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Tag: human rights

  • Kushner’s “Future of Gaza”: A Humanitarian Obscenity, Not a Peace Plan

    Kushner’s “Future of Gaza”: A Humanitarian Obscenity, Not a Peace Plan

    By Amal Zadok

    Kushner’s “Future of Gaza” is not a peace plan; it is a speculative real‑estate prospectus laid over a mass grave, an investor deck pitched on top of fresh rubble and uncounted bodies.  This brutality dressed in the language of “opportunity” and “master plans” is not statesmanship but moral bankruptcy of the highest order, especially in a territory where tens of thousands have been killed and more than 80% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed by war.

    Skyscrapers on top of corpses

    Jared Kushner arrives in Davos with glossy slides of 180 towers along Gaza’s shattered coastline, talking of ports, airports, logistics corridors and “catastrophic success,” as if he were zoning vacant desert land instead of a territory systematically pulverised for years.  He boasts of timelines of “two or three years” to rebuild Rafah, as though bulldozers and cranes were the missing ingredient rather than the deliberate destruction of an entire society and its basic infrastructure.

    The same presentation that sells Gaza as a “regional hub” requiring tens of billions in capital does not pause to name a single family still digging loved ones from under concrete, a single amputated child, a single mass grave.  When the slides show towers and yacht marinas but never cemeteries and bombed schools, this is not reconstruction; it is a visual coup against reality, a marketing campaign against memory.

    Genocide repackaged as redevelopment

    While Kushner and his patrons speak of “demilitarization” and “free market principles,” Gaza’s human losses remain almost unmentionable, reduced to an awkward footnote to the grand business vision.  Independent tallies already report tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, with epidemiologists warning that war injuries, disease and hunger could easily push the total toward or beyond 100,000 deaths in the medium term; that scale of killing matches the language of genocide and ethnic cleansing far more than it does the vocabulary of “development.”

    This is not a “market opportunity”; it is a demographic wound carved into a trapped population of barely 2.2 million.  The language of the plan is not the language of mourning, justice or accountability; it is the jargon of venture capital—“special economic zones,” “investment funds,” “GDP targets,” “microgrants”—sprayed like perfume over the stench of war crimes.  A territory in which perhaps one in fifty residents has already been killed is being treated as a distressed asset to be flipped, not a society entitled to self‑determination, reparations, and the prosecution of those who orchestrated its devastation before a competent international court.

    The Board of Peace: genocide for a fee

    The so‑called “Board of Peace” is the most obscene twist of all: a one‑billion‑dollar buy‑in for a permanent seat at the table where Gaza’s future will be decided.  This is not peace building; it is a pay‑to‑play cartel that monetises both suffering and sovereignty, turning an occupied, bombed people into the underlying asset of a global prestige club.

    Chaired by Donald Trump and populated by hand‑picked elites, the board offers plutocrats and compliant politicians a new status symbol: “I helped reshape Gaza”—for a price.  The promise that all funds will go to reconstruction does not cleanse the structure of its immorality; buying your way into steering the fate of a stateless population turns human rights into a luxury commodity.  When peace has an entry fee of one billion dollars, justice has already been priced out of the room, and genocide has acquired its own VIP lounge.

    Tony Blair, from Iraq’s lies to Gaza’s loot

    And then there is Tony Blair, whose name and institute have circulated around “day‑after” schemes and advisory circuits linked to Trump’s Gaza ambitions, even if reports now suggest he has been dropped from the final shortlist for the board.  A politician who helped sell the Iraq war on the basis of “weapons of mass destruction” that did not exist, and whose legacy is inseparable from hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, has no moral authority to co‑design—formally or informally—the future of another Arab population bombed and displaced under the banner of “security.”

    Blair’s presence in this orbit is not an anomaly; it is the system revealing itself.  The same political class that lied a country into war two decades ago now returns, scrubbed and suited, to sanitise an experiment in colonial redevelopment: dispossess, bombard, blockade, then invite the architects and apologists of previous disasters to broker the “rebuild” in partnership with investors.  In this cycle, Western leaders are never exiled by their failures; they are recycled into advisory boards and consulting roles, endlessly monetising the ruins they helped create.

    Erasing Palestinians to sell the land

    Kushner’s masterplan speaks fluently about towers, income levels, industrial zones and data centres, but stutters into silence when it comes to who owns the land, who governs the territory and who grants permission.  There is vague talk of technocrats and executive committees, of partner states and vetted locals, but no meaningful space for Palestinians to define their own future outside the conditions imposed by their jailers and their jailers’ patrons.

    This is how erasure works in the twenty‑first century.  You do not have to deny that Palestinians exist; you simply frame them as a logistics problem inside a larger story about corridors, ports and foreign capital.  You point at destroyed refugee camps and call them “phases” of a master plan.  You turn survivors into statistics and then into target demographics for tourism, cheap labour in someone else’s Riviera built on the ruins of their homes.

    Free markets over mass graves

    At the heart of the plan lies the dogma that “free market economy principles” will heal what bombs have broken.  Its authors talk as if unemployment, poverty and blockade were glitches in a spreadsheet rather than the deliberate tools of a regime of control, apartheid and dispossession.  By pretending that skyscrapers and special economic zones can substitute for justice, they ensure that the structural violence underpinning Gaza’s suffering remains untouched, unexamined and unpunished.

    “Catastrophic success,” Kushner calls it: a phrase so revealing it hardly needs commentary.  Catastrophe is the ongoing reality of Gazans; “success” is reserved for those who can turn that catastrophe into contracts, portfolios and keynote speeches in the Alps.  The dead, the displaced and the starved are not invited to Davos; they are the unacknowledged collateral in someone else’s growth projections and the invisible cost of a new speculative frontier.

    An unforgivable obscenity

    To unveil a glittering business blueprint for “New Gaza” while bodies are still decomposing under collapsed homes is not just premature; it is an unforgivable obscenity.  It tells the world that Palestinian life is so cheap that even their mourning period can be shortened to fit an investment cycle.  It signals to every future aggressor that you can flatten a territory and, if you have powerful friends, return as the visionary who will monetise the ruins.

    This is the line that must be drawn. A just future for Gaza begins with ceasefire, full humanitarian access, and international prosecutions for war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide—not with glossy renders, not with billion‑dollar seats on a “Board of Peace,” not with the rehabilitation of men whose careers are built on lies that killed entire nations.  Until the architects and accomplices of this horror stand in the dock instead of on Davos stages, every tower they imagine for Gaza will be nothing more than another form of occupation, another monument to a world that chose profit over people—and another reminder that no skyscraper, no board, and no master plan will ever be tall enough to cast a shadow long enough to hide the blood on their hands.

    References

    BBC News. (2026, January 21). Jared Kushner lays out Trump‑backed “master plan” for post‑war Gaza. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jared-kushner-lays-trump-backed-master-plan-post/story?id=129461124

    CNN. (2026, January 22). 180 skyscrapers for Gaza: Trump’s son‑in‑law Kushner unveils “masterplan” for enclave’s reconstruction. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/middleeast/kushner-trump-postwar-plan-gaza-board-peace-davos-intl-latam

    Breitbart / UPI. (2026, January 22). Kushner unveils $25B Gaza masterplan including skyscrapers, housing. https://www.breitbart.com/news/kushner-unveils-25b-gaza-masterplan-including-skyscrapers-housing

    BBC News. (2026, January 22). US unveils plans for “New Gaza” with skyscrapers. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7mmpljze7o

    Reuters. (2026, January 22). US pitches “New Gaza” development plan; Israeli fire kills five Palestinians. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-pitches-new-gaza-development-plan-israeli-fire-kills-five-palestinians-2026-01-22

    CNN. (2026, January 18). Trump’s “Board of Peace” for Gaza to require $1 billion payment for permanent membership. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/18/politics/board-of-peace-gaza-trump-payment-membership

    CNN. (2026, January 20). Trump says Board of Peace established to oversee reconstruction of Gaza “might” replace the United Nations. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/20/politics/trump-gaza-board-of-peace-united-nations

    ABC News (Australia). (2025, November 18). As Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza gets UN approval, critics warn it turns ruins into real estate. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/rebuilding-gaza-donald-trump-plan-investment-potential/106006900

    The New York Times. (2024, February 21). War and illness could kill 85,000 Gazans in 6 months, new analysis finds. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/health/israel-gaza-war-deaths.html

    Wikipedia. (updated 2026). Casualties of the Gaza war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war

    Al Jazeera. (2025, January 15). The human toll of Israel’s war on Gaza – by the numbers. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/15/the-human-toll-of-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

    The Washington Post. (2026, January 22). Trump’s “master plan” for Gaza contrasts with reality on the ground. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/01/22/trump-kushner-gaza-plan

    The Independent. (2026, January 22). Is Trump building peace – or a property deal on the graves of Gazans? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/trump-gaza-kushner-peace-board-property-b2869059.html

    The Guardian. (2025, December 8). Tony Blair reportedly dropped from Trump’s Gaza “board of peace” shortlist. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/dec/08/tony-blair-reportedly-dropped-from-donald-trump-gaza-board-of-peace-shortlist

    Al Jazeera. (2025, December 9). Tony Blair ruled out of Trump’s proposed Gaza “peace board”. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/tony-blair-ruled-out-of-trumps-proposed-gaza-peace-board-report

    France 24. (2025, December 9). Tarnished legacy: What role for Tony Blair in Trump peace plan for Gaza? https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20251209-tarnished-legacy-what-role-for-tony-blair-in-trump-peace-plan-for-gaza

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    When the Republic Wears a Mask: ICE, Trump, and the Constitution in the Crosshairs of Encroaching Power

    James Madison warned that “power is of an encroaching nature, and…ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”  In Donald Trump’s hands, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the very embodiment of that encroaching power: an armed, masked, and increasingly unaccountable apparatus that kills a U.S. citizen in Minnesota, terrorizes communities, and dares the constitutional order to stop it.  An agency that claims the mantle of law has slid into something closer to a standing force of intimidation, operating in a gray zone between policing and political control that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin would have recognized as the threshold of tyranny.

