Note: The following is an excerpt from my essay, We Are Not Animals, a longer piece that explores the studies of psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker with a focus on humanity’s relentless quest for immortality. It examines the concepts of “shadow projection” and “scapegoating” and provides a number of examples that illuminate the political motivations driving human aggression and large-scale atrocities both past and present.

The Whole World Is Watching!

The patina of virtue and morality enjoyed by the United States and its subservient allies in the years following WWII has long since tarnished beyond recognition. From Vietnam to the greed-driven oil and resource wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria, the illusion of democracy has morphed into a pathetic buzzword regurgitated by delusional politicians and global elites.

Today there are no ambiguities, no misconceptions about America’s crippling economic policies and imperialist goals. Many members of US Congress on both sides of the aisle have been bought and paid for by the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). In return for thousands of dollars in donations, these corrupt individuals have vowed their unified and unwavering financial, diplomatic, and military support for Israel’s relentless destruction and genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the neighboring people in Lebanon and Syria.

So strong is their allegiance to AIPAC and Israel’s warmongering expansionist policies, the US rolled out the red carpet and invited Israeli prime minister and war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address the US legislative branch at the US Capitol in July 2024. During his speech, Netanyahu was interrupted by applause 39 times, 23 of which were accompanied by standing ovations.

“Our enemies are your enemies,” Netanyahu said, affirming Israel’s relationship with his US constituents. He then went on to say, “Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel, and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization.”

Two months prior to the Israeli prime minister’s visit to the US, The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) released a report, marking the 76th anniversary of the Nakba (the catastrophe, in Arabic). The report reveals that since 1948, when Israel proclaimed Palestine as their God-given homeland, approximately 134,000 Palestinians and Arabs have been killed, both inside and outside occupied Palestine.

Since October 7, 2023, the start of the most recent Hamas/Israeli flashpoint, 2025 first quarter PCPS statistics are as follows: 52,535 deaths including 18,000 children; 12,400 women; 3,535 elderly; 1,402 medical personnel; 211 journalists; 800 educational staff; 203 United Nations staff; and 113 Civil Defense workers. Additional PCPS stats include 11,200 missing; 4,700 missing women and children; 125,191 injured; 18,700 imprisoned; 173,311 buildings destroyed; 330,500 housing units destroyed; 142 schools and universities destroyed; and 2,000,000 displaced.

These devastating totals raise this question: Exactly who are the civilized and who are the barbarians that Mr. Netanyahu was referring to in his address to US lawmakers?

Even more incredulous is the claim by Mr. Netanyahu and other government and Israeli Defense Force (IDF) officials who said—with a straight face—that Israel is “the most moral army in the world.” If this blatant piece of propaganda weren’t so pitiful, it would be laughable.

It’s unfortunate that Mr. Netanyahu’s claim of moral superiority failed to include Israel’s weapons and technology industries. Jumping the shadow as a means of obliterating the fears, guilt, shame, and self-loathing of one population and projecting them onto another is not only convenient, but also extremely profitable. In his eye-opening book, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Australian journalist Anthony Lowenstein, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a onetime resident living in East Jerusalem, documents Israel’s meteoric rise as the world’s leading manufacturer of weapons and surveillance technology.

In the section of the book titled “Selling Weapons to Anyone Who Wants Them,” Lowenstein wrote:

The history of Zionist militarism and the building of a viable, local defense sector began even before the establishment of Israel. The Jewish state and its backers quickly saw the potential of both developing weapons for their own benefits and then selling and promoting them to a global market. The Palestine laboratory was born. The birth of Israel in 1948 was a miracle for many Jews around the world but a catastrophe for the Palestinian population.

Lowenstein’s statement echoes the 1986 article titled “How Israel’s Economy Got Hooked on Selling Arms Abroad,” written by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem between 1984 and 1988. In his piece, Friedman notes:

Israel, with only 4 million people, has become one of the top ten arms exporters in the world and Israeli businessmen are among the world’s leading arms merchants.

For decades, the Israelis have used the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—two of the world’s largest outdoor prison camps—as their testing grounds for developing and perfecting weapons, surveillance equipment, spyware, crowd control, and counter-insurgency tactics. In addition to the sale of Uzi machine guns to apartheid South Africa, Israeli weapons and technology manufacturers have sold weapons, tanks, drones, and biometric technology to some of the world’s most brutal dictators and repressive regimes including Bahrain, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, to name a few, as well as to the United States.

According to a June 2024 Times of Israel article:

The ministry’s International Defense Cooperation Directorate, known as SIBAT, said defense exports totaled $13 billion last year, up from $12.5 billion in 2022— the previous record high. Between 2018 and 2020, that number hovered between $7.5 billion and $8.5 billion.

The Nazis believed with their hearts and souls that the Jews and other non-Aryan people were a scourge and a threat to the existence of the German homeland and proud Germanic traditions. Sadly, the Israelis, the self-proclaimed “chosen people,” have learned all too well from their Nazi enemies and have adopted comparable ethnocentric ideologies. In doing so, they have developed a litany of justifications for their aggression toward the Palestinians that promises to redefine scapegoating and sink humanity to new levels of moral decay and depravity.

In a 2014 Times of Israel blog post titled “When Genocide is Permissible,” blogger Yochanan Gordon wrote:

If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide, is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Ten years later, Yochanan Gordon’s despicable proposal has germinated and become a reality. In response to Hamas militants crossing the Israeli border and taking hostages, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced:

I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel; everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.

How Do We End This Madness?

A good question—one that I’ve asked myself many times. Not just the insanity in the Middle East, but in Ukraine, Africa, the South China Sea, or you name it. In my humble opinion, our only hope is to end the madness before it even begins.

In my view, the real crime is the indoctrination of our precious youth—fertile minds brainwashed and infected with mindless belief systems that only serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence and endless wars.

Be it the Hitler Youth pledging their undying allegiance to a psychotic dictator, young Americans sent off to kill people in foreign lands with the patriotic belief that they are promoting “democracy,” or young Israelis, self-obsessed and imbued with the twisted ideology that their very existence is contingent upon the death and total eradication of their neighbors, the thing that all of these onetime innocent children have in common is that from the moment they left their mother’s womb, they didn’t have a chance. Their indoctrination into a world of violence, corruption, and evil was formulated and fed to them along with their pablum and later expanded and nurtured with the assistance of a carefully curated politicized system of education analogous to a Roach Motel, a glue-based cockroach trap that promises consumers that “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out!”

We’ve descended into 2025, and the threat of nuclear war is more real today than any other time in history. Quite frankly, we are in the hands of lunatics who are threatening to end civilization as we know it.

To all the power-hungry, warmongering, global elites hell-bent on destroying the planet, I say to you: Stop projecting your dark, soulless shadows onto the people of the world. Our enemies are NOT your enemies. Like all the vile and corrupt evil dictators in the history of humanity, you and you alone are your own worst enemy.