The Jewish Origins of Usury

 

Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/the-jewish-origins-of-usury/

 

by Karl Radl

 

One of the most hated practices in history is that of usury and many people associate the invention (or at least major exponents) of usury with the jews. (1) Traditionally this has been poohpoohed by jewish and philo-Semitic historians and writers with various methods of obfuscation being used with the most common being the claim that ‘non-jews were engaging in but the jews outlawed’ and that ‘non-jews blamed it on jews when they were in fact doing it just as much if not more than the jews’. These arguments against the idea that jews as a group often engaged in usury are beyond the scope of this article and I will address these separately.

 

However, the argument that is probably the most used is the claim that the jews ‘didn’t invent usury’ and ‘were the first to regulate it’.

 

The argument goes that usury existed before the jews first appear onto the stage of history and usually the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1775 B.C.) is bought up as an example of usury being legislated against before jews appear in history.

 

The problem with this argument is that it completely mischaracterizes the nature of laws on interest that came before the Biblical prohibitions and especially Deuteronomy 23:19-20 which states that:

 

‘When you lend money, food, or anything else to another Israelite, you are not allowed to charge interest. You can charge a foreigner interest. But if you charge other Israelites interest, the Lord your God will not let you be successful in the land you are about to take.’ (2)

 

Since the bland statement in Deuteronomy that interest cannot be charged to an Israelite (= jew) but can be charged to a foreigner (= non-jew) is completely unique in the history of interest rates in the ancient/classical world. (3)

 

Further – as Robert Maloney is careful to note – while some of the discussions of ancient texts as regards legislation around interest rates and creditor/debtor ‘are often not clear’. (4) The fact remains that strict limitations were put on rates of interest as well as the treatment of creditors and debtors in the ancient Near East and only ancient Israel had any kind of blanket ban on taking interest. (5)

 

The first direct mention of the charging of interest occurs in the Laws of Eshnunna during the Old Babylonian period and date to shortly before the Code of Hammurabi.

 

Where laws 18a to 21 state that:

 

‘18A. Per 1 shekel (of silver) he will add one sixth of a shekel and 6 grains as interest; per 1 kor (of barley) he will add 1 (pan) and 4 seah of barley as interest.

 

19. The man who gives (a loan) in terms of his retake shall make (the debtor) pay on the threshing floor.5

 

20. If a man lends out money to the amount recorded, but has the corresponding amount of barley set down to his credit, he shall at harvest time obtain the barley and its interest, (namely) 1 (pan) (and) 4 seah per 1 kor.

 

21. If a man lends out money in terms of its initial (amount), he shall obtain the silver and its interest, (namely) one sixth (of a shekel) and 6 grains per 1 shekel.’ (6)

 

These laws only covered the period between seedtime and harvest and were a way to allow farmers in Mesopotamia to have sufficient funds to purchase seed and/or tools (7) by giving them fixed interest rate loans that were then repayable after the harvest was gathered. (8)

 

They also allowed the debtor to repay the loan the following year should the harvest fail which is also restated in the Code of Hammurabi, (9) while also protecting the creditor against non-repayment by the borrower as well as fraud. (10)

 

Different localities and regions did use different fixed interest rates (11) and the temples of the various Mesopotamian deities often acted as loan agents and were generally more forgiving of debtors. (12)

 

The successor of the Laws of Eshnunna; the Code of Hammurabi also includes the addition of legal clauses defending debtors against creditors manipulating their accounts to their advantage (13) such as using light counter-weights when giving out a loan and heavy counter-weights when receiving repayment (i.e., loaning less than agreed but receiving more than agreed) to substantially increase their profits, which the Written Torah (Leviticus 19:33-36 and Deuteronomy 25:13-15) and the Tanakh (Micah 6:10-11) refer to Israelites doing to their debtors as well. (14)

 

What Maloney is getting at here is that the Mesopotamians were simply standardizing rates of interests and the laws around what creditors and debtors could (and could not) do and were not proscribing interest as much as they were creating commercial mechanisms to benefit their economies to allow them to overcome the bad years as well as prevent any individual injustice or exploitation. (15)

 

In essence then the Mesopotamians didn’t create usury, but rather regulated interest rates and creditor/debtor rights so that their economies were flexible and robust while also ensuring that a debtor’s position was as lenient as possible without being permissive.

