentes hasn’t specified how highborn he is in this rarefied multicentury hierarchy, but self-made successes are extremely rare and most people with millions of followers are better connected than they care to admit. Regardless, Fuentes’s analysis is based on false claims about science, history, power, and ideology. He’s claimed that one reason right-wingers are flocking to his channel is because he was the first to see (in June 2025) that Trump was under Israel’s control and was going to go to war with Iran. This was a commonplace insight among anti-imperialists since the breakdown of the last ceasefire in March 2025.
3. Keeping anti-imperialism behind a thick curtain of right-wing noise
Historically Zionists have always preferred the anti-Jewish right – with whom Zionists share the same racial darwinism and the same biblical references to armageddon – to the anti-imperialist left, with its internationalist connections to the Global South.
Anti-imperialists want a stop to the plunder and genocide; when the right fight among themselves, it’s about how to divide the spoils. The left believes in equality: the right, in natural hierarchy. This is the irreconcilable difference and it makes the antiwar right a mirage.
When you search for voices that are against Israel’s genocide, you’ll see these viral debate clips and enter the right-wing marketing funnels. The internet is flooded with them for a reason: to make it much harder to find anything real. Debates where the pro-Israel side routinely gets trounced and where the anti-Israel side gets one “gotcha” moment after another – are still wins for Morgan. These successes are as valuable for the propaganda system as algorithmic suppression or banning the phrase, “I support Palestine Action.”
Right-wingers can look super-insightful saying obvious things that leftists know because unlike right wingers, actual leftists are almost entirely boycotted by the mainstream*.
*You’re thinking of exceptions. I know the exceptions. What’s important is the quantity and the pattern.
There’s a solid incentive for liberals and right-wingers alike to create and promote a very visible antiwar right: to ensure that someone that isn’t a leftist is out there saying every possible thing, so that you can hear any specific viewpoint from someone other than a leftist.
In the video where Fuentes defends himself from Tucker and Candace’s accusation that he’s working for the police, he shows a supposedly exculpatory video of himself at the January 6 protest telling the crowd to advance and disregard the police. People who have been to Palestine protests have a good idea how it would legally go for someone who did that. At least he wasn’t supporting Plasticine Action…
Another subtle note from that video, is when Fuentes is praising Trump’s 2016 term, he says “we achieved some modest reforms”. Among them? Moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “We achieved some modest reforms”, he says in his video. “He cut the corporate tax rate, moved Israel’s Embassy, did some minor stuff on the border, it was negligible.” (9:22).
Fuentes, now positioning himself as the foremost and original critic – not only of Zionism as he emphasizes, but of Jewish people racially – nonetheless calls it a modest (positive, by implication) reform for Trump to have moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a “reform” that Israel had desperately wanted for decades. Perhaps it’s a meaningless slip. Or perhaps it’s a slip that reveals that for Fuentes, like the rest of these people, anti-Israel positioning is fake, just seeking a slice of the audience to turn into revenue.
In the interview with Candace, Fuentes explains and endorses the idea that slavers didn’t believe that slavery should be abolished because Africans have low IQs. With his level of knowledge and intellectual curiosity, even if he was morally on the right side of history (he’s not), he would be a liability to whatever side he’s on. Tucker argued that he is a liability – to the anti-war right.
This is “shit-coating”: the carving off of an actual insight, mixing it with toxic and ultimately pro-establishment lies, and presenting it so that no one can recognize the unvarnished truth. The algorithm wants to distract you, and these people have, with the resources of the Anglo-American, Zionist oligarchy behind them, mastered the algorithm. The truth? They can only give you the shit-coated version.
For anti-genocide work, the supposedly anti-war right is another distraction. The same way that Bernie Sanders and AOC turned out to be pro-Israel empty suits, the so-called antiwar right is of no use to any just cause.
After England and America, it’s Israel’s turn to lead the Empire
The Roman Empire collapsed when the city of Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 – or did it? By the time of the sack, Rome was no longer the capital of the Western Roman Empire – other cities had played that role for over a hundred years (Milan and then Ravenna). What’s called the Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital in Constantinople, which everyone simply called the Roman Empire, continued for a thousand more years, until it fell to Turkey in 1453.
Roman Legionnaire, Byzantine Cataphract… both soldiers of the Roman Empire
The British Empire, a going concern since the East India Company was chartered in 1600, also never collapsed. A multi-decade, somewhat friendly, struggle for primacy with the United States over primacy over the globe-spanning financial, productive, and military arrangements of the Empire began in the 20th century. After World War 2, the capital of the Empire moved from London to Washington.
There was plenty of brutal continuity to the transfer. But with the change of capital came a change in philosophy and mode of operation.
The British Empire, whose crown jewel was India, was based on mass famines, a global grain market, manipulation of gold and silver standards, naval power, a balance of power in Europe, strict racial hierarchy taught at the universities that trained the elite, and the use of subject races to fight one another.
When it moved to America, the Empire’s crown jewel was the whole American continent. The post-WW2 version was based on fossil fuels, a dollar standard, air power, the subordination of allies, a military-industrial complex that encompassed science, engineering, and industrial might, coups d’etat, and increasingly, sanctions regimes.
Racial ideology in the US-led version was full of contradictions: co-opting decolonization struggles and the ideological battle with communism required a nominal disavowal of racial hierarchy, even as racism motivated many elite actions and underpinned the system of neocolonial theft of resources from the Global South and from Indigenous lands. No longer colonies, nominally sovereign nations were led by local elites who put their lands and their peoples to work to make the rich countries richer. Those who refused would see their countries bombed, sanctioned, or both, until an overthrow could be effected and a compliant local elite installed.
The smooth functioning of the US Empire occurred through a host of multilateral institutions: the United Nations, headquartered in New York, showed that the world was united under US leadership, with the UN Security Council guaranteeing that wars could be stopped by the will of the world’s powers. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund promised development to those Global South countries that followed America’s rules. The International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the World Trade Organization promised that international disputes could be resolved without violence.
Elections, in the US and throughout the world, let off tremendous amounts of steam when the masses got angry – no need for revolution when you can vote the bastards out.
