he Trumpster is not yet finished his first year back in the White House, and I cannot imagine how our crumbling republic will survive three more years of this man-child and the misfits and miscreants with whom he has surrounded himself. And it occurs to me lately that neither I nor anyone else is supposed to imagine any kind of future — good, bad, in the middle — beyond Jan. 20, 2029, when President Trump will no longer be president. The future will not be the point by then. By then we are supposed to be living in an imaginary past that we won’t have to imagine because the imaginary past will be the actual present.

It is not quite three months since Trump issued an executive order designating “antifa,” the more or less fictitious “organization” of antifascists, a “domestic terrorist organization.” In the Trump White House’s rendering, antifa “explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities and our system of law.” To this end, it organizes and executes vast campaigns of violence. It coordinates all this across the country. It recruits and radicalizes young people, “then employs elaborate means and mechanisms to shield the identities of its operatives, conceal its funding sources and operations in an effort to frustrate law enforcement, and recruit additional members.”

I didn’t take the executive order containing this kind of language the least bit seriously when it was issued Sept. 22. Antifa, so far as I understand it, does not actually exist. It is a state of mind, or it signifies a shared set of political sentiments vaguely in the direction of traditional anarchism — a hyper-individualistic ultra-libertarianism when translated into the American context.

Trump’s executive order describing antifa as an organized terrorist organization reminded me of nothing so much as those flatfooted fogies back in the Cold War years who, nostalgic for a simpler time but understanding nothing, went on about “outside agitators” as the root of America’s ills.

I was wrong in one respect, maybe more, about Trump and his adjutants and what they have in mind. These people are not flatfooted. They know exactly what they are doing and they are moving swiftly to get it done. It is time to take seriously, I mean to say, the wall-to-wall unseriousness of the Trump regime’s plans for a nation it would be impossible to live in were it ever to come to be. The saving grace here is they cannot possibly create the America they have in mind. But they will, I have to add, make an unholy mess on their way to failing.

Three days after the antifa executive order, The White House made public a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” NSPM–7, as this document is known, is formally addressed to Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary.

This thing picks up where the one-page executive order leaves off. It cites various assassinations and attempted assassinations — Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive, the two attempts on Trump’s life during his 2024 campaign — and fair enough, although casting political violence as terrorist violence is a sleight-of-hand too far. It is when NSPM–7 invokes recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and “riots in Los Angeles and Portland” that you sense the trouble to come.

From the first of the document’s five sections:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.

What is required, it turns out, is an institutionalized surveillance operation that goes considerably beyond the Patriot Act. “This guidance,” Section 2 reads, “shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.”

And then NSPM–7 gets down to what the Trump regime is truly after:

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

I am not letting the liberal wing of the ruling Late–Imperial War Party, commonly known as the Democrats, off the hook in this domestic terrorism business. Joe Biden banged on about this whenever it was politically expedient the whole of his discombobulated term, and we now witness the consequences of all his loose, opportunistic talk. In effect, Biden prefaced what the Trump regime is step-by-step codifying into law.

One of the more pernicious of the many objectionable features of NSPM–7 merits immediate note. This is the vagueness of its language. Whenever I see official documents of this kind my mind goes back to imperial China, whose mandarins were highly legalistic but kept written law purposely ambiguous so as to maximize the prerogatives of imperial power. A surfeit of laws, all of them to be interpreted in whatever way suited the throne.

As of last weekend we know how Pam Bondi, Trump’s patently fascistic AG, intends to interpret NSPM–7. This is by way of a Justice Department memorandum Ken Klippenstein, the exemplary investigative journalist, reported on (but did not actually publish in full) on Saturday, Dec. 6. This is Klippenstein’s exclusive. Here is the top of the piece he published in his Substack newsletter under the headline, “FBI Making List of American ‘Extremists,’ Leaked Memo Reveals:”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism”… The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti–Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti–Christianity.”

We watch in horror from afar as the Zionist terror state continues its genocide against the people of Gaza and escalates its slower-motion, lower-technology genocide against the 3 million Palestinians who reside in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, otherwise known as the Occupied Territories — illegally occupied, of course.

As a few Israeli commentators have pointed out — those few who guard their integrity— the operative principle here is the limitless impunity the Western powers have long granted “the Jewish state.”

This is the outcome, they say, when a people given to a culture of vengeance are told they will never suffer consequences however barbaric their conduct toward others, however many laws they break, however many their assassinations, however many their torture victims, however many exploding telephones they plant among civilian populations, etc.

