Resignations from the U.S. war on Vietnam, to the U.S. war on Iraq, to the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza In the November 21, 2024, weekly newsletter of the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training  (ADST), the editors included a 1995 oral history interview with William Watts, White House Staff Secretary for the […]

The post F**k You Alexander Haig, I am resigning; Say the same to Blinken!!! first appeared on CovertAction Magazine.

By Yasin Kakande / Truthout

FIFA has officially announced Saudi Arabia as the host of the 2034 World Cup, marking the second time the prestigious tournament will be held in a Gulf Arab nation and following Qatar in 2022. Saudi Arabia’s ambitious plans include building or renovating 15 stadiums, constructing over 185,000 hotel rooms, and executing massive infrastructure projects to welcome the mass influx of spectators.

However, this announcement has sparked widespread criticism, with Human Rights Watch (HRW) labeling the bid as a blatant example of “sportswashing.” By leveraging high-profile events like the World Cup, critics argue that the Saudi regime seeks to divert attention from its troubling human rights record, using sports to launder its international reputation while repression and authoritarian rule persist.

As someone who documented the abuses against migrant workers during Qatar’s 2022 preparations, this new plan for Saudi Arabia presents me with another reason to expose these persistent injustices. My work as a journalist and activist involved visiting construction sites where laborers toiled under scorching heat, denied basic rights like adequate breaks and humane living conditions. Those efforts not only led to articles and the publication of my books, Slave States and The Ambitious Struggle, but also resulted in my eventual expulsion from the region.

My ordeal began when my editor called me into his office, his face heavy with the burden of what he was about to say. “You’ve committed a grave sin” in the eyes of the UAE government, he said, referring to the book I had published without the government’s approval. The authorities were outraged, and they demanded that the newspaper terminate my employment and send me back to Uganda. Although the situation was dire, I felt a sense of gratitude when my editor managed to secure a one-month grace period for me — time to withdraw my children from school, surrender my apartment, and sell my car before I was forced to leave the UAE.

My book The Ambitious Struggle was primarily an autobiographical novel — though it did not solely recount my own story. It wove together the tales of countless migrants who, like myself, had ventured to the affluent Gulf states in search of opportunity. Across the world, migrant workers faced immense challenges, whether in Europe or America, but these struggles were particularly harrowing in the Gulf. The kafala system is a longstanding legal framework in Arab Gulf countries that gives employers near-total control over migrant workers’ employment and immigration status. This system often subjects workers — primarily from poor Asian and African countries — to exploitation and conditions resembling bonded labor, trapping them in cycles of servitude. This system, unchecked, stripped countless individuals of their dignity, forcing them into lives of hardship and submission.

During my time as a reporter for The National, I reported on the harrowing case of an Emirati sponsor who admitted to police that she had beaten her Sri Lankan maid to death with a wooden cane for being “lazy.” The woman’s lifeless body was found discarded in a bathtub, her skull fractured, her teeth broken, and her arms and legs marred with bruises — a brutal testament to the inhuman treatment that ended her life. In another heart-wrenching case, I uncovered the murder of an Ethiopian maid at the hands of an Arab family, who callously burned her body before abandoning it in Abu Dhabi’s Ajban desert. In another instance of abuse, a 23-year-old Ethiopian maid in Dubai was burned with cooking oil by her Arab employer, an act of cruelty that still haunts me to this day.

These stories, unfortunately, were not isolated incidents. The catalogue of abuse seemed unending, not just in the UAE, but across the Gulf region, making these countries some of the most perilous places to be a domestic worker. In Saudi Arabia, a 23-year-old Indonesian maid, Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, was taken to hospital with broken bones and severe burns, after her employer pressed a hot iron to her head and stabbed her with scissors. The employer was initially sentenced to three years, but she was swiftly acquitted in appeal, her crime overshadowed by claims of self-defense and the impenetrable protection granted by the kafala system.