 

Those who claim ‘usury is the taking of any interest’ will no doubt object that this is still usury, but it is worth pointing out that this absolutist definition is very late and comes from the high medieval era (e.g., Saint Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century) and usury has long truly referred to disproportionate/exploitative rates of interest not ‘any interest’ as we can see in the example of ancient and classical Greece where high rates of interests were charged but almost always on commercial ventures with a strong link to risk (i.e., if you were borrowing the money for a speculative commercial voyage to bring say olive oil from Sicily to Athens then your interest rate would be much higher than if you were borrowing the money to buy seed grain for your family farm for example) with the maximum chargeable interest rate being 100 percent. (16)

 

In addition, the ancient and classical Greeks enforced numerous legal and non-legal (e.g., social) restrictions against charging these highest rates of interest so that they were rarely used and only then in extraordinarily risky ventures with appropriate safeguards to the debtors as well as the creditors. (17)

 

Again the Greeks were not engaging in usury but rather using a form of early risk analysis to set interest rates on commercial loans with stipulated rights for creditors and protections for debtors in the case of disaster or non-payment not loaning money to say the citizens and farmers in the Bavarian market town of Deggendorf and then once the crop failed trying to move in to take control of the entire town’s assets and lands as jews did in 1338 A.D. (18)

 

Similarly to ancient and classical Greece; early Rome had a problem with the social consequences of interest-bearing loans between creditors and debtors since in Roman law of the time creditors could enslave the debtors in order to pay off the debt before 449-451 B.C. (19) as a kind of precursor to the European debtors’ prisons of the early modern to the Victorian era. However circa 449-451 B.C that changed with the issuance of the Law of Twelve Tables which did precisely what the Mesopotamian legal codes before it had done and regulated the amount of interest that could be charged (a maximum of 8 to 10 percent) on any loan between a creditor and debtor. (20)

 

This was then reaffirmed by the Lex Duillia Menenia in 357 B.C. (21) and a further law of 347 B.C. reduced the maximum allowed rate of interest to just over 4 percent from the previous 5 percent. (22) While the Lex Genucia of 342 B.C. prohibited the charging of any interest on loans altogether. (23)

 

Naturally Roman creditors sought to get around this and in so doing started to lend money through non-Roman intermediaries. (24) Thus, to remedy this; the Lex Cornelia in 88 B.C. returned the rate of interest to that of the Law of Twelve Tables (i.e., between 8-10%). (25) While a further revision of the Roman legal code – the Lex Valeria in 86 B.C. – introduced further protections for debtors by allowing bankrupts to pay off their debts by paying back one quarter of what they owed their creditors (26) in a measure that harked back to the earlier Mesopotamian law codes as well as earlier Greek counter-measures against malicious and predatory creditor practices.

 

From then on common Roman rates of interest were set at between 6-12 percent for centuries until the rise of the Eastern Roman Empire to prominence in the form of Byzantium. (27)

 

We can thus see from the foregoing summary that there was no other precedent for usury or exploitative interest taking in the ancient or classical world other than that stated in Deuteronomy 23:19-20, which remember states:

 

‘When you lend money, food, or anything else to another Israelite, you are not allowed to charge interest. You can charge a foreigner interest. But if you charge other Israelites interest, the Lord your God will not let you be successful in the land you are about to take.’ (28)

 

This – as Kirschenbaum points out – (29) is completely unique in the ancient and classical world which completely bans the charging of any interest whatsoever when the creditor and debtor are both jewish – (30) indeed jews are strongly encouraged to lend money to other jews at no interest whatsoever – (31) but when the creditor is jewish and the debtor non-jewish then it is not only permissible for the jewish creditor to charge the non-jewish debtor interest but also exorbitant rates of interest.

 

Since jewish religious law (halakha) makes no distinction between legal/reasonable interest and illegal/exorbitant interest in either the Biblical law or the Talmuds (32) and jews view interest being charged against borrowers – even harsh (i.e., usurious rates of) interest – as inherently fair and moral because it isn’t their money and they ‘freely entered into the contract’ (33) even if they were forced to do so (i.e., a legal fiction to justify immoral practices that could have been written by twentieth century jews like Ludwig von Mises).