Maybe we need no reminders, maybe we do, that this presumption of impunity is not bound by sovereign borders and is not limited to the cowardly, condemnable savagery of apartheid Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. But we had one last week, and it is well we consider it carefully.

Zohran Mamdani, the principled social democrat who is New York’s mayor-elect, is now under attack from Zionist Americans who insist Zionist Americans are above the law — American law and international law. You may look well on Mamdani and you may not, but as he is besieged by these objectionable people, so are we all.

This story begins on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at Park East Synagogue, a grand edifice that sits on East 67th Street between Third and Lexington Avenues in the Lenox Hill section of Manhattan.

Park East has been serving Modern Orthodox Jews since 1890. Its congregation, to be noted, is comprised of the great and good of the Upper East Side. These are observant but assimilated Jews, thoroughly plugged into, let’s say, secular public space.

Except.

Two Wednesdays back Park East hosted an organization dedicated to encouraging Jews to “make Aliyah,” the Hebrew term for emigrating to “the Promised Land.” O.K., you cannot find anything legally wrong in this, although it is unambiguously a moral wrong in that it expresses support for a genocidal state.

But let us set aside the moral question for now. The organization Park East sponsored, Nefesh B’Nefesh, also assists American Jews who wish to emigrate to Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. This is a legal matter and as such not inconsequential.

American Settlers

Statistics on the settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are hard to nail down (and I can easily imagine why). The Times of Israel reported eight years ago that some 60,000 Americans were among the Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

That was roughly 15 percent of the settler population then — not counting the considerable number residing in East Jerusalem. We have no precise figures now, but these populations — settlers and Americans among the settlers — are both higher.

As has been well-reported, and well-recorded in several documentaries, the Americans among the West Bank settlers are frequently the most violent in their incessant attacks on Palestinians. They have also been at times the most readily inclined to murder.

There is the infamous case of Baruch Goldstein, a freakshow Zionist from Brooklyn who killed 29 Palestinians when he attacked the Ibrahimi Mosque (tomb of Abraham and other patriarchs) in Hebron in 1994. Goldstein was not singular: He was and remains exemplary — and a hero among some Zionists. National Security Minister Ben Givr had a picture of Goldstein on his living room wall until 2020.

I cannot name the precise statutes applicable here, but they must be several. Open and shut, just the faces, Ma’am, Nefesh B’Nefesh is an accomplice to the settler movement.

Most immediately significant in the Park East case, Nefesh B’Nefesh — this translates as “soul to soul,” and who knows what that is all about — is directly implicated in the settlers’ breach of international law given that all the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal according to said law.

There was no claiming surprise that blustery Nov. 19th when a group of roughly 200 vociferous demonstrators gathered in front of Park East to protest the promotional seminar Nefesh B’Nefesh was running that day.

“Death to the IDF” was among the tamer of various chants; others encouraged violence against settlers. “It is our duty,” one leader of the demonstration said measuredly to those assembled, “to make them think twice before holding these events.”

Inside the Park East building, people indirectly but unmistakably promoting violence against Palestinians, land theft and all the rest. And on East 67th Street, righteous indignation, anger in behalf of a persecuted people, some violent rhetoric, but no violence.

It was obvious the mayor-elect would have to intervene. The event itself warranted this, and various Zionist constituencies, as well-reported before and since Mamdani’s election, have been attacking him as a radical jihadist, an anti–Semite and who knows what else, so attempting to poison his relations with New York’s Jewish community.

Here is the ever-poised Mamdani’s day-after statement, his first on the incident:

“The mayor-elect has discouraged the use of language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

A few days later, storms of protest from Zionist quarters having instantly erupted, Mamdani sent this statement to The New York Times:

“We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights while making clear that nothing can justify language calling for ‘death to’ anyone. It is unacceptable, full stop.”

I find these statements a little in the way of Solomon in their discernment, in Mamdani’s determination not to tilt his hand and to articulate the core truth of the matter:

The more extreme language out on East 67th Street was wrong so far as it intimidated synagogue goers, but the principle of free speech is nonetheless to be honored; those encouraging breaches of international law are wrong, and a synagogue should not be used to promote illegalities.

‘A Hateful Mob’

Maybe what has come back at Mamdani in the course of all this was predictable, more-of-the-same babble. “Mob” was the de rigueur term among those responding to the mayor-elect’s response.

