General
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements
Antelope Hill Publications, 2025
The page below has more photos, and you can click to see the pages of the index.
More than 80 percent of the occupied West Bank would become part of Israel, according to a new annexation proposal drafted by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday.
The hardline Minister presented a map showing all of the West Bank as a part of Israel, including Bethlehem, the Jordan Valley, and the entire Palestinian countryside, while only six Palestinian cities — Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, Jericho, Ramallah, and Hebron — were marked as isolated ghettoes. Smotrich said that if the Palestinian Authority (PA) opposes his plan, Israel would “uproot it like it did with Hamas.” Smotrich also called on Netanyahu to implement his proposal if he wished to “enter history as a great leader.”
On the same day as Smotrich’s presentation, Israeli forces arrested the mayor of Hebron, Tayseer Abu Sneineh. Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank and is home to 800,000 Palestinians. Some 500 messianic Israeli settlers have been imposing their presence in the city’s old town since the 1980s, and Abu Sneineh is known for his role in a Fatah cell that planned and carried out the shooting of six Israeli and Jewish settlers in the city’s old town in 1980, locally known as the “Dabuya Operation.” After his initial arrest, Abu Sneineh was later released in a prisoner swap in 1983 alongside other members of the cell.
Abu Sneineh’s arrest came days after Israeli media outlets reported that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was considering the establishment of a tribal “emirate” in Hebron, separate from the Palestinian Authority, which first surfaced in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last July.
Local Palestinian media speculated as to whether Abu Sneineh’s arrest was possibly a prelude to removing potential sources of local opposition to annexation, especially given Abu Sneineh’s background and his status as a consequential local nationalist figure in Hebron.
These events, in addition to a number of other developments in the lead-up to the Smotrich proposal, have catapulted the issue of Israel’s potential annexation of the West Bank to the top of the Israeli government’s agenda, and have left millions of Palestinians in the West Bank unsure of their future.
The Israeli cabinet met last Sunday for the second time in two weeks to discuss options for the annexation of parts of the West Bank. It was followed by a meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week, in which Saar informed Rubio of Israel’s intention to “impose Israeli sovereignty” on the Palestinian territory, according to the Israeli news site, Walla.
Meanwhile, Israel has been engaging in a show of force against the PA by launching several raids on major West Bank cities that make up Area A under the Oslo Accords, which comprise about 18% of the West Bank and are supposed to be under PA jurisdiction. The Israeli army launched the largest military raid in years on Ramallah last week, occupying the city center of the PA’s de facto capital with hundreds of troops accompanied by Israeli media crews for over three hours. The very next day, the Israeli army launched a similar raid in Nablus, the second most important PA center of power.
Although Israel claims that its latest moves to annex the West Bank are a response to the announcement by several European states that they intend to recognize Palestine as a state, Israel’s annexation of the West Bank has been years in the making.
In 2019, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged during his election campaign to annex the Jordan Valley. The first Trump administration allegedly stopped Israel twice, in January and June of 2020, from formally announcing annexation.
However, the same Trump administration announced its “Deal of the Century” plan in 2020, which included the annexation of most of the West Bank, including all of the Jordan Valley. Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over illegal settlements in the West Bank, the occupied Syrian Golan heights, and over all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Palestinians overwhelmingly rejected it.
Israel’s current plan of annexation is based on Smotrich’s 2015 “decisive plan,” which aims to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and expel Palestinians through encouraging so-called “voluntary migration.” Smotrich also said that Palestinians in the West Bank would either submit to Israeli sovreignty, leave the country, or “be dealt with” by Israeli forces. After October 7, Smotrich said that the annexation of the West Bank should be Israel’s response to the Hamas attack. He later said that Israel’s expulsion of half of Gaza’s population would “set a precedent” to do the same in the West Bank.
Over the past two years, Smotrich has been leading a campaign of financial strangulation against the PA, pirating Palestinian customs money that Israel collects on the PA’s behalf as per the Oslo Accords. Smotrich has also periodically threatened to ban Israeli banks from dealing with Palestinian banks, and in the meantime has compelled Israeli banks to limit the amount of cash that Palestinian banks can transfer to Israeli banks.
