Het blijkt dat er heel veel
geld wordt besteed aan onhandelbare kinderen.
Citaat uit het artikel:
"Bij de duurste
jongere liepen de totale zorgkosten zelfs op tot 1,75 miljoen euro. "
Ik had een
goede inzendig gedaan, maar die is niet geplaatst. Misschien omdat ik een
prikje uitdeelde over de Sharia.
Het is bekend
dat alle jongeren die een 'school-shooting' plegen in de VS aan de
anti-depressiva zaten.
En wat denk je
van een kind dat elke dag drie Red Bull's drinkt !?
Dit schreef
ik:
Oorzaken
bestrijden. Zoals: Gezond voedsel, geen moderne toevoegingen. Geen
anti-depressiva. Geen medicijnen als het kan. Duidelijk en streng beleid. (De
sharia als inspiratie?). Ouders mee laten betalen. Wij vinden onszelf humaan,
beter dan anderen, want we behandelen de probleemgevallen zo liefelijk. Ja,
maar de hard werkende en zich goed gedragende burger moet er voor opdraaien.
Krijgt geen hulp. Wij zijn NIET humaan. We prijzen onszelf met ons foute
beleid. Lees Thomas Sowell.
Nu heb ik hem nog eens
gepost. Hoop dat ie nu wel door komt.
UPDATE: Ja, nu is ie wel geplaatst:
Je moet de oorzaken bestrijden. Dus gezond voedsel, geen moderne toevoegingen. Geen anti-depressiva. Geen medicijnen als het kan. Duidelijk en streng beleid. Ouders mee laten betalen bij schade. Wij vinden onszelf humaan want we behandelen de probleemgevallen zo zachtaardig, terwijl de kinderen behoefte hebben aan LEIDING ! De hard werkende en zich goed gedragende burger moet er voor opdraaien, er onder lijden. Wij zijn NIET humaan. We prijzen onszelf met ons foute beleid. Lees Thomas Sowell.
------------------
Honderden ‘onhandelbare’ jongeren
voor miljoenen ‘gedumpt’ op vakantieparken: ‘Zij leven in het niks’
Honderden ‘onhandelbare’ jongeren belanden uit pure
nood in vakantiehuisjes en op campings, dag en nacht bewaakt door particuliere
begeleiders. Voor deze noodgreep betalen gemeenten zich blauw. De kosten
stijgen soms tot boven een miljoen euro per kind.
Binnenlandredactie
26 maart 2026, 07:00Laatste update: 26 maart 2026,
08:05
De oorzaak is een schreeuwend tekort aan zware
jeugdzorg. Omdat de gesloten jeugdzorg momenteel wordt afgebouwd na eerdere
misstanden, en reguliere instellingen geen plek hebben of jongeren weigeren te
plaatsen, zien hulpverleners vaak geen andere uitweg.
Als noodgreep huren ze een chalet of appartement en
zetten ze er permanente een-op-eenbegeleiding of twee-op-eenbegeleiding op.
Soms voor een paar maanden, soms ruim een jaar. „Dat zijn dus een soort
mini-gesloten jeugdzorgjes”, stelt emeritus hoogleraar Peer van der Helm in
gesprek met tv-programma Zembla. „Maar in plaats van dat de deur op
slot gaat, staat een aantal stevige kerels je tegen te houden.”
Gemeenten luiden de noodklok, blijkt uit onderzoek
van Zembla. Deze week nog schreef deze site dat een 13-jarige
jongen door de jeugdbescherming op zo’n vakantiepark was ‘gedumpt’.
Dat is in strijd met het Europees Verdrag voor de Rechten van de Mens,
oordeelde de rechter.
Miljoenenrekening
Uit een rondgang langs gemeenten blijkt dat deze
noodgreep de afgelopen drie jaar zeker vierhonderd keer werd toegepast.
Waarschijnlijk ligt het werkelijke aantal nog hoger. De constructies leveren
gemeenten torenhoge rekeningen op. Eén gemeente meldt een tarief van 2200 euro
per etmaal, uitsluitend voor de begeleiding.
Bij de duurste jongere liepen de totale zorgkosten
zelfs op tot 1,75 miljoen euro. „Eén miljoen voor een traject is natuurlijk
mindblowing”, reageert wethouder Pieter van der Zwan van de Friese gemeente
Smallingerland tegenover Zembla.