The change of imperial capital was announced to the world in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. The story is familiar: Egypt asserted sovereignty over the Suez Canal. Britain, France, and Israel invaded. The United States ordered them to stand down, and they did. The imperial capital had moved. If the British wanted to do something, they would have to ask America first.
In the 21st century, we are living through an analogous, multi-decade, friendly struggle that has moved the imperial capital from Washington to Tel Aviv.
We are living through the Suez Crisis of our time, our own announcement that the capital has moved. At several moments during this genocide, the US announced a ceasefire – including, at one point, not even vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the UN Security Council. Biden announced a ceasefire in May 2024, Witkoff announced one in January 2025. The Israelis ignored the first, rolled back the second. The message for the US: Israel will decide when the war ends, and the US will have to accept it, like the US decided that the Suez Crisis would stop and the British had to accept it.
In the new, Israel-led version of the empire, West Asia is the crown jewel. Like the wars of the East India Company to make India into British India, like the Indian Wars of US land theft and genocide, the Middle East today suffers endless wars for the goal of Greater Israel.
In the Israeli-led version of Empire, racial hierarchy is back with a vengeance: Cecil Rhodes’s most racist pronouncements can’t compete with the daily posts of the average pro-Israel twitter user. The disobedient are punished not with a coup d’etat that brings a pliant leader to power, but with genocide against the whole population. Surrender is irrelevant: the surrendered are genocided along with the defiant. Air power remains the principal hard power tool, while ground operations are basically anti-civilian terror operations on medium (assassinations, raids) or mass (gaza genocide) scale. Media and psychological operations have a growing primacy. Inducing psychological collapse is the main objective, in the hope that physical collapse will follow so that genocide can proceed. All the US-built multilateral institutions have been discredited: International courts, the security council, can issue rulings that are then ignored. The atomic energy agency passes intelligence on to Israel to help their assassination planning. Elections have been shown to make no difference, as genocide proceeds through changes of political party.
Anglo-American-Israel Empire soldiers in different periods
Different imperial premises, different kinds of resistance.
The Global South’s peoples fought British colonialism wielding the ideology of national sovereignty and the construction of nation-states to replace the colonies. They fought the American Empire with guerrilla warfare and resistance to military occupation.
The people of West Asia are fighting by not surrendering, enduring the assassinations, sieges, bombings, and psychological operations, defeating the ground forces, and developing missiles to retaliate for attacks made by Israel’s airpower. Those inclined to direct action in the West resort to attacking the fragile and still very important nodes of weapons production. For the Resistance, defense is based on endurance, without trying to match the empire’s specialty of assassination. Attack is based on physical attrition, without trying to match the empire’s specialty in psychological warfare.
Israel specializes in assassination; Iran in missile technology. The missiles can’t stop the assassins from killing and the assassinations can’t stop the missiles from landing. Who made the right investment?
The Roman Republic was founded around 509 BC. The capital was moved to Constantinople around 900 years later and the Empire lived on for another thousand years, until 1453. The British Empire was shorter-lived, around 345 years between 1600-1945, its American incarnation lasting around 80 years from 1945-2023. The Israeli-led iteration is burning itself out quickly. From here it doesn’t look like it will last long.
US naval assets are moving in. US bases within striking distance of Iran are being evacuated. Trump has signaled his willingness to ridicule his biggest supporters and contradict his own intelligence director to do Israel’s bidding. All of this adds up to: it is extremely likely that the US will very soon be attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf. The objective of the war is the removal of the Iranian government and its replacement by either a chaotic, perpetual civil war situation (chaos) or a pliant collaborator regime that will allow Israel to keep genociding with impunity (the main priority of the Western elite is genocide now).
A few decades ago, the US set out to “take out” seven countries. The list was Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Wesley Clark explains the plan to take out seven countries
To assess the chances that the US/Israel will succeed in Iran, consider the past decades of US/Israel operations in the region and the factors for success and failure.
Successes
Jordan. Defeated by Israel in the 1967 war. Working for Israel since. Main factor for US success: Jordan is small, exposed geographically to Israeli attack, and dependent on US/Israel sponsorship.
Libya. Subject to a sudden regime change effort in 2011 that had extremely rapid success. Chaotic civil war situation since. Main factors for US success: Libya is also a small country (6.3 million in 2011) with very limited military assets.
Egypt. Defeated by Israel in the 1967 war. Made peace with Israel after the 1973 war. Working for Israel since. Main factor for US success: Sadat’s decision to collaborate with the US/Israel even as the military was having success in 1973 and afterwards. Sadat’s successors have followed his pattern.
Assassination of Sadat in 1981
Syria. Defeated by Israel in the 1967 war and 1973 (betrayed by Sadat). Maintained a military deterrent capacity despite a decades-long campaign to overthrow the government. Survived an intensified overthrow effort starting in 2011 and only succumbed in 2024. Working for Israel since 2024. Main factors for US success: Turkey’s decision to join the overthrow effort in 2024 and Russia’s partial alliance, balancing of support for Syria against ISIS with Russia’s neutrality in the Syria-Israel conflict allowing Israel to destroy Syria’s military gradually so that Turkey/ISIS could finish it off.
Iraq. Part of the coalition that lost to Israel in 1967. Sponsored by the West to attack Iran 1980-1988. Tried to link withdrawal from Kuwait in 1990 to Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza (“linkage”) at which point the US/Israel decided on his ouster. Bombed in 1990/1, much military capacity destroyed, sanctioned for 12 years with hundreds of thousands of lives lost, finally overthrown in 2003 and occupied by the US since then. Main factors for US success: surprise attack in 1990 when Saddam Hussein thought the US was an ally; Saddam Hussein never seriously tried to fight the US in 1990 nor in 2003; the sanctions, inspections, and no-fly zone imposed after 1990 ensured that Iraq could not rebuild a significant military capacity.
Failures
Yemen. Intervening through Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, the US and UK bombed Yemen’s cities and attempted to starve the population through siege to try to achieve regime change for nearly a decade beginning in 2015. After Yemen struck Saudi oil facilities in 2022, a ceasefire materialized. Yemen then intervened in 2023 to try to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and the US Navy attacked Yemen again. Yemen had some successes against US naval vessels, after which a ceasefire materialized between the US and Yemen in 2025. Main factors in US failure: Yemen’s ability to absorb the damage and its ability to strike US targets (Saudi oil facilities in the first instance and the US navy in the second) enabled it to establish deterrence.
