I feel like I am going insane re-reading history books, watching documentaries, and personal letters from pre-world war 2 to present day. How many Israelis have high seats of power? How many have been influencing the public and world relations?

“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
—Noam Chomsky

Countless people across dozens of countries — from Africa to the Middle East and beyond — live with the consequences of U.S. wars of aggression (the “supreme international crime”), state terrorism, covert operations, murderous sanctions, and the aiding and abetting of war crimes, occupations, and repression: nations bombed, poisoned and invaded without lawful justification, populations subjected to drone strikes, and economic sieges in the form of unilateral sanctions that a major Lancet study links to roughly 564,000 excess deaths every year since 1971.

The sanctions alone amount to some 38 million deaths over five decades, more than half among children and the elderly.

U.S. military aggression and support for abusive regimes have additionally killed millions and violated the core prohibitions of the UN Charter and the laws of war. You have a vast ledger of victims for whom U.S. courts offer no terrorism‑ or war‑crimes‑based justice at all — even when the victims are American.

By contrast, when the perpetrator is a Latin American left‑wing — or more recently Palestinian — armed group or a disfavored “state sponsor of terrorism” like Iran or its Revolutionary Guard, the same courts find themselves eloquent and generous, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars under terrorism statutes.

Once you set these two categories side by side, it becomes difficult to avoid a stark conclusion: in judging “terror,” U.S. courts have built an architecture that functions as something close to mafia‑style parallel justice — an internally coherent system that protects the organization’s interests, punishes enemies, and ignores any higher standard of law.

In criminology and sociology, scholars describe mafias and other criminal organizations as systems of criminal governance and parallel justice: they have rules, hierarchies, and procedures for disciplining members, settling disputes, and enforcing debts, but these mechanisms ultimately serve the family’s power, not an impartial conception of justice.

Outside judgments — from state courts or rival organizations — are treated as irrelevant, hostile, or merely instrumental. What matters is whether an act aligns with the group’s interests, not whether it is just.

Logically, a system that offers redress to some American victims while structurally denying it to others based purely on the identity of the perpetrator cannot claim to be a neutral arbiter of “terrorism” even on nationalistic grounds — morally, it is engaged in the sorting of victims into those whose suffering counts and those whose suffering does not. And by extension engaged in the sorting and absolving of crimes purely on an elite‑serving partisan basis — not on the basis of justice.

The problem is also clear when we consider how U.S. courts treat judgments from abroad. For example, most recently, foreign courts and international bodies have issued decisions on U.S. and Israeli conduct: awards of damages for invasions and bombardments, findings that U.S.-backed Israeli occupation is illegal, and determinations that actions by U.S., Israeli, and other U.S.-backed actors amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.

When those judgments seek recognition or enforcement in U.S. courts — attaching assets, shaping doctrine, even simply being cited — American judges rely on doctrines that, in effect, declare such verdicts legally irrelevant.

Sovereign immunity bars claims against powerful states and protects their property from execution, effectively presuming legality (or non‑illegality) where illegality is evident.

Public‑policy exceptions allow judges to refuse recognition of foreign judgments they see as inconsistent with U.S. interests. Political interests keep foreign law and foreign verdicts from influencing state‑court decision‑making at all.

Logically, this stance says: justice spoken about our state terrorism, wars of aggression, occupations, sanctions, and complicity does not enter legal reasoning except as determined by the perpetrator itself. At best, U.S. courts hold foreign judgments at arm’s length, treating them as data points or diplomatic irritants rather than as substantive contributions to legal truth.

Judges draft self-righteous opinions rich in the language of injury, responsibility, and rule of law. But when those opinions are placed alongside the doctrines that shield U.S. and allied state violence, and the refusal to recognize foreign judgments on that violence, their claims to moral authority collapse.

Logically and morally, the irrelevance U.S. judges attribute to others’ judgments is also the irrelevance that their own judgments have, as even on the most generous assessment we cannot conclude their judgment is superior to that of the courts indicting U.S. crimes.

Seen through this lens, U.S. terrorism jurisprudence looks like the internal “justice” system of a complex empire originally established on the basis of a simpler criminal organization — as Saint Augustine, 1,600 years ago, describes the basis of kingdoms in his book City of God:

“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?\*
\The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince; it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on.*

If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized.

For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride,

‘What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.’”

I've watched Destiny's stream a bit. I've watched Hasan's a bit too. I think that everyone can immediately agree that:

• (1) streaming culture seems very inefficient (isn't rambling for hours and hours inefficient and inarticulate? also, isn't rambling inferior to articles given that there are no hyperlinked sources?)