In another horrific case, a Sri Lankan maid was found with 24 nails and a needle embedded in her body, the result of unimaginable torture. Some maids, like Ruyati binti Sapubi from Indonesia and Rizana Nafeek from Sri Lanka, were executed (beheaded) after rushed and unjust trials for alleged crimes, such as murder. The legal process was often swift and biased, allowing employers to exploit the kafala system to shield themselves while denying the accused a fair defense.

These stories resonated deeply with me, as I was a migrant myself. While my position as a journalist afforded me a certain level of status and privilege — allowing me to retain control of my own passport and those of my family, and enabling me to change jobs — I was still a member of the migrant community. All my friends, and many of my sources for stories, were also migrants. It was because of this shared experience that I dedicated my profession to exposing the atrocities suffered by migrant workers and bringing these injustices into the public eye for scrutiny.

However, it wasn’t long before the UAE government clamped down on my efforts to report and document these abuses, all in the name of protecting the country’s image and safeguarding the political economy. The subtle censorship filtered down through my editors, who began to reject my daily pitches exposing the violence and exploitation that plagued the migrant workforce — from unsafe, unregulated working conditions and squalid housing to unpaid wages, rape, torture and murder. It became increasingly clear that the powers that be would not tolerate anything that risked casting a shadow over the country’s reputation.

One particular story that I pitched, which was ultimately rejected, deeply affected me. It was the case of Khurshid, an Indian worker who perished in a petrochemical fire at the National Paints factory in Sharjah.

Khurshid lived in Sharjah with his brother, Tabreer Ahmed. On that tragic day, he had gone to work as usual, but disaster struck when the factory caught fire. He had been assisting in extinguishing the blaze when he lost his life. When Khurshid didn’t return home that evening, his brother went to the charred remains of the factory in search of answers. Speaking to Khurshid’s colleagues, he learned that his brother had died in the fire, but when he approached the factory owners, they flatly denied that any of their workers had been killed. In fact, they claimed they had never employed Khurshid at all. Desperate, Tabreer reached out to me for help, and I joined him in the search for his brother and the truth. We visited the Sharjah Civil Defence, the police — but each denied there had been any fatalities. It wasn’t just Khurshid. There were two other families who had also lost sons in the blaze, and I met with them as well.

I presented all these details to my editors, only to be told that there was no story to publish if officials were denying the deaths. Two months later, the bodies of three workers were discovered on site by other laborers clearing the premises. I was among the first reporters called to the scene, and I attempted to take photographs. But when the police arrived, they deleted my images and confiscated my camera. My editor was furious that I had insisted on pursuing the story, yet when he learned that rival publications were now chasing it as well, he begrudgingly agreed to publish a small piece that downplayed the three men’s deaths.

That incident was the turning point for me. It spurred me to write my first book, an attempt to chronicle every untold story I was unable to publish in the newspaper I worked for. These stories deserved to be written, even if no one was willing to print them.

International tournaments like the World Cup draw the world’s gaze to host nations, creating a rare opportunity for advocates to shed light on systemic abuses that might otherwise remain hidden. Even after my expulsion from the Gulf silenced my voice in the region, the flame of activism has only grown stronger. Migrant laborers who have been silenced and kept out of media stories are now standing up for their rights, often at immense personal risk. Through protests, social media and acts of defiance, they are making their voices heard, challenging a system that once thrived on their silence.

As a journalist and activist, I view Saudi Arabia’s successful bid to host the 2034 World Cup as more than a sporting achievement; it is another opportunity to expose human rights abuses on a global stage.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

Yasin Kakande

Yasin Kakande, is an international journalist, a TED Global Fellow, and the author of a number of critically acclaimed nonfiction books offering a fresh perspective on immigration and geopolitics, including Why We Are Coming and Slave States. As a migrant from Uganda now based in the US. following asylum, his journalism career spans international outlets including The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Al Jazeera, The National, and The Boston Globe. His latest book, A Murder of Hate, is out now.

Author Site

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

By Jeffrey D. Sachs / Common Dreams

In the famous lines of Tacitus, Roman historian, “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

In our age, it is Israel and the U.S. that make a desert and call it peace.

