Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Genocide

The Star of David Is Getting the Swastika Treatment

By

On May 11, 2026

23 Comments

The Swastika is an ancient symbol. It’s been used for thousand of years. It wasn’t evil, quite the opposite.

Then the Nazis adopted it and if you wear a swastika or have a swastika tattoo, people judge you. Badly.

The Star of David is an ancient symbol of Judaism. Then Israel used it for its flag and engaged in a historically vicious genocide, engaging in rape and torture, all live-streamed.

And so..


As everyone with sense has noted the rise in anti-semitism, such as it is (much measured anti-semitism is fake, since outfits like ADL count people saying “from the river to the sea” or “free Palestine” as anti-semitic) is caused by Israel saying it’s the only Jewish nation and that any criticism of its genocide are anti-semitic.

Well, if Israel = Jewish = Genocide, which is the logic of these statements, then people are going to be anti-semitic.

This isn’t helped by the fact the majority of synagogues raise money for Israel, and many sell stolen Palestinian land and recruit soldiers for the IDF.

There’s also the rising presumption that if someone is Israeli, they’re a war criminal who has probably killed women and children. The majority of casualties in Gaza are women and children, after all, and Israel has a draft. Unless an Israeli wasn’t drafted because of religious exceptions, or went to prison, they’ve been in the IDF and given how Israel makes war they’ve either killed kids, or helped other military members kill kids.

Then there was the time that prison guards were caught on tape raping a prisoner, and the only person charged with a crime was the person who released the video. The guards have become celebrities, going on TV, and there were huge demonstration in their support.

The majority of Israelis appear to be, forgive the word, evil. They approve of rape. They approve of genocide. Most of them have helped kill civilians. (Civilian murder was common long before the straight up genocide, and targeting of children is well documented. Israeli snipers in particular love shooting kids.)

So the Star of David is now a symbol of genocide, like the Swastika. Israeli citizenship means the presumption of actual participation in the murder of civilians, and even if somehow one avoided that, the majority of the population supports the genocide, as well as rape of prisoners.

I’ve never seen a country destroy its reputation so quickly. America, widely hated, took generations to land itself in the garbage heap of world opinion. Israelis have managed it in a few years, and because of their conflation of Israel with Judaism have managed to also smear Jews as a group. I feel for those Jews, and they do exist, who have opposed Israel and Zionism. But as with Germans who opposed Hitler and genocide, they’re going to smeared with everyone else.

In the past I said it would happen, now it has. I personally will not do business or be friends with any Israeli who didn’t refuse the draft, and I won’t be friends with anyone, Jewish or not who is a Zionist. Any politician, journalist or business leader who supported the genocide is dead to me, and what little influence or power I have, for as long as I live, will be used to see them prosecuted for their crimes.

As for Israel, it’s going to have to be de-Zionized. I don’t know how we get there, but the first step is ending US and European support, and the first step to that will be replacing current Zionist leaders and throwing them in prison. All pro-Zionist lobbies will have to be broken up, and their funders and operatives tried for their crimes.

Israel’s not a strong country. It appears strong because of vast support from America and from rich Zionists who have bought political support in America and Europe. If that support ends, Israel is doomed, and that’s the only way they’ll stop committing war crimes, raping and torturing.

Perhaps in a few centuries the Star of David will lose its association with genocide. Till then, if you wear it or display it, people will and should assume that you’re either a war criminal, or support war criminals.

 

Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Genocide & Brown Shirts Are Being Normalized

By

On February 19, 2026

31 Comments

So we have an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The death toll, as estimated by scientists, is probably north of half a million. (The official toll is laughable and obviously wrong, growth slowing over time.)

Trump was able to use oil piracy and a kidnapping to bend Venezuela to his will.

Now he’s cut off oil to Cuba, and because of how modern economies work, that means famine.

Deliberately causing a famine is genocidal.

This genocide creep. America could have done this to Cuba any time after the fall of the USSR. Sanctions were nasty and caused a lot of suffering and even deaths, but they didn’t rise to the level of “let’s just starve them to death. They’ll give in.”

Mind you, they tried to do this to Yemen, engineering a low-grade famine. Deaths were in the low to mid hundreds of thousands. Genocide. It was intentional, everyone knew that’s what was the intention.

In Israel a lot were killed by arms, but the cutting off of medical supplies, fuel and food I’m sure will have killed even more people.

Multiple times the US and/or its allies has engineered a famine. In Yemen with Saudi Arabian help. Israel with Israelis taking the lead, but the US supporting it all along the way, as when it cut funding to the primary aid agency, UNWRA.

Now Cuba.

This is the way it works. Whenever something evil is done by the powerful to the weak, they look to see if there were consequences. If not, they expand, moving inwards. Yemen is a place no one cares about in the West: there wasn’t a lot of coverage. Palestine got tons of coverage and even law cases, but in the end no one powerful suffered, and the genocide was and is pushed thru. Opponents lost their jobs, went to prison and were deported or lost their banking access (Albanese, for example.)