    Madison, encroaching power, and the ICE state

    Madison’s core insight in Federalist No. 48 was brutally simple: “power is of an encroaching nature” and “mere parchment barriers” are not enough to stop a determined branch from slipping its leash.  He feared precisely what is visible today in immigration enforcement: a single executive apparatus accumulating practical control over lawmaking (through broad discretion), execution (through raids and detention), and adjudication (through executive‑run immigration courts).  This “tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands,” Madison wrote, is the very definition of tyranny, whether wielded by a monarch or an elected president.

    Under Trump, ICE has become such a concentration point. Its Enforcement and Removal Operations wing conducts raids, arrests, detention, and deportation. Policy memos from the White House and DHS effectively rewrite who is targeted and how aggressively, far beyond what most Americans imagined when Congress wrote the underlying statutes.  Madison would not be fooled by the bureaucratic language. He would see an executive machine steadily expanding its reach, using the gaps between law on paper and practice on the ground to enlarge its power.

    The Minnesota killing: when “enforcement” becomes lethal impunity

    The killing of 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis is not an aberration; it is a revelation.  Good, a U.S. citizen, mother of three and celebrated poet, was in her car when ICE agents confronted her on a residential street. Video shows an officer at her door while another steps in front of the vehicle and fires multiple rounds into the windshield at close range.  Federal officials rushed to frame her as a threat who tried to run over agents, yet witnesses’ footage shows an officer shooting almost immediately as the car inches forward. The city’s mayor called it “reckless use of force” and told ICE to “get out of our city.”

    Local leaders have emphasized that Good appears to have had no serious criminal record and was reportedly present as a legal observer monitoring ICE activity, while the Trump administration branded her a “domestic terrorist.”  This is the logic of encroaching power: those who watch the state become enemies of the state. A federal officer can shoot a citizen in the face on a city street, then retreat behind a wall of official narratives and procedural reviews.  Madison warned that when one branch operates with “overruling influence” and escapes effective checks, “dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community” follow.  Good’s death is one of those oppressions, and the “minor party” is anyone the executive chooses to target.

    The “law and order” defense — and why it fails

    Defenders of ICE under Trump insist that such force and sweeping tactics are the price of “law and order.” They argue that agents face real dangers, that criminals will exploit any restraint, and that masks, unmarked cars, and aggressive raids are necessary to protect officers and communities alike.  Madison and the founding generation would have recognized the danger in this argument: it turns necessity into a blank check.

    Madison’s warning that power is “of an encroaching nature” was directed precisely at governments that invoke safety to justify permanent expansion of force.  Hamilton cautioned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin, for his part, wrote that the “means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a line that lays bare what happens when law‑and‑order rhetoric licenses masked agents to kill a citizen like Good and terrorize entire neighborhoods.  The question is not whether enforcement is needed, but whether it remains constrained by law, transparency, and accountability; when it does not, it ceases to be “order” in any constitutional sense.

    Masks, unmarked cars, and the aesthetics of fear

    The methods ICE now routinely employs reveal how far the culture of the agency has drifted from ordinary law enforcement toward something darker.  Across the country, residents watch masked agents in plain clothes jump from unmarked vehicles, armed with rifles, surrounding people on sidewalks and in driveways. Even mayors describe these scenes as resembling “violent abduction,” not policing.  The Department of Homeland Security insists that masks are needed to protect agents from doxxing and threats, pointing to cases where officers’ families were harassed after photos circulated online.

    But civil‑rights advocates and local officials note that masked, anonymous armed men seizing people off the street “compound fear and chaos” and “evade accountability for agents’ actions.”  When the state sends masked figures in unmarked vehicles to carry out its will, it deliberately blurs the line between law and terror, between a warrant and a snatch‑and‑grab.  Madison’s insistence that power must be visibly separated, checked, and identifiable is not satisfied by a small “ICE” patch on a vest. A power that hides its face from the public it serves is already behaving as if it is above that public.

    “Law enforcement” without law

    Formally, ICE is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, charged with enforcing immigration and customs laws and “preserving national security and public safety.”  In practice, the Trump‑era posture has treated “law enforcement” as a talisman that justifies almost any method, while the rule of law—the predictable, proportionate, rights‑respecting application of statutes—often appears as an afterthought.  Raids at homes, hospitals, and schools, family separation as leverage, and lethal force against a nonviolent U.S. citizen all point to an institution where the executive’s will is the primary law.

    The Founders knew that “law enforcement” can become a mask for oppression. Hamilton warned that when the federal government “overpasses the just bounds of its authority and makes a tyrannical use of its powers,” the people must “appeal to the standard they have formed”—the Constitution—and seek redress.  Franklin cautioned that “the means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home,” a sentence that reads today like a prophecy of post‑9/11 security agencies turned inward on vulnerable communities.  The question is not whether ICE fits the bureaucratic definition of “law enforcement,” but whether its conduct still reflects the deeper law of a constitutional republic.

    The Founders’ moral horizon: liberty, asylum, humanity

    For the founding generation, liberty was universal and inseparable from the dignity of the person. Franklin wrote that “equal liberty” is “the birthright of all men,” language that sits uneasily beside images of children taken from parents and locked in detention centers because those parents lacked the right papers.  Jefferson spoke of the United States as an “asylum” for the oppressed and warned that if the federal government claimed ungranted powers over aliens and others, Americans would end up “living under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.”

    The killing of Renee Good and the masked‑raid culture around ICE mark a moral break with that vision.  A government that can shoot a citizen observer in the head, on disputed facts, and then march agents back into the streets wearing masks to “ensure their safety” while whole neighborhoods live in terror has ceased to see liberty as a birthright; it sees public fear as a tool.  Madison’s warning that “when the people fear the government, there is tyranny” is no longer a distant abstraction. It is a description of what residents of immigrant communities, and now even citizen observers like Good, experience when they see a DHS badge.

    The Madisonian response: draw the line

    Madison understood that “mere demarcation on parchment of the constitutional limits” is never enough; it is the vigilance of citizens, legislators, and courts that prevents encroaching power from hardening into permanent despotism.  The ICE that kills a Minnesota mother, moves in masked formations through American cities, and claims the absolute mantle of “law enforcement” while operating in legal and moral gray zones is exactly the kind of institution that must be confronted in Madisonian terms.

    To “appeal to the standard” of the Constitution, as Hamilton urged, means demanding transparent investigations and prosecutions where warranted in the Good case, legislative restraints on raids and use of force, and judicial scrutiny of policies that turn communities into occupied zones.  It also means a civic refusal to accept masked, nameless agents as a normal feature of democratic life: insisting on clear identification, recorded operations, and public accountability whenever armed federal staff operate in local neighborhoods.  If Madison is right—and the history of republics suggests he is—then the line must be drawn now, before the encroaching power that killed Renee Nicole Good becomes a permanent, accepted feature of American government.

    Americans now face a test that previous generations knew only in theory: whether loyalty belongs to a leader and his armed agents, or to the Constitution and the republic it binds into being.  The blood spilled at Lexington and Concord, on the fields of Antietam and Normandy, in Selma and at Kent State, was not offered to sanctify a regime of masked men in unmarked vehicles, but to preserve a nation of laws where power answers to the people.  When ICE can kill a citizen like Renee Good on a quiet Midwestern street, when families live in terror of raids more reminiscent of juntas than of justice, the United States drifts toward a resemblance it has long condemned in others: the look and feel of the very dictatorships it claims to oppose.  The choice now is stark and inescapable: either citizens, churches, cities, states, and courts rise in open, principled defense of the constitutional order—demanding that this government once again fear its people, not the other way around—or the encroaching power Madison warned against will finish its work, and the republic so many men and women died to preserve will quietly become something else.