The demonstrators were “a hateful mob of anti–Israel protesters,” the New York Post reported, and it got worse from there. Mamdani sided with “an anti–Semitic mob,” eJP, or eJewishphilanthropy.com, declared. “Last week,” this outfit continued, “Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani failed the first test of his promise to protect all New Yorkers.”

And from William Daroff, the chief exec of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations: “We are still judging him, and I’d say that at the moment he’s got a failing grade.”

They sitteth in judgment, you see.

Wandering among the media over the Thanksgiving weekend….

On Saturday I read that President Trump announced the previous day that he intends to grant a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, who has been serving a 45–year sentence in a federal prison in West Virginia for running an immense, decades-long cocaine-trafficking operation, in cahoots with some of Latin America’s most notorious drug cartels, during his term as president of Honduras. Plainly proud of himself, the Trumpster boasted of this act of misplaced mercy on his Truth Social digital site Friday evening, in all caps if you please, “CONGRATULATIONS TO JUAN ORLANDO HERNANDEZ ON YOUR UPCOMING PARDON. MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” Señora Hernández reportedly wept (happy tears) on hearing her husband will soon be free.

Then on Sunday I read that Trump has commuted the sentence of David Gentile, who was serving a seven-year sentence for his part in a scheme that bilked 10,000 investors of $1.6 billion by—the usual thing—lying about the performance of the funds he operated and covering payouts Ponzi-style. A commutation and a pardon are not quite the same: In the former case the conviction still stands, in the latter it is erased. But who’s counting? Gentile had reported to prison Nov. 14 and was free after serving less than two weeks of his time.

Back to social media, of course: On Thanksgiving Day Trump’s pardon czar—yes, he has one, named Alice Marie Johnson—declared she was “deeply grateful to see David Gentile heading home to his young children.” This Alice Marie Johnson, it is fun to know, was convicted of cocaine-trafficking charges in 1996 and was serving a life sentence when the Trumpster commuted her sentence during his first term.

Just as I was gathering my thoughts about the Latin American president who flooded the United States with coke and the private executive who got caught defrauding thousands of unknowing investors and the ex-con managing Trump’s clemency operations, news came that Bibi Netanyahu, who was indicted on corruption charges six years ago, has just asked Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, to pardon him.

This is a very big banana. The Israeli prime minister stands accused of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust in three separate cases and has been dodging justice, lately by prolonging a genocide, ever since his trials began. As has been well-reported, Netanyahu has long attempted to destroy the Israeli judiciary—its independence and integrity—to pervert the nation’s courts in his favor and, so, avoid a guilty verdict.

And what did Bibi say in his appeal to Herzog? He must be cleared of all charges, he asserted, for the sake of Israel’s “security and political reality.” O.K., this has been his bedrock argument all along. But then the beyond-belief taker-of-the-cake, a reference to Trump’s recent appeals to Herzog in Netanyahu’s behalf: “President Trump called for an immediate end to the trial so that I may join him in further advancing vital and shared interests of Israel and the United States.”

Pardons, pardons, commutations, commutations. In mid–October Trump commuted the sentence of Geroge Santos, the short-lived Republican congressman, who was serving seven years for an assortment of fraudulent activities. A few days later it was Changpeng Zhao, the former chief executive of Binance, a cryptocurrency firm, who was given a brief prison sentence and fined $50 million for using Binance to launder money. Binance—so often there is some kind of back story in these cases—turns out to be involved in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency doings. Trump gave Zhao a full pardon on Oct. 21.

Yet more. On Nov. 9 Trump pardoned—preemptively, short of any charges filed—80 people associated with his efforts to reverse the 2020 election result. In a piece published the following day, Forbes lists eight high-profile figures Trump has pardoned so far in his second term. And there are, of course, those convicted or awaiting trial for crimes committed during the now-famous Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the Capitol. On the day of his inauguration, Jan. 20, 2025, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people.

Trump’s misuse of his power to pardon, including the clemency extended to war criminals during his first term, is extravagant by any measure. But he is not setting any records by way of numbers. During his years in the White House Joe Biden pardoned, preemptively pardoned or commuted the sentences of 4,245 people. This figure includes 1,500 commutations and 39 pardons the Biden White House announced on a single day, a little more than a month before he left office. Dec. 9, 2024, now marks a record in this line.