Zijn gemeente was in twee jaar tijd ruim 3 miljoen
euro kwijt aan een handvol jongeren. „Op een begroting van 32 miljoen is dat
niet houdbaar. Ook nog eens wetende dat dit niet eens echt helpt.”
Leven in het niks
Hoogleraar Van der Helm waarschuwt voor de schade die
deze manier van opvangen aanricht. „Deze kinderen leven in het niks. Ze
ontwikkelen zich niet. Je hospitaliseert, want er is continu iemand die op je
let.”
In strijd met de wet, reageert ook de Inspectie
Gezondheidszorg en Jeugd (IGJ) geschrokken. Zij noemt de werkwijze ‘zeer
vrijheidsbeperkend’, iets wat wettelijk alleen mag met toestemming van een
rechter. De inspectie snapt niet hoe dit op deze schaal ingezet kan worden.
------------
Bert de Fijter1 dag geleden
@Andre Eggerding "480.000 hulpverzoeken in de
jeugdopvang is niet de schuld van de politiek." Maar wel het feit dat de
hulpverlening is afgebroken door de bezuinigingen en de marktwerking die niet
de oplossing blijkt te zijn. De politiek heeft met een korte termijn visie en
"oplossingen" voor de lange termijn deze problematiek veroorzaakt.
Dit was destijds al direct duidelijk voor de werkers in de praktijk. Maar er
moest een gaaf landje opgebouwd worden. Oorzaak en gevolg denken was vrijwel
weg.
Andre Eggerding2 dagen geleden
@ Marja Teilen ,480.000 hulpverzoeken in de
jeugdopvang is niet de schuld van de politiek.
Rene van Gils2 dagen geleden
Je kan hier zeggen wat je van deze situatie vindt. Ik
heb er geen kijk op. Ik zou zomaar in de politiek kunnen werken en iets
beslissen, zonder er verstand van te hebben. Jongeren en alleen, zonder pleeg/
ouderlijk gezag. Met de oorlog in hun hoofd en hormonen die bij tieners horen.
Waarom wordt dat hier opgevangen en wordt de rekening betaald van alle
werkenden in Nederland. Wat beseffen deze jongeren om een 2e kans op vredig
bestaan waar te maken. Zoniet dan pas je hier niet meer; logisch toch
Arjan deijkers2 dagen geleden
Kijk dit is Nederland Nederland en de zorg het kabinet
is op de goede weg om Nederland nog verder kapot te maken dat lukt ze
ontzettend goed zeg
Marja Teilen2 dagen geleden
Rutte heeft de jeugdzorg over de schutting van de
gemeenten gekieperd met gelijktijdig een bezuinigingsopdracht. Gemeentes hadden
totaal geen ervaring en het aantal geprivatiseerde jeugdzorgburootjes ontplofte
in korte tijd met factor 10. De VVD en ook de andere rechtse partijen willen
namelijk een kleine overheid en dan krijg je dit soort wantoestanden, zeker als
het toezicht faalt. De arme hulpbehoevende jongeren en de samenleving betalen
de prijs
christ Frijters2 dagen geleden
Ik denk dat deze personen niet te helpen zijn, als ze
het thuis al niet kunnen oplossen, is er goed wat mis in hun denkwijze.Zet ze
aan het werk,zodat ze een doel in het leven hebben.Werken is de oplossing.
Harry Romijn2 dagen geleden
Door totale onkunde, omdat zo'n beetje alles, wat met
kennis, ervaring en hersenen wegbezuinigd is, zitten we nu met heel erg dure
ingehuurde oplossingen. In mijn huis tijdelijk een jongeman opgevangen: was
door ambtelijke ??? anderhalf jaar aan zijn lot overgelaten, en moest toen met
de uiterst slappe linkse hand weer op het rechte pad gebracht worden. Dat lukte
dus totaal NIET !
Jaap van Nieuwenhuijzen2 dagen geleden
Begrijp ik nou goed dat zo'n 10% van onze bevolking
onder de hoede van GGZ zit of zou moeten zitten? Het lijkt er dan op dat iets
structureel mis is. Of is dit realistisch?