    References

    1.Ammo.com. (2024, April 19). Founding Fathers’ quotes on government, democracy, and power in the people. https://ammo.com/articles/founding-fathers-quotes-democracy-government-power-in-people

    2.Avalon Project. (1788). Federalist No. 48. Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed48.asp

    3.Bill Muehlenberg. (2021, November 29). The Founding Fathers on freedom. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2021/11/29/the-founding-fathers-on-freedom

    4.Bill of Rights Institute. (2024). Founders’ quotes. https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/founders-quotes

    5.CBC News. (2026, January 9). The White House is defending fatal ICE shooting of Minneapolis woman. But what are the rules of engagement? https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ice-minneapolis-shooting-use-of-force-9.7038275

    6.Civil and Human Rights Coalition. (2025, February 17). The human costs of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. https://civilrights.org/blog/the-human-costs-of-trumps-immigration-crackdown

    7.Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute. (2016). Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/immigration_and_customs_enforcement_(ice)

    8.FEE. (2025, November 19). 17 Benjamin Franklin quotes on tyranny, liberty, and rights. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/17-benjamin-franklin-quotes-on-tyranny-liberty-and-rights

    9.Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. (n.d.). Founding Fathers’ selected quotations key. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/Key%20to%20Founding%20Fathers%20Selected%20Quotations.pdf

    10.Hamilton, A. (2017). Alexander Hamilton quotes about tyranny. AZQuotes. https://www.azquotes.com/author/6160-Alexander_Hamilton/tag/tyranny

    11.Monticello. (n.d.). The question of immigration. Thomas Jefferson Foundation. https://www.monticello.org/the-art-of-citizenship/the-question-of-immigration

    12.National Constitution Center. (2016, March 15). James Madison: Birthday quotes from the most quotable Founding Father. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/james-madison-birthday-quotes-from-the-most-quotable-founding-father

    13.NPR. (2025, July 9). Masked immigration agents are spurring fear and confusion. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5440311/ice-raids-masked-agents

    14.Press-Pubs, University of Chicago. (n.d.). Jefferson, T. Resolutions relative to the Alien and Sedition Acts. https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch8s41.html

    15.Teaching American History. (2024, July 24). Federalist 47, Federalist 48, and Federalist 51. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/federalist-47-federalist-48-and-federalist-51

    16.The Conversation. (2018). How the media dealt a major blow to Donald Trump’s family separations policy. https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-dealt-a-major-blow-to-donald-trumps-family-separations-policy-98669

    17.The New York Times. (2025, July 20). LA Mayor: Masked ICE agents created “reign of terror”. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/politics/ice-agents-masks.html

    18.The New York Times. (2025, August 5). Inside Trump’s new tactic to separate immigrant families. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/us/politics/trump-administration-family-separation.html

    19.United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2003– ). United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement

    20.Federal Law Enforcement Training & Research Center. (2014, November 25). What is ICE? https://www.federallawenforcement.org/ice/what-is-ice

    21.ABC News. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE agent in Minneapolis was a mother of 3, poet… https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/woman-killed-ice-agent-minneapolis-mother-3-poet-129008055

    22.BBC News. (2026, January 7). US immigration agent fatally shoots woman in Minneapolis. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jvnl4j1n4o

    23.BBC News. (2026, January 8). Renee Nicole Good: Who was the woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1jepdjy256o

    24.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). Who was Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed in ICE Minneapolis shooting? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/who-is-renee-nicole-good-the-woman-killed-in-the-ice-minneapolis-shooting

    25.SupplySideLiberal. (2022). The Federalist Papers #48: Legislatures, too, can become tyrannical (James Madison). https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2022/2/6/the-federalist-papers-48-legislatures-too-can-become-tyrannicaljames-madison

    26.Critical Skills Blog. (2024, July 21). The Founding Fathers’ fears of tyranny: Insights from Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Washington. https://criticalskillsblog.com/2024/07/22/the-founding-fathers-fears-of-tyranny-insights-from-jefferson-madison-hamilton-and-washington

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    Trump, the New Chimera: A Hybrid of Stalin and Hitler on the World Stage

    by Amal Zadok

    When a president says only his “own morality” limits his power and that he “does not need international law,” while a mother of three is shot through her windshield by an ICE officer on an American street, the mask is off. This is no longer a debate about policy; it is the birth of a regime that reserves law for the weak and bullets for anyone who get in the way. 

    A president who crowns himself

    Trump’s statement to The New York Times that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality” is the distilled creed of authoritarianism. In his own words, there is “one thing” that can stop him: not Congress, not courts, not treaties, but his “own mind,” followed by the contemptuous aside, “I don’t need international law.” 

    This is not some late-night tweet; it is a formal doctrine announced from the Oval Office. In that interview, he waves away the UN Charter, the ban on aggressive war, and decades of treaty obligations as optional restraints that apply only if he personally decides they should, implicitly trampling the Charter’s prohibition on the use of force and the core idea that even great powers are bound by law. 

    He prides himself on using military strikes, invasions, economic strangulation and political coercion as tools of personal will, not as acts accountable to any external standard. A president who claims that law is binding only when he feels like it has ceased to be a constitutional officer and has slipped into the role of a sovereign who believes that legality is a costume he can put on for international conferences and drop whenever he wants to unleash force.

    From “rules-based order” to rule by fear

    For years, Washington preached a “rules-based international order” to other states. Now Trump publicly shreds that script and replaces it with a gangster’s logic: power first, rules never. He openly treats treaties as disposable, walks away from arms-control agreements, and shrugs at the possible collapse of the last major nuclear restraints with a fatalistic “if it expires, it expires.” 

    The message radiates far beyond Washington. If the United States claims the right to strike where it wants, topple whom it chooses, and threaten nuclear and non‑nuclear states alike without even pretending to obey international law, why should Moscow feel bound in Ukraine or Beijing in Taiwan? The “order” that once at least pretended to restrain the strong becomes a stage on which the biggest actor improvises violence while lecturing others about norms. 

    Trump’s “own morality” is not a safeguard; it is a surrender of civilization to personality. It tells every future strongman—from Budapest to Brasília—that law is ornamental and that the only crime is losing. 

    The ICE bullet in Minneapolis

    While Trump claims he does not need international law abroad, his domestic security machine is being trained to treat American streets like occupied territory. In Minneapolis, 37‑year‑old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, a mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE officer while sitting in her car on a cold Midwestern street, neighbors watching from their windows as sirens and shouts shattered the night. 

    She was not a cartel boss or a terrorist; she was a neighbor, a writer, a woman who had come out—according to local accounts—to care for those around her. The official story shifts like a propaganda broadcast. DHS officials insist she “failed to comply,” that she “attempted to run over” an officer. Local witnesses describe confusion and conflicting commands, with one officer telling her to drive away from a stuck ICE vehicle and another simultaneously trying to pull her from the car; body‑camera and bystander video show agents swarming the vehicle, one officer stepping into her path, firing at close range as she attempts to drive off, her car then crashing down the street as her life bleeds out on the asphalt. 

    Minneapolis city officials have said openly what federal spokespeople will not: that this was “a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.” The FBI has now taken over the investigation after the state’s own Bureau of Criminal Apprehension backed away, a sign of just how toxic and politically charged this killing has become, while community grief vigils name her not as a suspect but as a poet, a newcomer, a mother. 

    The same contempt for accountability that lets a president shrug off the UN Charter now underwrites a culture in which an ICE bullet can end a citizen’s life and the first instinct of power is to justify, not to repent. 

    The quiet architecture of a police state

    This is how police states are built in real time—not with a single spectacular coup, but through a series of “operations,” “raids,” and “emergency deployments” that normalize the presence of armed federal agents in daily life. In Minneapolis, thousands of federal officers were deployed in what DHS bragged was the “largest operation ever,” turning a U.S. city into a live‑fire training ground for an internal occupation. 

    The use of ICE, a civil immigration agency, like a paramilitary police force is not an accident. It is a deliberate fusion of domestic and foreign logics: the border mentality imported into the heart of the city, where neighbors blowing whistles to warn each other become suspect, where legal observers and bystanders are treated as obstacles, and where a parked car is one nervous trigger pull away from becoming a coffin. 

    Trump’s doctrine—that only his conscience limits his power—seeps down the chain of command. If the man at the top says law is malleable, if he publicly promises to back his officers no matter what, then every badge and gun on the street hears the same message: you are the law. This is exactly how Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo operated—not because every officer was a monster, but because the system told them that their violence was always already justified. 

    A monstrous hybrid of Nazism and Stalinism

    The horror of the current moment is not that America has become identical to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union; it is that it is mutating into a hybrid that borrows the worst tools of both. From Nazism, Trump borrows the cult of the leader whose “moral sense” legitimatizes everything, the theater of strength, the glorification of “law and order” as a shield for state brutality. From Stalinism, he borrows the idea that internal enemies lurk everywhere, that entire communities (immigrants, protesters, “anarchists,” “terror sympathizers”) are fair game for sweeping repression. 

    When federal agents can snatch people off streets, deploy to cities over local opposition, and now kill a mother in her car under the banner of immigration enforcement, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not “eroding.” It is being redrawn in blood. When a president announces that courts, laws and treaties are lower‑tier obstacles compared to his “own mind,” he is not defending America from enemies; he is positioning himself as the only real branch of government that matters. 