“There’s more of a sense of the insider pardon than we’ve seen previously,” Bernadette Meyler, who professes in constitutional law at Stanford University, told NPR after Trump’s Nov. 9 pardons were announced. Will you give us all a break, Professor? Only a card-carrying liberal could possibly make such an assertion. No one who followed the Biden pardons, starting with his son, Hunter, can take it seriously.

Let’s give these numbers a little historical context. During his first term Trump issued 1,700 pardons or commutations. Obama issued 1,927 during his White House years, George W. Bush 200 and Bill Clinton 459. If you want to go further back in history: Kennedy, 575; Theodore Roosevelt, 981; Ulysses S. Grant, 1,332; Lincoln, 343. Andrew Johnson extended clemency to 7,650 people, but this included many thousands of former Confederate officials and officers and so must be counted an atypical case.

Something has happened these past two administrations, we have to conclude, and I see two ways to explain it. Both, in my view, reflect the state of our crumbling republic in its late-imperial phase.

One, we live amid the radical breakdown of law and the decay of our foundational institutions. Power is ever more—and ever more unconstitutionally—concentrated in the Executive Branch, and both of the White House’s most recent inhabitants, Biden no less than Trump, have demonstrated an extravagant disregard for the law.

And as the United States collapses into lawlessness, an obvious domestic crisis also has obvious international dimensions. When Trump announces his intention to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández even as the United States prosecutes an unlawful campaign against “narco-terrorists” and threatens to attack Venezuela on the specious grounds its government is a major drug-trafficker, one or another kind of disorder is the only possible outcome. “This action would be nothing short of catastrophic,” Mike Vigil, formerly a senior official at the Drug Enforcement Agency, told The New York Times after Trump announced the Hernández pardon, “and would destroy the credibility of the U.S. in the international community,”

To turn this question another way, would Bibi Netanyahu have cited Trump in his request for a pardon had he, Trump, not made the same appeal—and not backed the Israeli terror machine’s barbaric lawlessness in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in West Asia?

Related to this, there is the progressive sequestration of power that is now evident all around us—certainly in the United States but also among many of its clients, if not most of them. Trump’s pardons and most of Trump’s foreign and security policies betray a supreme indifference to the constitution and the American electorate and a betrayal of those who voted him into to office.

aybe you saw the video that went public on Nov. 1 wherein Itamar Ben–Givr stands above a row of Palestinian prisoners lying face down with their heads in bags and their hands bound behind their backs. “Look at how they are today, the minimum of conditions,” the ultra–Zionist minister of national security in Bibi Netanyahu’s fanatic-filled cabinet, says as he turns to his entourage. “But there is another thing we need to do. The death penalty to terrorists.”

Those lying on their bellies were reportedly members of al–Nukhba, the special forces unit of al–Qassam, Hamas’s military wing. Ben–Givr, a militant settler who proves, time and again, utterly indifferent to international law, the laws of war, or any sort of accepted norms, wants the Zionist state to kill prisoners of war. This is what it comes down to.

If you haven’t seen the video (and here is a version with good English subtitles), maybe you heard the outrage that subsequently echoed around the world (except in the United States). The footage of the vulgar Ben–Givr has been all over digital media — on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Al Jazeera put it out on “X.” I took the version linked here from CNN, one of the few mainstream American media to cover it.

That was then, this is now: On Monday, Nov. 10, the Knesset voted 39 to 16 in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists” — so long, this is to say, they are Palestinians and not Israeli settlers, who have been on an escalated rampage of terror in the West Bank for many months. “Any person who intentionally or through recklessness causes the death of an Israeli citizen, when motivated by racism, hatred, or intent to harm Israel, shall face the death penalty,” the bill reads in part. It disallows any reconsideration of a death sentence once it is imposed.

This vote was on the legislation’s first reading, of which there are to be three per Israeli parliamentary procedure. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government support the bill, according to The Times of Israel and Haaretz. Gal Hirsch, a former IDF military commander and the man who oversaw all the negotiations that led to the recent release of captives on both sides, told Haaretz the bill is “a tool in the toolbox that allows us to fight terror.”

The media coverage was yet more extensive this time — although not, once again, in the United States — and I found it better than one might expect. The BBC had it, reporting that the bill covers “people Israel deems terrorists.” Reuters referred to “Palestinian militants” instead of “terrorists.” These are modest steps in the right direction — away from the Zionist state’s account of what it is doing, this is to say. Al Jazeera also covered the vote, as to be expected. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, reported that Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of the Knesset, got into an altercation with Ben–Givr that nearly came to fisticuffs. I wish it had, to be honest.