Both of the above measured have forced the PA into an ongoing financial crisis, unable to pay public functionaries, medics, teachers, and security staff their full monthly salaries for months on end. And if Smotrich goes through with actually banning all financial dealings between Israeli and Palestinian banks, it would spell total financial collapse in the West Bank, threatening the PA’s very existence.
Weakening the PA to this level is meant to obviate its need for Palestinians and to pave the way for annexation. And Smotrich is just the face of this recent push to isolate and besiege the PA — he is one of many Israeli ministers key to the continuity of Netanyahu’s government, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Amichai Elyahu, and Orit Strock, all of whom represent the religious right and control the majority in the Israeli Knesset.
The Knesset has also been laying the legal grounds for the West Bank’s annexation for years. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Israeli Nation State Law, which states that the only right to self-determination between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea belongs to the Jewish people. In July of last year, the Knesset passed a bill rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere between the river and the sea, and a year later — last July — the Knesset passed a bill enabling the annexation of the West Bank.
The prelude to the official annexation of the Palestinian territory isn’t limited to Israeli measures, but also includes what are so far symbolic U.S. moves underwriting Israel’s intentions. As European states, including France, the UK, and Belgium, announce plans to recognize a Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly later this month, the U.S., for its part, revoked visas for Palestinian officials, including the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, set to attend the General Assembly. The move was followed by Washington’s decision to stop issuing visas to any Palestinian passport holders.
In essence, this means that the U.S. is implicitly supporting Israel’s plans to erase the possibility of a Palestinian state and extending Israel’s control over all Palestinian territories.
Although Smotrich’s most recent plan has been described as “maximalist,” the general orientation of Israeli lawmakers, even the “pragmatic” opposition represented by Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, does not oppose annexation in any meaningful sense. The main differences that do exist between Israelis is not over annexation per se, but over its extent.
The less “maximalist” Israeli lawmakers either call for the annexation of all Israeli settlements, the annexation of Area C (which makes up over 60% of the West Bank), or the annexation of the Jordan Valley. But all those versions would deprive Palestinians of any meaningful geographic continuity, control over natural resources and borders, or prospects for future population growth. In essence, the entire Israeli political class is deadset on making a Palestinian state an impossibility. This is the range of political currents the U.S. is picking between to support.
Ultimately, the U.S. will be the one to decide whether official annexation as a whole will move forward. Axios quoted two unnamed U.S. officials that it was “unlikely” Trump would support such a move. But even if Washington halts the de jure annexation of the West Bank, it will most likely offer an “alternative” that would solidify de facto annexation.
When one of the best writers on anti-White racism feels the need to write a column about a noble immigrant, we have to wonder if America’s ethno-masochism has gone too far.
Has it been mandated by law that everyone have a heartwarming story about a plucky, hardworking immigrant?
Liberals don’t like Americans, so they’re left out of this question. But Jeremy Carl? He wrote the excellent book “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.” And his article came out the same week that sensible economist Tyler Cowen uttered his own lunacy about our marvelous immigrants.
This bizarre reflex demands an explanation.
Carl’s story is about a young Chinese boy taken in and befriended by U.S. Marines stationed in China at the end of World War II. They sheltered him from the ChiComs, fed him, gave him a bed and a Marine uniform and paid for him to attend a Christian school. After the U.S. pulled out, the communists took over, and the Chinese boy suffered, but he finally managed to get in touch with his Marine buddies in the U.S., who arranged for him to come to America, where he started a Chinese restaurant, featuring pictures of Marines and discounts for any Marine.
While it’s terrific to hear about any immigrant who isn’t angrily accusing Americans of racism these days, it seems to me the real heroes of this story are the Marines. Can we learn a little more about them? Nah, they’re just Americans.
Cowen’s article is about America’s living standards surpassing Europe’s by leaps and bounds. Among our advantages, he says, is immigration — which would come as a surprise to Californians, who took in 30 million Mexicans and immediately went from Reagan Country to The Open Sewer State.
But Cowen says Europe’s immigrants — in contrast to ours, apparently — “are from quite different non-Western cultures.”
Our immigrants are raping children, running vast human trafficking operations, performing bizarre Santeria rituals, committing complicated credit card frauds and stealing billions of dollars from U.S. government programs. Not exactly de Tocqueville’s America.
Describing the contributions of each immigrant group Cowen praises is beyond the purview of this column — that will be a coming attraction. We’ll look only at the “top achievers” he says we’re getting from Afghanistan and East Africa, inasmuch as that claim was clearly calculated to tick us off.