The story is simple. In stark violation of international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers claim the right to rule over seven million Palestinian Arabs. When Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands leads to militant resistance, Israel labels the resistance “terrorism” and calls on the U.S. to overthrow the Middle East governments that back the “terrorists.” The U.S., under the sway of the Israel Lobby, goes to war on Israel’s behalf.

The fall of Syria this week is the culmination of the Israel-U.S. campaign against Syria that goes back to 1996 with Netanyahu’s arrival to office as Prime Minister. The Israel-U.S. war on Syria escalated in 2011 and 2012, when Barack Obama covertly tasked the CIA with the overthrow of the Syrian Government in Operation Timber Sycamore. That effort finally came to “fruition” this week, after more than 300,000 deaths in the Syrian war since 2011.

Syria’s fall came swiftly because of more than a decade of crushing economic sanctions, the burdens of war, the U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil, Russia’s priorities regarding the conflict in Ukraine, and most immediately, Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah, which was the key military backstop to the Syrian Government. No doubt Assad often misplayed his own hand and faced severe internal discontent, but his regime was targeted for collapse for decades by the U.S. and Israel.

Before the U.S.-Israel campaign to overthrow Assad began in earnest in 2011, Syria was a functioning, growing middle-income country. In January 2009, the IMF Executive Board had this to say:

Executive Directors welcomed Syria’s strong macroeconomic performance in recent years, as manifested in the rapid non-oil GDP growth, comfortable level of foreign reserves, and low and declining government debt. This performance reflected both robust regional demand and the authorities’ reform efforts to shift toward a more market- based economy.

Since 2011, the Israel-U.S. perpetual war on Syria, including bombing, jihadists, economic sanctions, U.S. seizure of Syria’s oil fields, and more, has sunk the Syrian people into misery.

In the immediate two days following the collapse of the government, Israel conducted about 480 strikes across Syria, and completely destroyed the Syrian fleet in Latakia. Pursuing his expansionist agenda, Prime Minister Netanyahu illegally claimed control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights and declared that the Golan Heights will be a part of the State of Israel “for eternity.”

Netanyahu’s ambition to transform the region through war, which dates back almost three decades, is playing out in front of our eyes. In a press conference on December 9th, the Israeli prime minister boasted of an “absolute victory,” justifying the on-going genocide in Gaza and escalating violence throughout the region:

I ask you, just think, if we had acceded to those who told us time and again: ‘”The war must be stopped”– we would not have entered Rafah, we would not have seized the Philadelphia Corridor, we would not have eliminated Sinwar, we would not have surprised our enemies in Lebanon and the entire world in a daring operation-stratagem, we would not have eliminated Nasrallah, we would not have destroyed Hezbollah’s underground network, and we would not have exposed Iran’s weakness. The operations that we have carried out since the beginning of the war are dismantling the axis brick by brick.

The long history of Israel’s campaign to overthrow the Syrian Government is not widely understood, yet the documentary record is clear. Israel’s war on Syria began with U.S. and Israeli neoconservatives in 1996, who fashioned a “Clean Break” strategy for the Middle East for Netanyahu as he came to office. The core of the “clean break” strategy called for the Israel (and the US) to reject “land for peace,” the idea that Israel would withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands in return for peace. Instead, Israel would retain the occupied Palestinian lands, rule over the Palestinian people in an Apartheid state, step-by-step ethnically cleanse the state, and enforce so-called “peace for peace” by overthrowing neighboring governments that resisted Israel’s land claims.

The Clean Break strategy asserts, “Our claim to the land—to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years—is legitimate and noble,” and goes on to state, “Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon…”

In his 1996 book Fighting Terrorism, Netanyahu set out the new strategy. Israel would not fight the terrorists; it would fight the states that support the terrorists. More accurately, it would get the US to do Israel’s fighting for it. As he elaborated in 2001:

The first and most crucial thing to understand is this: There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states.… Take away all this state support, and the entire scaffolding of international terrorism will collapse into dust.

