1533 De Jeugdzorg heeft geen idee hoe ze kunnen voorkomen, en genezen lukt al helemaal niet.

 

 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.

https://www.bndestem.nl/binnenland/honderden-onhandelbare-jongeren-voor-miljoenen-gedumpt-op-vakantieparken-zij-leven-in-het-niks~acb1b1d5/

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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.

  

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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.

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Andre Eggerding2 dagen geleden

@ Marja Teilen ,480.000 hulpverzoeken in de jeugdopvang is niet de schuld van de politiek.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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 !

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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?

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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.

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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.

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james groote2 dagen geleden

ach verhogen we de belasting toch weer een beetje

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Karl van den Broek2 dagen geleden

Weer een schandaal waarbij politiek loopt te slapen of weg kijkt.

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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.

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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.

                        ==========================

      Ik heb de volledige tekst van Chris Hedges in Princeton door DeepSeek laten fatsoeneren.

Ik plaats hem hieronder.  

HIj is door Deep Seek ook in 1000 woorden (  bijna 2 pagina's ) samengevat, in het Nederlands.  Die heb ik in de comments geplaatst.

  

Chris Hedges:  

 

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.