Like most Americans, 99% of Afghans want sharia to be the law of the land, and 61% say it should apply to non-Muslims. Seventy-nine percent support the death penalty for leaving Islam, 60% approve of honor killings, and 39% think suicide bombings are sometimes justified.
Last year, two Afghans were arrested with AK-47s and 500 rounds of ammunition, with the intent of committing a terrorist attack on Election Day. We don’t even have that many Afghan immigrants, though we’ve got a lot more than we wanted, thanks to Joe Biden.
Our main source of immigration from East Africa is Ethiopia, a country with a rich history of genocide, constant warfare and ethnic cleansing. (New York Times headline last year: “Ethiopia’s Agony: ‘I Have Never Seen This Kind of Cruelty in My Life.’”) So that sounds promising.
One of Cowen’s thriving East African immigrants is Ethiopian Besam Semirali Bashwie. He entered the country in 2019 and within two years was arrested in Alexandria, Virginia, for racketeering. He was sentenced to five years, then released after a year in prison. Thereupon, he was re-arrested for driving drunk, released again, and in short order, he was charged with abduction with intent to defile, poisoning by other methods and felony sexual penetration by force. He’s what we call a “striver.”
Just this month, an Ethiopian naturalized citizen was criminally charged with fraudulently receiving U.S. citizenship by lying about his participation in the 1970s Ethiopian Red Terror.
Why would a respected economist feel obliged to wax lyrical about Afghan and East African immigrants?
At least Carl’s piece wasn’t hilariously wrong, just pointless. Is there a deficit of praise for immigrants? Has there been a lull in the endless prattle about their wonderfulness?
Where does this primal urge to praise immigrants come from? Do French writers regularly pop off about the fantastic American ex-pats they know? Are Indians driven to give hourly tributes to the British who brought them railways, roads, canals, bridges, indoor plumbing, commercial food production, irrigation systems, the telegraph, the rule of law, etc. etc.? I know Zimbabweans don’t pen homilies to White farmers; they kill or exile them.
There would seem to be two possible explanations:
1) Our pervasive liberal monoculture has managed to inculcate conservatives into the belief that anyone is better than an American. That seems implausible. They haven’t persuaded us of anything else.
2) More likely, conservatives are embarrassed about the fact that Western culture is so vastly superior to every other culture in the world, and their praise for immigrants is how they give a little pat on the head to people from the inferior cultures. Good job, Zippy. We’re all proud of you.
COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER
South Africa likely trying to stave off total collapse by appeasing the Americans: “However, after pressure placed on SA leaders by the Trump Administration through sanctions, South Africa is starting to feel the pain and they are rolling over. Malema has been brought up on charges again and this time he was convicted by an “equality court” for inciting violence through hate speech.”
South African Politician Who Called For Killing White Farmers Convicted On Hate Speech Charges
It was the White House ambush that shocked the world. A South African delegation headed by president Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in Washington DC with big grins and smug confidence, ready to milk the American taxpayer for even more foreign aid. What they received instead was thorough embarrassment.
Trump confronted Ramaphosa on the issue of race-based land seizures through the Expropriation Act of 2024, which largely targets white farmers for confiscation (There are 140 race based laws that oppress whites in SA) . The land is then redistributed to black citizens who often run the farms into the ground. The leader has denied that land confiscation is taking place. The South African government and the leftist media has spent the better part of the year trying to spin the issue and deny their motives.
When asked by reporters what he could do to convince Trump that there was no threat of “white genocide” in South Africa, Ramaphosa chuckled and shrugged off the accusation, suggesting that Trump had been misinformed. Trump surprised the leftist political leader with a video montage proving otherwise.
The South African government, dominated by woke political activists, has tried to cover up the targeting of white farmers by race communists for years. Their efforts to expropriate land from those same farmers sent a clear message that they are in support of the ethnic cleansing of whites.
Trumps montage featured a number of speeches by communist EFF party leader Julius Malema. Malema represents around 10% of South African voters, but all parties in South Africa are essentially socialist or communist in their ideals and Malema’s sentiments are shared by many of their members. White conservatives in SA have near-zero representation in the government. Malema’s chant of “Kill the Boer” (kill the white farmer), is not limited to members of the EFF.