Netanyahu’s strategy was integrated into U.S. foreign policy. Taking out Syria was always a key part of the plan. This was confirmed to General Wesley Clark after 9/11. He was told, during a visit at the Pentagon, that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Iraq would be first, then Syria, and the rest. (Netanyahu’s campaign for the Iraq War is spelled out in detail in Dennis Fritz’s new book, Deadly Betrayal. The role of the Israel Lobby is spelled out in Ilan Pappé’s new book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic). The insurgency that hit U.S. troops in Iraq set back the five-year timeline, but did not change the basic strategy.

The U.S. has by now led or sponsored wars against Iraq (invasion in 2003), Lebanon (U.S. funding and arming Israel), Libya (NATO bombing in 2011), Syria (CIA operation during 2010’s), Sudan (supporting rebels to break Sudan apart in 2011), and Somalia (backing Ethiopia’s invasion in 2006). A prospective U.S. war with Iran, ardently sought by Israel, is still pending.

Strange as it might seem, the CIA has repeatedly backed Islamist Jihadists to fight these wars, and jihadists have just toppled the Syrian regime. The CIA, after all, helped to create al-Qaeda in the first place by training, arming, and financing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan from the late 1970s onward. Yes, Osama bin Laden later turned on the U.S., but his movement was a U.S. creation all the same. Ironically, as Seymour Hersh confirms, it was Assad’s intelligence that “tipped off the U.S. to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.”

Operation Timber Sycamore was a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. The CIA funded, trained, and provided intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups. The CIA effort also involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:

“A highly classified annex to the report, not made public, described a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations. It pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

Soon after the launch of Timber Sycamore, in March 2013, at a joint conference by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House, Obama said: “With respect to Syria, the United States continues to work with allies and friends and the Syrian opposition to hasten the end of Assad’s rule.”

To the U.S.-Israeli Zionist mentality, a call for negotiation by an adversary is taken as a sign of weakness of the adversary. Those who call for negotiations on the other side typically end up dead—murdered by Israel or U.S. assets. We’ve seen this play out recently in Lebanon. The Lebanese Foreign Minister confirmed that Hassan Nasrallah, Former Secretary-General of Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel days before his assassination. Hezbollah’s willingness to accept a peace agreement according to the Arab-Islamic world’s wishes of a two-state solution is long-standing. Similarly, instead of negotiating to end the war in Gaza, Israel assassinated Hamas’ political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

Similarly in Syria, instead of allowing for a political solution to emerge, the U.S. opposed the peace process multiple times. In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Americans, who demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement. The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace. In September 2024, Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly with a map of the Middle East divided between “Blessing” and “Curse,” with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as part of Netanyahu’s curse. The real curse is Israel’s path of mayhem and war, which has now engulfed Lebanon and Syria, with Netayahu’s fervent hope to draw the U.S. into war with Iran as well.

The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.

In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.

All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism based on the 7th century BCE Book of Joshua. Remarkably, according to that text—one relied on by Israel’s own religious zealots—the Israelites were not even the original inhabitants of the land. Rather, according the text, God instructs Joshua and his warriors to commit multiple genocides to conquer the land.

Against this backdrop, the Arab-Islamic nations and indeed almost all of the world have repeatedly united in the call for a two-state solution and peace between Israel and Palestine.

Instead of the two-state solution, Israel and the U.S. have made a desert and called it peace.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

Author SIte

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

A U.S. nonprofit has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an Israeli sniper unit for the stated purpose of buying scopes, silencers, and other equipment. The unit, which is nicknamed Rephaim, or “Ghosts,” has since been implicated in possible war crimes and killing over 100 people in Gaza and has been tied to the killing of four unarmed Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

On October 9, 2023, the mother of unit member Daniel Raab—an Illinois native—posted on Facebook that the nonprofit, registered as “Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202,” was in need of “helmets, rain gear, barrels, vests, sniper stands, silencers, camouflage, and the list goes on.”

In its 990 filings, Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 is described as “an organization dedicated to catering to the additional requirements and the overall welfare of soldiers serving in a specific military unit.” The description continues to say that the primary focus of the nonprofit is, “to ensure that soldiers have access to the necessary resources, support systems, and amenities that can enhance their comfort, safety, and well-being while they are actively serving their duty.”