 

As Kirschenbaum has pithily put it:

 

‘The Deuterominic double standard did not disturb the Jewish commentators.’ (34)

 

And then goes on to further explain

 

‘To Jewish commentators the verse presented no difficulties. The morality of the permission was clear: taking interest on loans is consistent with economic justice and with the rules of ethics. But if so, it may be asked, what need was there for Scripture to grant such permission? The answer: to intimate that when a Jew lend to a Jew on interest, he violates a positive as well as the negative injunction. In the Rabbinic interpretation of Scripture negative implications expressed in positive language (e.g., Unto a foreigner thou mayest lend upon interest) are technically positive commands, and added to negatively expressed commands (e.g., Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother), render them more severe.’ (35)

 

In summary then in Deuteronomy 23:19-20 jews are positively ordered by their god Yahweh to go out and loan money to non-jews with any interest rate that the non-jew will accept (usurious or non-usurious) while are by contrast strongly forbidden from charging any interest on loans to fellow jews whatsoever and indeed positively commanded to make such loans. (36)

 

The rationale for this was explained by the prominent thirteenth century rabbinic commentator Rabbi David Kimhi as follows:

 

‘Not so regarding the relation between Israelite and Gentile. The Israelite is under no obligation to perform hesed with him and to lend him his money without, for they generally hate the Israelites.’ (37)

 

Put simply jews are positively commanded in Judaism to charge usurious rates of interests to non-jews because ‘non-jews hate jews’ therefore doing anything bad to them (such as charging them usurious rates of interest) is permissible because ‘they hate jews anyway so it doesn’t matter’.

 

Since we have to remember the Written Torah is ‘the primitive expression of an ethnocentric, pre-commercial clan’ (38) who had the ‘blood brotherhood morality of the Hebrew tribesmen.’ (39)

 

Thus, whenever we read Biblical provisions – and Christians have often attempted to universalize them incorrectly – (40) we should remember Hillel Gamoran bland statement in his article on Biblical law in 1971.

 

To wit:

 

‘That the interest law applied only among Israelites should not surprise us. In fact, it would be more surprising if it had included the foreigner, for most of the Bible’s laws protecting the poor were only for the Israelite poor, not for foreigners. The laws protecting the slave from harsh treatment, guarding the rights of the female slave, declaring that a slave must be freed on the seventh year, releasing from debts on the seventh year, and leaving the land’s growth on the seventh year to the poor all applied only to the Israelite. The law on interest, then, was part of a legal body which served to protect the poor among the Israelites.’ (41)

 

So yes jews did indeed invent usury and they have justified it ever since based on their dislike/hatred of non-jews.

 

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References

 

(1) For example: Montagu Frank Modder, 1960, ‘The Jew in the Literature of England: To the End of the 19^th Century’, 1^st Edition, The Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia, p. 22 and Barnet Litvinoff, 1969, ‘A Peculiar People: Inside the Jewish World Today’, 1^st Edition, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London, pp. 12-13

 

(2) Deut. 23:19-20 (CEV)

 

(3) Aaron Kirschenbaum, 1985, ‘Jewish and Christian Theories of Usury in the Middle Ages’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 75, No. 3, p. 270, n. 3

 

(4) Robert Maloney, 1974, ‘Usury and Restrictions on Interest-Taking in the Ancient Near East’, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 1

 

(5) Idem.

 

(6) Quoted in Ibid., p. 2

 

(7) Ibid., pp. 2-3

 

(8) Ibid., p. 3

 

(9) Ibid., pp. 4-9

 

(10) Ibid., p. 10

 

(11) Ibid., p. 5

 

(12) Ibid., p. 15

 

(13) Ibid., pp. 8-9

 

(14) Ibid., p. 9

 

(15) Ibid., pp. 11-12

 

(16) Robert Maloney, 1971, ‘Usury in Greek, Roman and Rabbinic Thought’, Traditio, Vol. 27, pp. 79-81

 

(17) Ibid., pp. 81-88

 

(18) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/deggendorf-1338-the-anatomy-of-anti

 

(19) Maloney, ‘Usury in Greek’, Op. Cit., p. 88

 

(20) Ibid., p. 89

 

(21) Idem.

 

(22) Ibid., p. 90

 

(23) Idem.

 

(24) Ibid., p. 91

 

(25) Idem.

 

(26) Idem.

