Trump Meets Putin on Ukraine: On the Exclusion of the E.U.

Like proud male birds dancing for a female for the chance to reproduce, U.S. President Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky engaged in public posturing ahead of the negotiations set to take place between Trump and Vlad the Impaler Putin of Russia in Alaska on August 15, 2025. For the public, to take the postures as real positions, set in stone, would be nothing short of depraved naivete. Missing in action in all this posturing was E.U. President Van der Leyen and the E.U.’s foreign minister. Instead, the governors of two, albeit large, E.U. states were busy making demands as if their respective political bases were more powerful than the E.U. as a whole. In short, Van der Leyen missed an opportunity to join the dance of posturing.

After a virtual meeting with Trump, Zelensky postured by saying, “Putin is bluffing that the sanctions do not work, that they are nothing. In fact, sanctions are hitting the Russian economy hard.”[1] The Ukrainian president added that Putin had not changed his military goal with respect to occupying “the whole of Ukraine.”[2] Meanwhile, Trump was rattling his saber by warning Putin that there would be “very severe consequences” if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire.[3] This warning is sheer posture; no one should assume that Trump was saying what would actually happen, so protests against Trump unleashing World War III would be unfounded and based on a failure to distinguish negotiating posturing from announcing a new policy.

Different from posturing were demands from the governor of a large E.U. state, including that a ceasefire “must be at the very beginning. Later, there may be a framework agreement. Third, . . .”[4] A leader of an E.U. state who was not to be included in the upcoming negotiation between Trump and Putin, whose respective federations are empire-scale and consist of states and regions, respectively, that are themselves the size of E.U. states, was making demands as if that leader were to be a participant in the negotiations, for otherwise to make demands would not make sense; all that could be offered would be suggestions.

As the de facto head of state for the E.U., and de jure president of its executive branch, the European Commission, President Von der Leyen would have had more sway with Trump and Putin were she to have made suggestions; it would have been improper for her as a non-participant to make demands. So E.U. foreign minister Kallas overstepped in stating, “Any deal between the US and Russia must have Ukraine and the EU included.”[5] Even though Kallis’s rationale, that “it is a matter of Ukraine’s and the whole of Europe’s security,”[6] is a valid argument for why the EU rather than a governor of even a large EU state should be included in the negotiations, her demand is but from the sidelines of the playing field on which negotiations take place, and thus her making a demand only shows her weakness as being situated as such. That the E.U. had stood a better chance of edging its way into the Trump-Putin negotiations was undone by state officials jumping in for Von der Leyen in meeting before the negotiations with Trump and by Kallas’s deference to state officials in her own meeting with them. That the E.U. state of Hungary blocked an E.U. foreign policy supporting Ukraine also reflects on the weakness of the E.U. in not having sufficiently resisted opposition by governors to getting rid of the necessity of unanimity on foreign-policy (and other significant) matters at the federal level.

Between the lack of respect for the federal officials by state-level governors and foreign ministers, and the continuing inherent weakness at the points of state involvement in federal institutions, blame for the E.U. being sidelined by Trump and Putin applies at least partially to the Europeans themselves. Merz and Macron should have made way for Von der Leyen stand for the EU being the European to meet vicariously with Trump a few days before the negotiation in Alaska, and the foreign ministers at the state level should have respected the necessary role of consensus, as unanimity is difficult to achieve with 27 states, so Kallas could have made E.U.-wide suggestions for Trump and Putin. There is indeed a very practical cost in world affairs that Europeans pay in refusing to expand qualified majority voting in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., and for not increasing the power of the European Parliament, which represents E.U. citizens rather than states. Although it would be unwise to cut state involvement off at the federal level as has happened in the U.S., that just one governor can paralyze the E.U. in foreign policy is indication enough that the state governments have too much power at the federal level—much more than is necessary to safeguard the interests of state government from being eclipsed by a much more powerful federal government, as has happened in the U.S., keine Zufall, especially after state governmental institutions ceased appointing U.S. senators to Congress in the early 20^th century. The state governments in the E.U. could give up the ghost on the principle of unanimity at the federal level without worrying about unfettered encroachment from the federal institutions. State governments should continue to be represented in the European Council and the Council of the E.U., but on the basis of qualified majority voting rather than unanimity. The result, I contend, would be that the E.U. would be better able to muscle its way into negotiations between the E.U.’s counterparts: The U.S., Russia, and China.

