Trump’s Free-Speech Fandango

 Trump’s Free-Speech Fandango

Jim Kavanagh

So, Donald Trump dropped this fierce speech, promising to “reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans,” prompting an ecstatically joyful reaction from Elon Musk and from RFK, Jr.  who says it makes Trump one of “the greatest U.S. presidents since Lincoln.”

This alone puts DJT in company with the greatest U.S. presidents since Lincoln. The globalist project has laid siege to democracy and freedom across the globe. The USA is the final redoubt. President Trump just launched freedom’s counterattack. https://t.co/2brXEjTByg

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) November 9, 2024

 Sorry, it’s a long and necessary quote:

If we don't have free speech, then we just don't have a free country. It's as simple as that. if this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and Liberties will topple just like dominoes. One by one they'll go down.

That's why, today, I'm announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans. And “reclaim” is a very important word in this case, because they've taken it away. In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of Deep-State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital Information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately.

And here is my plan: First, within hours of my inauguration I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information, and I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.

Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new unlined censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified—these include possible violations of federal civil-rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and antitrust laws, the Hatch Act and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters—and we have to do this right now—to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.

Third, upon my inauguration as president. I will ask Congress to send bill to my desk revising section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business from now on. Digital platform should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.

Fourth. we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and disinformation. The federal government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any U.S. university has discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal or blacklisting, those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years, and maybe more. We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their first fourth and fifth amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote. And once you lose those elections, and once you lose your borders, like we have, you no longer have a country.  Furthermore, to confront problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former deep-staters and intelligence officials, there should be a seven-year cooling-off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of U.S. user data.

Fifth, the time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital Bill of Rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter. Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadowbanned, or otherwise restricted—no matter what name they use—they should have the right to be informed that it's happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why. and the right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation entirely and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose. The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America, and for the survival of Western Civilization itself. When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won't be anything left.a By restoring free speech, we’ll begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation. Thank you, and God bless America.

Though I’m dismayed by the idea that they are “left-wing” political actors, I agree that the Biden administration has engaged in an assault on free speech and the unique protection offered to free speech by the First Amendment. It’s arguably the worst such assault since the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-8.[1] I agree that the Biden administration and the bulk of the Democratic Party and its allied media created a public-private “censorship cartel,” much as Trump describes, that  “must be dismantled and destroyed,” much as Trump describes.

Except, just one little thing my Colombo-Spidey senses notice: “We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism,”

Excuse me while I fire up my eighteen-wheeler to drive through that loophole.

Please harken to what President-elect Trump, no free-speech “absolutist,” tells us in the midst of this militant anti-censorship rant: The Trump administration will require platforms—i.e., demand via legal and financial governmental coercion— to increase their suppression of any content “promoting terrorism.”

“Promoting” is a slippery word that was placed in Trump’s speech about free speech quite deliberately. The context of a discussion of social media platforms makes it clear: Trump is not here saying his administration will require suppression of material acts of terrorism but of speech acts promoting terrorism, which he’s defining, along with “child exploitation,” as “unlawful” and outside the realm of free speech.

Is there anybody on planet Earth who does not see exactly what is going to happen? “Promoting terrorism” will replace “misinformation” as the free-speech, First-Amendment exception, the rationale for more government-mandated censorship in the realm of political speech and expression, not less. At least in any of the many corners of the discursive universe where the word “terrorism” might be conjured up. And guess where, above all, that most definitely will be? You have one guess.

What Trump Teaches, Again

 What Trump Teaches, Again

Jim Kavanagh

 

It happened, again.

After the Trump victory in 2016, I wrote an essay with the title, “Ship of Fools: What Trump Teaches” and it’s the basis for what I’ll say here, with appropriate updates and additions. See the original for a fuller analysis.

As in 2016, except worse, Donald Trump won the presidential election because of the rage of working people—of all colors and genders—over the Democratic party and administration’s failure to substantially improve the material conditions of their lives.

Working people were fed up with watching the party that claims to represent their interests allow their material conditions to worsen, even as that party lavishes attention and resources on foreign wars for “democracy” and domestic programs for “inclusion” while castigating them for not being woke enough to embrace those virtues that don’t pay the rent.

