Let’s do some lateral thinking. Always useful to connect disparate dots when a lot is coming at us and it is time to assess our circumstances.

We have this famous rapper who goes by Macklemore, né Benjamin Hammond Haggerty. The 43–year-old Macklemore was just thrown off the tour of an even more famous rapper, Ed Sheeran, for uttering the phrase, “Free Palestine” at the start of a concert in a New Jersey stadium.

Macklemore said a lot of other, strikingly intelligent things that evening (and has said more since), and I’ll get to him shortly.

Then we have this new documentary, NAZA, which exposes the purposeful, altogether calculated regime of mass murder the high command of Israeli Defense Forces authorized in Gaza after the events of Oct. 7, 2023.

NAZA was directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two Israeli Jews. They got a prolonged ovation when they premiered the film in Venice a few weeks ago. They are now subject to the typically repellent attacks of the Netanyahu regime, its propagandists, the I.D.F. and a majority of Israeli so-called Jews.

Then last Monday, The Washington Post reported that the Trump regime plans to sell the Israelis $2.8 billion worth of 2,000–pound bombs, 40,000 of them, and 20,000 more of the “bunker-buster” variety.

This is the ordnance the Zionists have used to destroy Gaza and kill 70,000–and-counting of the Strip’s people. It is the largest shipment of 1–ton bombs to date, and the Pentagon will recycle U.S.–taxpayer money so the Israelis can — what a joke — pay for it.

It is especially galling to read the State Department has no intention of seeking Congressional authorization for this transfer, as required by law: State will simply claim the sale is necessary in response to an emergency.

A rapper who speaks articulately in behalf of the Palestinian cause is censored — but not silenced.

The I.D.F.’s systematic campaign to annihilate the Palestinian population of Gaza is recounted on film with no apparent regret or remorse by soldiers who pulled the triggers and directed the drones.

An Extermination Campaign

2000 pound bombs configured as MK-84 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), being moved onto an aircraft elevator, next to an F-14 “Tomcat” fighter in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, 2002. (U.S. Navy photo)

The State Department, supremely indifferent to law and the objections of a majority of Americans, will send the Zionist terror machine a record volume of the bombs most responsible for the I.D.F.’s indiscriminate spree of murder in Gaza.

We must put all this together, aspects of a unified field, and draw our conclusions. I insist on this and here is mine: There is no war in Gaza and there never has been.

Everyone not blinded by uncritical allegiance to “the Jewish state” or dulled by incessantly dishonest media coverage knows this. There is an extermination operation justly compared with the Reich’s in 1930s and 1940s Germany — if the Zionists have not proven more pointedly sadistic than the Nazis.

“There is no war in Gaza and there never has been…. There is an extermination operation justly compared with the Reich’s in 1930s and 1940s Germany.”

No, the war is here, and against us — we who dwell in the late-phase imperium.

This is a war waged more or less across the board for the Zionization of American politics, society, culture, media and there must be something I’ve left out. Those subject to this across-the-board assault owe it to the Palestinian people as well as themselves to resist these serial violations of law and any kind of moral order worthy of the term.

Censoring those who stand publicly for the Palestinian cause is of course nothing new. But the attack on Macklemore in response to his remarks at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a couple of weeks ago marks a sharp, aggressive escalation in the Zionist-driven campaign against free speech in America.

Here is what Macklemore said as he opened for Sheeran on Sept. 4. I draw from a transcript Newsweek published three days later and reproduce the whole of his remarks:

“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to say this all day. One of the reasons why I wanted to come on this tour was because I wanted to stand up here on stages and stadiums across America and say two words that are very near and dear to my heart: Free Palestine.

I said, ‘Free Palestine.’

I want those words to be loud and clear, so the people from Gaza, all the way to the occupied West Bank, know that we have not forgotten them.

And this next song was inspired by the bravery of Columbia University students who led an encampment movement that mobilized the entire world; opened up hearts, myself included, so thank you to those students that risked their diplomas, that risked their tuition, that risked their scholarships, that stood up and said, ‘No.’ 