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1. Sacha Vakulina, “’Putin Is Bluffing,’ Zelenskyy Tells Trump as European Leaders Push for Ukraine Ceasefire,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Sacha Vakulina, Aleksandar Brezar, and Alice Tidey, “Trump Warns of ‘Very Severe Consequences’ for Russia if Putin Does Not Stop War in Ukraine,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
4. Sacha Vakulina, “’Putin Is Bluffing,’ Zelenskyy Tells Trump as European Leaders Push for Ukraine Ceasefire,” Euronews.com, August 13, 2025.
5. Jeremy Fleming-Jones, “Kallas Calls Snap Meeting of EU Foreign Ministers on Ukraine on Monday,” August 10, 2025, italics added.
6. Ibid.

Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu

Israeli state officials met on August 7, 2025 to debate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to expand the presence of the IDF, Israel’s military, to include all of the territory in Gaza, which had been under Israeli occupation anyway for many decades. With Gaza already under Israeli occupation, characterizing Netanyahu’s plan as being “to conquer all or parts of Gaza not yet under Israeli control” is strange.[1] Similarly, mischaracterizing the E.U. as a bloc even though that union has the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial is odd. The media’s artful way of reporting is without doubt superficial relative to Netanyahu’s unvirtuous decisions and their respective consequences to which the labels of genocide and holocaust have justifiably been applied around the world. Behind the relevant vice lies an extreme egocentricity that the ethical theory of Sikhism describes quite well, even to the level of ontology or metaphysics.

The full essay is at "Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu."

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “Israel’s Security Cabinet Debates Expanding Gaza Operation Despite Opposition,” Euronews.com, August 7, 2025.

Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."

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1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.

The Gaza Holocaust

I contend that the genocide in Gaza being committed by the Israeli government can also be termed a holocaust. This is actually not much of a leap; what is surprising is that American mercenaries—retired U.S. Army officers working as subcontractor security forces at food distribution sites in Gaza—have also enjoyed the sport of shooting adult and even children Gazans under the reasonable assumption of impunity. As the funder of the subcontractor, the U.S. Government can be considered as an accomplice even more directly than in merely supplying Israel with the weapons to use to kill off the population of Gaza. The sheer inertia of the American electorate and the intractability of the federal representatives can itself be viewed as a subtle accomplice in the ongoing atrocity of the Gaza Holocaust. Even in the E.U., the electorate and its federal representatives have been slow to adjust, as for instance E.U. President Von der Leyen made an excuse in July of 2025 not to end the trade agreement with Israel. With the U.S. so ethically compromised, the world wisely looked to the E.U. and even to China to step in and stop the holocaust, especially after an American who had witnessed the killing publicly described the horrendous role of both the Israelis and Americans providing “security” at the food-distribution sites.

Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Army employee who had served a quarter century in the Special Forces as a Green Beret, worked as an independent subcontractor for UG Solutions as armed security for GHF, which is funded by the U.S. Government to manage food-delivery sites in Gaza. So he is very credible. He ended his contract on June 14, 2025 “after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.”[1] That is, a retired U.S. Army employee working as a subcontractor witnessed not only Israeli soldiers, but also American mercenaries, carry out atrocities “against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.”[2] The IDF lied that soldiers have used their guns at the sites only to “deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.”[3] Aguilar has stated, “(a)ll four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone.”[4]

In other words, it is no accident that Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries have shot so many Gazans at the food-distribution sites. Perhaps it could even be said that the idea for the sites was part of a wider strategy in the Israeli government to kill as many Gazans as possible while seemingly placating objections by other governments that Israel had been deliberately starving Gazans under the ethically-discredited notion of collective justice. Similar to the Nazi strategy of representing the concentration camps as labor camps, the Israeli strategy seems to be to turn a humane response—food distribution sites—into a means of shooting even children under the false claim of “crowd control.”