Afghanistan. The West has sought a pre-eminent position in Afghanistan since the British Empire in the 1830s. The US intervened (beginning in 1979) in an alliance with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and China to destroy the Soviet-backed Afghan government. This US intervention was a failure until Russia (no longer the Soviet Union) ceased supplying the Afghan government in 1991, which collapsed in 1992. The Pakistan-backed Taliban won the civil war and gained power in 1996, and was overthrown in turn by the US in 2001. After a US occupation of 20 years, the Taliban swept the US from power (probably with Pakistan’s blessing) in 2021. Main factor for US success in 1992 – Russia’s betrayal of its Afghan ally. Main factor for US success in 2001 – Pakistan’s decision to work with the US occupation. Main factor for US failure in 2021 – Pakistan’s decision to no longer work with the US occupation.
The analogy with Iran
How can we use these examples to assess the US chances in Iran? Factors include size, population, military capacity, how devastated the target country has been by previous sanctions and wars, the strength of the pro-imperialist constituency in the target country, and the strength and number of neighbours willing to work with the US on a regime change campaign.
Size. With 90 million people, vast terrain with mountains, a very capable missile force, a potentially huge army, and potentially very powerful alliances, Iran is the biggest regime change war the US has ever attempted.
Military capacity. Even after all the sanctions on Iran, even after the surprise attack by Israel on June 13, the country retains the ability to hit Israel and to hit US assets when the US joins.
Devastation by sanctions. Iran has been sanctioned for decades and has suffered great economic harm as a result, like other countries being softened up for regime change. But because of its size and location, it has been able to continue to develop, despite all of the setbacks.
Pro-US elements. The US/Israel have assassinated many Iranian leaders; Iran has a substantial liberal, pro-Western elite bloc (like Russia and China do); there are small Western-sponsored separatist movements among Iranian communities; there’s a substantial, western-sponsored ISIS-like terrorist group called MEK; and the old monarch’s son has declared his readiness to take the throne back in the event of a US/Israeli success. The equivalent of a Jolani (a manufactured terrorist leader who can be put on the throne after a successful regime change) could come from one of these quarters; but the equivalent of a Sadat (someone who gets to the very top of the state and then conspires to disarm and subordinate his own state to imperialists) is a very rare gift to imperialists and happens very rarely (it could still happen and is the main way that the US could win, but it’s unlikely).
Neighbours. Most of Iran’s neighbours are not likely to join the regime change effort. Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan won’t. Azerbaijan and Turkey could cause issues if the war goes long. Iraq could be a platform for US attacks on Iran, but Iran has allies there as well. Across the Persian Gulf are several US proxies, but they also have targets that are valuable and indefensible from Iranian retaliation, which makes the situation potentially costly for the US/Israel.
Getting past the Iranian military will be (already is) a challenge like none the US/Israel has yet faced, a long, world-transforming war with a highly uncertain outcome. The only alternative the US has is to wait for an Iranian version of Sadat (or Gorbechev) who will voluntarily dismantle his own state. Such a person would have to be in power already, not waiting to be installed.
How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?
Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.
In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.
The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?
Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.
The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required.
For lower rungs, public words of submission could suffice.
Sometimes an elite member will survive (or be allowed to survive) a revelation with a warning.
Or the revelation will have the effect of keeping things in line.
But where scandal fails to have the desired effect, there are other, more murderous options.
As genocide subordinates all other Western goals, these messy rituals of humiliation become more public. As revealing them becomes a valid tactic for intra-elite disputes, we may all be subjected to a more comprehensive view of the mess.
We already have a picture: This is an elite that wants nothing more than to continue a genocide against children, bound together by fear of exposure of the crimes they’ve personally committed in private.
Can they be trusted to solve the problems of the world?
The university is dying in the West. Can it be resurrected on anti-genocide principles?
In the West, the university is dying for three reasons.
Financialization. The Western university is based on generous public endowments of land (in North America, endowments of stolen Indigenous land) and public resources intended to produce an increasingly large educated public (in Western countries the goal was, quite recently, universal higher education) the better to innovate and develop the whole society intellectually, scientifically, and technologically.
But led by US propaganda (white backlash against the racial diversification of the student body and against desegregation progress, the presentation of everything as a form of consumption…), support for public education has eroded. Higher education is seen as an (increasingly false) promise of individual prosperity for which an individual (and their family) should have to pay (and borrow), generating hundreds of billions of dollars of business for banks and comparable amounts in private tuition revenue for institutions.
The generous endowments of land and government subsidies for teaching and research have come to be understood by the institutions as collateral for investment portfolios, land deals, and financial trickery.
Research collaborations are focused on legitimizing Israel’s genocide and providing intellectual cover and innovation in genocidal weapons and methods of dehumanization, policing, and control.
After decades of this, the stated mission of the university – teaching and open-ended (non-genocidal) research – is quite incidental to the financial, real estate, investment, and genocidal operations that are the highest priority of Western societies.
Genocidality. To be successful, academic inquiry and teaching require a wider range of tolerance of views and their expression (“academic freedom”), including on the most important questions of the time.
To have a society whose most important priority is the commission of genocide, as Western societies exist today, requires the range of expression and thought to be extremely narrow and for inquiry and teaching to be physically suppressed. This suppression has been established through the destruction of student university encampments in 2024, progressing to the deportation and imprisonment of students for their views in 2025.
Meanwhile what you actually learn in university has to conform to Western genocidal ideology, and continues to narrow (because most knowledge actually threatens that ideology)
The university, like social media, has become a trap: individuals are drawn to these institutions with the promise of free expression, but then arrested, beaten, and jailed for actually expressing themselves, if those expressions are anti-genocide.
The consequences of this have yet to be fully felt and may not be as bad as anticipated here, but the promise of a place for young people to grow intellectually through debate, study, and even activism has been broken. It is unclear whether young people will want to take on immense debt when the university reality is so far from the university ideal.
AI. The actual activities of studying at university include: listening to lectures, reading, writing essays and assignments, perhaps taking midterm and final examinations. Through repetition of these activities and taking into account feedback from professors and tutorial leaders, learning happens.