Since those responsible for the genocide got away with it twice, they’re now doing it a third time.

Everything the powerful do to someone else is something they are willing to do to you if they think it’s in their interest, or just fun.

In the US we have the ICE crackdowns. I wrote for years that if Trump went wild, ICE would be his brown shirts, and here we are. Substantially we have masked men in unmarked cars without badges or in most cases judicial warrants, terrorizing Americans. Not as bad as what Israelis do to Palestinians or America and NATO did in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the same sort of thing. Just call everyone an immigrant or a terrorist and do what you want to them. Refuse to obey the law, ignore judges (what can they do) and on your way.

Start internally with “immigrants” but sweep up lots of citizens and treat them abusively, without reference to their rights.

Set those precedents. And if you get away with it: if no one important winds up punished, then you can expand it. Go after the citizens next. Kick out native Americans. Keep people locked up for months on end without any real judge even knowing about it. Ignore health care problems, let them suffer and die.

Every time the elites of any country get away with abusing regular people, whether foreign or domestic, the line moves on what is acceptable.

We fight for other people to be treated well not just because we aren’t monsters, but because we know that it could be us. Every time we fail to make sure other people are treated fairly and well, we make ourselves less secure. What was done to them can now be done to us. It is for this reasons that even people accused of the worst crimes, like pedophilia and rape have rights, because an accusation isn’t proof and the government and police often get things wrong or lie.

The precedents are now firm that anyone who isn’t in the elite has limited rights: no free speech, no right to see an attorney, no right to security against search and seizure, and so on.

Genocide and ignoring the rule of law, even ignoring judicial rulings, are now the norm.

And the goal isn’t genocide of foreigners. The goal is to get to the point where they can lock up or kill anyone they want domestically.

That’s what American elites want. If an election is going to be lost, fix it. If a person is against a genocide, lock them up or deport them or de-bank them. Anyone who is inconvenient because they oppose what the elite group in power find the rule of law is increasingly no shield. It’s been broken too often, elites know they can mass murder, rape and traffic children and teens with few or no consequences.

What has been done to outsiders will increasingly be done to us, core Western citizens. By failing to protect others, we set the precedents that we were no longer protected.

Never think “it’s OK to do monstrous things to outsiders” because everyone who isn’t an elite eventually becomes an outsider.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

The Weird Pro-Biden Messaging

By

On January 17, 2024

25 Comments

Democrats, Democrats never change.

It’s all, “well yes, Biden is bad, especially that *cough* Gaza thing, but, ummm, Trump will be worse. So hold that nose, crawl up to the cesspit and vote Biden.”

I mean, I’ve always been anti-lesser evil, but is there any line?

We’re talking a full blown genocide, with deliberate starvation of the population. Only one working hospital remains in Gaza and it is under attack as I write this. If you want to, and you have a strong stomach, you can find such fun videos as a father who is a doctor amputating his own daughter’s leg, on his kitchen table, without anaesthetic. (There is no anaesthetic left in Gaza, all surgery is without anaesthic. Welcome to Hell.) Babies died abandoned in incubators and Palestinians running to get food from aid trucks are gunned down by quad-copter drones.

Israel couldn’t do this without the US, which has been in constant bomb and missile airlift mode since it started. Further, the only person who could stop the genocide with a single phone call is Joe Biden.

But sure, vote for him because Trump would be worse. Vote for a genocider.

There will be some commenters, I bet, who say, “but Trump would be worse: he’d support the genocide and do other bad things.”

Possibly true.

“Vote Beelzebub, he is 3% less bad than Satan.”

Let’s explain basic politics in a democracy (the same rules apply in non-democracies, with slight adjustments.)

You have power if you can deliver voters, volunteers or money in sufficient quantities to make a difference, and no one can get those voters, volunteers or dollars without going thru you.

That is it, that is all. If you want to have influence on policy, you must have enough voters/money/volunteers who will only make that difference if they get what they want and who will absolutely work against you if they don’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s single payer or “don’t genocide”. If enough people won’t say “you don’t get what you want from me if I don’t get what I want from you” then you have no power. None.

The right has power because they will absolutely vote against and work against people who cross them and are loyal to those who do what they want. Say what you want about Trump and the right: he gave them the abortion ban they’ve been wanting for generations. He did that. They got what they wanted from him, the single most important thing they wanted.

“Progressives”? No principles. They believe in nothing. There is no red line they will not cross, no slight or betrayal they will not forgive if it is wrapped in a smarmy right wing Democrat’s lying lips.

Fortunately, in this case, there are lot of Muslims in Michigan, a battleground state. And apparently there is a red line for them, “you killed my relatives!!!!!” So there’s a good chance Biden will lose, even if the usual suspects whine that he’s better than Trump, even if he did everything he could to make a genocide happen.