CUAD students, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voices for Peace. Thank you, guys.

To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you. My message is for peace; love for all human beings to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality.

So I say Free Palestine, I say Free Lebanon, I say Free Cuba, I say Free Congo, Free Sudan, I say Free all people in America living in fear of this terrorist organization, ICE. None of us will be free until we are all free.”

Does it get any more intelligently righteous? “My Jewish brothers and sisters”: Could Macklemore have taken any greater care to underscore that genocide and apartheid, not Jewishness, are what is at issue?

I have never heard Macklemore’s music and probably never will and probably wouldn’t like it if I did, but I admire this man for his principle, his clarity of mind and his guts.

Macklemore, The Heist Tour, Toronto November 2012. (thecomeupshow, Wikimedia, CCA 2.0)

The attacks came instantly, as he must have known they would.

The Anti–Defamation League, the Israeli–American Council, StopAntisemitism, various celebrities — they all accused Macklemore of anti–Semitism and insisted Ed Sheeran remove him from the rest of his tour.

Soon enough, the ignorant hoards one finds on social media (along with Zionist-trained trolls) said he, Macklemore, made his hatred of Jews plain when he dressed up in a fake beard and a hooked nose at a performance in his native Seattle a dozen years ago.

In the end, it was not Ed Sheeran who forced Macklemore off his tour. This was the work of Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and of a stadium that had scheduled the Sheeran tour.

The exuberantly Zionist Kraft, accusing Macklemore of “hate speech” and “a broader history of anti–Semitic rhetoric and imagery,” told Sheeran that he had enlisted other stadium owners and Macklemore would not be allowed to appear at any of them— whereupon Sheeran acquiesced and claimed to take a neutral position on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and elsewhere.

“I don’t take sides,” he told Macklemore in conversation (as recounted by the latter). 

Read Macklemore’s remarks again and tell me the conclusion here is not obvious. I defer to the singer, who issued a lengthy statement Tuesday in response to his removal from the Sheeran tour. Here is the pith of it:

“When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying ‘Free Palestine’ gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn’t protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.”

Zap.   

As to Macklemore’s long history of anti–Semitism, let us all thank Caitlin Johnstone for doing the work of exploding this. It turns out Macklemore, wishing to surprise his audience in Seattle all those years ago, rummaged through a bin of theatrical costumes and came up with a beard, a wig and a protuberant nose to disguise himself so he could walk through his audience undetected.  

Full bloody stop. The A.D.L. and these other disgusting character assassins will stop at nothing, I tell you. 

And here is Macklemore, obviously chagrined as he addresses Sheeran, his longtime friend:

“There is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side does not leave you in the middle.”

Macklemore put up a fight on behalf of Palestinians, and — not to be misjudged — he has won it.

As of Tuesday, all of the other acts on Sheeran’s tour have quit, which sounds to me as if the tour has collapsed.

More to our point, the contemptible rubbish Zionists of Kraft’s kind try to foist off on the American public, along with the phony “neutrality” of all the cowardly Ed Sheerans among us, will now be obvious to millions.

Zionization begins in people’s minds: win the war there and the rest falls immediately into place. Lose the war there and … and you have lost: This is the lesson I read into the Macklemore case.

NAZA Confronts Zionist Power

Israeli Defense Force soldiers preparing for a ground operation in Gaza on Oct. 29, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

It is interesting that the to-do Macklemore precipitated simply by saying “Free Palestine” in front of a lot of people coincided, more or less, with the Aug. 24 premiere of NAZA at the Venice International Film Festival.

They are both to be read as confrontations with Zionist power: The rapper and the film directors are waging the same war. And the filmmakers have won just as obviously as the singer.

NAZA consists of interviews with two dozen I.D.F. soldiers and intelligence operatives who participated in the planning and execution of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. They describe the systematic use of A.I. tools — surveillance and targeting technologies — in the purposeful murders of many thousands of Palestinians.