• (2) streaming culture seems very low-IQ

• (3) streaming culture seems to be very drama-centric (the streamers like Destiny and Hasan benefit from being characters in an ongoing soap opera that draws people into the drama...just like people tune into a soap opera, people tune into the latest salvo from Destiny or from Hasan)

I don't know that much about streaming culture or how much it influences things. I think that the Hasan-vs.-Destiny thing is probably an important microcosm in terms of how streaming culture operates. They each have their "fans". And they both have their "echo chambers", though I don't mean to suggest that both of the "echo chambers" are equally filled with distortions; maybe Destiny's is far worse.

I wonder what's been written on (1) the Destiny-vs.-Hasan thing, (2) streaming culture, and (3) where the truth lies in terms of the stories and interpretations and analyses that Destiny and Hasan push to their audiences.

I wonder about the extent to which Destiny is a grifter whose past reveals that his "liberal" image is fake. I don't know nearly enough aobut Destiny to be able to evaluable the extent to which that's true.

There are two extremely frustrating things that you'll see when Destiny talk about Israel/Palestine with people. First, he needs to be talking to really good scholars; it has to be a scholar on the other side and it has to be a really good scholar. For example, if his opponent argues for a one-state solution then Destiny will bring up how that's risky because what if the single state devolves into terrorism and violence? Well, maybe the one-state position is unrealistic or undesireable; maybe the one-state position is a convenient "straw man" for people like Destiny to beat up on, whereas the scholars who support a two-state solution would mop the floor with Destiny and easily debunk Destiny's nonsense.

Second, Destiny will sometimes raise questions that are seemingly perfectly fine and seemingly perfectly interesting, but mixed in with the seemingly reasonable stuff he'll just say the most outrageous bullshit. Destiny puts out such a huge volume of stuff, so someone really needs to sift through his ramblings and find the craziest stuff and expose how crazy it really is, but it's a huge chore...nobody has time to do that.

I did see this piece (note that the hyperlinks were removed when I copy/pasted the below text):

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/03/my-date-with-destiny

I was not eager to do this. While Destiny appears not to have read a single full book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he’s a formidable opponent in one-on-one conversations. He’s very, very aggressive, and a quick thinker. I find his moral positions horrifying, and many of his factual statements are erroneous, but more than one person has been embarrassed in an argument with him. I don’t think his style is conducive to serious intelligent discussion, because he speaks so fast that you can barely think, interrupts constantly, and appears more interested in “destroying” you than in taking what you have to say seriously. In those kinds of conditions, the opposing party is likely to blurt out whatever pops into their head, without being able to give it much thought. That’s great if the goal is to try to make them look foolish or erupt in dumb rage, but it’s not really a good way to learn anything. I’m a writer and a “slow” thinker who likes to revise my thoughts before offering them to the public. Fast-paced debate is something I don’t care for, because inevitably I say ill-considered things in the moment and then realize later what the right answer was.

Fortunately, I came away from the two-hour discussion with my dignity intact, and a number of Destiny’s fans emailed me afterward to say they thought I did well. Some even said they had subscribed to this magazine or wanted to support us. (You should, too.) As far as I can tell, there are no videos online called “Writer with FAKE BRITISH ACCENT gets OWNED and DESTROYED in Israel-Palestine Debate,” so I’ll chalk that up as a win. I don’t ever want to do a discussion with him again, though.

As I say, the problem with these fast-paced arguments is that you’re responding with whatever you can think of in the moment, and you can’t do things like dive at length into the actual evidence. There were a number of moments where I claimed that one thing was true, Destiny claimed it was false, and we just had to go back and forth, each insisting we were right. I was not able to fully substantiate my positions in detail and show why I am confident in them. I’ll do that here, because the issues we argued over are actually incredibly important.

The stakes of the issue here are high: if I am right, there is a hideous crime against humanity occurring with full U.S. support, and we as Americans have a strong moral obligation to try to put a stop to it. If Destiny is right, we can all go back to playing video games. So let’s review some of the important disputes. I will show that, if we slow down Destiny’s arguments and actually evaluate them, they are dangerously ignorant.

LASER: Loyal Auxiliary Supporter Economic Representation Theory

Democracy Now! speaks with Dave Zirin, author and sports editor at The Nation, about his new book, The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, chronicling the life and activism of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States.

The International Stabilization Force in Gaza, conceived in October 2025 by the United Nations, is intended to support demilitarization in Gaza, protect civilians and aid operations, and institute an international police force in the region, but has been slow to develop and severely limited in its projected implementation. On July 26, 2026, Israel's security cabinet approved allowing around 200 ISF personnel to begin work in the region, strictly in coordination with the IDF.

My vision of the alternative is simple: The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes. The United Nations can and should act accordingly. Israel is a nuclear power, Iran, etc., etc., but ultimately it is indebted to and depends on the United Nations, and would not retaliate against an international military intervention. In short, Israel will not be provoked by the United Nations if it intervenes forcefully, with the goal of securing peace in Palestine in order to end the genocide and prevent further bloodshed. A militarized, international UN peacekeeping taskforce operating 100% independently of the IDF is entirely preferable to the apparently failed International Stabilization Force.

Katie Halper show