Lectures and readings are now available online, and you’ll probably be able to find something better than your average lecture on youtube. There are interactive elements that aren’t available by listening to a podcast or a youtube video, but they would have to be built in consciously by your instructor – and aren’t, always.
Essays and assignments can be written by AI. In principle AI could be used to increase productivity which could be shared across society. In practice it’s a trillion-dollar industry whose main use case seems to be the facilitation of cheating in schools and universities – a use case for which AI is excellent. The temptation to use it is irresistible. The use of it is undetectable. The main weapon of the university professor – the writing assignment – is now obsolete. Most of the adaptations proposed for dealing with this are variations of “just let them use it.” We can switch to in-person, pen-and-paper testing, oral exams, and interviews, but only until they put their trillions towards using wearables to cheat on those too.
The promise of university was: spend some years on an idyll, meet friends for life, learn and grow, challenge yourself and challenge society, get a valuable credential for your future. The promise of university today is: mortgage your future to finance genocide today, suppress your conscience or be punished, use robots to write your assignments that will probably be graded by robots, and get a dubious credential that might be denied to you if you get a conscience at any point.
This is the future of university in the West
If this is true, there should be an opportunity to create a different kind of Academy.
The abilities to write, read critically, apply logic, and evaluate evidence, will continue to be valuable. Developing these abilities by practicing them through challenges designed and evaluated by a teacher who gives you progressively more difficult tasks and feedback along the way and peers who you can learn with socially, will continue to be an excellent – maybe even optimal – way to learn.
The university is ultimately professors and students. Its history is longer than the current genocide, longer than its current corporate form, longer even than capitalism and colonialism. Many liberatory projects have included an academic component: The Black Panthers, SNCC, movement schools and freedom universities.
Over a year ago, during the dismantling of the encampments, when the possibility of a massive purge of academics from US universities seemed to be on the table, I talked in a sit rep about building a university that could absorb the purged academics as teachers and the purged students as learners. We don’t need the land or buildings, the extortionate tuition or the investment portfolios. We could charge students enough that the teachers could make a good living teaching; publish research and writing directly to the web without the extortions of the journal publishing monopolies; and students could come out of their programs with portfolios and credentials showing exactly what they did (since we’d be unlikely, for reasons I’m about to mention, to get the same legislatures that ordered the purges to give our academy degree-granting status). These would be real courses, with real work and real feedback, not merely watching (even great) lectures on an online platform, chained together in a progression to make a real program.
This Academy need not have its entire curriculum focused on Palestine. Ideally students could learn all the subjects that they would learn at a Western university. But Palestine would not be a taboo and that alone would differentiate it from all other universities in North America. Students could study Israel, Zionism, apartheid, and genocide; at the journalism school students could develop their skills without worrying about the pro-Israel censor, etc. We might even get a brief reprieve from AI: for as long as AI is trained on data from the corporate web currently monopolized by genocidal maniacs, students would have to write their own papers to meet the anti-genocide criteria of this Academy.
There are several hurdles in the way of establishing the anti-genocide Academy.
Web infrastructure and payment systems can be attacked and shut down. Genocidals like to infiltrate all spaces and, if these spaces threaten their racist goals (or feelings), shut them down. An institution dependent on the web (currently monopolized by the aforementioned genocidal maniacs) would have this vulnerability. It can be mitigated, but not completely eliminated.
The credential obtained would be worthless to mainstream genocidal institutions (though not, perhaps, elsewhere). On the other hand, the skills would be real and the credential itself would be true badge of honor in an anti-genocide community that might be bigger than many of us realize.
Institution-building is very difficult and no one trained in mainstream institutions is very good at working together. Political, ideological, and organizational splits doom most organizations. This risk is also always present.
This is the kind of thing that we could try to start small and see where it goes; we could have multiple groups trying it different ways. If I’m right and there is real demand for this, there could well be enough demand for many academies. I think we should go for a labor-intensive model, where more students means more teachers – the niche of trying to mega scale is already filled.
When I talked about this idea about a year ago, many of you came forward to tell me that you would want to participate. Here, I am fleshing out the idea further. Let’s discuss.
American Revolutionary theory states, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, that, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Jefferson was a slaver and genocider but that doesn’t negate the truth of his statement.
American Revolutionary theory states, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, that, “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Jefferson was a slaver and genocider but that doesn’t negate the truth of his statement. Chinese political theory had the concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which a ruler could lose, and which would give the people the right to rebel.
It’s a myth that Western democracies are messy and unstable compared to so-called authoritarian regimes in the Global South that are free to use repression to impose stability. In reality Western democracies are no less repressive: these states torture, assassinate, mass-incarcerate, and have police do what they like with no accountability. They use all the tools of the dictatorships they criticize, inflicting the same evils at the same scale. These days they do all of these things in the service of genocide.
What Western democracies have that others lack is several layers of defense protecting their system of brutality. These pressure releases make Western democracies much harder to overthrow, as they channel rebellious energy into one dead end after another.
The genocide Israel is committing in Gaza should have lost the whole Western elite its mandate, heavenly or otherwise. It should have exposed the Western elite as a total, genocidal, racist tyranny. By presenting fake divisions inside of this elite, they give the people false hopes that the genocide can be stopped while they remain in charge, if they could be asked in just the right way.
Wait for elections. Trump came in and imposed a ceasefire for a short time, before advancing the genocide to its worst level (and getting worse). Democrats argued that since both parties were genocidal, the strategic voter would vote for the Democrats because they’re better on other issues, and ignore the anti-genocide parties that were running (Stein/Ware, De la Cruz/Garcia…). The idea that there are differences between the parties about genocide makes people think there’s some anti-genocide strategy in voting instead of starting from the premise that all genocidal parties are illegitimate. People are apparently waiting for Israel’s democracy to produce an alternative to Netanyahu, ignoring the fact that there millions of Israelis who are just as genocidal as Netanyahu and who will eagerly continue the genocide were he replaced.
Wait for divisions. Apparently Obama hated Netanyahu when he gave him $38 billion. Biden yelled at him on the phone before giving him a thousand new one-ton bombs. Trump doesn’t answer Netanyahu’s calls and doesn’t mention Israel on a trip to Saudi Arabia (which is the historic norm and nothing special) as Israel gleefully embarks on mass starvation. The UK, Canada, and France have issued a “serious warning”, after 19 months of genocide and hundreds of thousands murdered as Israel celebrates.
