Tag: Hamas

The peace, the grift and the vendetta

President Trump is justly celebrating the apparent end of the war in the Gaza Strip in a peace agreement that his administration brokered. Just over a week past the second anniversary of the horrific attack from Gaza into Israel that triggered this war, Hamas and its allied fighting groups in that part of Palestine have largely been defeated — although not yet eliminated — by the Israeli military. After tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza and the razing of much of the territory’s built environment, the Palestinian survivors there can begin piecing together something resembling a recovery.

Next to come: the stabilization and redevelopment of Gaza under a 20-point Trump plan to be overseen by the “Board of Peace” (read “Board of Grift”) which Trump, of course, will lead. The stabilization and redevelopment plan is beautifully explained by the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

But a great danger remains. The seeds of further conflict lie in the Trump peace plan and in the ruins of Gaza. The plan calls for an “International Stabilization Force” drawn from Arab and other supportive countries gradually to take over security in Gaza as Israel withdraws its troops in stages. The plan also calls for the disarming of Hamas and the other Palestinian fighting groups in Gaza and for the destruction of their weaponry. But Hamas does not agree to be disarmed and disbanded. And it views the Board of Peace as a neocolonialist structure.

The rumps of Hamas and the other fighting groups remain embedded in Gaza, and all kinds of weaponry, including explosives, remain cached all over the territory. Will the International Stabilization Force, or ISF, become the new enemy and target of Gaza’s militants? That remains to be seen, but it seems to me to be highly likely. If the remnants of these groups do fight on, little progress will be possible in Gaza beyond the trucking in of emergency food and medical aid. Obviously, the absence of fighting is a requirement for large-scale reconstruction to occur.

But if Gaza’s fighting groups do finally agree to stand down and disarm, watch for a Trump-facilitated grift in Gaza on a scale “like nobody’s seen before,” to borrow one of the grifter in chief’s favorite hyperbolic formulations. We already know from Trump’s own mouth that he has his eyes on Gaza as a Mediterranean resort destination. (He seems to have dropped, at least for the present, the mad idea of clearing Gaza of its Palestinian population.) In his dual role as U.S. president and head of the Board of Grift, Trump will be able to steer redevelopment work and other moneymaking opportunities in the new Gaza to his friends and political donors. And you can be sure that the Trump family will be dipping its beak into the river of money that will be flowing into the rebuilding of Gaza’s housing stock, roads, hospitals, clinics, bakeries, shops, water supply systems and sewage plants.

The new resort-flavored Gaza will need a specific type of seafront profile. It will need corniches and marinas and luxury hotels (the Trump family’s special area, lest we forget).

Who will sit on the Board of Peace alongside Trump to make all of this come to pass has not been announced beyond the lamentable Tony Blair. And his participation now seems in doubt after Trump said over the weekend that it was unclear whether Blair would be acceptable to all others involved with the board. Trump’s announcement of Blair’s name at the announcement of the Board of Peace drew an intense backlash. Blair has been severely out of favor for backing the falsely grounded 2003 invasion of Iraq when he was British prime minister.

But who are the others to sit on the Board of Peace? Trump will be looking for certain kinds of people to be with him, because he will need those people to be onboard with the entity’s alter ego, the Board of Grift. This much we can take for granted: He will have no use for people who are likely to raise awkward concerns about fiscal transparency, accountability and fairness, because transparency, accountability and fairness are anathema to any enterprise in which Trump is involved.

Meanwhile, on the home front, the great peacemaker is making war on his chosen targets via the U.S. military and the Department of Justice. National Guard troops are being sent into large, Democrat-run cities, which of course did not support Trump in the election, to intimidate them on the pretext of crime emergencies in those jurisdictions. Although National Guard troops are still to be seen roaming aimlessly in D.C. after Trump inanely declared the city to be totally crime-free, the president has shifted his attention elsewhere, and cowing Chicago seems to be his present obsession. Expect him to resume his domestic aggression as soon as he has finished making peace overseas.

With the fanatical compliance of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump has sicced a handpicked federal prosecutor on former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And Bondi’s Justice Department is investigating Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors whom Trump is trying to fire. Her alleged crime is mortgage fraud. So is Letitia James’. Comey’s is allegedly lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee during testimony in September 2020 about leaks from the FBI to news media concerning FBI investigations.