 

(27) Ibid., p. 92

 

(28) Deut. 23:19-20 (CEV)

 

(29) Kirschenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 270, n. 3

 

(30) Benjamin Nelson, 1969, ‘The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood’, 2^nd Edition, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, p. xx, n. 2

 

(31) Maloney, ‘Usury in Greek’, Op. Cit., p. 97

 

(32) Kirschenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 270, n. 3

 

(33) Ibid., pp. 270; 283-284

 

(34) Ibid., p. 288

 

(35) Idem.; Maloney, ‘Usury in Greek’, Op. Cit., p. 102 makes a similar summary.

 

(36) Maloney, ‘Usury in Greek’, Op. Cit., p. 97

 

(37) Quoted in Kirschenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 289

 

(38) Morris Cohen, Bernard Meislin, 1964, ‘Backgrounds of the Biblical Law against Usury’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 6, No. 3, p. 251

 

(39) Nelson, Op. Cit., p. xix

 

(40) Ibid., p. 4; also, Kirschenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 286-288

 

(41) Hillel Gamoran, 1971, ‘The Biblical Law against Loans on Interest’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, p. 130

 

via Karl Radl’s Substack

Palantir Paid No Federal Income Tax in 2025 as It Partnered With ICE, Pentagon

 

Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/palantir-paid-no-federal-income-tax-in-2025-as-it-partnered-with-ice-pentagon/

 

(Truthout) A new analysis finds that tech giant Palantir Technologies paid $0 in federal income taxes last year, despite raking in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to build out a mass network to surveil Americans in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

 

Palantir, which has landed multiple massive contracts under the Trump administration, made $1.6 billion in net income last year.

 

It grew so much last year that it joined the list of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with its stock more than doubling in value in the first half of 2025 alone. In a report to shareholders, the company said it was “crushing” expectations in terms of growth, with revenue growing 93 percent year over year at the end of 2025.

 

Despite this growth, it did not pay any federal income taxes in 2025 due to tax policies allowing corporations to effectively dodge taxes, according to an analysis released this week by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP). The practice has been present for years, but was worsened this year due to the combination of GOP tax breaks passed in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the group found.

 

Because of this, Palantir was one of at least 88 major profitable U.S. companies that avoided paying any federal income tax in 2025, ITEP found.

 

This includes companies like Tesla, owned by Elon Musk, who spent the first half of 2025 ravaging critical U.S. welfare, public health, humanitarian aid, and research programs, under the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

 

Other major companies also owed $0 or even got money back in the form of tax rebates, including ticketing company Live Nation Entertainment; airlines like Southwest and United; other military contractors like Honeywell; utility companies like American Electric Power, Dominion Energy, and Duke Energy; entertainment companies like Walt Disney; and many more.

 

Together, these companies enjoyed over $105 billion in pre-tax income. If this were taxed at the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent, the companies would have paid $22 billion in taxes, ITEP found.

 

“What we’re seeing in this most recent year is corporate tax avoidance on steroids,” said report co-author Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP.

 

Palantir was able to dodge federal income taxes despite being the recipient of massive federal outlays.

 

“Palantir has been rewarded significantly through the second Trump term. On one end, the company’s domestic revenues surged in 2025, yet it paid zero federal income taxes,” said Spandan Marasini, a co-author of the report and ITEP data analyst, in a statement to Truthout. “Through the corporate giveaways in the most recent tax bill, the administration has made clear that being profitable is no longer sufficient reason to contribute to the public treasury.”

 

From Donald Trump’s inauguration to May of last year, it received $113 million in federal government funding, in a mix of existing and new contracts, reporting found. This funding just scratches the surface, however, with the Pentagon awarding Palantir a contract ceiling boost of $795 million in May — then, later in the year, a contract worth up to $10 billion that allows the Department of Defense wide latitude to purchase services from the company like its AI military system, Maven.

 

The company was tapped by the Trump administration to build a network to massively expand the federal government’s knowledge on Americans, allowing the government to consolidate information across agencies and granting federal officials “​​untold surveillance power,” as The New York Times reported last May.

 

This partnership is just one part of Palantir’s prolific role in Trump’s fascist anti-immigrant campaigns and targeting of protesters across the U.S.