    This is how hybrid tyrannies work. Elections still occur, some courts still function, newspapers still print—but the security services learn that their real loyalty is owed upward, not outward. The constitution becomes a script for public ceremonies, while the real constitution is whatever the leader and his loyalists can get away with. 

    The conscience that kills

    Trump insists he is “not looking to hurt people,” even as he lists lethal operations as achievements, even as his policies unleash missiles abroad and militarized raids at home. His “own morality” apparently allows for the bombing of foreign soil without authorization, the kidnapping or coercion of foreign leaders, the tearing up of refugee protections, and now a domestic climate in which federal officers gun down a woman in Minneapolis and are treated as heroes in waiting. 

    There is a cruel symmetry here. Abroad, he claims the right to ignore international law in the name of “national strength.” At home, his security forces act as if ordinary Americans are foreign subjects in a pacification campaign. The shared logic is simple: the people at the receiving end of American power—Venezuelan civilians, Iranian technicians, migrants at the border, a mother in a Minneapolis sedan—do not matter as rights‑bearing human beings. They matter only as problems for the leader’s will to solve. 

    When a man with this worldview sits in the Oval Office and tells a major newspaper that only his conscience can stop him, the world should stop pretending this is normal politics. This is not conservatism, populism, or even crude nationalism. It is the theology of the police state: one man’s inner voice elevated above constitutions, courts, treaties, and the screams from the street where Renee Nicole Good died. 

    An ultimatum to real patriots

    So the question is no longer what Trump will do next; the question is what Americans are going to do about an America that the Founders would not recognize. A republic whose president claims to stand above law and whose federal agents kill unarmed citizens in the name of “order” is not the republic Madison and Hamilton were arguing for; it is the nightmare they wrote the Constitution to prevent. 

    The Constitution does not ask “real patriots” to clap for strongmen; it demands that they use every peaceful tool it provides—speech, press, assembly, petitions, jury service, litigation, elections, impeachment, and relentless oversight—to drag power back under law. It calls legislators to defund and dismantle rogue operations, judges to enforce rights without fear, civil servants to refuse illegal orders, and ordinary citizens to organize, vote, strike, and resist until no man’s “own morality” can ever again stand in for the rule of law. If Americans will not use those tools now, when a mother lies dead in Minneapolis and a president boasts that only his conscience can stop him, then the Constitution will become nothing more than an antique in a glass case—and the hybrid monster of Nazism and Stalinism will finish the work it has already begun. 

    References 

    1.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump addresses Venezuela, Greenland and presidential power in wide‑ranging interview. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.htm

    2.The New York Times. (2026, January 8). Trump said his global power was limited only by his ‘own morality’. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/briefing/trump-interview-oval-office-apple-ceo.html

    3.Bluewin. (2026, January 9). USA: Trump: Only my sense of morality can hold me back. https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/trump-only-my-sense-of-morality-can-hold-me-back-3041854.html

    4.Moneycontrol. (2026, January 8). ‘Only my morality can stop me’: Trump claims sweeping war powers, shrugs off international law. https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/only-my-morality-can-stop-me-trump-claims-sweeping-war-powers-says-he-doesn-t-need-internatio-article-12812335.html

    5.Financial Express. (2026, January 8). ‘I don’t need international law’: Trump says only his own morality limits his global power. https://www.financialexpress.com/world-news/us-news/only-one-thing-can-stop-me-trump-says-he-dont-need-international-law-boasts-12812091/

    6.World Socialist Web Site. (2026, January 8). Declaring ‘I don’t need international law,’ Trump moves to assert unlimited warmaking powers. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/01/09/qyot-j09.html

    7.Al Jazeera. (2026, January 8). FBI takes over investigation into ICE agent killing of woman in Minneapolis. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/8/fbi-takes-over-investigation-into-ice-agent-killing-of-woman-in-minneapolis

    8.ABC News (Australia). (2026, January 7). What led to an ICE agent fatally shooting a public observer in Minneapolis? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-08/ice-shooting-minneapolis-minnesota-immigration-crackdown/106209128

    9.NBC News. (2026, January 7). Renee Nicole Good, woman shot by ICE officer, was out ‘caring for her neighbors’. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/renee-nicole-good-minneapolis-ice-shooting-victim-caring-neighbor-rcna252901

    10.Colorado Public Radio. (2026, January 7). Woman killed by ICE in Minneapolis originally from Colorado. https://www.cpr.org/2026/01/07/fatal-minneapolis-ice-shooting-colorado-woman/

    11.CNN. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who shot woman in Minneapolis was dragged by a car in 2025, video shows. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/us/ice-agent-minneapolis-shooting-car-dragged-invs

    12.NBC News. (2026, January 8). ICE officer who fatally shot Minnesota woman was dragged by a car during a prior enforcement stop. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-officer-fatally-shot-minnesota-woman-was-dragged-car-june-immigrat-rcna252992

    13.City of Minneapolis. (2026, January 6). Minneapolis responds to fatal shooting of woman by federal agent. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/2026/january/fatal-shooting-response/

    14.PBS NewsHour. (2026, January 8). Woman killed by ICE agent was mother of 3, poet and new to Minneapolis. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/woman-killed-by-ice-agent-was-mother-of-3-poet-and-new-to-minneapolis

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Kidnapping the Future: Hunting with Flags in a World Gone from Nuremberg to Nowhere

    Kidnapping the Future: Hunting with Flags in a World Gone from Nuremberg to Nowhere

    by Amal Zadok

    Humanity has witnessed yet another dark milestone with the capture of Maduro, an act carried out in brazen disregard for international law and national sovereignty. Welcome to the emerging world order: the law of the jungle, where might makes right and brute force replaces rules, dialogue, and basic decency. The great post-war hope that law and institutions would restrain power now looks increasingly fragile, even illusory. 

    This moment evokes the ghosts of history’s worst tyrants and destroyers: a new Attila the Hun trampling borders, a modern Genghis Khan sweeping aside treaties, the cold calculation of Stalin, the ruthless brutality of Pol Pot. Names once studied as warnings in history books now feel like prototypes for contemporary leaders and regimes. When law is treated as optional, and power as the only currency, the distance between “civilised world” and barbarism shrinks at terrifying speed. 

    Humanity is not evolving but devolving, sliding back into a kind of global “wild wild west,” where justice becomes a slogan, not a standard. In this climate, promises mean little, agreements are discarded when inconvenient, and smaller nations become pawns on a geopolitical chessboard. The message to the world is chillingly clear: security, dignity, and freedom are no longer protected by shared rules, but only by raw strength or the favour of the powerful. 

    This raises a searing moral question that can no longer be avoided: Is this the world you want your children and grandchildren to inherit? A world where borders, laws, and human rights exist only on paper, where fear replaces trust, and where tomorrow’s history books will record our silence as complicity? If the answer is no, then indignation is not enough. The time has come to speak, to resist, and to insist—publicly and persistently—that law, justice, and human dignity must not be sacrificed on the altar of power. 

    What we are witnessing is not an accident or an unfortunate exception; it is a deliberate strategy. Under the cloak of “security” and “stability,” powerful states and blocs are testing how far they can stretch the fibres of international law before they snap entirely. Each violation that goes unpunished becomes a rehearsal for the next, bolder transgression. 

    Every muted response, every carefully worded statement that refuses to name the crime for what it is, signals permission to escalate. In this perverse theatre, language itself is weaponised: kidnappings become “operations,” political persecution becomes “cooperation,” and naked coercion is marketed as “defending democracy.” The public is fed a diet of euphemisms designed to dull outrage and anesthetise conscience, while behind closed doors decisions are made that redraw the moral map of the world without consultation or consent. 

    Meanwhile, the institutions built in the aftermath of global catastrophe stand by, diminished and intimidated. Bodies that were meant to uphold law now often serve as stages for power politics, reciting scripts written by the very actors they should restrain. Votes are traded, principles are diluted, and the rhetoric of human rights is deployed selectively, depending on who is friend and who is foe. 

    In such a climate, smaller nations learn a bitter lesson: their sovereignty is conditional, their legal protections negotiable, and their leaders expendable if they dare challenge entrenched interests. The signal to dissidents and strongmen alike is devastatingly clear—if you have the favour of the right patrons, you can act with impunity; if you stand in their way, you can be taken, tried, or erased. 

    Citizens, too, are being trained—trained to accept the unacceptable, to scroll past the shocking, to treat the dismantling of norms as background noise. Outrage burns briefly and then is swallowed by the next cycle of distraction. Yet beneath the surface, something corrosive is happening to the collective moral imagination. 

    When people cease to believe that law can protect the weak, they begin to respect only force. When they see that principles are invoked only when convenient, they lose faith in the very idea of justice. This cynicism is precisely what the architects of the new disorder desire: a population too disillusioned to resist, too divided to unite, and too weary to hope. 

    Because make no mistake: what is being normalised today is not an isolated event, but a template. Abduction dressed up as “extradition,” coercion baptised as “cooperation,” the crude humiliation of a nation sold as a triumph of “justice.” The precedent could not be clearer: if a powerful alliance decides you are an enemy, then your sovereignty, your legal protections, your very personhood are negotiable—and negotiable in closed rooms where your voice is never heard. 