Anadolu then quoted Ben–Givr as bragging on social media: “Jewish Power is making history. We promised and delivered.” Jewish Power, Otzma Yehudit in Hebrew, is the party Ben–Givr heads, which counts the infamous Meir Kahane, madman of all Zionist madmen, among its inspirations.

On the NGO side, I was pleased to see Amnesty International step forward boldly. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior research director, stated. “A majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians.” The headline on this report was just as good: “Israel must immediately halt legislation of discriminatory death penalty bill.”

Apartheid Israel will not halt anything, of course; the more indecent the proposition the more certainly this is so. And here we go. On Thursday and Friday, Nov. 13 and 14, the IDF made mass arrests in the West Bank, all arrestees detained as “terrorists.” The Times of Israel puts the number at 50, The Jerusalem Post 40. Just to complete the picture, on Thursday a pack of Israeli settlers descended on a mosque 18 km southwest of Nablus — this just before morning prayers were to begin — and, after scrawling racist graffiti on its walls and burning copies of the Quran, attempted to set the mosque ablaze.

Take a sec, as I did, to consider these events side-by-side, with the law now pending in the Knesset in mind. What are we in for here, 40 or more mass executions at some point not far down the road? And how many after that? And Israeli settlers will go on their terrorizing way?

I am right with Amnesty and all others condemning the racism implicit in legislation that makes the repulsive Ben–Givr so pleased. But I don’t quite get the reasoning. Would the Knesset bill be OK if it also extended to settler violence and, so, wasn’t discriminatory? Not sure I understand the point here.

No, I see a larger matter at issue in this bill. It is this: The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations. The Knesset and the Netanyahu regime, in other words, implicitly argue that Israeli law supersedes what the jurists of international law may count as beyond the boundaries of legality.

We are going to make it legal to execute prisoners so long as we call them terrorists, and all we have to do to make this legal is say it is legal by ruling on our own conduct: This is the Israeli position, fairly stated.

This, the consecration of lawlessness in national law, tips us into another line of inquiry altogether. To put the case very simply, where does the Zionist state get off attempting this stunt? The bitter truth is that the United States, world leader in lawlessness for a long time now, has licensed the Israelis to go unabashedly down this road. We should be clear about this for the sake of our integrity: What the Israelis are about to do is nothing the Americans have not already done.

■

The most obvious case in point is the bundle of secret memoranda Justice Department attorneys wrote to construct the legality of the kidnappings, the detentions without charge, the torture, the offshore “black sites,” Guantánimo — the whole horrific schmear — after the 9/11 attacks. The commander-in-chief was acting legally in a time of war. The Geneva Conventions did not apply because all those people fighting on their own soil against American soldiers were “unlawful combatants,” and the United States had no obligation under the laws of war to afford them legal protections. The waterboarding, the beatings, the electrodes, the rectal feedings and all that wasn’t torture: It was “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which even got an acronym, EITs. The black sites were OK because they were beyond U.S. borders and the U.N. Convention Against Torture therefore did not apply.

I never thought I would see the day, but the day came Monday, when Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House for a sit-down with President Donald Trump and the usual gaggle of misfits who must be there to make sure the Trumpster understands at least a little of what is being said.

A freak-show terrorist amid all that retro Oval Office elegance: Who could have imagined so offensive a tableau?

Al–Sharaa, alert readers will know, is one of those dripping-with-blood Sunni jihadists who, during the West’s extended covert operation against the Assad regime in Syria, had the habit of changing their names and the names of their murderous militias whenever the world figured out who they were and the extent of their savagery.

Al–Sharaa was known back then as Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, the surname translating as “He of the Golan.” Past beneficiary of C.I.A.–MI6 profligacy during those years when American and British intel financed, armed and trained primitive killers of al–Sharaa’s kind, he is now the president of Syria — the result of a final Anglo-American push that put him in Damascus a year ago next month.

Al–Sharaa–al–Jolani began his brilliant career in 2003, when, at 21, he joined al–Qaeda in Iraq to fight against the American occupation (which, one has to say, was a creditable thing to do in and of itself). Then he hooked up with the Islamic State, via the infamous Abu Bakr al–Baghdadi, to get the Sunni barbarism going back in his native Syria.