But these three people’s real crimes are that they have either resisted Trump or have had some hand in legal cases against him.

Lisa Cook: Trump wants to appoint a lackey to the traditionally independent Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and one of his other lackeys, Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, came up with accusation that Cook had committed mortgage fraud. Trump declared her fired on that basis; she resisted and sued him and the Fed itself, for good measure. For now, the Supreme Court is allowing her to remain a Fed governor. But Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is beavering away at making a criminal case against Cook.

Letitia James: The attorney general of New York state had the temerity to sue Trump’s company for business fraud and win a judgment requiring the disgorgement of hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten money. Trump declared that she should be prosecuted, and so she is being prosecuted.

James Comey: In March 2017, when Comey was director of the FBI and Trump was just settling into his first term as president, the agency began investigating whether members of Trump’s presidential campaign had colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Trump was outraged, of course, and Comey was the target of his ire. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, citing a loss of confidence in the director. Trump has held that grudge like an heirloom, and when he recently declared — for the umpteenth time — that Comey should be prosecuted, the deed was all but done.

The U.S. attorney who is prosecuting Comey and James is Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer to Donald Trump who was hastily appointed on an interim basis to the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia, the famous “rocket docket.” She has had no previous prosecutorial experience. Her background is in insurance law, and she worked for a law firm before joining the Trump White House, from which perch she was sent to take charge of the very serious Eastern District, one of the most prestigious of the Justice Department’s districts and a preferred venue for terrorism and other national security cases.

Halligan was appointed specifically to secure an indictment of Comey because her predecessor, Trump-appointee Erik Siebert, had declined to take that action on the grounds that the case was inadequate and was then forced out by Trump. After securing the Comey indictment, Halligan got one for James, the New York attorney general. If anyone wonders why she was able to indict whereas her predecessor would not act, just remember the famous declaration by former New York Court of Appeals chief judge Solomon Wachtler: any prosecutor can get a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.” The prosecutor simply feeds the grand jury cherry-picked evidence to get the desired outcome.

So as Trump wraps up his whirlwind peace mission in the Middle East and heads back to the home front, he will be wringing the neck of the white dove and burning the olive branch.

He is coming home to cast off the mantle of peace and snatch up the sword that he dropped when he set off abroad. But we want no dictators or kings here in these United States, so he is returning to meet his match in that segment of the American populace that sees him for what he is and has righteously decided that he will not have his way here.

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The next No Kings day is this Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025. Find D.C.-area events here. National website here.

Shameful U.S. silence on the genocide in Gaza

A nation that was born as a rebuke to genocide is now guilty of committing genocide to preserve its own existence.

That is a broad-strokes painting of where Israel finds itself today. But between today and the end of World War II — during which Nazi Germany tried to extirpate Europe’s Jews — lies a tormented and bloodstained narrative of colonial highhandedness, ineptitude and bankrupt assumptions; betrayals; usurpations; religious and secular warfare; deep hatreds; land grabs; displacements; massacres; terroristic murder; apartheid; and so much else, all for control of what the American author Aaron David Miller has called “the much too promised land.”

This is how the United Nations defines genocide: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

And the U.N. lists acts that constitute genocide:

  • Killing members of the group;
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

With the exception of the final item in the list, I think all of the conditions for genocide exist in the Gaza Strip. But what is the proximate context and background to what is happening in Gaza?

On Oct. 7, 2023, the terrorist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, led a shock assault out of Gaza into southern Israel, attacking multiple small civilian communities, Israeli military posts and a music festival underway in the desert near the Israel-Gaza frontier. The assault force included fighters representing multiple groups that are pretty much universally committed to the eradication of the state of Israel: Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades; Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades; the Popular Resistance Committees’ al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades; and, of course, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades among a handful of other militant anti-Israel groups.

The assault was a horror. About 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, were slaughtered in civilian settings and at military posts. The terrorists butchered people in unspeakable ways, and about 250 people, also mostly Israelis, were kidnapped and hauled across the frontier into Gaza to be held hostage for bargaining purposes. Israel responded with a furious assault on Gaza to destroy Hamas and its allied forces and to free the hostages.

Today, about 50 of the hostages are thought still to be in Gaza, but it is now feared that most of those are corpses. To minimize its own troop losses, Israel has taken the sledgehammer approach to killing militants. And so Gaza lies in absolute ruin because of the pounding that it has taken from Israeli artillery fire and airstrikes, Israel’s preferred method of attack.