Malema had been brought up on charges of inciting race violence through hate speech before, and was convicted on lesser incidents in 2011. None of the charges for his genocide chants stuck. The courts categorized “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” as a type of protest song. It was treated as protected cultural expression rather than what it really was, a call to mass murder. Malema famously noted:
‘No white man is going to beat me up…You must never be scared to kill. A revolution demands that at some point there must be killing…”
The Home Office said Malema had also made “statements calling for the slaughter of white people [in South Africa] or hinted that it could be an acceptable option in the future”.
However, after pressure placed on SA leaders by the Trump Administration through sanctions, South Africa is starting to feel the pain and they are rolling over. Malema has been brought up on charges again and this time he was convicted by an “equality court” for inciting violence through hate speech.
It might be the first time that a leftist bureaucratic institution in South Africa has actually punished a leftist group instead of protecting them from prosecution. The EFF has responded by rolling out one of their token white members to deflect, concocting a story in which Malema led the chants because of a supposed “racist incident” at a high school that occurred years earlier (which did not involve farmers). In other words, it was the white man’s fault that Malema called for the killing of whites.
The EFF asserts that their actions are in response to “white supremacy”, but that excuse isn’t going to hold water anymore. The equality court’s ruling justifies Trump’s concerns about anti-white racism in South Africa. Furthermore, whites only make up around 7% of the population and have no power in government. A group cannot be “supreme” if they have no power.
It is the leading party, the ANC, and their partners in numerous other socialist parties that have run the nation into the ground. At this time, South Africa is nearing total collapse, with a 33% unemployment rate and crumbling infrastructure.
This is what happens when leftists are allowed to take power. The result is an economic implosion with white conservatives and producers used as a convenient scapegoat. South African leaders are clearly not used to this kind of scrutiny. They have long been shielded from western criticism by the establishment media.
Trump is the first president to put a spotlight on the backwards progressive government and its grotesque mismanagement, and it appears that his efforts are beginning to have an effect. Not so much in punishing Malema, it is unlikely he will face any real consequences. Rather, it’s the fact that South Africa has been forced to acknowledge the ethnic hatred of whites as a tangible issue. It’s a geopolitical win and a win against leftist propaganda.
The Third Edition of The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements will be published by Antelope Hill on September 5. This is James Edwards’ interview from August 30 where we discuss the revision.
Philip Weiss is a Jewish liberal who somehow hopes that the Democrats get real on Israel. He hates Trump and the GOP and champions diversity and “anti-racism. It’s true that the Democrat base hates Israel but the Democrat politicians still toe the line, refuse to talk about Israeli apartheid or genocide, and they continue to rake in donations from Lobby pro-Israel Jewish donors.
Tom Friedman has finally reached his limit. The Gaza slaughter is turning Israel into “a pariah state,” so it’s time for the war to stop, he says. The massacre of journalists and other civilians at the Nasser hospital did it.
Friedman says Gaza is tearing apart the Jewish community and the Democrats. “It is … going to rip apart many, many synagogues around the world… between those who feel the need to stand with Israel, right or wrong, and those who simply can’t stand this Israeli government’s awful behavior in Gaza.
“It is also going to rip apart the Democratic Party, between those who are afraid to defy the influential Israeli lobbying group AIPAC, for fear of losing campaign funding to their Republican opponents, and those who just can’t stand it any longer.”
Friedman is right on both counts, though he’s got the wrong attitude.
Yes, the Jewish community is f***ed for as far as the eye can see – and it should be. Israel’s racist aggression is at last dawning on the Jewish mainstream. Young Jews are shocked and determined to find out — How-and-why did generations of the leading Jewish organizations support the false idol of Israel through cycle after cycle of ethnic cleansing? Nothing will save the Jewish community from this accounting for another generation or two. It’s about time
As for the Democratic Party– we need the Democratic Party to defeat Trumpism. But the Democratic Party is also f***ed as far as the eye can see.
For good reason. There is a cancer on the Democratic Party, its blind advocacy for Israel, and nothing Zionists, even liberal ones, say about the occupation will fix that. Polling shows that the base hates Israel (and so do lots of other Americans). The party bosses love Israel.
Kamala Harris’s bent-knee support for Israel in the midst of a genocide clearly played a role in her loss last year. This was proven by Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in the NY mayor’s primary in June, up against $25 million in Cuomo’s warchest, when the assemblyman mobilized an army of the young because he was unafraid to say genocide and apartheid.