The charity has raised significant amounts of money for the sniper unit since its establishment last year. According to its tax filings, Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 raised over $304,000 in the year ending December 2023, of which it spent roughly $208,000 in grants—money which its promoters emphasize goes directly to soldiers in the unit.

The nonprofit was registered in Illinois by Benjamin Raab, who appears to be Daniel's father. Melissa Raab, who has identified herself as his mother on Facebook posts, is listed as a director in the 2023 IRS filings. (The 2024 form is not available yet.) As of publication, the links to donate are still active. Drop Site reached out repeatedly to the nonprofit itself, Benjamin Raab, and Melissa Raab in advance of the publication of this story but received no response.

According to social media posts, the non-profit’s funds were used to purchase military equipment. “Your support allowed us to get my son and his elite sniper unit the most advanced scopes needed in order to have an advantage over Hamas when they go into Gaza,” Daniel’s mother Melissa wrote in a note shared by a family friend on Facebook on October 27, 2023.

“There is advance [sic], high tech equipment that only the United States Army, and only the Navy SEALs have. We can get this equipment for the snipers,” she said, also sharing a voice note by Daniel himself.

The Ghost Unit

On April 19, 2024, Shalom Gilbert, another member of the 202 Paratroopers Battalion posted a montage video of his battalion’s activities in the Gaza Strip. Like many similar videos uploaded to social media by Israeli soldiers since the start of the war in Gaza, Gilbert’s footage shows in detail the tremendous devastation wrought upon the territory by the Israeli military assault. While there is typically very little combat footage in the montages, this particular video shows three separate clips of snipers targeting apparently unarmed people.

The battalion’s video states in blunt terms their intention to bring violence upon Gaza.: “When they meet the 202nd battalion they are going to regret being born,” a text displayed in the video says.

Around two minutes into the montage, grainy thermal imagery displays a scene of two men, appearing unarmed, walking down a street and in civilian clothes. The man then falls to the ground, appearing to have been shot. The second man runs away to the left, outside of the camera view.

Source: Shalom Gilbert on YouTube

Fast forwarding about five minutes into the montage, footage that appears to be taken from a higher vantage point or a drone, showing two people, one dead and lying motionless on the ground and the second leaning over him. A shot seems to be fired at him, throwing him backwards. He appears to have been killed on the spot.

Source: Shalom Gilbert on YouTube

Shortly afterwards, there are grainy thermal images of two men walking side by side. The one on the left of the picture is slightly ahead. He appears to be shot, falling to the ground immediately, while the other man, who is slightly behind, runs off.

Source: Shalom Gilbert on YouTube

The videos showings the killings was first made public in October as part of the Al Jazeera Investigative Unit’s film, “Gaza,” and geolocated to the area of the hospital —the Tel Hawwa neighborhood in southern Gaza City. (Sami Vanderlip, the author of this story, was a researcher on the film, “Gaza,” along with Younis Tirawi.) There are questions about the legality of the killings shown in the video, which targeted people not appearing to hold any weapons. Charlie Herbert, a retired major general in the British army, expressed concerns about the scene that the video displayed. “I don't know the context of what happened before, I don’t know what happened 2 minutes before that. You know, they may have been tracked,” he said. “They may have been involved in contacting and shooting at Israeli forces, they may have been legitimate targets. But it sure doesn't look like it to me.”

In October, the Belgian government launched an investigation into Alon Ben Sira, a dual citizen, for alleged war crimes as a result of Tirawi’s reporting on the sniper unit.

Drop Site News also obtained a video from February from the sniper unit’s Instagram account, geolocated to Khan Younis, showing the targeting of a Palestinian who appeared unarmed and posing no threat. According to the soldiers who boasted about it, he was shot from a distance of 1.26 kilometers away.

Source: @rephaim9 on Instagram.