This is what Piers is.
Piers Morgan, after becoming a caricature chasing genocide victims down to ask them if they condemn Hamas, tweets that Israel has gone too far. This is faked controversy and faked division in the most united and monstrous ruling class.
Decades ago, during one of Argentina’s economic crises, the people marched shouting the slogan, “que se vayan todos” – all of them must go. It should be common sense that there should not be any mass murderer or defender of mass murder in power anywhere.
It’s scary to take on people who are proudly displaying that they have no limits to their depravity. It’s natural to hope for cracks between them that might make the task easier. But the cracks are fake. And there’s no escaping the starting point: all the genociders must go.
Here are some facts that are being avoided in the discussion of this conflict.
India has committed horrible injustices and abuses in Kashmir for decades. Kashmir only joined India at Partition time on the basis of a deal with protections through special articles in the Indian Constitution. The current government did not have the authority to cancel these articles of the constitution (Articles 370 and 35), but did so nonetheless, in 2019, which was a major abuse in a long line of abuses.
India’s government is run by fascists who have used police riots, mob violence, assassination, torture, public and media campaigns against minorities, especially Muslims, as an established part of their ruling and electoral strategy. The image of Pakistan plays a major role in this playbook.
Pakistan’s regime is run by group that came to power in a coup against Imran Khan, who was overthrown at US behest, principally as punishment for not allowing Pakistan to be used as a platform for the US to continue to hold Afghanistan, but also because of deals he wanted to make with Russia, his advocacy for Palestine. It has faced the largest protests in history, it has seen a decline in the prestige and faith in its military (always the main power bloc in the country), and it continues to persecute Imran Khan’s movement to this day, including stealing elections and outrageous abuse of the judicial system.
The Pakistani state commits horrible injustices and abuses against minorities, including counterinsurgency and international assassination campaigns against activists from Balochistan.
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were all part of British India. After the British monopoly on the slave trade and its pillage of the Americas, India became the principal engine of Britain’s wealth and power, generating so much surplus that Britain used it to industrialize the US and Europe.
When it became clear that India was going to become independent, Britain ensured that it would be divided and poor. Partition was imposed by the British imperialists.
All of India and Pakistan’s wars with one another since Partition have served no one but the same (now neo) colonial interests that imposed it in the first place. Militarily speaking there can be no victor in a war between these countries, only losers.
The official language of India is Hindi (and English). The official language of Pakistan is Urdu (and English). These are the same language written with a different alphabet in each country. This language, Hindi-Urdu, is not spoken by people from any other country. It’s the same language, the same people, with the same culture and a shared history.
It is outrageous and unrealistic to suggest that Partition shouldn’t have happened and that South Asia could be a federation with wealth and power commensurate to its size and history.
It is far more realistic to believe that India and Pakistan should develop methods of rule dependent on persecuting minorities internally and fighting wars with one another with weapons manufactured in other countries and purchased at huge expense.
That’s it, we’ll return now to regular anti-genocide programming.
We keep hearing that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is “AI-powered.” Many pundits are warning that this marks a new era in warfare, the first time that “automated” war has been waged.
We keep hearing that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is “AI-powered.” Many pundits are warning that this marks a new era in warfare, the first time that “automated” war has been waged. Foreign Policy declared that “AI Decides Who Lives and Dies.”Voxreports that “AI tells Israel who to bomb.” The Washington Postclaims “Israel offers a glimpse into the terrifying world of military AI.”
These narratives are misleading, by design. They distract from the institutions and ideologies responsible for the devastation, and from the sheer scale of the devastation itself. Like other appeals to “Artificial Intelligence” – a confused and confusing term that is inseparable from racist ideologies – these framings invite the imperialist experts to offer their non-solutions.
Rather than fight the entities responsible for genocide, and support the Palestinian resistance, the experts want us to blame the genocide on “misuses” of computers – misuses they promise to “fix” through their partnerships with the US government, corporations, and academia (the institutions that have enabled the genocide in the first place).
“AI-Powered” Bombings: A Story Approved by the Israeli Military Censor
The now common narrative about an “AI-powered genocide” in Gaza is largely based on articles by Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and activist working for +972 Magazine. Abraham is famous for co-directing the documentary filmNo Other Land about Israel’s efforts to destroy Masafer Yatta and the inspiring resistance by the residents, which recently won an Oscar. Abraham’s co-director, Hamdan Ballal – who could easily have told the story with the film’s other Palestinian co-director, but not gotten to the American Academy Awards without Israeli support – was kidnapped and beaten by Israeli settlers and the army in March 2025. The publicity following the Oscar win also led to justifiable criticism of Abraham’s actions, including his circulation of Israeli atrocity propaganda concerning October 7 and his use of the Oscar acceptance speech to condemn Hamas and draw a false equivalence between Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal war.
Over the past year, Abraham wrote several articles that have been used to support the idea of an “AI-powered genocide” – even though Abraham, tellingly, never uses the term “genocide.” Some of his articles were published in collaboration between +972 Magazine and the Guardian and have been widely quoted by pro-Palestinian activists and news outlets. Middle East Monitor, for instance, referred to “Israel’s AI-powered genocide” based on this reporting.
Since +972 Magazine is an Israeli outlet, they are subject to the Israeli military censor. Any story concerning “sensitive” matters must be first approved by the censor to ensure it doesn’t compromise the zionist entity’s “security” interests. And if we read Abraham’s articles carefully, it’s not surprising that they passed, because they minimize the genocide, transfer the blame from people to machines, and (whether intended or not) promote Israeli technologies.
What’s the Difference Between “AI Targeting” and Just Bombing Everything?
Abraham’s widely referenced article on a system called “Lavender” (published April 3, 2024) begins by quoting a book written by the Israeli military. The book claims there’s a “bottleneck” in generating targets (humans are apparently too slow) and suggests that “AI” will solve this problem, thereby revolutionizing warfare. Rather than challenge the premise that the Israeli military has a sophisticated method of “generating targets” – which plays into Israel’s narrative that it uses “precision targeting” – Abraham concludes that the revolutionary technology the Israeli military dreamed of now exists: it is Lavender.