Bert de Fijter2 dagen geleden
Dat is de uitkomst van de korte termijn
bezuinigingsvisie van de afgelopen 15 jaar op de GGZ en wonen en het resultaat
van de marktwerking die al deze problemen vanzelf zouden oplossen. Bakken geld
kostende huidige oplossingen voor GGZ en afbraak van instellingen en daardoor
daklozen en de ellende die deze mensen moeten ondergaan en veroorzaken, zonder
korte termijn oplossing nu, want diezelfde veroorzakers hebben nu de grootste
lepel in de pap. In wat een waanzinnig gaaf land leven we.
Andre Eggerding2 dagen geleden
In 2024 hebben 1,5 miljoen mensen hulp gezocht bij de
GGZ. Dat kostte meer dan 5 miljard. De zorgvrager terug dringen is de
oplossing. Neem meer verantwoordelijkheid voor je eigen gezondheid.
james groote2 dagen geleden
ach verhogen we de belasting toch weer een beetje
Karl van den Broek2 dagen geleden
Weer een schandaal waarbij politiek loopt te slapen of
weg kijkt.
made by proxy2 dagen geleden
Ik heb een zoon die deze hulp gehad heeft, deels klopt
dit verhaal en is het zorgelijk. Echter heb ik ervaren dat het het
tegenovergestelde is als wat gesteld word in dit artikel. Er staan niet altijd
zware kerels om ze in het huisje te houden. Mijn zoon is totaal los gemaakt van
de maatschappij en dagelijks leven. Gevolg is dat hij nu niet goed reïntegreert
in de maatschappij en nog steeds wacht op goede hulp, dit alles na de toeslagen
affaire.
joris goedbloed2 dagen geleden
Typisch gevalletje "het volgende kabinet lost het
maar op"? Er is geld genoeg om de zware jeugdzorg goed in te richten. We
lezen allemaal dagelijks waar Den Haag de belastingcenten aan verbrast : aan
zaken waar van tevoren van bekend is dat het geldverspilling is. Ze hebben
maling aan degenen die hulp nodig hebben. Simpel : die koste geld Maar wel
zichzelf 15% loonsverhoging geven...... Heb ik het nog niet over de
buitenlandse invasie. Die kosten kunnen voor de jeugdzorg worden gebruikt.
Thank you for inviting me.
I have just finished up with the cartoonist Joe
Sacco. I hope you know his work: Palestine, Footnotes in
Gaza, a book on the genocide. We interviewed 29 families in Egypt from Gaza
and have spent the last year writing the story of the genocide through their
experiences. We literally turned in the manuscript a week ago, which is why, if
I look burned out, I am burned out. It will be published in October. But I
didn’t want to speak about the book given what’s happening as I speak in
southern Lebanon, in Iran, and in Gaza. I wanted to speak a little more
globally today.
The genocide in Gaza is the beginning.
Welcome to the new world order, the age of technologically advanced
barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the
strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands, and you are showered with
missiles and bombs.
We watch this madness daily with the war on Iran, the saturation bombing of
southern Lebanon, and the suffering in Gaza. International bodies such as the
United Nations have been neutered, transformed into useless appendages of
another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders, and international
law have vanished.
The most psychopathic rulers of human history—those who reduced cities to
ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites, and littered lands they
occupied with mass graves and corpses—have returned with a vengeance, opening
up a vast moral abyss. The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of
judges who will soon be purged domestically, and international bodies such as
the International Court of Justice, is contemptuously violated.
Savagery abroad, savagery at home.
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying South Lebanon,
and I quote, “using Gaza as a model, a blueprint for destruction, used again as
a path to peace.” End quote. Over 1 million people have already been displaced
in Lebanon—one fifth of the entire population of a country that already hosts
the world’s highest number of refugees per capita—in just a few weeks. Add to
this 2 million displaced in Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. Six million
people rendered homeless for four decades.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the US to
go to war with Iran. Previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, have
refused, in no small part because of fierce opposition within the Pentagon,
which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not project a positive
outcome for the United States or its allies. But Donald Trump, encouraged by
his inept negotiating team of his son‑in‑law Jared Kushner and fellow real
estate developer and golfing partner Steve Witkoff—each fervent Zionists—took
the bait.