The same Instagram account posted a story in February with four members of the unit. The post claimed that these soldiers set an Israeli military record for long-distance sniping—stating that they neutralized a target identified as a terrorist from 1.26 km away.

The caption reads: “Interesting fact: The team, in collaboration with Adir and the Citroën ‘Rank of lieutenant and above,’ is responsible for the IDF record in operational sniping after eliminating a terrorist at a range of 1,260 meters.”

U.S. Nonprofits Supporting the Israeli Military

According to publicly available online registry filings, Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 was granted tax-exempt status by the IRS in early August 2023.

The activities of Friends of Paratrooper Sniper Unit 202 are not an isolated case but represent a part of a broader trend in which U.S.-based nonprofits have significantly ramped up fundraising efforts for the Israeli military since their assault on Gaza began following the attacks of October 7.

One of the most prominent organizations in this space is the Israeli military affiliated Friends of the IDF, which raises close to $100 million annually. Their consistent ability to generate immense sums underscores the deep financial and ideological ties between pro-Israel organizations in the United States and the Israeli military.

Smaller organizations have also been able to mobilize significant resources to support the assault on Gaza. One case in point has been the Ari Fuld Project, which has raised over $855,000, according to a tabulation of their various public campaigns set up in support of a number of units in the Israeli military since October 7. According to the group, these funds are going toward purchasing everything from protective eyewear to drones for Israeli soldiers.

Speaking generally, Sarah Lee Whitson, the executive director of DAWN, said that the IRS looks to U.S. law and not international when considering whether a nonprofit purpose is legal or not, but that international law could be considered through the War Crimes Act. “It stands to reason that someone should be able to file a complaint to say that an organization should have their nonprofit status cancelled because they are aiding and abetting war crimes under the War Crimes Act.”

Documenting Israel, an online social media account that aims to document “daily events in Israel relating to security, terrorism and general Jewish life” to its thousands of followers have leveraged its social media platforms to start a fundraising campaign for Israeli soldiers following October 7th. They have since raised over $130,000 to buy equipment ranging from helmets and scopes to tactical vests for soldiers serving in Gaza. Videos and photos of soldiers thanking donors for new equipment like helmets, vests, and drones have been used as powerful marketing tools to garner greater support.

“There are dozens of 501(c)(3)s that are funding West Bank settlements – which is a war crime that should be covered under War Crimes Act, but so far the IRS has not done its job to ensure that nonprofits are not funding illegal acts,” added Whitson. “From a purely legal standpoint, if the IRS was doing its job it’d be investigating and shutting down nonprofit organizations that are funding war crimes. That’s not only what international law demands, but what American law demands.”

The trend also highlights a disparity in how nonprofits are scrutinized. HR 9495 or Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, passed the House mainly along party lines. If signed into law it would grant the Treasury to revoke tax-exempt status of nonprofits that are subjectively deemed to be supporting “terrorism”—a move that many critics believed would be used to target pro-Palestinian groups in particular. Meanwhile, organizations supporting units within the Israeli military would continue to operate without similar oversight.

While fundraising links for the tax-exempt charity remain online, the social media page has since been taken down. Social media posts from Raab’s mother and other family members show efforts to solicit donations on Facebook, emphasizing that any money given would go directly to soldiers serving in the unit.

As the donations aimed at buttressing capacity came in, the unit bragged of its impact in the onslaught of Gaza. On March 14, 2024, PAZAM, a public relations company associated with the Israeli military, posted on Facebook that the sniper unit of the 202 Battalion had reached “100 eliminations of terrorists.” The message read:

Sniper Unit of the 202

Was everywhere since the start of the war

Sderot, Kfar Aza, Beeri, Gaza City, Rimal, Shuja’iyya, Khan Younis and soon maybe Rafah

Currently standing at 100 eliminations of terrorists and they’ll reach more !!!

Let’s cheer for these legends.

Raab also acknowledged the role that the money that flowed from donors to the sniper unit in helping build its capacity in the war.