David Axelrod, an architect of the problem, described it nicely on election night on CNN: “The Democratic Party has become more of a suburban, college-educated, professional party and it still feels allegiance to working…But it approaches working people like missionaries or like Margaret Mead would approach the natives.”

Well, the natives are restless. “Democracy” means people having and exercising power. They just did. And the missionaries just got cooked. 

I really hate to say it, but even conservative commentator David Brooks can see the problem. His latest NYT op-ed, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?” has a slew of cogent zingers like: “As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet…His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot”; and “The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it…Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself”; and even “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.”

Bernie Sanders himself, who two weeks ago said Biden "has been the most progressive, pro-worker president since FDR," now recognizes, and is in high dudgeon about, the problem with the Democratic Party he surrendered his “disruptive” movement to:

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they're right. 

Too bad, as Bernie admits in his statement, the Democratic Party is not going to confront and rectify this problem, because it’s not a “problem” but an effect of the party’s fundamental mission—to preserve capitalism (and Zionism).

The Democratic Party takes any disruptive threat to the prerogative of capital in its false “embrace” to kill it—which is precisely what they did with Bernie’s “disruption,” and with Bernie’s help. 

Why I Won't Vote

Why I Won't Vote

Jim Kavanagh

I will not vote in this presidential election.

It’s not just because I consider genocide a deal-breaker and refuse to choose between the clowns and criminals offered up by the duopoly. It’s because the whole electoral system is thoroughly rigged and corrupt. It’s not a matter of withholding my vote because there’s no acceptable candidate.  It’s a matter of a prior, prerequisite problem: whether, as a citizen, to withhold a vote because the lack of integrity of the electoral process makes a mockery of casting it.

I’ve written about my thoughts on voting in presidential elections in previous electoral cycles, and I’m going to draw on those previous essays here. Please go to the links below to see a fuller version of my position, with many more references.

As I said in my last essay on this election:

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College. It is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

There’s a fundamental fact of our election system that undermines all the standard ways we consider electoral strategies. With the proliferation of electronic voting machines and computerized tabulation systems, the electoral process is not only corrupted by all the influences leftists consistently criticize—the financial control of the plutocracy, media bias, unfair ballot laws, voter caging and suppression tactics, the two-party duopoly, etc.—it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense: it gives the voter no reasonable assurance, and no way of ever knowing, that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought s/he did. 

I can certainly understand the desire to vote for Jill Stein in this election, both in order to advance the third-party possibility by reaching the 5% threshold and to make Kamala and the Democrats lose—and know they lost—because of their support of the Gaza genocide. But that only works if your vote for Jill Stein is counted for Jill Stein.

It is foolish to ignore how electronic voting systems affect what third-party voting might actually accomplish. Third-party votes are no longer just brave markers of political dissidence; they now become a kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around unnoticed—precisely because they are votes for candidates who would have lost anyway. Your brave gesture is the machine’s prime fodder. In a close race in a swing state, a few thousand or so votes from the Libertarian and Green candidates combined can be easily shifted to a RepubliCrat candidate. The combined third-party share of the vote will go from 5% to 2%, and Kamala or Donald (depending on which party controls the hack in a given state) will eke out a victory.

Presidential Catastrophe

Presidential Catastrophe

Jim Kavanagh

The United States of America is on the verge of World War III in three different theaters. Its social economy and infrastructure are in tatters. It’s actively engaged in genocidal ethnic cleansing—killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of mainly children and women and spitting on every precept of humanitarian and international law—on behalf of an atavistic settler-colonial project. It is more than ever despised and less than ever feared in a world escaping its control. And in this catastrophic conjuncture, our political and media culture throws up two of the most ridiculous and incompetent figures imaginable to vie for the role of leading us into the abyss.

Our electoral system is insultingly anti-democratic. Built around donor control, a pastiche of opaque voting and tabulating systems including black-box proprietary electronic machines that allow (and therefore make inevitable) undetectable fraud, and, topping it all off, the Electoral College, it is designed to evade the popular will and enable fraud. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are the two most perfectly clownish figures to lead this election circus, which is guaranteed, on purpose, to end up in a fight over the result.