Joseph Kent, who resigned his position as director of the National
Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter
that, quote, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that
we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American
lobby.”
The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28th
has been protean. Is it to shut down Iran’s nuclear program? Is it to thwart
Iran’s ballistic missile program? Is it because the US carried out preemptive
attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of US assets once
Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out
lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti‑government protesters during
massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down
Iran’s so‑called state‑sponsored terrorism? Or are these subtexts for something
else?
Certainly, Israel and the US seek regime change, but here it appears the US
and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and
Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran—the breaking apart of the country
into warring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a
failed state. Persians in Iran, where I worked frequently, constitute roughly
61 percent of the population, with various minority groups who often suffer
state repression making up the remaining 39 percent. These ethnic groups
include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Baloch, Arabs, and Turkmens, along with
religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians, Baháʼís, Zoroastrians, and
Jews.
The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic and religious enclaves
would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region, giving it the ability
to, if not occupy its neighbors, then directly control and subjugate them
through proxies—part of a long‑held desire for Greater Israel. It would also
make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian gas reserves, the second
largest in the world, and its oil reserves—12 percent of the global total.
Israel’s crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and now the
Iranians is justified by the extermination of six million Jews during the
Holocaust. But it is not lost on the Global South, especially Palestinians,
that nearly all Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in
Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating
the Holocaust has drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass
slaughter. Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their
true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the
frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as
eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes
of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.
The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims
because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust
scholars and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to
prevent genocide but to perpetuate it—not to explore the past but to manipulate
the present. Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive
property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The
Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles deleted an Instagram post that read “Never
again can’t only mean never again for Jews.” After a backlash, in the hands of
Zionists, “never again” means precisely that: never again only for Jews.
Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism—which, if you
haven’t read it, you should—writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only
because he presided over, quote, “the humiliation of the white man applying to
Europe the colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved
exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the Blacks of
Africa.”
The near annihilation of Tasmania’s aboriginal population, the German
slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine
of 1943—then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to Hindus as,
quote, “a beastly people with a beastly religion”—along with the dropping of
nuclear bombs on civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrates
something fundamental about Western civilization. Genocide is not an anomaly.
It is coded within our DNA.
In America, the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negroes do not have to be told
what fascism is in action. We know its theories of Nordic supremacy and
economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg Laws, modeled them on laws
designed to disenfranchise Blacks. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to
Native Americans and Filipinos—although they lived in the US and US
territories—was emulated by the German fascists, who stripped citizenship from
Jews. American anti‑miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial
marriage, were the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.
American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry—the
so‑called one‑drop rule—as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more
flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as
Jewish.
The millions of indigenous victims of colonial projects in countries such
as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo, and Vietnam are, for this
reason, deaf to the fatuous claims by Zionists that their victimhood is unique.
They too suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or
unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state our own Christian fascists and
the far‑right dream of creating for themselves—one that rejects political and
cultural pluralism as well as legal, diplomatic, and ethical norms. Israel is
admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and
uses indiscriminate lethal force to cleanse its society of those condemned as
human contaminants.
It was this distortion of the Holocaust that troubled Primo Levi, who was
imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and who wrote Survival in
Auschwitz. Levi was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and
its treatment of Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as, quote, “an
inexhaustible source of evil that is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors and
springs up in a thousand ways against the very will of all—as a thirst for
revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”
Levi deplored the Manichaeism of those who shun nuance and complexity. He
condemned those who reduce the river of human events to conflicts and conflicts
to duels—us and them. He warned that the network of human relationships inside
the concentration camps was not simple; it could not be reduced to two blocks,
victims and perpetrators. The enemy he knew was outside but also inside.
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, known as King Chaim, ruled in the Łódź ghetto in
Poland on behalf of the Nazi occupiers. The ghetto became a slave‑labor camp
that enriched Rumkowski and his Nazi masters. Rumkowski deported opponents to
death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned
obedience. He embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example
of what many of us under similar circumstances are capable of becoming. We are
all mirrored in Rumkowski. His ambiguity is ours. It is our second nature. We
hybrids molded from clay and spirit. Levi wrote in The Drowned and the
Saved: “His fever is ours. The fever of our Western civilization that
descends into hell with trumpets and drums, and its miserable adornments are
the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”
Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget
our essential fragility. Levi continues: “Willingly or not, we come to terms
with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled
in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the
train is waiting.”