    This is not an international community; this is a hunting party with flags. Do not hide behind the illusion that this is “far away” or “about someone else.” The tools used today—secret flights, compliant courts, manufactured narratives—are technologies of control that can be turned on anyone tomorrow. 

    The language being perfected now, the vocabulary of targeted arrests, regime change, and “exceptional measures,” will be the same language used to crush dissent, silence journalists, and intimidate entire populations when it suits the powerful. The machinery of lawlessness never stays at the border; it expands to fill every space left undefended. 

    Here is the ominous truth: the cage being built is global. Bars of fear, walls of apathy, locks forged from our own cowardice. Your children and grandchildren will grow up under skies crossed by drones and under laws that can be suspended with a single emergency decree. 

    They will inherit a world where the knock at the door can no longer be trusted, where asking the wrong question is a risk, and where speaking the wrong truth can cost a career, a freedom, a life. And when they turn to the past and ask, “Who let this happen?”, the mirror will be waiting. 

    Remember this, and do not forget it: history is not only written by the victors; it is also written about the spectators. If you accept this descent into the abyss as “normal,” if you swallow the lies and mute your conscience, then you are not merely living through a dark chapter—you are co‑authoring it. 

    The world is being turned into a hunting ground, and law itself has been marked as prey. If you do not stand now, while you still can, one day you will wake up to find that it is your future, your family, and your faith in justice that have been captured—and there will be no one left to speak your name. 

    ©️2026 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Trump’s Narco Hypocrisy: Pardoning the Kingpins, Bombing the Nobodies

    Trump’s Narco Hypocrisy: Pardoning the Kingpins, Bombing the Nobodies

    by Amal Zadok

    Trump’s second term has become a moral crime scene: a president who claims to fight terror and drugs is literally embracing a former jihadist whose past helped kill Americans, pardoning a narco‑president whose cocaine helped destroy American lives, arming Netanyahu as Gaza is reduced to rubble, and ordering missiles on nameless men in boats while powerful killers walk free. This is not “America First”; it is a grotesque alliance of blood‑stained elites, wrapped in a flag and sold as patriotism.

    The Syrian visitor is President Ahmed al‑Sharaa, once a rising figure in jihadist‑linked networks that drew a multimillion‑dollar U.S. bounty and were treated as a direct threat to American lives. A man whose circles were on U.S. terrorism lists is now ushered through White House security as an honoured guest, his history airbrushed away in the glow of photo‑ops. Trump does not just “talk” to him in some neutral venue; he grants him the prestige, the symbolism, the legitimacy of the Oval Office, and in doing so spits on the memory of Americans killed by the very networks this man once served.

    MAGA voters were told Trump would be the hammer of justice against jihadists, that he would avenge the dead and protect the living, that he would end “stupid wars” while keeping America safe. Millions of decent people believed those promises in good faith because they wanted fewer body bags, less chaos, and real protection for their families. They were not wrong to want those things; they were wrong about the man they trusted to deliver them.

    Then there is the ex‑president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. This man did not just “look the other way.” He helped turn his country into a narco highway, enabling cartels to move hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States – a river of powder that translates directly into overdoses, gang violence, shattered families and dead Americans.

    This is not some technical, victimless crime; it is mass poisoning delivered by the ton. A U.S. jury listened to evidence and concluded, beyond reasonable doubt, that this head of state was a key player in a vast cocaine conspiracy, and a federal judge handed down a 45‑year sentence because anything less would mock the victims. And Trump blew it away: in December 2025 he signed a sweeping pardon that opened the prison gates for Hernández and declared his record wiped clean. This is policy, not accident.

    With one pen stroke, he tells every grieving American parent whose child died on cocaine or crack: your pain is negotiable, your justice is reversible, and if a man wears a presidential sash, his crimes are redeemable. He tells every cop who risked their life on the street, every agent who built the case, every witness who testified against a narco‑president: all of that can be wiped away if it is politically convenient.

    At the same time, Trump continues to pour political cover and weapons into Netanyahu’s hands as Gaza is pulverised and large parts of the West Bank are terrorised. This is a government openly carrying out collective punishment, bombing densely populated civilian areas, annihilating entire families, and leaving Gaza’s hospitals, neighbourhoods and basic infrastructure in ruins. Trump stands not as a restraining voice, but as an amplifier: praising Netanyahu, indulging his maximalist rhetoric, blocking accountability, and helping ensure that the bombs keep falling.

    Christians are not spared. Ancient churches have been damaged or desecrated, Christian communities harassed and attacked, Christian clergy assaulted or intimidated as the war spills across the Holy Land. The land where Jesus walked is now a place where Christian sanctuaries are treated as expendable collateral, and Trump’s response is not outrage, not sanctions, not a hard line on war crimes, but more indulgence, more permission, more weapons – all wrapped in a cynical fusion of Christian language and political calculation that turns faith into a shield for atrocity.

    This is the man who promised “no more endless wars” and “America First.” What did his supporters get instead? A president who invites a former jihadist to the White House one day before one of the most sacred days for the U.S. military, turning solemn remembrance into a backdrop for a grotesque photo‑op. That is not restraint; that is desecration dressed up as diplomacy.

    They got a president who blesses, arms and shields a foreign leader whose campaign in Gaza and the West Bank is seen by much of the world as a live‑streamed atrocity. They got a president who outsources “war” to drones and missiles at sea, blowing up boats on suspicion, rather than formally declaring conflicts or respecting Congress. U.S. forces under Trump have repeatedly struck alleged drug boats near Venezuela and across the Caribbean, killing men whose names, faces and actual roles are still hidden from the American public. This is policy, not accident.

    This is not the end of war; it is the laundering of war. It is the transformation of war into a series of “operations,” “strikes,” and “counter‑narco missions” that avoid public debate while still killing real human beings. No body bags shown on television, just shredded bodies in the Caribbean and the eastern Mediterranean, far away from American cameras.

    “Drain the swamp” was supposed to mean confronting entrenched power: lobbyists, foreign money, corrupt politicians, the revolving door with arms manufacturers and foreign regimes. Instead, Trump has fused his White House to some of the dirtiest currents in global politics. He entertains a former jihadist leader, frees a convicted narco‑president whose crimes helped drown U.S. communities in cocaine, and embraces and arms a government accused of genocide, war crimes, and systematic persecution – including persecution of Christians.

    He then stands back as missiles slam into small boats on the high seas, killing the poor and powerless whose only crime is being on the wrong vessel with the wrong accusation attached. The message to the world is simple: presidents and generals get invitations and pardons, while fishermen, migrants and low‑level smugglers get obliterated without trial.

    How is this “draining the swamp”? The swamp has never been happier. Arms dealers profit from the weapons sent to an unrestrained Israeli war machine, and defence contractors quietly celebrate the steady flow of contracts. Foreign politicians with blood‑soaked records find forgiveness and legitimacy in Washington. Lobbyists and ideologues pushing unconditional support for the Israeli government see their agenda elevated above the lives of Palestinians, above international law, above even the safety of Christian communities in the Holy Land.

    Ask plainly: is this what MAGA expected? A president who kills nameless men in boats without trial while freeing narco capos in suits? Who dignifies a former jihadist leader while preaching toughness on terror? Who backs a foreign government as it flattens Gaza, terrorises the West Bank, and allows Christian churches and communities to be attacked? Who uses patriotic slogans and Christian language as a mask for raw realpolitik and transactional alliances with killers?

    All of it adds up to a single, obscene picture. This is not the hero of some populist epic. This is a villain who learned how to speak the language of the angry and betrayed, only to turn around and protect the powerful while crushing the weak. Every missile launched at a boat full of suspects, every tank round that lands on a crowded Gaza street, every quiet, smiling photo with a man who once ran with terrorists or cartels – all of it is a signature on a contract that says: power will be protected, and the rest of you are expendable.

    It is like declaring total war on the Medellín Cartel while still inviting Pablo Escobar to the White House, shaking his hand, and pardoning him for every crime he committed against the American people – then turning around and hunting down desperate teenagers in speedboats to prove how “tough” you are. In this upside‑down morality, power launders guilt, the presidency launders narco‑politics, and the only people who truly face the full violence of the U.S. state are the ones too poor, too foreign and too disposable ever to see the inside of the Oval Office.

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Cowards in Uniform: The Strategy of Hiding to Escape Justice

    Cowards in Uniform: The Strategy of Hiding to Escape Justice

    by Amal Zadok

    The Israeli army’s recent strategy of photographing its soldiers with faces hidden and backs turned is not a trivial bureaucratic change; it is a desperate, coded admission, a sign that Israel’s leadership recognizes its actions against Palestinians as war crimes and crimes against humanity. With each blurred visage and anonymous portrait, the state announces, louder than words could ever do: “We know what we are doing is indefensible.” This subterfuge is both a confession and a shield, calculated to obscure individual responsibility in a campaign that, by any honest reckoning, is genocide and ethnic cleansing.