After the C.I.A. and MI6 turned “Arab Spring” protests in Syria into a bloody armed conflict in 2011 (early 2012 at the latest), al–Jolani (as he was by this time) helped form Jabhat al–Nusra, al–Qaeda’s front organization in Syria.

But by 2017 al–Nusra was getting an other-than-brilliant press, and al–Jolani changed its name to Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, HTS, via a merger with… let’s see… by my count, six other not very nice Salafist militias.

HTS was designated a year later as a terrorist organization by the United States and the U.N.; al–Jolani, with the same designation, had a $10 million price on his head.

The world is run in secrecy, I long ago concluded. And it is hard to tell when the invisible powers that determine global events decided to buy al–Jolani some suits, tell him to change his name back to what it was and make him legit.

Rehab Operation

I first clocked that some kind of rehab operation was afoot when, in April 2021, PBS broadcast the first interview with al–Jolani ever to appear in a Western medium. In it, the specially designated terrorist in a blue blazer and a buttoned-down shirt promised to found a “salvation government” in Syria. Martin Smith, a correspondent with a good reputation (at least until April 2021) nods credulously.

Three years and change later, al–Jolani leads his expensively armed forces in a lightning march toward Damascus, backed, as it was all along, by the Western powers, this time by the Turks and probably but not demonstrably the Israelis.

HTS had not even got to Damascus before you read of how terrific it was all going to be. Headline in the Dec. 3 editions of The Telegraph: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.”

The sectarian violence for which al–Sharaa has lived and breathed all these years has not stopped since he declared himself president for the next five years — violence against the Druze, violence against Christians, violence against Alawites.

The place is a riot of Sunni-driven brutality, so far as one can make out from the spotty reporting. Some of this is reportedly the work of foreign Salafists who have continued to operate — under al–Sharaa’s direction? with his tacit approval? — since the Assad regime fell.

The American edition of The Spectator ran an interesting piece in its Monday edition by Theo Padnos, who spent a year as a prisoner of HTS, under the headline, “The jihadist I knew: my life as al–Sharaa’s prisoner.”

Here is Padnos’s lead:

“As Washington rolls out the red carpet today for the former al–Qaeda chieftain and now Syrian president, Ahmed al–Sharaa, Syria’s minorities continue to live in terror. An army of destruction, half Mad Max, half Lollapalooza is rolling through the desert somewhere south of the country’s capital, Damascus.

Who has ordered these militants into action? No one knows. What do they want? It isn’t clear. But, as a former prisoner of al–Sharaa’s band of jihadists, I can’t say I’m surprised by what is unfolding in Syria.”

You don’t read much about what is unfolding in Syria in the mainstream American press. Instead, you read about “Mr. Sharaa’s journey from a jihadist intent on killing American soldiers to today’s suave, impeccably dressed, conciliatory leader wooing nations across the globe” — this from Roger Cohen in Monday’s New York Times under the headline, “A Syrian Village and the Long Road to the White House.”

Slather on the uplift, Roger.

Or, from Christina Goldbaum in the same paper, same day:

“Mr. al–Sharaa’s meeting in Washington is the latest turn in the transformation of the Islamist former rebel leader, who was once designated as a terrorist by the United States with a $10 million bounty on his head.”

Suave? Conciliatory? Impeccably dressed? No, no, and those suits look like cheap schmatta to me. The latest turn in the transformation?

You see what is happening here, I hope. Just take this criminal as the powers behind him present him and think no more about what was on that long road, or the beheadings, or who financed the journey.

Ms. Goldbaum informs us that al–Sharaa went to Washington this week “to sign an agreement to join 88 other countries in the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State, which remains active in Syria.” Say whaaa?

Al–Sharaa, no stranger to the Islamic State, was sanctioned as a terrorist until the Treasury Department removed him last Friday; Syria is still designated a state sponsor of terrorism. And al–Sharaa is in the Oval Office for some kind of enlistment ceremony?

Age of Comprehensive Secrecy

In our Age of Comprehensive Secrecy we may never know why Trump and his people had al–Sharaa into the Oval Office. My surmise: At issue Monday was how al–Sharaa is to manage — how he will be told to manage — his relations with Israel, given the Zionist state’s objective is to reduce what is still formally called the Syrian Arab Republic to a smashed mosaic mess as it proceeds with its “seven-front war.”

Al–Sharaa is, in short, now a fully certified instrument of the imperium and its appendages. He is to serve an assigned purpose.

https://twitter.com/xxx/status/1988226452479738192