Levi understood that the line between the victim and the victimizer is
razor‑thin. We can all become willing executioners. There is nothing
intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust. And Levi
for this reason was persona non grata in Israel.
Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and
meaning as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel
seized Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan Heights, and
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel, as American sociologist Nathan Glazer
approvingly observed, became, quote, “the religion of the American Jews.” The
Holocaust became their moral capital.
“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always
to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles Maier in The
Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity. “It is
intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public, so that
gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be
enshrined in public sites—Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation
sites—dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials.”
But what is the role of a museum in a country such as the United States,
far from the site of the Holocaust? Is it to rally the people who suffer or to
instruct non‑Jews? Is it supposed to serve as a reminder that it can happen
here? Or is it a statement that some special consideration is deserved? Under
what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as a public grief?
And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the
credentials of other particular sorrows too?
An American historian of Polish ancestry argues that with the German
invasion of 1939, the Poles became the first people in Europe to experience the
Holocaust, and that historians have so far chosen to interpret the tragedy in
exclusivist terms—namely as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish
diaspora. If Polish Americans claim that their own “forgotten Holocaust,” what
recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to
publicly funded Holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh‑day
Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third
Reich?
Unique suffering confers unique entitlement. Any crime Israel carries out
in the name of its survival—its right to exist—is justified in the name of this
uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never‑ending
battle against Nazism, which is protean depending on who Israel targets. To
challenge this bloodlust is to be an antisemite, facilitating another genocide
of Jews.
This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel but also
the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides—ones they
also seek to obscure.
The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro
quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, blocking UN resolutions and
sanctions that would condemn its crimes, and demonizing Palestinians and their
supporters becomes proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel in return
absolves the West for its indifference to the plight of Jews during the
Holocaust and Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to
separate Nazism from the rest of German history—including the genocide German
colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German Southwest Africa,
now Namibia.
Such magic, the Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal writes,
legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel
perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus
reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler
colonialism that led to the Holocaust.
Professor Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide
Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article about the war on
Gaza on October 13, 2023, titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” This
denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar whose family members perished in
the Holocaust was a very lonely stance. Professor Segal saw in the Israeli
government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza and
the blood‑curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials—the
defense minister said Israel was fighting “human animals”—the stench of
genocide.
“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that as we teach our
students there are red flags that once we notice them we’re supposed to work in
order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Professor Segal
told me. “Even if it’s not genocidal yet, Holocaust studies as a field might be
dead—which is not necessarily a bad thing. If indeed Holocaust studies is
intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory,
maybe it’s good that we won’t have Holocaust studies anymore. And maybe it will
open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust
as history, as real history.”
Professor Segal paid for his honesty. The offer to lead the University of
Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which has issued no
condemnation of the genocide, was revoked. When Professor Segal and I testified
at the state capitol in Trenton in opposition to the adoption of the
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) bill, which equates
criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism, we were jeered by Zionists
and our microphones were cut by the committee chairman. There we were arguing
that this bill would curtail free speech while we were in real time being
denied free speech.
Genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai
calls, quote, “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction that is geared to
preparing the world for the winners of globalization minus the inconvenient
noise of the losers.”
The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European allies
as it carries out genocide has effectively imploded the post‑World War II
international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West can no longer
lecture anyone about democracy, human rights, or the supposed virtues of
Western civilization. The ruse that somehow we as a nation promote democracy,
equality, and human rights is finished.
At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo—a feeling of chaos and
emptiness—it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of
political and ethical consciousness in the twenty‑first century, just as the
First World War was for a generation in the West.
Pankaj Mishra writes: “None of us who reported from Israel and Palestine,
where I worked as a reporter for seven years, predicted this genocide, and yet
we were acutely aware of the genocidal impulse that lay at the heart of the
Zionist project—the desire by large segments of Israeli society to eradicate
and expel all Palestinians.”