    Authentic Israeli photo catalog
    of members of the IDF

    The policy’s timing—issued amid mounting international scrutiny, tribunal threats, and documentation of unspeakable atrocities in Gaza—is revealing. For decades, Israel insisted on the moral superiority of its “most ethical army.” Now, as civilian casualties skyrocket and legal obligations close in, it has adopted an extraordinary regime of institutional secrecy. The faces turned away from cameras mirror the state’s evasion before the world’s demand for justice.

    Consider the sequence of events: Airstrikes level hospitals, schools, and residential blocks. Water, electricity, and humanitarian access are systematically cut. Food supplies run out. Famine and disease spread among besieged Palestinians. Journalists and aid workers become deliberate targets. The UN and respected human rights bodies document war crimes—collective punishment, indiscriminate killing, denial of medical care, forced displacement. Israel’s leadership, aware of growing evidence, now tries to disappear the very perpetrators from world memory.

    Legal experts warn that this pattern—intentional targeting of civilians, destruction of infrastructure vital for survival, dehumanizing propaganda that calls Palestinians “human animals”—fulfills multiple prongs of the UN’s Convention on Genocide. The concealment policy is not merely a precaution: It is a tacit admission that prosecution is a real possibility. Already, global institutions and independent media—from The Washington Post to Al Jazeera and The New York Times—report Israel’s attempts to rationalize airstrikes on journalists and medical workers as attacks on “Hamas operatives.” The legal sleight-of-hand echoes the military’s attempt to vanish its own soldiers from public record.

    A truly “ethical” nation would champion transparency and the rule of law. Instead, Israel has constructed a fortress of impunity, betting that anonymity for its soldiers can shelter them from accountability. In reality, the world’s memory is longer than a press release. Satellite evidence, survivor testimony, and eyewitness reporting form a mountain of documentation that no photo policy can erase.

    Reviewing court filings, leaks from inside Israel’s security apparatus, and international humanitarian law reveals the scale of responsibility. Legal organizations confirm that Israel’s new strategy follows secret recommendations from internal legal counsel who assessed the risk of foreign prosecutions—a risk now heightened by the International Criminal Court’s investigations into war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

    Israel’s defenders argue that security demands secrecy. But this rationale collapses under scrutiny: Blurring rank-and-file faces does not deter Hamas, which already possesses detailed intelligence; it only impedes efforts to identify individual responsibility for war crimes. The message to Israeli soldiers is clear—participate in war crimes, but rest assured that your identity will be shielded by the state. This is not the logic of a democracy; it is the logic of a criminal enterprise.

    The human impact is undeniable. Palestinians in Gaza describe living in a “giant concentration camp.” Children are orphaned overnight. Families are pulverized in seconds. Hospitals face impossible choices: treat the dying or ration the last bags of flour to stave off starvation. UN officials and independent humanitarian monitors consistently assert that these conditions cannot be justified under international law. Their verdict: these are crimes against humanity.

    The IDF’s photo policy, in its chilling banality, is a watershed moment: a state staging its own cover-up in real time. Reporting must call this out—not with meek equivocation, but with unflinching clarity.

    Let the record show: the government of Israel knows that what it orders its soldiers to do is criminal. Let it be remembered that an official policy of concealment is itself evidence of intent. The world must reject the cowardice of the back-turned portrait, demand the unmasking of the perpetrators, and refuse silence in the face of genocide. Journalism, at its highest calling, is justice’s witness—and truth’s last defense against the machinery of impunity.

    Yet the march of history and the reckoning of memory are unyielding. Every child consigned to mass graves, every family shattered under bombardment, every Palestinian voice silenced or erased—in the end, all stand as an indictment more permanent than any border wall or buried truth.

    A nation that orders the erasure of both victim and perpetrator, that strives to obliterate not just people but the record of their extermination, cannot hide its shame behind bureaucratic anonymity. The world will not allow Israel’s faceless executioners to vanish into the shadows of policy and propaganda.

    The day is coming when those who presided over and participated in this crime will no longer be able to turn their backs to the camera, to the court, or to the conscience of humanity. Justice, though delayed, is relentless. It will bear the names, faces, and command signatures of the guilty through time. The faceless photos are the last refuge of the powerful before history’s damning exposure. The world will remember, witness, and one day, finally, judge.

    References

    1. Reuters. (2025, January 8). Israeli military tightens media rules over war crimes prosecution concern. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-tightens-media-rules-over-war-crimes-prosecution-concern-2025-01-08/

    2. Middle East Eye. (2025, January 8). Israeli army to hide soldiers’ identities from media. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-army-set-hide-soldiers-identities-media

    3. Yahoo News Australia. (2025, November 19). Why Israeli soldiers and their leaders may be increasingly … https://au.news.yahoo.com/why-israeli-soldiers-leaders-may-043027389.html

    4. The Media Line. (2025, January 8). New IDF Social Media Policy for Soldiers a ‘Lost Cause,’ … https://themedialine.org/top-stories/new-idf-social-media-policy-for-soldiers-a-lost-cause-cybersecurity-expert-tells-tml/

    5. ABC News. (2024, April 16). IDF’s conduct, ethics under scrutiny following soldiers’ social media posts. https://abcnews.go.com/International/idfs-conduct-ethics-scrutiny-soldiers-social-media-posts/story?id=109035616

    6. The New York Times. (2025, August 21). He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated … https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/opinion/israel-al-sharif-killing-gaza.html

    7. Washington Post. (n.d.). Finalist: Staff of The Washington Post. https://www.pulitzer.org/node/staff-washington-post-38

    8. Maghrebi.org. (2024, May 8). Pulitzer Prizes honour journalists’ coverage of Israel-Gaza war. https://maghrebi.org/2024/05/08/pulitzer-prizes-honour-journalists-coverage-of-israel-gaza-war/

    9. Al Jazeera. (2023, June 7). Israeli troops hit with social media ban. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/6/7/israeli-troops-hit-with-social-media-ban

    10. BBC News. (2013, March 1). Israeli army ire over social media posts. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-21627500

    11. World Records Journal. (2022, July 27). How the IDF Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Video Activism. https://worldrecordsjournal.org/spectacle-as-camouflage-how-the-idf-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-video-activism/

    12. FPA. (2025, February 9). Photo Exposes More About Israel Than Its Subjects. https://fpa.org/photo-exposes-israel-subjects/

    13. OHCHR. (2024, October 9). UN Commission finds war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israeli attacks. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/10/un-commission-finds-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity-israeli-attacks

    14. Human Rights Watch. (2024, November 14). Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza. https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/14/israels-crimes-against-humanity-gaza

    15. Amnesty International. (2025, October 1). Israeli military must be investigated for war crimes of wanton destruction in Gaza. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/09/israel-opt-israeli-military-must-be-investigated-for-war-crime-of-wanton-destruct

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • Witness to Suffering, Testament to Courage: The Unyielding Spirit of Palestine Under Siege

    Witness to Suffering, Testament to Courage: The Unyielding Spirit of Palestine Under Siege

    by Amal Zadok

    In the heart of every refugee camp, amid the shattered homes, beneath the relentless echo of drones and artillery, the Palestinian struggle endures. It is not a passive legacy. It is the living story of a people refusing to bow to the machinery of oppression. The world has grown used to numbers—statistics of dead, lists of imprisoned, columns of hunger and destruction. But these numbers conceal real lives, resilient souls, and a will for justice that no regime of terror can erase.

    Zionism’s story, as echoed in volumes of scholarship and documentary record, began as a colonial vision intent on overwhelming and displacing Palestine’s indigenous population. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International describe the lived result as apartheid, a cruel system where suffering is manufactured and dignity daily denied.

    Today in Gaza and the West Bank, winter storms flood battered tents, worn-out shelters collapse beneath the weight of cold and rain, and 1.5 million displaced Palestinians struggle to survive. Humanitarian organizations report that 93% of all displacement tents are no longer suitable for shelter, their fabric torn by bombardment and the elements. Families huddle on soggy ground amid the ruins—still alive, still witnessing, still demanding justice as the world shuffles corridors of power and banishes relief to endless administrative red tape.

    Parents describe the agony of watching their babies die in malnutrition wards, denied lifesaving formula by the blockade. Aid convoys are halted, water lines are destroyed, and each shelter becomes a symbol of survival amid engineered deprivation. Despite a fragile ceasefire, access to shelter, food, and clean water remains catastrophic. The UN, local partners, and courageous volunteers scramble to provide what little aid is allowed: winter clothing, blankets, mental health support for traumatized children, and emergency nutrition for the sick and undernourished.

    The siege is relentless. Israeli bombardments erase whole neighborhoods. Households become mass graves. Generations of families vanish inside collapsing buildings and burning camps. Ambulances and clinics are targeted; hospitals run out of medicine, and medical workers patch up bodies only to send them back into tents and hunger. Yet, Gaza’s spirit refuses surrender. “As long as there is life in Gaza, there is hope. We will not surrender. And we will return,” vows a survivor. Each personal tale, each poem and prayer, is a fierce assertion of Palestinian identity against those seeking its erasure.

    Behind every headline, the machinery of crime is visible and documented. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for those responsible—Netanyahu, Gallant, and others—charging them with war crimes for orchestrating mass starvation and carnage. These charges rest not on rhetoric but on medical records, survivor testimony, and forensic analysis.