“I would like to first and foremost thank everyone from the bottom of my heart who has been a part of and contributed in action or in spirit, but specifically in action in terms of capital to the organization Friends of Paratroopers Unit 202 Sniper Team,” he said in a voice note from October 27, 2023, shared on Facebook by a family friend.

“The work that you have done and the results of your tireless work, effort and capital has absolutely changed our capabilities to accomplish our missions, to go into battle, to win, to protect ourselves, to protect our comrades and come home safely. And I would like to send a message to continue that work, keep it coming. It's doing nothing but helping us and it is much needed.”

Leave a comment

Murtaza Hussain and Younis Tirawi contributed reporting.

“Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.” – Shakespeare, Coriolanus

Long ago, but what seems like only yesterday, I didn’t go to the U.S. war against Vietnam but the war came to me. It was when my exile began.

I am telling you this to try to shed some light on today’s wars and alarums since my tale is common for a small subset of Americans of my generation. We learned long ago that the USA was run by ruthless killers who reveled in war. Vietnam, the Phoenix Program, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc. Nothing was beyond them. We sensed that they would never stop and they haven’t. The genocide of Palestinians, the proxy war via Ukraine against Russia, the current US/Israel/Turkey bloodbath in Syria and Lebanon led by our ruthless terrorists – it is all nightmarish, malevolent, utterly evil, and conjures up hell on earth. And it will get worse in the future.

The mainstream media is claiming that the new savior of Syria is the terrorist “rebel” leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the founding leader of Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, and a former deputy to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.,

While there is truth in the view that the world has always been a butcher’s bench with wars, hatred, and strife being a common theme, “always” is meaningless to me. For I have never lived in “always.”

I have lived since birth in the United States during a period of time when it has been the world’s number one butcher, starting with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then continuing waging non-stop wars, assassinating foreign and domestic leaders, including President Kennedy, executing coup d’états, supporting and arming ruthless dictators and terrorists, and creating an economy dependent on war.

All this has been sustained by lies and propaganda that most Americans have swallowed. It is a deeply ingrained Yankee doodle dandy ethos joined with American exceptionalism and a self-induced false innocence.

Just this morning, December 8, 2024, as it did during the Vietnam war, The New York Times spewed out lies about the events in Syria, calling the U.S.-backed jihadist terrorists (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham/Al Qaeda, et al.) “rebels” and the overthrow of the Assad government a “civil war.” In doing so, the paper is just doing what it has always done as an organ for U.S. foreign policy, seemingly forgetting that it was the Obama administration that in 2012 launched Operation Timber Sycamore, a CIA program to, under the guise of a civil war, overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as part of a larger effort to undercut Iran and Russia for U.S./Israel/Turkey/NATO control of the region.

It is propaganda about a much larger war well underway, as the presence of Ukrainian forces in Syria and the usual Israeli bombing attest. Like a mountain ridge wildfire, the winds whip wildly now, and whether the fire spreads next to Iran or somewhere else, it is sure to spread.

To paraphrase Thoreau, there is no need to care for a myriad of instances and applications, the only thing you need is to be acquainted with the principle, which in this case is the long-standing demonic nature of U.S. foreign policy which is synchronous with waging perpetual war.

Yet most people don’t want to go past such lying headlines that are repeated by all the mainstream media. They never did, except when the issues concerned them personally, as when there was a military draft.

Yes, government and media propaganda have contributed mightily to it, but so many of the country’s war crimes have been committed out in the open and accompanied by the public’s cheering and flag waving that propaganda is only part of the explanation.

The will to believe and self-delusion are a large part of it. And people seem to like war, if it is far away and the cheerleaders are on this side of the water. It lends excitement to life like a real murder mystery, a sex scandal, or an approaching hurricane.

Furthermore, it provides roots for the national myth, the mythic home, the mythic womb, wherein one can root for the home team as one stands with tens of thousands of team people and sing along with the words “bombs bursting in air” while feeling a stirring of patriotic pride. This desire to be patriotically conventional, to support the national team in war and peace, is very powerful. Why else the creation of the mammoth bureaucracy called Homeland Security, the un-American word homeland taken straight from Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally. Root, root, root for the home team.