America Throws Its Service Members into an Unjust War for Israel

 

Source: https://www.renegadetribune.com/america-throws-its-service-members-into-an-unjust-war-for-israel/

 

Via Brian McGlinchey at Stark Realities

 

President Trump’s decision to join Israel in launching a regime-change war on Iran has so far cost the lives of at least 13 American service members. More than 200 have been wounded, dozens seriously enough to require evacuations to military hospitals in Europe and the United States. Among them are individuals who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries, burns and shrapnel wounds. One was facing potential amputation of an arm or leg.

 

As much as these service members and their families are victims of Iran’s justified retaliation for a surprise attack perpetrated amid ongoing negotiations, they’re victims of a betrayal perpetrated by their president and the joint chiefs of staff, who cast them into an unconstitutional war of aggression, packaged in lies and initiated to advance the agenda of a foreign government, while undermining the security of their own country.

 

Of course, US casualties comprise a small subset of the total bloodshed. In executing this unjust war, Americans have collectively inflicted far more death and dismemberment than they’ve endured, teaming up with their Israeli counterparts to kill more than 3,000 Iranians, including some 150 schoolgirls – mostly between age 7 and 12 – whose school was destroyed by Tomahawk cruise missiles at the war’s very start.

 

Though it should have already been apparent, Operation Epic Fury should make clear that – service members’ good intentions aside – combat waged under the US flag rarely has anything to do with American security. Moreover – and I say this as former Army Reserve enlistee and Regular Army officer – anyone thinking of starting or extending a military career should understand that their government may send them to be killed, maimed or psychologically damaged, and to slaughter foreign innocents, so long as it helps those in power remain in the good graces of the extremists who rule Israel, and their powerful collaborators inside the United States.

 

Under international law, a war of aggression is considered a supreme war crime unto itself, and Operation Epic Fury is precisely that. Like so many of America’s wars before it, this one was launched on false premises. Contrary to the US-Israeli narrative…

 

1. Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. In 2007, the US intelligence community assessed that Iran halted any effort to develop a nuclear weapon in 2003. Since then, the intelligence community has periodically re-validated that conclusion, most recently in March 2025. Belying Trump’s claim that the United States had only two weeks in which to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard this week testified that Iran had made “no efforts” to rebuild its enrichment capacity after it was devastated by last summer’s US bombing.

 

Note that, in 2005, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa – a formal interpretation of Islamic law – asserting that “the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.” In the opening act of their latest warfare on Iran, the United States and Israel collaborated to kill him.

 

2. Iran did not stray from the 2015 nuclear deal until Trump did. When Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran was in full compliance. Among other things, the JCPOA required Iran to eliminate its medium-enriched uranium, slash its cache of low-enriched uranium by 98%, limit future enrichment to 3.67%, agree to even more external monitoring than it was already submitting to, and render its heavy-water reactor worthless by filling it with concrete. After Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018 and reinstated sanctions, Iran waited a year, but then began straying from its own commitments, using elevated enrichment as a lever to push for a new agreement and relief from suffocating sanctions. Iran says the JCPOA permitted it to suspend its commitments after Trump’s withdrawal, citing language governing “material breaches” and “significant non-performance.”

 

Iran is a member of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and has long cooperated with international inspections and monitoring required by the NPT. On the other hand, Israel has refused to join the NPT and has some 200 nuclear warheads, a situation that makes every dollar of American aid to Israel illegal under US law.

 

In 2002, Netanyahu assured Congress that “Saddam is hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs” and “guarantee[d]” that a US invasion of Iraq would have “enormous positive reverberations on the region”

 

3. Iran wasn’t the problematic negotiation partner. When historians write about the run-up to this latest of American regime-change disasters, they’ll surely emphasize that fact Trump assigned Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to represent the United States in negotiations. While people rightly scoff at their lack of credentials, it’s far more important to appreciate their intimate ties to the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who has been trying to maneuver the United States into a war with Iran for decades.

 

As Branko Marcetic writes in an excellent account of the negotiations at Responsible Statecraft,

 

Witkoff is known as a staunch supporter of Israel. He counts pro-Israel megadonor Miriam Adelson as a “dear friend” and carries a custom pager gifted to him by Netanyahu and senior Mossad officials, in a reference to an operation in which Israel remotely detonated thousands of pagers that allegedly belonged to Hezbollah officials…

 

Kushner, meanwhile, has been steeped in the pro-Israel community his entire life. He counted Netanyahu as a family friend growing up, with the future Israeli prime minister occasionally borrowing the teenager’s bedroom during visits. Kushner reportedly consulted with Netanyahu officials to pen Trump’s 2016 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he is both friends with hardline pro-Israel figures and has donated money to illegal West Bank settlement-building.