The Israelis’ Gaza Holocaust and the Nazi’s Jewish Holocaust resemble on another in that extermination of a people (i.e., people who group-identify themselves in a particular group) can be said to be the goal. In fact, the Israeli leveling of entire cities in Gaza goes beyond the Nazi’s Jewish ghettos. Put another way, whereas the Israeli government has sought to render Gaza as uninhabitable so the residents would suffer for an extended period of time before dying, the Nazis did not render the ghettos uninhabitable before the Jews were taken to the camps. In this way, the Gaza Holocaust is actually worse, assuming that it is unethical to intentionally make people suffer, especially if severely. An Israeli government official even stated that death is not bad enough for what the Gazans deserve, as if even the children were culpable for Hamas’ attack back in 2023. Perhaps therein lies the real difference between a genocide and a holocaust.

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1. Sanjana Karanth, “’Nothing Is Going To Buy My Soul’: GHF Whistleblower Reveals Horrors In Gaza,” The Huffington Post, July 31, 2025.

2.Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

Passive Aggression on Campus: Redefining Hate-Speech

Besides using social pressure and anger to purge words that a student or faculty member deems unacceptable, the word police have found that they can get objectionable opinions criminalized. This runs 180 degrees from the sort of openness to different, even objectionable ideas that makes a college campus thrive with an academic rather than passive-aggressive atmosphere. Sometimes, getting the law to go against a pollical opinion that a fallible person deems to be intolerable can show just how dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary the criminalizing of ideas can be. Here I have in mind the case of Marianne Hirsh, a genocide scholar at Columbia University. It is a sign of going too far that political corrective would be weaponized with criminal punishments that such a scholar, whose parents had died in the Nazi Holocaust, would think that she would have to teach at another university to be able to continue teaching material from the notable twentieth-century scholar, Hannah Arendt, who wrote on the banality of evil in that Holocaust (and, were she still alive in the next century, would probably also write of the Gaza Holocaust in such terms). Behind political correctness is the arrogance and related intolerance that stem from the sin of self-idolatry: taking oneself to be omniscient and omnipotent (but not omnibenevolent).

Hirsch had been using Hannah Arendt’s book about the trial of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem; he was convicted of the war crime of forcing Jews in Hungary to march to a death camp in Poland so as many as possible would die on the way and thus reduce the killing needing to be done at the camp. Arendt, a Jew, is critical in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, of Israel’s illegal kidnapping of Eichmann in Argentina. Even mentioning that text, or explaining why Arendt criticized Israel’s founding, could run afoul of Columbia’s 2025 revision of antisemitism, “which casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech.”[1] That’s pretty heavy language, and the penalties would surely go beyond getting fired from the university. So it is worthwhile to unpack the claim that criticism of Israel constitutes hate-speech.

For criticism of Israel to be taken as antisemitic, hence anti-Jewish, speech, the criticism would have to pertain to Jews generally, but to criticize Israelis is not to criticize Jews who are American and live in the United States, for example, unless they hold dual citizenship. Moreover, to conflate citizenship, which is a political designation, with a religious or social designation is to commit a category mistake, for the categories are distinct. To criticize another country is not to criticize a world religion (or even religion itself, as it is a distinct category).

Once we have properly identified criticism of a foreign government (or country) as political in nature, we can see that such criticism is acceptable in international relations; people criticize other countries all the time. It can even be said to be the human condition, and we are all in trouble if that is criminalized. It would be like making the breathing of air illegal. In short, criticizing other countries is so normalized in international relations that to make criticizing only one country illegal while another other country or government thereof is “fair game,” would be highly unfair. It would be especially unfair were that country’s government exterminating a people within its territory, for to not criticize such a country could be considered inhuman or at least insensitive to the desperate plight of other human beings.