As far as I’m concerned, as I’ve argued before, the proper response to this is an organized public political boycott. A smart left political movement would lead the fight, uniting all dissident factions, to make the electoral system transparent, honest, fair, and democratic as a condition of participating in it. No voting in a rigged system. The ruling class doesn’t care too much about which duopoly clown emcees the circus; the majority of the people not voting, not giving legitimacy to the system, is what the ruling class fears the most.

But no one seems interested in exiting the Big Top, so let’s bring in the clowns.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better, more radical, exposition of who runs the country than this gem:

Take note of which Trump comments provoke controversy, and which don't. Trump said this week that he "gave" the Golan Heights to Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, his top funders, who came to the White House "almost more than anybody." Not a peep about this brazen admission of graft pic.twitter.com/MaJLFnH7oi

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2024

 Just as I promised I recognized Israel's eternal capital and opened the American embassy in Jerusalem, Jerusalem became the capital. I also recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You know, Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House, probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there, and they were always after... And as soon as I'd give them something, always for Israel, as soon as I'd give them something, they'd want something else. I said, give me a couple of weeks, will you please?

But I gave them the Golan Heights, and they never even asked for it. You know, for 72 years, they've been trying to do the Golan Heights, right? And even Sheldon didn't have the nerve. But I said: You know what? I said to David Friedman, give me a quick lesson, like five minutes or less. on the Golan Heights. And he did. And I said: Let's do it. We got it done in about 15 minutes, right? 

Yup. Even more radical than his notorious answer as a candidate at the Republican debate in 2015:

BRICS And The Fundamental Paradigm Shift in the Political Economy of the World

"one of the biggest stories in the world and nobody is talking about it"

As a marxist, I’ve always known that an indispensable resource for understanding what is happening in the political economy of the country and the world is the business press. It’s the place where capitalists are required to rigorously and honestly take stock of the present state of, and ongoing developments in, what we call the infrastructure.

Thus, I came across this video from a channel called Inside China Business, by a guy named Kevin Walmsley, who has lived and worked in China since 2012 for a company called Direct Equipment. The video is entitled, bluntly, “The BRICS trading system is already wiping out US farmers, as global price discovery is destroyed” and it gives a concrete analysis, which surprised me, of how the BRICS system has already upended the global commodities trading system that was “for a hundred years” based on the U.S. dollar and essentially managed from Chicago. As he says, “This is one of the biggest stories in the world, and nobody is talking about it”—because few people know how. He knows how.

He talks about how the BRICS are developing

a new global trading system, which is completely independent of the U.S.-led system based on U.S. dollar trading and the SWIFT bank system. the system that we use in western countries … that has obvious advantages to us and obvious disadvantages to everyone else. If we're honest with ourselves there is no logical reason why a farmer in Brazil who's selling soybeans to China should use an American bank or the exchange in Chicago to make the deal happen, or need U.S. dollars to do so….Now, China, Brazil, and the other BRICS have the technology to build their own system, buying and selling directly without U.S. dollars, without Western banks, and without going through commodities traders and going through exchanges in Chicago.

Bobby's Bounce: RFK Jr’s Lesser-Evilism

 

https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr/status/1656323009139953667

Oops. I didn’t see that one coming.

So, let’s talk about RFK Jr.’s decision to help Donald Trump win the presidential election.

Because, to be clear, Bobby is not just—excuse me, not even dropping out of the race. He could have done that, correctly denouncing the Democratic party’s anti-democratic legal and electoral tactics that made it impossible for his campaign to compete within the party or as a third party, and, indeed, denouncing the whole duopoly-enforced structure of American electoral politics that makes it impossible for any non-duopoly candidate to succeed. If he were really interested in building the possibility of a progressive third party, he could have stuck with his very recent critique of how  “President Biden[/Harris], President Trump offer no solutions” and ended his campaign without transferring allegiance to either of the duopoly parties or candidates. He could have approached Jill Stein—as he apparently did both Kamala and Trump—and tried to negotiate agreements on highlighting issues that were important to him in return for urging his supporters to vote for her.