 

In addition to their glaring conflicts of interest, Witkoff and Kushner refused to bring nuclear experts to their meetings with the Iranians, which reportedly left the Iranians perplexed about how any progress could be made in negotiating such a highly technical subject.

 

Iran put forward a fresh offer less than 48 hours before being attacked. In the last meeting before bombs dropped, Iran offered concessions that included dilution of its 60%-enriched uranium, a multi-year pause on new enrichment, subsequent enrichment capped at 20%, and expanded IAEA oversight. Sources say UK national security advisor Jonathan Powell, who attended that meeting, was surprised by the strength of the Iranian offer, and saw it as reason to be optimistic about reaching a deal.

 

After learning that Witkoff was grossly mischaracterizing Iran’s stance – if not outright lying about it – Oman’s foreign minister, who’d been mediating the discussions, made an urgent trip to Washington to tell the administration and anyone who’d listen that Iran had made substantial concessions, some of which surpassed the provisions of the JCPOA. His mission failed. In the aftermath, a Gulf diplomat bluntly told the Guardian, “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.”

 

4. Iran’s ballistic missile program wasn’t built for offense. In an example of moving goalposts that would be laughable if the context weren’t so tragic, the Trump administration reopened nuclear negotiations with a new demand – that Iran surrender its conventional ballistic missiles. The White House claimed Iran was building a “conventional shield” that would enable future “nuclear blackmail,” but anyone who’s been paying attention could see the demand sprang from last summer’s 12-Day War, when Iran effectively used cutting-edge ballistic missiles to retaliate against Israeli aggression.

 

That use is consistent with US intelligence’s characterization of Iran’s military posture as primarily defensive. As the US Defense Intelligence Agency wrote in a 2019 report, “Iran’s conventional military strategy is primarily based on deterrence and the ability to retaliate against an attacker…If deterrence fails, Iran would seek to demonstrate strength and resolve, [and] impose a high cost on its adversary…this strategy is unlikely to change considerably in the near term.”

 

The demand for Iran’s conventional disarmament and the demand for the scientifically-advanced country to end any nuclear enrichment had something in common: both were made knowing they’d be refused. Here’s how Joe Kent – the former National Counterterrorism Center Director who resigned this week in protest of the war – characterized the enrichment demand in his in-depth, post-resignation interview with Scott Horton:

 

“I really frankly don’t think the Israelis cared that much about…nuclear enrichment…What I think the Israelis care about is regime change. They wanted to push this war as fast as they could, so they came up with this talking point that zero enrichment was the starting point, knowing that was a non-starter for the Iranians.”

 

5. Iran hasn’t been waging war on the United States for 47 years. To the contrary, the hostilities have overwhelmingly originated in Washington, and any thorough survey of the history should go back at least 73 years, to 1953. That’s when the United States and United Kingdom orchestrated the ouster of Iran’s democratically-elected prime minister, and the installation of the Shah. The ledger should also include US support of Iraq’s eight-year war on Iran in the 1980s, which included giving artillery targeting intel to Iraq, with the knowledge those targets would be hit with chemical weapons. Then there’s decades of economic blockades, which, mirroring the morality of Al Qaeda, intentionally inflict suffering on civilians with a goal of forcing political change. Last summer brought America’s unprovoked bombing of Iran’s imaginary nuclear weapons program. The ceasefire that ended the so-called 12-Day War turned out to be a mere strategic pause before all-out warfare was initiated by Israel and the United States on Feb 28.

 

A central line in the “47-year war” narrative blames Iran for killing “thousands” of Americans in Iraq, by supposedly directing Shia militias to target Americans, and equipping them with improvised explosive devices (IED). In a concise treatment at his Substack, former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who led counter-IED efforts in Iraq, dismantled that well-entrenched narrative. His key points:

 

·  The great majority of American service members killed in Iraq died at the hands of Sunni resistance groups. Iran provided some support to Shia militias, but Hoh calls out the hypocrisy of US officials saying Iran alone has blood on its hands, pinning no such blame on US-aligned Gulf monarchies that backed Sunni militias in Iraq.