That both Hirsch and Arendt are/were Jewish and yet included criticism of Israel should be enough to dispel the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic. So it is ironic that Hirsch, whose very parents died in the 20^th century holocaust, thought she might have to leave Columbia university to be able to continue to include Arendt’s political criticism of Israel in courses. This is not to say that Columbia’s new “definition” of antisemitism is itself antisemitic because both Hirsch and Arendt could be expunged for being in violation.

I contend that any government, and thus any country, is “fair game” in terms of being the recipient of political criticism, and that this does not constitute hate speech. In criticizing Israel’s role in the Gaza Holocaust, no hatred is being directed at or even implied to pertain to any Jews in America who are not Israelis. That Israelis in Israel can be criticized for their government’s policies and actions is fair because that country’s political system is democratic.  Even in an autocratic state such as Russia, the people can be criticized for not standing up sufficiently to an unprovoked invasion of another country. Perhaps Vatican City would be a closer parallel to Israel, but even in criticizing a political stance of the Pope or a public policy of Vatican City, a person is not criticizing being Catholic in terms of its religious culture or beliefs. Vatican City is recognized internationally as a country and thus as a political entity, and thus political criticism is fairly done without being labeled as hate speech against Catholics. Also, to criticize them for regarding the Virgin Mary as a divine being in being born without sin and being bodily assumed into heaven does not constitute a political criticism of the Vatican as political entity. It is not as if the Virgin Mary were president of Vatican City.

For the governments of Israel and the United States to wield antisemitism as a club so to curtail adverse political speech—and Columbia’s new definition doubtlessly came from pressure from the Trump Administration—represents a category mistake that is ethically and politically unfair, especially if a legitimate basis exists to criticize a policy and/or action of the Israeli government. The Gaza Holocaust evinces such a basis. In fact, ethically, it can be argued that it is the duty of every human being on the planet to criticize a government (or country) for being in the process of starving, shooting, and bombing an occupied population of people, who, unlike in the case of a war, could not fight back. In the 20^th century as news of the Nazi holocaust broke, criticism of Nazi-Germany or even Germany itself was not “redefined” as anti-German hate speech because a legitimate reason for even harsh criticism existed. True to American culture, therefore, it is best to side with free political speech in international relations.

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1. Jeff Offenhartz, “A Columbia Genocide Scholar Says She May Leave over University’s New Definition of Antisemitism,” The Associated Press, July 25, 2025.

Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice: The Case of Israel in Gaza

One of the many pitfalls in the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, whereby government officials acting as government can literally get away with murder domestically given the lack of credible de jure and de facto enforcement of international “law,” is the ability to inflict collective punishment based on group-identity, including the ideologies that hinge on identity politics. Going the actual culprits of a crime or even a revolt, collective punishment inflicts harm and even mass murder on an entire group, including individuals thereof who are not at all culpable. Unlike “collateral damage,” the ideology of collective justice includes intentionally harming such individuals. It is an ideology because it is based on beliefs about a group rather than an ethic that would justify normatively the infliction of pain and suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, collective justice is an ideology because it includes the artificial elevation of a group (i.e., the collective) over the individual even though members of a group are arguably foremost individuals, who typically belong to more than one group or organization. To put the collective abstraction first ontologically is thus tenuous at best. A person may be a Texan, a Democrat, a Catholic, and a member of a football team, for example, so the claim that that person is essentially any one of these would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In privileging a part over a whole, thus being partisan, an ideology is in a sense arbitrary, even in claiming that a state of affairs that is favored or desired is the present state of affairs, as if the statement were a fact of reason rather than a counter-factual statement.