The Democratic Party is screwed until it can
The Democratic Party is screwed so long as it accepts AIPAC at any level. It is screwed so long as liberal media take Israeli lies seriously. It is screwed so long as Tom Friedman and David Brooks refer to a racist war criminal as “Bibi” and their editors and hosts think that’s OK.
The party is screwed so long as it cannot make the simple moral declaration that American arms must not be used to murder brave journalists and starving children.
The great moral voice of the left at this moment is Rachel Accurso, the children’s entertainer Miss Rachel. Because she will not shut up about the maiming and killing of civilians, and she does not care about her career. She has made viewers of PBS News Hour cry the world over by showing us the beautiful children hurt by our bombs. We must lift her up.
Our bombs. Democrats in Congress need to start saying just one ounce of what Marjorie Taylor Greene said about American-funded genocide on social media the other day.
“If America was being bombed day and night because of something horrific our government did, and many innocent Americans and American children were being killed and traumatically injured, and we begged for mercy, but the rest of the world said, ‘Americans voted for their government so they deserve it, their government is bad so all Americans are bad, therefore this is what they get and must be done’ And the world was silent to our suffering And our cities and homes were bombed and turned to rubble. And our infrastructure was destroyed, no farms, no grocery stores, no more organized society. And no one helped our injured and hungry children. How would you feel? What would you think? What would you do? This is what is happening to Gaza where in spite of what we have all been told, many innocent people and children are being killed…
“[E]very U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with. And I will not be silent about it.”
Yes—Greene has said hateful things about Muslims. But she honors the humanity of Palestinians in a way very few Democrats are able to do. Why? Because of the money they get from the Israel lobby, as Friedman says.
Shame on these racist corrupt Democrats. They should be following the leadership of Miss Rachel, who day after day is putting herself on the line for the sake of children starving to death thanks to American weapons.
Then they’d have a political party again.
We need some clarity and leadership among liberals:
If you are going to talk about the horrors of the West Bank – as Ira Glass did for an hour on This American Life — and not say the word “apartheid” once – a word every human rights organization has said — you are useless. (If the Dems had listened to Jimmy Carter on apartheid nearly 20 years ago rather than shutting him down, the genocide would not be happening.)
If you are going to say that the killing was tolerable so long as Israel backs a two-state solution – you are just being racist. (“Palestinian civilians are being killed by the dozen almost daily as the inevitable spillover” of a “just war for Israeli survival and an attempt to produce a better Palestinian partner in Gaza.” — Friedman)
If you are going to offer apologetics for genocide, you are useless. “As I’ve said before on the show, there is no country in the world with a capable military that would not have responded to something like October 7 with unfathomable force” – Ezra Klein. This is the argument the Myanmar government makes against the Rohingya.
If you are going to talk about the horrors of Gaza and not call for an end to American weapons for the genocide, then you are useless.
This has to be the bare minimum. Stop arming war criminals who kill children. Americans will sign up for your party. Ask Mamdani.
While we’re at it, let’s honor the campus protesters. They put their futures on the line, and some paid with their Ivy League degrees, for a simple principle: we don’t want our institutions to support a genocide. Stop smearing them as antisemites.
If you can’t stand up for children and journalists in the bomb sights, if you can’t separate your politics from a genocide because the Zionist community has given you big campaign contributions, then you are deservedly screwed.
There’s only one way to move forward, in dignity and the light.
End of Ukraine war within 6 months; Ukraine is losing badly and suffering enormous casualties; war is much less popular than it was among Ukrainians; Trump has good instincts but little knowledge; Trump was pressured into arming Ukrainians in his first term because of the Russiagate hoax; he is getting little pressure from Republicans to end it, and even though 2/3 of Democrats oppose the war, the Democrat elites are not pressuring Trump to end it. Russia will not agree to a NATO force in Ukraine p0st-war.
Re the Gaza genocide, Israel’s problem is that they want to ethnically cleanse Gaza but no one will take the Gazans; so they keep up the killing. The Israeli army, depending on reservists, is exhausted, and they are recruiting foreign Jews to serve. Napolitano plays two clips from Israeli Foreign Minister Bezalel Smotrich illustrating Israel’s genocidal intent.
