Nearly all Holocaust scholars, who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust, have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature, the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of the 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 studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but 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 LA 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 “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “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 nègres d’Afrique.”

It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and wrote “Survival in Auschwitz.” He was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “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.”

He deplored “Manichaeanism,” those who “shun nuance and complexity” and who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duals, 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 blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside.”

Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and 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.” “[H]is 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 adds. “[W]illingly 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.”

These bitter lessons of the Holocaust, which warn that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin, that we can all become willing executioners, that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust, are what Zionists seek to deny. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.

Holocaust studies, which exploded in the 1970s and were epitomized by the deification of the Holocaust survivor and fervent Zionist Elie Wiesel — literary critic Alfred Kazin called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust” — have now surrendered any claim to championing universal truths. These Holocaust scholars use a benchmark evil, as Norman Finkelstein points out, “not as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club.” The mantra “Do not compare,” Finkelstein writes, “is the mantra of moral blackmailers.”

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 and the West Bank, Israel, as Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews.”

Holocaust studies are based on the fallacy that unique suffering confers unique entitlement. This was always the purpose of what Finkelstein calls “The Holocaust Industry.”

“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? … Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? 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?”

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 anti-Semite 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 seek to obscure. What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians in the Bengal famine by the British or the Soviet-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Manifest Destiny any different from the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of Lebensraum? These too were holocausts, fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlusts.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, preventing U.N. resolutions and sanctions from being adopted to condemn its crimes, and demonizing Palestinians and their supporters, is proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of 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 South-West Africa, now Namibia.

“[S]uch magic,” 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.”

Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article on Gaza on Oct. 13, 2023 — six days after the incursion by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters into Israel — 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.

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,” Segal said when I interviewed him, “even if it's not genocidal yet.”

You can watch my interview with Segal here.

“Holocaust studies as a field might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing,” he continued. “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.”

Segal paid for his courage and 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.

Nearly two years into the genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars finally issued a statement saying that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide.

But the vast majority of Holocaust scholars remain mute, endlessly condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas while ignoring those committed by Israel. They were mute when South Africa argued before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. They were mute when Amnesty International published a report in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide.

“How many Palestinian students apply to graduate programmes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies around the world? Usually none. How many Palestinian scholars identify themselves as scholars in this field? They, too, can be counted on one hand,” Segal writes in a co-authored article in the Journal of Genocide Research.

Genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“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 in “The World After Gaza.”

The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended. The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth — barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable.

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By Chris Hedges, see comments for sources and more.

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 Your dog knows something you probably don't. That soft gray plant in the border—the one with leaves like rabbit ears—is scanning the air for chemical signals. Animals recognize lamb's ear instinctively, the way they know which grasses settle an upset stomach.

There's a reason for that recognition. Long before cotton swabs and sterile gauze, battlefield surgeons reached for these leaves when the carnage overwhelmed their supplies. A single leaf could drink up an astonishing amount of blood, three times its own weight, transforming from velvet to crimson sponge in seconds. But the absorption was only half the magic.

The plant secretes its own pharmacy. Those fuzzy hairs aren't just soft—they're tiny factories producing compounds that wage quiet war against bacteria. While the leaf soaks up blood, those same fibers release substances that keep wounds clean. Medieval medics didn't understand the chemistry, but they understood results. Men wrapped in lamb's ear healed when others didn't.

Modern researchers finally caught up about fifteen years ago. Labs started analyzing what traditional healers had known through observation: the leaves contain natural antimicrobial agents similar to what we now synthesize in expensive wound dressings. Hospitals have been running trials. Some surgical units keep dried leaves in their experimental protocols, testing whether this ancient remedy might solve modern problems like antibiotic-resistant infections.

The plant doesn't advertise its abilities. It sits quietly in cottage gardens, softening the edges of stone paths, glowing silver in moonlight. Most gardeners grow it for texture, for the way it makes other plants look brighter by contrast. Children love to stroke it. Cats occasionally chew it when their stomachs bother them, another knowing buried in instinct.

It spreads gently if you let it, never aggressively, sending out new plantlets that root where they touch ground. The whole colony becomes a living medicine cabinet, renewing itself each spring, asking almost nothing in return. Poor soil suits it fine. Forget to water and it shrugs, those thick leaves holding moisture the way they once held soldiers' blood.

Every spring when the flower stalks rise—tall purple spikes that bees adore—I think about all the gardens that hold this plant without knowing its story. How many thousands of neighborhoods have this healer growing by the mailbox, pressed into service only as a placeholder, something silver to fill space.

Your garden is full of these quiet powers. Plants remember what we forgot when we started buying everything in bottles. The knowledge isn't lost—it's growing three feet from your back door, waiting for attention, for wonder, for someone to see past the decorative and recognize the profound.

That fuzzy leaf your hand passes over on the way to pull weeds? It's been saving lives longer than your family has had a surname. [XE8YG]

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THE “17 SHIELDS” THEORY IS EXPLODING ACROSS THE INTERNET — AND IT’S REIGNITING SOME OF THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS IN THE EPSTEIN CASE 

Just when many believed the public debate surrounding Jeffrey Epstein had begun to fade, a controversial online theory known as "17 Shields" has sent social media into another frenzy.