Abraham’s sources are Israeli soldiers who convinced him that Lavender “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians.” Abraham adds that his anonymous sources told him Lavender’s “influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine ‘as if it were a human decision.’ ”
In fact, all decisions made over the course of this genocide are “human decisions.” Even if a computer was used in the process of enacting genocide, it is people who decided to use the computer, designed the software, chose the data, determined what constitutes a valid “output” and how that output will factor into the ultimately human decision to kill. Machines don’t pull triggers, people do. While AI pundits debate absurd scenarios where machines wake up and decide to turn everything into paperclips, machines on their own are nothing. In the real world, we have material systems and institutions in which human beings make political and moral decisions. No machine is autonomous; everything depends on resources allocated by people, and anything can be unplugged.
It is estimated that by January 2025, over 70% of structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Israel has dropped over 85,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza since October 2023 (not to mention the engineered starvation and lack of medical supplies). Basically everything has been bombed, much of it more than once, as we know from accounts by the people of Gaza and from satellite images.
Figure showing Israel’s systematic bombing of all civilian infrastructure in Gaza, using satellite images. (Source: “‘Nowhere and no one is safe’: spatial analysis of damage to critical civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the Israeli military campaign, 7 October to 22 November 2023,” Conflict and Health, 2024).
Why would “target generation,” regardless of how it works, matter when the zionist entity decided to bomb all of Gaza – to try to send it “back to the stone age,” as Israel’s craven politicians have openly said for years?
Israel bombed the areas where people lived and the areas people fled to for shelter and food. It has intentionally attacked all life-giving facilities. By October 26, 2023, Israel had bombed over 35 health care facilities, including 20 hospitals. As Mary Turfah wrote then, it was a clear case of “the logic of elimination,” where “the colonizer destroys the medical infrastructure to diminish a people’s ability to live, after they try and cannot crush the people’s will.” By now, several hospitals have been bombed multiple times. Israel aimed to destroy everything that was good for life in Gaza, from mosques to bakeries to water and sewage facilities (85% of such facilities were destroyed by early October 2024).
What does “target generation” even mean, when elimination is the settler-colonial policy? And since Israel has been bombing everything, why so much hype for stories about AI-based targeting?
The focus on target generation minimizes the genocidal intent, painting the perpetrators as victims of sorts, pawns of the machine. Abraham writes,
The [Israeli] army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions…This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
But again, these are not “the machine’s decisions,” and Israel has never needed “AI” to indiscriminately bomb Palestinians. Destruction of entire areas is a long-running zionist policy. Saying these attacks are primarily targeted at “militants,” with some deviations due to technical “errors,” sanitizes Israel’s genocidal nature. It also elevates “AI,” treating it like a revolutionary new technology with a mind of its own.
In getting trapped in the logic of “target generation,” Abraham also affirms the propaganda that the Israeli military abides by certain “ethics.” The Israeli military is infamous for having its ownphilosophers who developed an “Army Code of Ethics,” as well as lawyers who ensure adherence to international law. According to Israel, these experts decide what is an acceptable amount of “collateral damage.”
Abraham writes that “in an unprecedented move” the Israeli military decided recently that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any ‘collateral damage’ during assassinations of low-ranking militants.” Abraham added that “in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
This framing makes it seem like the policy isn’t one of elimination, but rather that the Israeli military simply moved its “ethical” threshold from something acceptable (~15 civilians for every target) to something that seems extreme even by liberal Zionist standards (~100 civilians for every target). This reporting never challenges the targeting of the resistance, of course. It is implied that it’d be fine for Israel to murder every single “important” Hamas member, as long as it does so with more precision.
Abraham basically says that in an interview with +972 Magazine’s podcast, in Hebrew. The interviewer asked, “These people [marked by Lavender], we have no way of knowing if they’re really active in Hamas?” Abraham answered,
Before the war, Lavender was just an aid. It gave us a lead. Say, there was a phone call and someone on the call was in the Lavender database. Ok, that’s great, fine, so he’s a suspect. Maybe he’s in Hamas, maybe he’s not. Maybe he just has similar communication patterns to Hamas members. Journalists, for example, who regularly talk to Hamas members and attend Hamas rallies and take photos, they could have similar communication patterns.
It was “the madness of October 7,” Abraham says, that drastically changed things. The Israeli army apparently started taking Lavender’s recommendations as the truth, without further “verification,” despite knowing that Lavender has a “1 in 10” chance of mistakenly identifying someone as an “active Hamas member.”
Does Lavender Even Exist?
We can’t even be sure that Lavender exists as described by +972 Magazine. Unlike in Edward Snowden’s disclosures of mass surveillance by the NSA and collaborating companies from 2013, Abraham provides no internal documents about the system. +972 Magazine claims to have obtained footage from a presentation on “human target machines” given by the Israeli military at Tel-Aviv University, along with the presentation slides, but neither the footage nor the full slides were ever released. Abraham’s article shows only two slides from the presentation, which lack details and don’t name any system. Even if Abraham had access to detailed documents, the Israeli military censor wouldn’t have approved their publication (which is why Israeli outlets like +972 Magazine can’t do serious reporting on these topics).
A slide obtained by +972 Magazine from a private presentation given by the Israeli military’s Unit 8200 at Tel-Aviv University’s “AI week.” The slide shows that the Israeli military surveils people by looking at characteristics of individuals in their inner and also outer circles. This is how spying works generally.
Even if Lavender does exist, it might as well be a list of the GPS coordinates of every structure in Gaza. The result would be no different from what we’re seeing – utter destruction. There is no super machine in the Israeli army’s possession telling them what to bomb. Their compulsions and ideologies can’t be found in the computer.
The story that what is happening in Gaza is driven by a machine makes it appear like some Israeli soldiers are taking a moral stand. In an interview with Democracy Now, Abraham said some of his informants were “shocked by committing atrocities and by being involved in things and killing families, and they felt it’s unjustifiable. And they felt a responsibility, I think.” He added that “they felt a need to share this information with the world, out of a sense that people are not getting it.” Why did their shock not stop them from obeying their genocidal orders?