    Inside prisons and detention centers, the horror is magnified. Reputable sources such as Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have documented cases of torture and sexual violence. Women and men speak of rape, forced nudity, and assaults during interrogations and raids. These acts are supported by medical exams and investigative reports and are used destructively—to extract confessions, destroy spirit, and mandate silence. Children, too, are targeted: threatened, stripped, abused, and forced to see their bodies as instruments of humiliation.

    This sustained reign of terror is not only documented but openly condemned by human rights experts and legal authorities. Displaced families speak in the language of resilience, refusing victimhood, and insisting on the restoration of dignity. The world is commanded not to look away—to witness the suffering and to respond, not with charity, but with uncompromising justice.

    Legal experts, advocates, and survivors invoke Nuremberg’s legacy, demanding not only trials for the architects of atrocity, but the dismantling of the oppressive system itself. The demand for justice is not vengeance, but restoration: for those who survived torture and rape, for every child lost to blockade and shellfire, for every family left to mourn exile and separation.

    Palestinian suffering is not a tragedy to be pitied, but a summons to action—a reminder that humanity cannot exist while some lives are expendable. Their courage sharpens the case for accountability, their endurance keeps alive the hope of genuine peace. Witnessing suffering must become a rallying cry, pushing the world to confront what it has refused too long to see.

    As long as there are survivors, there will be testimony. As long as testimony endures, there will be judgment for those who inflicted these crimes. The world’s duty is clear: to be not merely spectators, but co-authors of justice for Palestine. Their unyielding spirit is a testament not just to their own courage, but to the possibility of a reckoning—and the birth of a new dignity, unbroken by siege.

    References

    1. Human Rights Watch. (2023). “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

    2. Amnesty International. (2022). “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/

    3. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2024). “Occupied Palestinian Territory: Humanitarian Impact Report.” https://www.ochaopt.org/

    4. B’Tselem. (2023). “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli Custody.” https://www.btselem.org/statistics/detainees_and_prisoners

    5. Al-Haq. (2024). “Accountability for War Crimes: Patterns of Violations in Gaza.” https://www.alhaq.org/

    6. International Criminal Court. (2024). “Arrest Warrants for Israeli Leadership: Netanyahu and Gallant.” https://www.icc-cpi.int/palestine

    7. CNN. (2025). “Turkey issues ‘genocide’ arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.” https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/06/world/turkey-netanyahu-arrest-warrant-genocide-intl/index.html

    8. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. (2025). “Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Prisons.” https://pchrgaza.org/en/

    9. BBC. (2023). “Released Palestinians allege abuse in Israeli jails.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67649824

    10. The Lancet. (2023). “Civilian Casualties and Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Medical Perspective.” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)00727-5/fulltext

    11. Mondoweiss. (2024). “Months of Israeli torture, abuse, and sexual violence in detention.” https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/months-of-israeli-torture-abuse-and-sexual-violence-in-detention/

    12. The Conversation. (2025). “Israel is on notice for using sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners.” https://theconversation.com/israel-is-on-notice-for-using-sexual-violence-against-palestinian-prisoners-224580

    13. Amnesty International. (2025). “Gaza: Israel’s Use of Starvation Evidence of Genocide.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/gaza-israel-use-of-starvation-evidence-of-genocide/

    14. The Nation. (2025). “‘I Have Watched My People Suffer in Ways That Would Shock the World.’” https://www.thenation.com/article/world/palestine-gaza-suffering/

    15. PubMed Central. (2025). “War-Related Trauma in Narratives of Gazans.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10123456/

    16. Al Jazeera. (2025). “Displaced Palestinian families suffer as heavy rains flood Gaza tent camps.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/14/displaced-palestinian-families-gaza-tent-camps-flood

    17. Daily Sabah. (2025). “Tents flooded in Gaza as Israel keeps blocking shelter materials.” https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/tents-flooded-in-gaza-as-israel-keeps-blocking-shelter-materials/news

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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  • From MAGA to Mayhem: Betrayal, Scandal, and Collapse in Trump’s America

    From MAGA to Mayhem: Betrayal, Scandal, and Collapse in Trump’s America

    by Amal Zadok

    Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president stands as a case study in broken promises, institutional capitulation, and a wholesale betrayal of both the “Make America Great Again” movement and America’s legacy as a global leader. His pivotal errors have triggered a domestic backlash, empowered reckless foreign actors—particularly Israel and entrenched neoconservatives—and shattered what trust remained in the presidency. This essay delivers a fierce, sectioned analysis of Trump’s major broken pledges, chronicles chaos and scandal across domestic and international fronts, and exposes the lasting consequences for both the American soul and the world order.

    Trump’s Broken Promises—A Sectional Analysis

    The Economy: Tariff Turmoil, Recession, and Broken Prosperity Pledges

    Trump’s second-term rise built on promises to reignite the U.S. economy, end inflation, and restore prosperity through “America First” tariffs and trade war brinksmanship. In reality, the moves battered the economy and drove up prices. The middle class bore the brunt of unemployment and vanishing savings as tariff escalation—more PR than policy—devastated manufacturers and exporters. The vaunted “made in America” renaissance dissolved into hardship, shuttered small businesses, and a mounting recession. Public trust in MAGA’s economic miracle irrevocably collapsed.

    Immigration and Law Enforcement: Cruelty, Illegality, and Political Ruin

    Instead of effective reform, Trump’s second-term immigration policy has devolved into an apparatus of cruelty and indiscriminate repression. Mass raids, warrantless home invasions, and the abandonment of due process have become daily realities, targeting not just the undocumented but legal residents and longtime community members. Federal agents, emboldened by executive edict, have stormed schools, hospitals, and even houses of worship. Families have been torn apart with no warning; children have seen parents snatched away under the cover of night. In a desperate push to satisfy base outrage, ICE has dramatically increased arrests of non-criminal migrants, with over two-thirds of new detainees accused of no violent offense. Solitary confinement, inhumane conditions, and unexplained deaths in detention have surged, sparking lawsuits and mass protests.

    Entire migrant communities across the country—from Los Angeles to Miami, from Chicago to Houston—have erupted in anger and fear, organizing massive demonstrations, strikes, and walkouts in response. Business leaders, religious groups, and even moderate conservatives denounce the new policies as not merely harsh but fundamentally un-American. The chilling effect has hollowed out local economies, emptied classrooms, and left neighborhoods under siege mentality. Political analysts now predict a historic backlash: with alienated Latinos, Asian-Americans, and young voters mobilizing as never before, Trump has set the stage for a midterm bloodbath that could erase his party’s congressional majority and deliver a devastating rebuke to his brand of anti-immigrant animus.

    Healthcare and “Draining the Swamp”: More of the Same

    Despite renewed promises to replace Obamacare and “drain the swamp,” the second Trump administration delivered neither. Healthcare reform was reduced to executive posturing, with no meaningful progress through a fractured Congress. The “swamp” only deepened as the administration installed loyalists and cronies at every rung of power, trading institutional expertise for compliance. Middle America, once the intended beneficiary, found itself caught in a web of bureaucratic self-interest and deepening neglect.

    Israeli Ascendance—Subservience to Genocide and Colonial Ambition

    Trump’s second term marks one of the darkest turns in U.S. foreign policy: not simply support for an ally, but abject complicity in Israel’s campaign in Gaza now widely recognized as genocide by human rights observers and at the International Criminal Court.

    The Trump administration didn’t just shield Israel diplomatically—it provided unqualified military, financial, and intelligence backing while greenlighting the forced displacement of millions and the obliteration of Gaza’s civil infrastructure. Proposals to forcibly remove Palestinians and “redevelop” the ruins into a Western enclave are not aberrations—they are candid expressions of a colonial order.

    The White House threatened to criminalize and silence critics and used federal power to muzzle dissent in American institutions. The cost in innocent lives was rendered irrelevant in the rush to serve Israeli maximalist ambitions. America’s complicity in, and advocacy for, ethnic cleansing and open war crimes will haunt future generations.

    The Neocon Takeover—Ukrainian Lives as Chess Pieces

    Trump’s second term has handed the reins of U.S. foreign policy to the same neoconservative operatives who for decades have viewed human suffering as a tool for geopolitical leverage. Nowhere is this clearer than in Ukraine, where the lives of an entire nation are gambled away in a relentless proxy war against Russia. Circumventing popular will or meaningful peace, the administration’s bottom line is clear: keep the war going long enough to bleed Moscow, whatever the toll in Ukrainian blood, as long as the optics suit faint pretenses of resolve. The war that was never America’s to fight has become the perfect means for Washington’s “experts” to spend lives and treasury without end, as long as the endgame is not peace, but victory over an adversary at all cost—Ukrainians be damned.

    Venezuela and Nigeria—Energy Colonialism Revived

    Far from being principled or people-focused, Trump’s foreign policy in Venezuela and Nigeria has been exposed as naked resource extraction under the cover of “democracy” and “stability.” In Venezuela, engagement with both sides of the political divide served only to prepare for U.S. and Western corporate control over the largest proven oil reserves on earth.