Instead, he is re-positioning himself and his campaign as supporting elements of the campaign of one of the extant duopoly parties—the Trump-Republican Party campaign. He will take himself off the ballot in battleground states, in order not to “likely hand the election to the Democrats,” and he’ll stay on the ballot in “safe” red or blue states where it won’t make any difference. This mirrors the “safe states” strategy of previous “left” third-party candidates, and it defines him as an auxiliary Republican, just as it defined those candidates as auxiliary Democrats. Whether he or they want to admit it, it’s an abdication of any effective third-party building, and a capitulation to one of the two duopoly parties and to duopoly politics tout court.

So, why is RFK Jr. doing this? Why is he abandoning a third-party building effort and any pretense of duopoly non-partisanship, and instead—in an astounding turn for a Kennedy—dedicating himself to the defeat of Kamala and the Democrats, and the victory of Trump and the Republicans? Here’s his campaign-suspending address, with his three reasons highlighted:

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

Jim Kavanagh

So, it looks like we’re heading into a major war. With its assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief “ceasefire/hostage release” negotiator, topping off its incessant, deliberate slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza and its accelerated evictions and home demolitions in the West Bank, Israel has erased any scintilla of pretense that it is doing anything else but trying to “finish ’48”—-achieve the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine via extermination and expulsion.

Israel has crossed all and everybody’s red lines. Israel is telling the world it will kill anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at anytime of its choosing, and it does not give a damn about what anyone in the world thinks of it. It is acting with complete, insouciant, contemptuous disregard of international law, conventions, and common morality, certainly of the people and nations it considers its adversaries and of the countries on whose support it depends.

Best Not Miss: Trump Assassination Tango

 Best Not Miss
Trump Assassination Tango

Jim Kavanagh

The first and worst thing to say about the attempted assassination of Trump is that it is going to divert attention from the much more important and horrific mass slaughter of Palestinians that is taking place daily in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the constant Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria. Nothing that did happen, or could have happened, to Donald Trump or any American politician supporting that atrocity is worth an ounce of concern that should be going to the killed and amputated children of Gaza. In that context, it’s particularly sickening to witness the spectacle of politicians across the US political spectrum proclaiming the unacceptability of “political violence”—meaning violence against establishment politicians—while they vie to manage the country MLK correctly called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”

N. Pelosi: political violence is unacceptable

J. Fetterman: political violence is unacceptable

L. Austin: political violence is unacceptable

A. Blinken: political violence is unacceptable

J. Biden: political violence is unacceptable

Gaza’s 2M people: u bigoted hypocrites

— Zachary Foster (@_ZachFoster) July 14, 2024

Sat morning: Israeli massacre, Western politicians in full support

Sat afternoon: Israeli massacre, Western politicians in full support

Sat night: Trump’s ear shot, Western politicians denounce all violence

Sun morning: Israeli massacre, Western politicians in full support

— Tiberius (@ecomarxi) July 14, 2024

Nonetheless, I’ll succumb to discussing what is, however ultimately diversionary, an unavoidable event that’s symptomatic of the present, tense, American political paradigm and of the peculiar, fascinating history of such events in American history. It’s impossible to ignore, and kind of fun to discuss, presidential-level political assassination.

So what are we dealing with here? What we seem to know now is that shots were fired at Donald Trump—a volley of three evenly spaced shots followed by another volley of five more quickly spaced shots; Trump was injured, either directly by a bullet or indirectly by the glass of a shattered teleprompter that was hit by a bullet; a spectator was killed and two others critically wounded; a man, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was seen climbing onto a roof with a rifle by witnesses who pointed him out to police and Secret Service personnel, and was shot and killed by a Secret Service sniper after shots were fired at Trump.

We know, from Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe, as interviewed by Pittsburgh CBS affiliate KDKA-TV, that an armed police officer “had both hands up on the roof to get up on the roof, never made it because the shooter had turned toward the officer, and—rightfully and smartfully—the officer let go.”

The Democrats’ Painful Suicide

The Democrats’ Painful Suicide

Jim Kavanagh

So, Biden’s debate debacle clarified a number of things and opened a slew of bizarre and unprecedented questions that will have to be resolved quickly.