Abraham anyhow doesn’t endorse such refusals. When asked by Israeli media whether he thinks Israeli soldiers should refuse orders to expel Palestinians in Masafer Yatta from their homes (expulsions documented in No Other Land), Abraham said: “It’s not my place to say. Everyone has to act according to their conscience…our emphasis isn’t on the individual soldier.”
Abraham’s informant soldiers seem to have no conscience. These soldiers aren’t acknowledging the genocide, let alone challenging it. They are merely raising questions about the protocol of “target generation” (without realizing all of Gaza is the target). Abraham’s informants told him they used “dumb” bombs for many targets, which cause massive damage, over so-called smart bombs, which create more localized damage. Some of the soldiers justified this. “You don’t want to waste expensive [smart] bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” one soldier told Abraham. Another similarly said, “it would be a shame to waste bombs” on Palestinians who aren’t important “Hamas operatives.”
Yet another informant told Abraham that the bombing of Gaza is unprecedented in scale, but that “I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.” Whatever this is, it is not resistance to the genocide.
Israel’s official response to Lavender is actually closer to the truth than +972 Magazine’s coverage. The Israeli military told Israeli media that the “dumb bombs” it has been dropping on Gaza are standard weapons of war. As for Lavender, the Israeli military said they “don’t use artificial intelligence to tell or predict whether a person is a terrorist,” adding that information databases are “just tools” for military analysts who make the decisions.
“AI” is a nebulous and shifting term, which has been used as a pretext for advancing imperialist and capitalist agendas.
“Artificial Intelligence” Is the Refuge of Scoundrels
What nearly all discussions of AI miss is the malleability of the term. Systems that have been used for many decades have been rebranded as “AI.” Basically anything involving a computer can be “AI” in the right context, from systems that calculate insurance premiums to the simplest “if-then” statement. Calling something “AI” is marketing, putting a fresh gloss on old political agendas. The term “AI” is useful for oppressive institutions because it hooks into many ideologies about hierarchies of intelligence, labor, and the limits of the human mind.
If there’s an “algorithm” for what Israel is doing, it can be captured by a simple “if-then” statement. “If it’s necessary for indigenous life, then try to destroy it.” This is the logic that settler-colonial states have been following long before digital computers existed. No need to invoke “AI.”
A Red Carpet for the Empire’s Expert Class
If it’s an “AI-powered genocide,” then the issue isn’t racist, Zionist ideology. What we need are experts to help us fix the computer, whose “decisions” were less than perfect.
Yuval Abraham’s reporting on Israel’s supposed use of a ChatGPT-like system, published in both +972 Magazine and the Guardian (co-authored with Harry Davies), is a prime example. Abraham begins by describing the system in a way that sounds like PR for Israeli technologies: a tool created by the Israeli army’s “elite cyber warfare squad,” which is “being fed vast amounts of intelligence collected on the everyday lives of Palestinians living under occupation.” Yet there are downsides. Davies and Abraham’s expert on the matter is Brianna Rosen, a former White House “national security” advisor.
As expected, Rosen told the journalists that ChatGPT holds great potential for the state; that it could “detect threats humans might miss, even before they arise.” But there are “risks” of “drawing false connections and faulty conclusions.” Like many other servants of empire, Rosen says that it’s really AI that is now waging war and she wants to improve its “transparency” and “accountability.” This is done in the name of “national security.” The questions Rosen wants us to focus on are:
What safeguards has Israel put in place to prevent errors, hallucination, misuse, and even corruption of AI-based targeting systems? Can Israeli officials fully explain how AI targeting outputs were generated? What level of confidence exists in the traceability and explainability of results?
Rosen concludes that it’s not clear how “responsible AI” is being practiced. One of her complaints is that Israel, which she describes as “a key U.S. ally,” hasn’t endorsed the principles of AI ethics that enlightened countries such as the US have (she notes that Russia hasn’t either). In 2020, for example, the Pentagon published an “Ethical Principles of AI” statement that includes “Responsibility,” “Traceability,” and “Equitable” use (which is promised to reduce “unintended bias”). If only Israel could be so ethical!
The experts discuss these weighty matters in gatherings such as the “Responsible AI in the Military Domain Summit” (2024) and in the Microsoft-sponsored “Global Conference on AI, Security and Ethics” (2025) hosted by the United Nations. It’s safe to say that if Henry Kissinger (who rebranded himself as an “AI expert” late in life) were still alive, he’d be a keynote speaker in these “responsible AI for war” conferences.
Davies and Abraham give an example of the consequences when AI isn’t “responsible.” In their article on the Israeli military’s ChatGPT-like system, they refer to a case where “AI was likely used by intelligence officers to help select a target in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in November 2023 that killed four people, including three teenage girls.”
“Killed four people”? It’s remarkable that this article, published March 6, 2025, neglects to mention that tens of thousands – and likely far more – Palestinians have already been killed by Israel in this genocide. Were there tens of thousands of these technical errors? Or are Israeli human beings enacting a genocide their leaders announcedbeforehand?
The loudest voices on “AI” take the same approach. AI Now, a think tank created by companies complicit in the genocide (Microsoft and Google) and the Obama White House, recycled the analysis of +972 Magazine, crafting it to appeal to the US “national security” establishment. Heidy Khlaaf of AI Now (formerly a Microsoft employee) toldDefense One this about the Israeli military’s use of “AI”:
…the data is inaccurate and [the models] sort of attempt to find patterns that may not exist, like being in a WhatsApp group with a…Hamas member should not qualify you for [a death] sentence. But in this case, that is what we’re observing.
The implication here is that if a Hamas member were targeted, not just someone who’s in a WhatsApp group with one, then it’d be okay; that wouldn’t count as a machine “error.” In this worldview, Americans and Israelis decide who lives and who dies in Gaza by right: they just need to do so responsibly.
There’s a similar sleight of hand when “AI” is invoked in other areas. When it comes to policing and prisons, for example, the experts are preoccupied with the “bias” of the “sentencing algorithm” (as if the US carceral state can be made “unbiased”). But the algorithm didn’t make the US incarcerate nearly 2 million people, significantly more than China (which has four times the US population) and more than three times that of India (which also has four times the US population). Instead of thinking about how to abolish this abhorrent, racist system, AI experts are here to make sure those 2 million are selected without undue bias.