Millions of users are once again diving into:

Court records.

Flight logs.

Witness testimony.

Archived investigations.

And years of unanswered questions.

Why is everyone suddenly talking about "17 Shields"?

Supporters of the theory claim it points to overlooked patterns, hidden connections, and unanswered questions that continue to surround one of the most controversial scandals of the modern era.

Critics, however, argue that the theory relies heavily on speculation and assumptions that extend beyond publicly verified evidence.

Yet that hasn't stopped the conversation from spreading.

Across TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and X, users are analyzing old documents, revisiting testimony, and debating whether important details may have been missed—or whether the internet is creating a new mystery from an old story.

Now the questions are growing louder:

Are there still significant aspects of the Epstein case that remain misunderstood?

Have all relevant records already been made public?

Where does document evidence end and online speculation begin?

And why does this case continue to capture global attention years later?

Important reminder:

Many claims circulating online remain disputed, incomplete, or unverified. The appearance of a person's name in records, testimony, contact books, photographs, or flight logs does not automatically establish criminal wrongdoing.

Still, public fascination shows no signs of slowing down.

Because every resurfaced document...

Every witness account...

Every online theory...

And every unanswered question...

Adds another chapter to a story that continues to fuel worldwide debate.

Some believe the biggest revelations are already known.

Others remain convinced that important pieces of the puzzle are still missing.

What do YOU think: Is the "17 Shields" theory uncovering overlooked questions—or is it simply the latest viral chapter in one of the internet's most enduring controversies?

 

 

One of the most horrifying punishments ever inflicted on a famous religious dissenter happened to Jan Hus — a preacher whose execution helped ignite centuries of conflict in Europe.

In the early 1400s, Hus became one of the strongest critics of corruption inside the medieval Catholic Church.

Preaching in Prague, he condemned the sale of church offices, abuses of wealth, and moral decay among clergy.

He was heavily influenced by the earlier English reformer John Wycliffe and argued that scripture should stand above corrupt religious authority.

To ordinary followers, Hus became a symbol of spiritual reform and national pride.

To Church authorities, he became dangerous.

Europe at the time was already deeply unstable.

Religious unity was considered essential to political order.

Questioning Church authority could easily be treated as rebellion against society itself.

Eventually, Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 to defend his teachings.

Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund granted him safe conduct for the journey.

But once Hus arrived, he was arrested anyway.

The promise of protection collapsed instantly.

For months, Hus remained imprisoned under harsh conditions while Church officials demanded he recant his teachings.

He refused.

The punishment became inevitable.

In 1415, Jan Hus was condemned as a heretic.

Witnesses described him being dressed in priestly garments one final time before Church officials stripped them away publicly as a symbol of degradation.

A paper crown painted with demons was reportedly placed upon his head.

Then he was led outside the city for execution.

Bound to a stake, Hus was burned alive before crowds gathered near Constance in present-day Germany.

Historical accounts claim he continued praying and singing as flames rose around him.

The execution was meant to destroy dangerous ideas permanently.

Instead, it triggered fury across Bohemia.

Followers of Hus launched rebellions that erupted into the violent Hussite Wars —

conflicts that shook Central Europe for years.

The irony is unforgettable:

Authorities burned Jan Hus to stop reform.

A century later,

many of the same criticisms he raised exploded again during the Protestant Reformation.

The man executed as a heretic became remembered by millions as a martyr.

In the year 897, a dead man was put on trial.

Not a symbolic trial.

Not a legend.

An actual trial.

The corpse belonged to Pope Formosus.

Nine months after his death, his successor, Pope Stephen VI, ordered Formosus' body exhumed from its tomb beneath St. Peter's Basilica.

The corpse was dressed in papal robes.

Placed upon a throne.

And brought before a church court.

What followed became known as the Cadaver Synod.

One of the strangest events in medieval history.

A deacon stood beside the decaying body and answered questions on behalf of the dead pope while Stephen hurled accusations at the corpse.

Formosus was charged with violating church law, unlawfully becoming pope, and abusing his office.

The outcome was never in doubt.

The dead pope was found guilty.

His election was declared invalid.

His official acts were annulled.

Then the punishment began.

The three fingers used for blessings were cut from the corpse.

His papal vestments were stripped away.

And the body was dragged through the streets of Rome.

Finally, it was thrown into the Tiber River.

The spectacle shocked even many contemporaries.

Romans reportedly viewed the trial with horror.

Political factions turned against Stephen VI.

Within months, the pope who had prosecuted a corpse was himself overthrown, imprisoned, and later died in captivity.

The bizarre episode exposed the chaos consuming the papacy during the late ninth century.

Powerful families, rival factions, and political alliances transformed the highest office in Western Christianity into a battlefield.

In the end, Formosus was rehabilitated.

His convictions were overturned.

His body was recovered and reburied with honor.

But the story endured because it sounds impossible.

A pope put a dead pope on trial.

The corpse lost.

And then history put the prosecutor on trial instead.

Few moments better illustrate how strange medieval politics could become when power eclipsed reason.