 

·  Americans were an occupying force in a country that US forces had devastated and which was beset by civil war, which means both Shia and Sunni militias had their own reasons for using violence against US troops. Hoh notes that the now-decades-old narrative that Iraqis were killing American soldiers and Marines on orders from Iran “not only helped justify a longed-for war with Iran but also bolstered the fiction of the American occupation as a benevolent and liberating one.”

 

·  The charge that Iran killed Americans with IEDs centers on the claim that Iran provided Shia militias with a special type of IED called an explosively formed penetrator (EFP). “Anyone with a simple understanding of explosive principles and a half-decent machine shop can make an EFP,” says Hoh. Given the abundance of explosives and other materials around war-torn Iraq, Hoh says “Shia forces were able to mass-produce EFPs in Iraq. Smuggling in EFPs from Iran was unnecessary.”

 

6. Iran isn’t the “world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” If that title were awarded on the merits, top contenders would include Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel. The US government selectively applies the “state sponsor” label to vilify countries and – more importantly – as the basis for imposing economic sanctions. As we’ve seen in the case of Cuba and others, American secretaries of state have full discretion to slap the “state sponsor of terror” label on and pull it off, with no due process or burden of proof required.

 

“The US’s list of terrorist organizations is at this point really laughable, because we take groups off willy-nilly based on whether we like them politically or not – not whether they’ve actually engaged in or continue to engage in terrorism,” said Trita Parsi, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft co-founder, in a recent appearance on Judging Freedom. “The Sudanese got off the State Department’s terrorist list by simply agreeing to normalize relations with Israel – nothing else.”

 

It’s true that Iran has sponsored various groups in the Middle East that seek to thwart US and Israeli hegemony in the region. At times, some of those groups – like Hamas – have used violence against civilians to achieve political ends, which is the honest definition of terrorism. However, US and Israeli condemnation of Iran’s support for such groups is intensely hypocritical, considering the United States and Israel have themselves backed forces that have carried out terrorism. Indeed, if sponsorship of Hamas is damning for Iran, it’s also damning for Israel and Netanyahu, who long fostered the rise of Hamas even after it turned to terror.

 

Then there’s the regime-change campaign in Syria, which saw the United States and its Gulf allies empowering head-chopping terrorists, and saw Israel patching up al Qaeda members and sending them back into Syria to raise hell. Keep in mind, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Shia militias were instrumental in beating back ISIS, the monstrous terror entity that sprang from the Syria regime-change campaign carried out for Israel.

 

The war on Iran isn’t about nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles or state-sponsored terrorism. It’s the continuation of a long-running Israeli program to achieve total dominance over the Middle East by repeatedly shattering surrounding states and territories. Here’s how the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer has described it:

 

“The Israelis want to make sure that their neighbors are weak and that means breaking them apart, if you can, and keeping them broken…The Israelis want Syria to be a fractured state. They want Lebanon to be a fractured state. What do they want in Iran? …What the Israelis want to do is to break Iran apart. They want to make it look like Syria.”

 

For many in Israel, this strategy isn’t merely about safeguarding the current version of Israel. Rather, it’s a means of achieving an expansionist dream of “Greater Israel.” While interpretations vary, this vision typically goes far beyond annexing the West Bank and Gaza, also taking Egyptian territory east of the Nile, along with all or portions of what is now Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

 

The US government has aided and abetted this ruthless strategy in a variety of ways, from the arming of Israel, to running covert operations to foment unrest and equip militant groups, to direct use of American military force. The human cost has been incalculable. In the regime-change wars against Iraq and Syria alone, more than a half million people have been killed, and several times more are believed to have died from secondary causes like disease.

 

Sadly, it seems it’s now Iran’s turn to be shattered in the pursuit of Israeli supremacy. Iran has been Netanyahu’s white whale: After the launch of Operation Epic Fury, Netanyahu gushed that Trump’s collaboration meant Israel was finally doing what Netanyahu had “yearned to do for 40 years.”

 

Underscoring the cold-blooded and maliciously dishonest nature of the regime-destruction campaign, consider that Israel and the United States have framed their surprise attack on Iran as a virtuous endeavor meant to liberate the Iranian people from theocratic rule. On the day Israel and the United States launched this new war on Iran, Netanyahu called on Iranians to rise up: “Do not sit idly by, very soon the moment will come when you must take to the streets to finish the job and overthrow the totalitarian regime.”