This genocidal impulse was there from the inception of Zionism. Victor
Klemperer, a professor of linguistics and the son of a Berlin rabbi living
under Nazi rule, noted in his diary: “To me the Zionists who want to go back to
the Jewish state of 70 AD, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, are just as
offensive as the Nazis with their nosing after blood, their ancient cultural
roots, their partly cringing, partly obtuse winding back of the world. They are
altogether a match for the National Socialists.”
I covered the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, who claimed that violence was a
Jewish virtue and revenge a divine commandment. He was, when I was based in
Jerusalem, barred by the Israeli government from running for office. Kahane was
assassinated on November 5, 1990, in New York City. His party in Israel was
outlawed four years later after Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn‑born doctor and
member, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on worshippers,
killing 29 Palestinians—an event I covered for The New York Times.
Goldstein, dressed in his army captain’s uniform, was overpowered by
worshippers and beaten to death.
Kahanism didn’t die. It was nurtured by Jewish extremists and colonists.
Kahane’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians
infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society.
I saw this intolerance at political rallies held by Netanyahu, who received
lavish funding from right‑wing Americans associated with AIPAC when he ran
against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the
Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted Kahane‑inspired slogans such as
“Death to Arabs” and “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed
in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin. And
Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on November 4, 1995.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political
career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben‑Gvir, who hung a
portrait of Goldstein on the wall of his living room; Bezalel Smotrich; Avigdor
Lieberman; Gideon Sa’ar; Naftali Bennett; and others. Netanyahu’s father, Ben‑Zion,
who worked as an assistant to the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir
Jabotinsky—who was referred to by Benito Mussolini, and I quote, as “a good
fascist”—was a leader in the Herut Party that called on Israel to seize all of
the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party
carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of
Israel.
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and other Jewish intellectuals
described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York
Times as a party, quote, “closely akin in its organization, methods,
political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties.”
There has always been a virulent strain of Jewish fascism within the
Zionist project—mirroring the strain of fascism in American society.
Unfortunately for us and the Palestinians, these fascistic strains are
ascendant.
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far‑right
Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism
are the Zionist versions of the Nazis’ Blut und Boden ideology.
Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the
Palestinians—whom Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, who were
massacred by the Israelites. Europeans and Euro‑Americans in the American
colonies used the same biblical passage to justify their genocide against
Native Americans.
Enemies, usually Muslims, who are slated for extinction are subhumans who
embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of
communication. Those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism
understand that messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are
expelled.
Jewish extremists call for the Al‑Aqsa Mosque—one of the three most sacred
sites for Muslims, supposedly built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple,
which was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD—to be demolished. These
extremists call for it to be replaced by a Third Jewish Temple, a move that
would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which zealots refer to as
Judea and Samaria, is being annexed, as I speak, by Israel. Israel, governed by
religious laws imposed by ultra‑Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties,
will soon mirror the despotic theocracy in Iran.
James Baldwin presciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism—and
just the students here, if you have not read James Baldwin, you don’t
understand America. He warned that there was a, quote, “terrible probability
that Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from
their captives and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos
throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end,
will bring about a racial war as the world has never seen and for which
generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.”
The savagery in Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza is the same savagery we face at
home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter, and unprovoked war on
Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.
The Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these
monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be
trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths: superficial charm,
grandiosity and self‑importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant
for lying, deception, manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.
They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion, and self‑sacrifice.
They live by the creed of “me, me.”
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these
vices virtues. The fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors
to be truths. And the fact that millions of people share the same forms of
mental pathology does not make these people sane.” Erich Fromm writes in The
Sane Society.
We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in
Iran. We watch it in Lebanon. We see this evil excused or masked by political
leaders and the media. The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell,
sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms
“refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing,” and of course
“genocide” when writing about Gaza.
Those who name and denounce this evil—including the heroic students who set
up encampments on campuses here at Princeton and even abroad—are smeared,
blacklisted, and purged. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is
descending upon us. The silence of all authoritarian states.
We know where this ends.
Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, speak out against
the crime of genocide, and see your broadcasting license revoked—as Trump’s
chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, has proposed.
We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They
are not in Iran. They are here among us. They dictate our lives. They are
traitors to our ideals and they are traitors to our country. They envision a
world of slaves and masters, and Gaza is only the start.
There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.
These are the only choices left.
Thank you.