More important, an estimated over 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in the bombardments. How many of those are non-combatants is unclear, because the Hamas authorities in Gaza obviously will not issue numbers distinguishing between fighters and civilians. But there is no doubt that the vast majority of the victims of the war have been Palestinian civilians, people trapped in Gaza with no way to escape the fighting between Israel and the Hamas coalition.

Remind yourself that the Gaza Strip is, indeed, a strip of land, just 25 miles deep and about seven miles at its widest point, bounded to the south by Egypt’s North Sinai Governorate, to the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and to the east and north by Israeli territory. Israel holds the sea and the surrounding land except for that south of Gaza, which is Egypt’s.

Gaza is, in effect, a prison holding about 2 million suffering people. Most of them have been displaced multiple times, chased from their homes by fighting or directly ordered by Israeli forces to leave parts of Gaza to make way for military operations.

As Israel has pressed its campaign, its military has repeatedly targeted journalists working in Gaza, killing scores so far, no doubt to cut off the outward flow of information about the atrocious spectacle unfolding in Gaza. And with the repeated killings of aid workers, medical rescue personnel and civilians just trying to get food at aid distribution points, no one should doubt that the Israeli military is acting with naked malice toward Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinian civilians have repeatedly been herded in every direction within that tiny territory. Their homes have been leveled. All the normal structures of civic life have been shattered. Their hospitals have been repeatedly attacked and are mostly out of use — and not just because Israel has wanted to destroy them: Hamas does embed itself in civilian facilities, as the Israeli forces say, because Hamas cares nothing about how many Palestinian civilians it causes to be slaughtered as it pursues its own interests. If it cared at all, the conflict would not have come to this.

And what it has come to is famine.

A single dry sentence just issued in a United Nations report should shock us all: “As of 15 August 2025, Famine (IPC Phase 5)—with reasonable evidence—is confirmed in Gaza Governorate.”

Those words are the essence of a “snapshot report” on the hunger situation in the Gaza Strip, whose lifelines have been exclusively in Israeli hands for many months now. The next two sentences of the snapshot are no less grim: “After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death. Another 1.07 million people (54 percent) are in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), and 396,000 people (20 percent) are in Crisis (IPC Phase 3).”

The Israeli government declares that there is no starvation in Gaza.

But that is a lie.

Israel has repeatedly cut off or sharply restricted the entry of food and medicines into Gaza in order to force Hamas to give up the remaining hostages, employing the illegal tactic of collective punishment. But we also know that Israel has another design on Gaza. It wants to possess all of that land, but without Palestinians on it. And the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busily scheming with the barbarian Donald Trump to cleanse the Gaza Strip of its people and turn the place into a gleaming Mediterranean resort for the world’s unscrupulous rich. They are planning ethnic cleansing, lest anyone be confused about what is in the works.

And it is because Donald Trump, the chief executive of the United States, is a part of this dirty plan that the U.S. government is silent on the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. How did the great United States of America sink to such infamy? When your nation is led by a thug, thuggish things will be done in your nation’s name.

But what about Congress, our independent legislature and a check on the executive branch of government led by Trump as president? Ah, poor Congress. So cowardly, so feckless. It is in the hands of Republicans, and almost to a person, they are moral midgets. They remain silent in the face of multiple outrages being committed by the Trump administration.

Why will members of the Republican majority that controls Congress not rouse themselves to say something about the enormous crime being committed in Gaza? They have an obligation to do so, because we, the United States, are the ultimate guarantors of Israel’s security. As such, the Israeli government’s crimes are our crimes. Israel’s infamy is our infamy.

The genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza is being armed and underwritten by us. This is intolerable.

Clarification: The assertion that fighters from Gaza who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, committed rapes is a highly disputed issue, and an assertion that rapes were committed that day has been removed from this post. It is to be noted, however, that on Aug. 14, 2025, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict issued a news release that includes the following passage:
With respect to the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Hamas is listed in the annex of the report on the basis of information verified by the United Nations in 2024, indicating reasonable grounds to believe that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to different forms of sexual violence during their time in captivity, and clear and convincing information that sexual violence also occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in at least six locations.

The actual report can be seen here.