Whether the discussion is about policing or genocide, this expert class offers the only solution it knows: forming more partnerships between the “stakeholders” – corporations, the state, academia, and NGOs – and promising “transparency,” “accountability,” and “bias reduction.” Fair, unbiased genocide and mass incarceration delivered by the most updated technologies.
“I See, I Shoot”
The myth of an automated, high-tech means of controlling Palestinians predates the current obsession with AI. For years, Israel has boasted about its weapons systems, presenting them as both impenetrable and nearly fully automated. A video from 2009 shows the Samson remote controlled weapon station, made by Rafael, in action along the Gaza colonial fence. The system is known in Hebrew as “roah-yorah,” which means “I see, I shoot” (in the Hebrew name, the feminine verbs “see” and “shoot” are used). The system’s female operators are in communication with a group of other female soldiers who monitor the colonial fence (the tatzpitanyiot, who were captured by the resistance in Al-Aqsa Flood). When they see movements of “Hamas militants” from afar, the video says, they shoot them down.
A video from 2009 of female Israeli soldiers operating the Samson “I See, I Shoot” system, made by Israeli weapons developer Rafael. In the video, the operator says: “I shoot the first [‘Hamas militant’]. I get confirmation from the [female] soldier [in Hebrew, tatzpitanit] who is monitoring that there is indeed a hit…I shoot the second. The third.” The video says that the story of this weapon system has “a feminist aspect to it, because initially the army called the system ‘I See, I Shoot’ using masculine verbs, but then it was decided that it will be operated by women soldiers.”
In recent years, such systems (and many others) have been rebranded as “AI.” Journalists and policy pundits circulated manystories about how Israel’s fence around Gaza is apparently patrolled by “killer AI robots,” ushering in a new era of warfare. Such stories help Israel sell its weapons worldwide, along with the people who build them (Israelis who, after serving in the Israeli military, go work for companies like Google and Microsoft).
But there’s a big gap here between image and reality. In 2018, we saw how the nearly “automated” fence was made up of Israeli military snipers who were shooting with the intent to maim (or kill) Palestinians. And on October 7, 2023, we saw how the Palestinian resistance broke through and easily glided over that automated “killer AI” fence, even blowing up an “I See, I Shot” station from the air.
Palestinian resistance fighters blowing up an “I See, I Shoot” station from a hang glider on October 7, 2023.
Microsoft and Israel: “A Marriage Made in Heaven”
The AI-centered stories still insist there’s a magical new technology that could enable Israel to do great harm – and that if only this technology were regulated, the problem would be solved. Once again, +972 Magazine set the terms of discussion, with an article by Yuval Abraham describing Microsoft’s contracts with Israel for advanced “AI” systems. This story and similar ones have been presented as “breaking news.” Are they?
It’s well-documented that Microsoft (like Google and other companies) has been providing services to Israel for decades. These include routine computing and data storage services, which are necessary for daily oppression and surveillance but have little to do with “AI.” Microsoft is also occupying land in ‘48 Palestine (which includes a new data center opened in October 2023). It also relies on the Israeli military to supply its workforce. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once said “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company,” while current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella praised the “human capital” that the zionist entity produces. As Benjamin Netanyahu summed it up, in a 2016 meeting with Nadella marking twenty-five years of collaboration: Microsoft and Israel are “a marriage made in heaven but recognized here on earth.”
“AI-Powered” Deportations?
We are now seeing another wave of AI propaganda surrounding the detention and deportation of students engaging in Palestine solidarity work. There are many stories about how the US government and zionist groups are using “AI” to flag people for deportation. Once again, “AI” is being used to dress up old political projects.
It’s already been easy for decades to make lists of people from social media who match certain criteria – that’s what the platforms were built for. It is simple to search posts for keywords that the government might now deem as “pro-terror” (“resistance,” “settler-colonialism,” “BDS,” or whatever). The next step is to compile lists of people based on whether they’ve shared articles from certain sites (say, Mondoweiss or Electronic Intifada) or activist groups (for example, Students for Justice in Palestine).
The Zionist startup that says it is employing “cutting-edge AI” to flag people could very well be doing these simple things, yet calling it “AI” makes the operation seem more powerful and sophisticated. This goes beyond a marketing agenda of overselling a technology by claiming it is better than it really is.
AI propaganda can also make us forget that social media platforms were designed to surveil and create profit. In their 2014 article on surveillance capitalism, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney noted that an early application of ARPANET – a Pentagon network created in the late 1960s, which later became the internet – was to store millions of files the state collected on US citizens involved in anti-war movements (known as the “Army Files”). The digital platforms we have today grew from these efforts to surveil and control social movements, and were developed by the same institutions.
Focusing on the (mis)uses of “AI” regarding deportations also distracts from some important and difficult political questions. Questions such as: Why is it that so many activist groups depend on platforms made by companies that serve US imperialism? How can we challenge these platforms and overcome decades of propaganda that said social media is a liberatory tool for grassroots struggles? What can be done about a culture of activism that, in the imperial core at least, is often more focused on creating images of resistance – thereby feeding the platforms of surveillance – than materially disrupting oppressive pipelines (as groups like Palestine Action have)? And what could be done to reduce the harms of these digital platforms, now that they’re everywhere, and that so much information about activists is readily accessible?
Getting Off the Propaganda Train
Every so often an executive from one of the tech monopolies tells the media he’s alarmed that AI is going to replace human beings. Generations of Hollywood blockbusters (2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Terminator in 1984, The Matrix in 1999, Avengers: The Age of Ultron in 2013, Subservience in 2024, and many many more) have trained us to think of AI as something awe-inspiring and terrifying. Over the same time span, Israeli propagandists have put forward a similar image of the Israeli military: an invincible, all-knowing machine full of intelligence and technology.
These parallel propaganda trains – of AI and of Israel – have the same goals: puffing up the self-image of imperialists as gods, and inducing despair in those trying to resist genocide. In fact, as anti-colonial rebels have shouted through the centuries, our oppressors have nothing that we don’t have. This genocide can be stopped. If it is, it will be stopped by human beings resisting, not by fixing a computer.