It is one thing for intellectuals to debate and discuss ontological and ethical matters, and quite another when a leader on the world stage makes an explicit normative statement condemning collective punishment. The reason why such a public pronouncement by a person chosen to head a government or a global religious organization is important is that the Israeli government quickly discovered in 2023 that having its president state publicly that every resident of Gaza would be punished for being culpable in an atrocity committed by criminals in October of that year in Israel was not going over well in the media around the world. Because the collective-justice motive was from then on—for at least 21 months (and counting)—on stealth mode in the Israeli government even though the fingerprints were obvious in Gaza, to have a leader recognized globally state publicly that collective “justice” was being pursued by the Israeli government even though prohibited by international law. For some reason, facts on the ground, even when obvious, are not enough for human beings to think, Hmm, the Israelis really are pursuing collective justice on their subjugated people within Israel’s borders. Even with such a recognition and acknowledgement, the prerogative of absolute sovereignty can go on, unimpeded internationally.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Pope Leo of the Roman Catholic Church, whose billion-plus membership spans the globe, “said at the end of his Sunday Angelus prayer” on July 20, 2025, “I once again call for an immediate end to the barbarity of this war and for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.”[1] Typically, leaders on the global stage are satisfied to leave it at that; they condemn this or that without stating what actions in particular, or what ideologies behind those actions, are being castigated. In addition to bringing up the Israeli attack on the only Catholic church in Gaza just days earlier, the pontiff said, “I appeal to the international community to observe humanitarian law and respect the obligation to protect civilians as well as the prohibition of collective punishment, the indiscriminate use of force, and the forced displacement of populations.”[2] Together with the barbarity of that war, the collective punishment, which presumes the validity of collective justice unless punishment is inflicted without cause, such as randomly, can be said to be extreme in its severity, and not just in its scale. If in fact the Vatican had turned a blind eye to the Nazi Holocaust, the Church was not making the same mistake on the Israeli Holocaust in Gaza. Pope Leo was essentially telling the Israeli government officials:

We know what you’re trying to do; you’re trying to extinguish the Palestinian people who now live in the uninhabitable area that you created so to decimate the Gazans, whom you view not only as culpable collectively, but also sub-human—as “animals,” as it were. This is not the first time in human history that a government has considered a people in its territory to be subhuman. It is ironic, is it not? The Torah makes clear that being Yahweh’s chosen people does not spare you from God’s wrath. You are not divine, so it is not your place to fete out collective justice that God can do by virtue of being omniscient as well as omnipotent.

Whereas the Pope would have to acknowledge the validity of divine collective justice in the Old Testament, Nietzsche argues that the conception of the deity wherein it is both omnibenevolent and vengeful, for “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” is discredited by whomever added that line, knowing that God must be perfect goodness. Perhaps collective justice is not vengeance, and a deity who knows all would only inflict collective punishment in cases in which everyone is in fact guilty of some injustice. Nietzsche was not an atheist; in fact, he may have been criticizing a flawed concept so that a new, healthier concept could be built.  An atheist would likely go further, arguing that collective justice is inherently unjust so positing it of a deity is wrongheaded, and in fact could do additional damage as Israeli officials could try to justify their heinous crimes against humanity by saying that Yahweh engages in collective justice in punishing Israel, such as by keeping the Hebrews in the wilderness for forty years and later by allowing them to be conquered for violating the covenant. Trying to exterminate a people who believe in the same deity—unlike the people in Jericho in the Bible story—is arguably such a violation. It would be ironic were Yahweh to apply collective justice on the Israelis by punishing Israel for having inflicted collective punishment on the Gazans as if every resident in Gaza in October, 2023 were a culprit. Whether collective justice rightfully applies to an omniscient deity or contradicts the very notion of divinity, the assumption that we mere mortals enjoy God’s prerogative is impious self-idolatry.  

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1. The Associated Press, “Pope Repeats Call for Gaza Ceasefire as Israel Widens Evacuation Orders,” Euronews.com, July 20, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.

The Israeli Military Kills Starving Gazans Seeking Food as Police in Massachusetts Intimidate Human-Rights Protesters

Even as the Israeli military was shooting innocent, starving people waiting for food in Gaza, Massachusetts police were overreacting to a pro-Gaza, pro-human rights protest in Cambridge, where Harvard University has most of its campus. Whereas the Israeli military (intentionally?) did not engage in crowd control around a designated food-distribution site, Cambridge and Harvard police employees overreacted and in so doing, falsely presented the visuals of an emergency and intimidated peaceful protesters. Both the Israeli military and a local and a private police department in Massachusetts can thus be criticized, and the choices of all three were to the advantage of Israel in spite of its ongoing war crime and crime against humanity in regard to the Gaza Holocaust, and to the advantage of the American defense contractors profiting from the U.S. Government sending weapons to Israel.  