    Everything—sanctions, clandestine talks, public threats—was calibrated to secure access to energy and strategic minerals, not to better the lives of ordinary Venezuelans. In Nigeria, the professed concern for persecuted Christians was always a fig leaf: the true objective was a grip on the region’s oil, gas, and electric grid, ensuring that American companies and geopolitical operatives could direct both flows and profits. It is twenty-first-century neocolonialism with a MAGA hat—dressed as virtue, but devoted only to resource and power.

    Catastrophic Policies Toward Russia and China

    Rather than recalibrating U.S. grand strategy, Trump’s policies toward Russia and China have yielded only disorder and danger. Against Moscow, Trump has veered between reckless escalation—empowering hawks to push Ukraine toward ever more provocative actions that risked an uncontainable conflict—and disastrous retreats that emboldened Putin’s regime. There was no principle, no coherent vision, merely transactional swings that left allies doubting and adversaries calculating fresh moves.

    On China, Trump’s improvisational strongman routine backfired, igniting trade wars that devastated American businesses, provoking Beijing to expand ties with Russia and other U.S. rivals, and failing completely to contain the expansion of Chinese influence or military ambition in the Asia-Pacific. U.S. alliances are at their weakest, the postwar order is in tatters, and the world sees in Washington nothing but instability, unpredictability, and lost leadership.

    The Epstein Scandal—A Presidency Entangled, a Republic Corrupted

    The scandal of Trump’s intimacy with the Epstein empire is no longer just a footnote; it is a cancer at the heart of the presidency. Recent email dumps and congressional files lay bare Trump’s sustained proximity to Epstein—hours spent alone with a documented victim at Epstein properties, knowledge of targeting and exploitation, and close involvement with mutual enablers like Maxwell.

    The cover-up is as shocking as the crime: the administration leans on federal agencies to block further investigations, demonizes survivors and whistleblowers as political enemies, and turns the machinery of state into an instrument of silence and intimidation.

    In the face of mounting evidence, Trump’s White House projects total impunity—for himself, for Epstein’s circle, and for the darkest abuses of the elite. The damage is generational: faith in government, the courts, and American justice is poisoned, while the world sees a country unable or unwilling to prosecute its most powerful offenders.

    The Ultimate Betrayal—Welcoming America’s Greatest Enemy to the White House

    For generations, American servicemembers have laid down their lives fighting the poison and brutality of al-Qaeda, grieving families have mourned, and a nation has tried to honor their sacrifice as the sacred price of defending civilization against terror. But Donald Trump, in a move that has stunned every patriot and spit on the graves of the fallen, chose not only to rehabilitate but to openly embrace Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—once the most wanted terrorist on the planet—after he rebranded himself as Syria’s president.

    Jolani, architect of massacres, bombings, and decades of jihadist violence, was received with applause by Trump, flanked by the same military whose comrades he once ordered murdered.

    With cameras flashing and hands shaken on the White House, Trump praised Jolani as “doing a very good job,” stripped away U.S. sanctions, and branded him an ally to secure fleeting advantages in the Middle East power game. In that moment, every promise to the families of the honored dead was burned.

    The true cost is moral annihilation: the government glorified the very man responsible for American deaths and agony, desecrating the memory, dignity, and meaning of every soldier’s sacrifice. Is this the behavior of a true patriot, or the act of a leader for whom principle and loyalty mean nothing beside expediency?

    In one stroke, Trump transformed the people’s house into a hall of betrayal—and his name is forever stamped on a disgrace no parent, no widow, no veteran can forgive.

    The Work Visa Scandal—Insulting America’s Talent, Alienating a Nation

    Among Trump’s most divisive and offensive moves in his second term is his handling of the H-1B work visa debate. In a highly publicized exchange with Fox News, Trump dismissed American workers, declaring, “No, you don’t. You don’t have certain talents and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say I’m gonna put you into a factory to make missiles.”

    The implication: that Americans lack the expertise or drive necessary to compete, a remark instantly labeled as a slap in the face by those who have built the nation’s industries and defended its security.

    This wasn’t an isolated moment. On multiple occasions, Trump doubled down on his support for expensive work visas—raising fees to $100,000 per application for companies seeking skilled foreign labor—while flatly telling struggling Americans they were simply “not qualified” to fill the jobs of a modern economy.

    The MAGA base erupted, with voices from across the conservative spectrum denouncing their own president for demeaning American talent and undermining “America First.” Steve Bannon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other stalwarts led the charge, blasting Trump’s rhetoric as “unforgivable” and predicting it would alienate millions of blue-collar and patriotic voters.

    The backlash has spread well beyond the political right. Veterans groups, educators, union leaders, and ordinary citizens all responded with outrage, seeing the president’s comments as not only economically damaging, but deeply offensive to American dignity and work ethic.

    With the midterms on the horizon, analysts warn Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the nation’s workforce may prove a fatal error—one that erodes trust, fractures his coalition, and reverberates as a decisive failure on the national stage.

    A Legacy in Ashes

    Donald Trump’s second term is not simply a history of failed governance and burnt bridges; it is the ultimate evidence of what happens when ambition, fraud, and cruelty become the center of national power. The pillars of principle and alliance that underpinned American greatness have been smashed for spectacle, ego, and profit. In place of honor, there is only cowardice; in place of leadership, only wreckage. He has left behind a landscape of demoralized citizens, betrayed allies, enraged communities, and global adversaries now emboldened by American weakness. Every hope raised by MAGA is now a cinder scattered across the world’s conscience: a ruthless reminder that toxic populism, corruption, and brutality can burn through the foundations of democracy when accountability is surrendered and truth annihilated. Trump’s legacy stalks America like a curse—division, rage, disgrace, and a shattered national identity that may never be rebuilt.

    And still his second term is a long way to finish…

    References

    1. TRAC Reports. (2025, Jun 2). Immigration Prosecutions Jump in March 2025. https://tracreports.org

    2. Pew Research Center. (2025, Aug 20). Key findings about U.S. immigrants. https://pewresearch.org

    3. Reuters. (2025, Jul 2). Trump’s immigration enforcement record so far, by the numbers. https://www.reuters.com

    4. Wikipedia. (2024, Nov 7). Deportation in the second Trump administration. https://en.wikipedia.org

    5. Brookings Institution. (2025, May 20). 100 days of immigration under the second Trump administration. https://brookings.edu

    6. Al Jazeera. (2025). Is Trump pushing for regime change in Venezuela… https://www.aljazeera.com

    7. bne IntelliNews. (2025). Is Venezuela’s resource wealth Trump’s real target? https://intellinews.com

    8. Reuters. (2025). US intel found Israeli military lawyers warned there was evidence of genocide. https://www.reuters.com

    9. Amnesty International. (2025). Israel/Gaza: Any peace proposal must be grounded in human rights. https://www.amnesty.org.au

    10. Counterfire. (2025). Trump’s mediation over Ukraine collapses. https://counterfire.org

    11. Wikipedia. (2025). Foreign policy of the second Trump administration. https://en.wikipedia.org

    12. The American Conservative. (2025). Trump Should Leave His Neocon Streak Behind. https://www.theamericanconservative.com

    13. The New York Times. (2025). Trump, Long Erratic on the World Stage… https://nytimes.com

    14. BBC. (2025). Trump says ‘war is over’ in Gaza… https://bbc.com

    15. ScienceDirect. (2025). The second Trump administration: A policy analysis… https://sciencedirect.com

    16. Atlantic Council. (2025). The expert conversation: Trump’s endgame in Venezuela? https://atlanticcouncil.org

    17. Sky News. (2025, Nov 9). From US enemy to ally? Why ex-jihadist Syrian president’s White House visit matters. https://news.sky.com

    18. France24. (2025, Nov 10). Trump hosts Syria’s Sharaa at White House, Damascus hails ‘historic’ US visit. https://www.france24.com

    19. BBC. (2025, Nov 8). Syria’s Sharaa arrives in US for Trump talks after sanctions lifted. https://bbc.com

    20. PBS. (2025, Nov 10). Al-Sharaa meets with Trump at White House as Syria seeks US legitimacy. https://pbs.org

    21. ABC News. (2025, Nov 11). Some MAGA supporters in uproar over Trump’s H-1B visa comments. https://abcnews.go.com

    22. Fox News. (2025, Nov 11). Trump faces MAGA backlash over H-1B visa support. https://foxnews.com

    23. The Hill. (2025, Nov 12). Trump organization requested record number of foreign workers. https://thehill.com

    24. Yahoo News. (2025, Nov 12). Trump, who slapped an extra $100,000 on the H-1B visa. https://yahoo.com

    25. Forbes. (2025). Trump Immigration Rule Could Make H-1B Visa Holders Exit the USA. https://forbes.com

    26. Times of India. (2025, Nov 11). Is Donald Trump softening rules on aggressive H-1B visa fees? https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

    27. Fox Baltimore. (2025, Nov 11). President Trump faces criticism from MAGA base over comments on American workers. https://foxbaltimore.com

    ©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.

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