“NAZA” is a transliteration of a Hebrew acronym referring to the number of civilian casualties a given airstrike or drone attack is likely to cause — a cold, hard calculation, “collateral damage” in the phrase all too familiar to us.

It is all there, from what one reads. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor tell this sickening story the most effective way they could: In the very words of the 24 executioners who agreed to talk, all veterans of the Gaza operation. They filmed, curious detail, at night on Tel Aviv rooftops to protect the identities of their interviewees.

Abraham and Szor, to be noted, are the two Israeli co-directors (with two Palestinians) of No Other Land, the documentary filmed on the West Bank and winner of an Academy Award and a best-documentary prize in Berlin when it came out two years ago.

Their nighttime interrogations under the stars in Tel Aviv are based on Abraham’s original work uncovering the Zionist army’s diabolic use of advanced technologies to hunt down and murder Palestinians, utterly careless of the family members killed with them. Then as now, he was an investigative reporter for +972, the independent digital journal published in Israel.

Abraham observed in an interview with The Guardian, which co-produced NAZA:

“It’s easier to kill people when you’re doing it on a screen. … Intelligence officers know the most. They listen to the cellphones. They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.”

Indeed, the film treats us to people who likened the Gaza operation to a video game—“insanely fun,” as one of those interviewed put it. “Insane” being just the word.

And now for the smear campaigns, the charges of defamation and treason, the- interviews-are-a-fraud, etc. Bibi Netanyahu and Miki Zohar, the Israeli prime minister’s culture minister, propose stripping the film directors of their Israeli citizenship.

Pitiful, if you ask me. These people simply do not understand that they have lost the propaganda war.

The film is scheduled for release Oct. 6, and I write from the descriptions of those who produced it, directed it or have seen it. But at the Venice premiere Abraham and Szor got a 24–and-a-half minute standing ovation when the screening concluded….

…. I just took a sec to add my own “Bravo!” Speech by speech, report by report, testimony by testimony, film by film, the Zionists’ criminal atrocities are located ever further beyond denial.

State Dept. Bypasses Congress

Hornet aircraft releases MK-83 1000 pound bombs of the type included in March sale to Israel during a series of Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) tests, 2004. (U.S. Navy photo by Vernon Pugh, Wikimedia)

How bitter is it to realize that, as the truth of the Zionist regime’s pathologies are made so starkly, irrefutably plain, the State Department plans yet another shipment of indiscriminate instruments of murder.

And the new, $2.8 billion sale of 60,000 bombs follows one last March, when State also bypassed Congress to send $4 billion worth of ordnance, including 35,000 1–ton bombs. And that sale followed two others authorized by the Biden administration in December 2023 — neither of which had congressional approval.

As widely reported, 2,000–pound bombs can kill up to a radius of 1,000 feet and make craters 50 feet deep. Even the Pentagon, not noted for its humanitarian considerations, deemed it wrong to use them in heavily populated urban areas.

But they are — The New York Times’s lovely word — the “workhorses” of the Zionist army’s reign of terror in Gaza.

A few conclusions, now that we have our dots connected:

One, those who exercise power in the United States do not want the citizenry to exercise their rights to free speech any more than the Zionists who are willing openly to suppress it.

Two, a corollary to the above, arms transfers to Israel have been more or less completely removed from political oversight. This is another of the designs we find as we discover the extent of America’s Zionization.

Three, the indifference of power to the popular will in the United States is now complete and Day–Glo obvious. This is the lesson to be taken from State’s latest arms-transfer plan. The disconnect is total, and it is well Americans get this through their heads as soon as their psyches can manage the loss of all illusions.

Four, saving the best for last, Macklemore, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have something to tell us. There are things to do and victories to achieve so long as there is a willingness to accept sacrifice — in these two cases a loss of millions in concert receipts, maybe a loss of citizenship.

There is a Macklemore act in every one of us. It is all that is left for anyone whose civic self has not died. And how very fine are the thought and practice of self-reliance.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being censored. 

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