On July 19, 2025, “Israeli troops opened fire” on “crowds of Palestinians seeking food at a distribution point run by an Israeli-backed US company in southern Gaza, killing at least 32 Palestinians.”[1] As if killing starving people on their way to an Israeli-approved food-distribution point being managed by an American company, in “a separate incident, at least 18 more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strikes (sic) on Gaza City . . . near hubs operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF).”[2] Of course, the “Israeli military did not immediately react to reports of the two incidents.”[3] Especially concerning the first, even an attempted justification that the crowd was unruly would only beg the question of why the Israeli military had so badly mismanaged crowd-control, as it could certainly be anticipated, given the extent of famine in Gaza, that a crowd of starving, desperate Gazans would manifest to get food. To fail to manage an easily anticipated crowd and then shoot on the crowd reflects badly on the Israeli government rather than the starving people.

On the very same day, presumably many hours later, a “Free Palestine” small protest took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whereas the Israeli military lapsed in managing a crowd, the Cambridge police surrounded the small group of protests on both sides. Even a city block away, Harvard’s private police employees had infiltrated Smith Hall, which is just across a street from Harvard Yard. Even though no university administration office was open on that Saturday in Smith Hall, which doubles as a student hang-out space, at least eight police employees interspersed themselves out in front, and left four or five of their cars double-parked on the street. To say that both the local and university police overreacted, given the small size of the protest and where it was taking place, is an understatement. The extent of police-presence around the small group of protesters can even be interpreted as an attempt to deny Americans their right of political protest and free speech by visible intimidation. When Black Lives Matter protests were going on several years earlier in Phoenix, Arizona, such intimidation was at the extreme of police surrounding protesters with machine guns even though the protests were all non-violent. The presumptuous “right” of police to deter by intimidation deserves to be contested in a U.S. district court, for the convenient (in terms of power-aggrandizement by police) assumption that peaceful protest will turn violent and thus should be treated as such is fallacious.

In short, there is simply too much show of military/police force evinced in these two cases—one in Gaza and the other in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The instinctual urge to bully ought to be checked by local governments, and even private universities that operate as de facto non-democratic local governments, against military and police employees, including their respective directors. Starving people being shot on the way to an approved food-distribution site and pro-human rights protestors being intimidated by an excessive show of presence by police up close and even a city-block away from the protest itself can both be taken as “red-flags.” Absolute power corrupts absolutely. No Harvard administrator would say to that university’s police unit that its presence was excessive in front of Smith Hall, and no government official in Netanyahu’s government in Israel would chastise the military for letting the crowd of starving people get out of hand, if in fact that crowd became unruly as opposed to being “sitting ducks” for Israeli troops hateful of Palestinians.

The Pro-Palestine Protest in Cambridge on July 19, 2025

Meanwhile, over at Harvard, an invasion of human-rights advocates was expected . . . 

And, just for added fun, photos of the Massachusetts Army intimidating Americans at Boston's Fireworks on July 4th

With the celebration of liberty obscured by the smoke of intimidation, I left in utter disgust as the booms of the "bombs" in the sky began. As I walked away quite determined, the first few powerful thuds I could feel through my body made the show of force on the ground seem somehow more real. A celebration of raw force by means of weapanry, or liberty from autocratic intimidation? It is no wonder that the U.S. was being so helpful to Israel. My visit to Boston was eventful and enlightening. I hear that Geneva is wonderful. 

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1. Malek Fouda, “Israeli Troops Open Fire on Palestianians en Route to Food Distribution Site, killing 32,” Euronews.com, July 19, 2025, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid. The grammar error aside, there were more than one strike, as the report also mentions them as “attacks.”
3. Ibid.