 

However, at the same time Netayahu was calling for an Iranian uprising, senior Israeli officials were privately telling US diplomats that “the people will get slaughtered” if they act on those exhortations. Of course, any such slaughter would serve the Israeli agenda, since it could be used to propagandize for more vigorous regime-change action, up to and including what is likely Netanyahu’s greatest wish: a US ground invasion.

 

It’s hard to imagine, but there could be something even worse than committing one’s self to the defense of America, only to be killed or maimed in a campaign to advance the agenda of a foreign government that is far less an ally than a parasite – and that’s killing, wounding and immiserating innocent people for that same government.

 

Through March 19, more than 3,000 Iranians have been killed by American and Israeli attacks, according to HRANA, an Iran-focused human rights group. Of that total, 1,394 were civilians, including those several dozen schoolgirls killed on day one; 639 deaths have yet to be classified as military or civilian.

 

There have been more than 1,100 Iranian military fatalities. Among those dead Iranian service members are 87 sailors whose lightly-armed ship was sunk by an American torpedo off the coast of Sri Lanka. The ship was not only far away from the war zone, but it was reportedly lightly-armed as it was returning from a largely-ceremonial, multi-national exercise hosted by India in the interest of building international maritime cooperation.

 

Given they died on the receiving end of an unjust war of aggression, these and other dead members of the Iranian military were likewise innocent victims of America’s war for Israel. Note too that, unlike every American who’s dishing out death from the sky, land or sea, most Iranians in uniform are conscripts, not volunteers.

 

That said, there’s reason to empathize with volunteer American service members who’ve now been ordered to wage this war. Ahead of their enlistment or commissioning, most are ill-equipped to peel back the patriotic red-white-and-blue veneer and discern the true nature of US military service. In a sense, they’re victims of a grand fraud. Millions of their fellow citizens are oblivious collaborators in that fraud, to the extent they help perpetuate the false assumption that military service is inherently virtuous and invariably serves the American people.

 

With Marines now steaming toward the Persian Gulf, the 82nd Airborne Division gearing up and Netanyahu cryptically referring to the necessity for a “ground component”, the number of dead, wounded, dismembered and PTSD-inflicted Americans could soar higher. Given the unjust nature of this war, many are certain to face a lifetime dealing with a lesser-known type of wound – moral injury, which is psychological and emotional distress springing from having witnessed, participated in, or failed to prevent acts that go against one’s moral convictions.

 

Importantly, the suffering that springs from this war of aggression isn’t confined to the United States, Israel, Iran and Gulf states hosting US bases. People around the world are already coping with growing scarcity and increasing cost of oil and gas. Asian countries are particularly vulnerable, and they’re already taking measures like rationing fuel, cutting workweeks, urging more people to work from home and closing hotels hit by diminished air travel – all this after less than three weeks of the Strait of Hormuz being closed to most traffic.

 

There’s much more to this Pandora’s box of harms. For example, the world’s supply of medicine is in growing jeopardy. “Nearly half of U.S. generic prescriptions originate in India, which relies on the Strait of Hormuz for the arrival of key inputs in drug manufacturing,” explains CNBC. The Gulf also supplies about half the world’s urea – a fertilizer component – and the price US corn farmers are paying for fertilizer has jumped upwards of 70%. That presages higher food costs all over the world, with malnourishment and starvation a distinct risk in some parts of the globe.

 

Clearly, if the war continues and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, it’s certain to result in a global health catastrophe, a devastating economic depression, surging crime and social unrest. America’s standing will be profoundly and irreparably damaged in a world united in outrage over a US president’s lawless decision to launch this demented war of choice in service to Israel. American citizens are likely to suffer terrorist acts inspired by this latest savagery inflicted on a Muslim country.

 

And it will have all started with weapons fired by American service members…

 

…service members who swore to defend the Constitution, but were given unconstitutional orders to wage war without congressional authorization

 

…service members who joined the military to defend America, but became attack dogs for a foreign country that saps America’s wealth, depletes America’s arsenal, undermines America’s security and standing, exerts alarming influence on America’s institutions, and inspires terrorism against Americans back home

 

…service members who should now recognize a stark reality – that they are cogs in a machine that repeatedly inflicts death, dismemberment, disease and destitution on countless innocents in service to the expansionist State of Israel.

 

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