The first thing that’s been clarified beyond question is that Joe Biden, the President of the United States, is seriously cognitively impaired, suffering from a worsening dementia—as Seymour Hersh says: “simply no longer there…a captive [who has] rapidly diminished over the past six months.”

Also thus clarified is the fact that those of us who were saying this for years were correct, were capable of recognizing and telling the truth, and those who were denying it were wrong , were lying (perhaps to themselves first of all, but definitely to their audiences), and were engaged in a desperate program of gaslighting anyone who did tell the truth.

Let's be clear: No one in the Democratic, liberaloid cohort who claims to be shocked or surprised by what happened Thursday night deserves anything but scorn and ruthless critique. Here's a bit of what “dog-face pony soldier” Joe Biden was doing 4-5 years ago:

November, 2019

January, 2020

The entire CNN post-debate panel is talking about how incoherent Biden was. And they legitimately seemed shocked. Incredible stuff. It’s fascinating what it takes for liberals to catch onto something people have been talking about for 4 years now.

— keyvan (@still_oppressed) June 28, 2024

https://x.com/still_oppressed/status/1806519993242149098 

If you did not know—or, more precisely, did not admit that you knew—that Joe Biden had major, rapidly worsening, cognitive impairment, for at least the last few years, it's because you inexcusably refused to recognize what you were seeing with your own eyes, and attacked the people who were telling you.  

Out of Touch: The Empire Has Lost Its Mind

 Out of Touch: The Empire Has Lost Its Mind

Jim Kavanagh

I've been trying to figure out something to say that captures the insanity of the present conjuncture, and a friend steered me to an article in the Washington Post about American strategy towards China that epitomizes the delusional and dangerous thinking that underlies American policy around the world.

In the piece, titled “Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight,” WaPo National Security Reporter, Ellen Nakashima explains the U.S. “military’s latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic islands in the western Pacific…striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could play out across thousands of miles of islands and coastline in Asia.”

The strategy, dubbed “Force Design” involves the “forward deployment” of “smaller, lighter, more mobile” Marine units called Littoral Combat Teams throughout the  First Island Chain, “a crucial stretch of territory sweeping from Japan to Indonesia.” These smaller, lighter Teams will be “as invisible as possible to radar and other electronic detection,” and will “gather intelligence and target data… as well as occasionally sink ships with medium-range missiles”— thus “enabl[ing] the larger joint force to deploy its collective might.”

Of course, there is no other “adversary like” China, and this is the “latest concept” for nothing else but winning a war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), blocking any attempt by the PRC to forcibly reunify its Taiwan province with the mainland. What’s remarkable is that, in carefully describing how this innovative war-fighting strategy might work (“The reality of the mission is daunting”), Nakashima makes painfully clear how utterly ridiculous it actually is.

The Wall: American Students Hit The Iron Wall of Zionism

American college students have launched a movement that has run into the Iron Wall of Zionism

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGEs

It was the subject of a foundational book by a founding father of modern Zionism. It was the object that Zionist soldiers ruthlessly defended in 2018. It is what protesting American students have just run into. Concretely and conceptually, it is the keystone of the Zionist project: the Wall.

The first rule of Zionism is that the wall must be absolutely impenetrable.

The material wall must be impenetrable because, in the context of an ethno-religious supremacism, it's the boundary that separates the elect, the chosen, the ubermenschen from the rejected, the dispossessed, the untermenschen. Any breach in the wall will lead, inexorably and quickly, to a breakdown of the essentialist exceptionalism and the social order premised thereupon.

In the white-supremacist segregated south, the police and the dogs and the nightsticks had to be used to prevent even one black child from entering a white school because, they knew, that would mean the end of Jim Crow.

In Jewish-supremacist apartheid Israel, as Israeli academic and political advisor Arnon Soffer said years before the Great March of Return in 2018, it is necessary for Israel to “put a bullet in the head of anyone who tries to climb over the security fence.” Israel must prevent even one Gazan from crossing the wall, because “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. … The pressure at the border will be awful. … So, … we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist.”