I know the patriotic feeling. It left me back in 1967 when my exile began. For the most part, it has not been apparent to outside observers, for there are places difficult to reach, and the one within is the most distant. My youthful “normalcy” received its first body blow with JFK’s assassination in 1963. By 1967 I had joined the Marines and then declared myself a conscientious objector as I realized the evil my country was committing in Vietnam. I was on my way away.

In the years that followed, as Malcom X, MLK, Jr. and RFK, were assassinated and Johnson and Nixon lied and brutalized Vietnam, my understanding of history and politics deepened. Families and friends called me a communist for being a C.O. and opposing the war and a lying government. It was laughable but relentless.

Many years have elapsed, and the charges have risen and fallen as the years have gone by. For years now, the name of abuse is a “conspiracy” theorist or Russian sympathizer for daring to say that Russia Gate was a Democratic conspiracy and the war against Russia in Ukraine has been a U.S. project from the start. There is much more.

But my point about internal exile is that I had to adopt the motions of normalcy in everyday life – to create a pleasant persona – to get through the days. My teaching and writing continued as hard-hitting as before, but family, friends, academic colleagues, and acquaintances didn’t take my courses or read my writing, which they made sure to avoid.

These days, many more people have been forced to discover the twofold life where they can’t talk to the people in their lives about many issues – politics, wars, Covid, etc. Something has broken. Almost everything.

To accept the conclusion that the country is run by a bunch of ruthless warmongering imperialists is a step too far for most people. They must mean well or just make mistakes, for their hearts are in the right place, runs through so many minds. At least they assume that about the leaders they support.

A key way the endless wars roll on is the deadly political game of the lesser of two evils. If it is one’s political party waging the foreign wars, there are always many reasons to still find it better than the other party’s wars. “My leader may be a warmonger but he’s better than your warmonger” is the unspoken implication. This neat trick is supported by a host of mitigating excuses to justify the delusion that one is for peace even as these wars occur non-stop throughout the decades as the Democratic and Republican leaders switch highchairs.

Rather than dismiss the lot of them, the desire to feel that patriot heart-pump, however dim, and to reject the “extremist” conclusion that war is the life blood of the country, remains.

Throughout the sixty years of my adult life, the U.S. has been continuously waging wars, hot and cold, small and large, openly and secretly, all across the world, and its economy has increasingly become a military-industrial-national-security complex so vast and intricately linked to daily life that the country would collapse without it. Simply put: Beneath daily life lies a death cult, a river of blood. If that sounds too strong for you, give me another name for it.

It seems to me very clear that most Americans are today suffering from some sort of traumatic mental sickness, trying desperately to deny it in a multitude of ways. Scratch the surface of an everyday conversation or a greeting on the street and there’s the rolling of the eyes and the looks that say, “Let’s not go there, it’s all too crazy!” Something has broken, and people seem like walking desperadoes with the flag panted like a dagger in their hearts.

Even the alternative media, those writers with whom I share wishes for a peaceful world, have for a good while let their hopes trump realty by claiming the American empire is doomed, as is Israel and the neo-liberal, neo-con agenda. For many months now, I have noticed something amiss with these claims. Too much wishful thinking. Too little appreciation for the machinations of the CIA, M-16, Mossad, Turkish conspiracies. To think these devils would accept defeat without bringing the world down is naïve.

I don’t relish saying all this. It is depressing. But I think it is true.
Some people who know me call me an extremist and claim I make no room for the middle ground. When it comes to U.S. war-waging, I say there is none. It is endless and integral to U.S. foreign policy no matter which party is in office. And the foreign policy is integral to the domestic policy. Without it, the country would be so different. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden – to buy their lies is to be a fool.

To realize the difference between power and innocence is to come to understand the demonic nature of America’s Forever Wars.  When in 2014 President Obama stood at West Point and said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” he was revealing consciously or not a hard truth, just as when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and told the world he believed in war.  But he smiled.

For war is the lifeblood of this “exceptional” country.  But if you keep repeating that, don’t expect smiles to come your way.