But until there is a voting/giving/volunteering bloc with actual principles which aren’t garbage and which they can’t be cajoled out of with empty promises and lies and “but he’s even worse!”, no one’s getting a better country or world, for that matter.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

I Try To Avoid The Word Genocide

By

On October 11, 2023

22 Comments

—because it’s vastly over-used. Most things are not genocide, even some events were believe are (the Holodomar) are not. Genocide is the deliberate killing of mass numbers of specific ethnicity because they are that ethnicity.

Now, I’ve always been very concerned for Palestinians and Israelis because there is no way for Israel to remain a “Jewish” state in the long run without getting rid of the Palestinians. One option is ethnic cleansing. The other is genocide.

The sane solution is to make everyone a citizen and give up on blood citizenship, but that wouldn’t be a “Jewish state”.

Israel has bombed Gaza plenty in the past. It’s sickening and evil and collective punishment and all those bad things. They’ve also engaged in ethnic cleansing repeatedly, that’s part of why so many Palestinians are packed into Gaza.

But they’ve stopped short of genocide.

Now here’s the thing which isn’t being emphasized about the current attack on Gaza: all water has been cut off and the water infrastructure has been bombed. Much of Gaza’s water comes from “Israel”, much comes from desalinization (which requires electricity), and while some comes from wells and there is one stream in Gaza (it doesn’t make it to river) there simply isn’t enough water. Palestinians do have a lot of cisterns, but they will run out soon.

You die fast without water.

And Israel has been attacking any relief convoys trying to come from the Egyptian side.

Israel is mowing the grass — killing as many civilians as they can. That’s the plan and they’ve been open about it. The US, of course, is helping.

Days like these it’s hard to disagree with Iran when it screams about America being the “great Satan”. (For the record, I am not a fan of Iran. I am a believer in secular society with equality between the sexes and so on.)

If there isn’t a climb-down from this monstrous nonsense, we’re in danger of seeing Israel commit a genocide, aided by much of the West.

Much is still in play, including possible entry of Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. Israel’s army is performing pathetically, with Hamas soldiers still able to attack into Israel and running gun battles.

But Israel is on course to lose its soul. You don’t “mow the grass” or commit genocide because about a 1,000 people were killed after you’ve spent over 70 years killing another people at loss ratios of over 10:1, while stealing and living in their homes and on what was their land.

Well, actually, you often do. America certainly did, squealing about Indian atrocities (which definitely happened) even as it committed greater ones.

I do not expect Israel, as a Jewish state, to exist in 50 years, and that is whether or not they genocide Gaza. It may end much, much sooner.

But the end of Jewish Israel will be a lot less violent and bloody if they do not go full Nazi first.

This is not America or Germany, this a tiny country surrounded by the co-religionists of the people they are massacring.

Donors and subscribers make it possible for me to write, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE

 

The Yemeni Holocaust

By

On June 4, 2018

12 Comments

We often ask, what would we do if there was another Holocaust? Surely we would do something? Surely, at least, we would not be complicit?

The question might have been answered in Rwanda, where the UN commander begged the UN for orders to intervene, orders which never came. The general, Romeo Dallaire, has spent the rest of his life curled around his failure to act despite orders.

Meanwhile, we have the blockade of Yemen, which despite claims, continues:

Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, expressed his concern regarding the “recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports” — adding that, if conditions do not improve, the number of Yemenis at the brink of starvation would rise from the current figure of 8.4 million to 18.4 million by this December. Given that there are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, a continuation of the Saudi-led blockade would mean that nearly two-thirds of the entire country’s population will soon face starvation.

Not sure how many of those who face starvation will starve to death, rather than simply sit on the edge of death, but millions of lives are at risk, this is deliberate, it is happening in slow motion, and the rest of the world is doing nothing.

Well, if they aren’t helping the mass murder, like America (and America was helping under Obama, so no, this isn’t a partisan issue.)

America could stop Saudi Arabia cold if it wanted to; and it certainly could at least not participate.

But, of course, we all know that in the run up to World War II no one cared what was happening to the Jews: we refused to let in Jewish refugee ships, after all. If all Hitler had done was the Holocaust, no one would have gone to war with him over that.

Not that the US needs to go to war; the simple credible threat of sanctions would bring Saudi Arabia to its knees. Nor does the US, post shale oil, need Saudi Arabia’s oil, but the Saudis, in any case, are no longer in a position to not sell. Their own society would implode in months.

Europe could do this too: SWIFT is located in Europe and subject to European law. Apparently Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program, which Netanyahu has stated was 5 years from a nuclear bomb since the early nineties, was worth Europeans forcing SWIFT to cut them off (SWIFT objected), but not millions of Yemeni deaths.

Since Europe = Germany (no, don’t pretend, if Germany wants it, it happens), that means the Germans, having done the Holocaust are now sitting aside when they could stop millions of deaths, and doing nothing.

Lovely.

Well, I guess we’ll just watch.

And no, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince is not a good guy even if he has decided to let Saudi women drive.

The only bright lining on all this is that Saudi Arabia will be in civil war itself by 2030, I suspect.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén